Atlas Of Cursed Places

When I was a kid I drew all over the wall with a marker,

I'm sure I had a good reason,

Although it escapes me now, but I did realize that I was

Going to get in a ton of trouble and so I hit on

The perfect alibi, the easter bunny did it.

That was airtight, you can't poke holes in that.

No one knows where the easter bunny is.

Problem was my parents didn't believe in the easter bunny anymore,

I was busted.

I learned a hard lesson that day about the nature of magic.

Now sadly I'm an adult and I envy my younger self,

The one who believed in magic.

Did the wrinkles and gray hair grow an adverse

Relationship to wonder.

So what does the easter bunny have to do with the bermuda triangle?

We miss that wonder, we long for a world with magic in it.

So here I am on the edge of a boat in the bermuda triangle

And I'm hosting a tv show about curses,

So maybe all hope isn't lost.

There's a desire to believe in something beyond our understanding,

Can a science minded skeptic, like myself,

Reignite the spark of magic?

Is there an intersection point between science and myth?

Wait, what was that?

Dude, that was a shark, man.

Oh there he goes.

There goes the genius.

I used to be a professional sailor and at

Some point I've crossed most of the world's oceans on

Various sail boats, and I've seen some

Pretty strange things.

Cheers guys. Nobody knows.

If you wanna hear some stories just mix sailors and alcohol

And you'll turn on a spigot you wish you could stop.

Who's got like a good bermuda triangle story?

- Deep underneath it? Yeah. - It's probably godzilla.

Yeah. What's the vortex?

It's a spot where all the instruments go crazy and

It's like a portal to another dimension or something.

Have you guys seen anything like that around

Here, like, weird stuff?

I mean, there's no way.

I mean, you guys all know steve nolands, right,

Like his story about they're were like 40 knots or so,

You got three or four guys on the boat.

One green light came screaming up behind the boat and

Then it came around to the side of the boat,

They're still doing 40 knots, lit up the whole side of the

Boat and then they say it took off like a rocket in front of them.

That's crazy, man. - Yeah.

What do you guys think happened to flight 19?

Right.

Right.

The story of the bermuda triangle really has three chapters,

Plane crashes, ship wrecks and the

Mysterious disappearances of entire crews.

We call those ghost ships.

But are any of these chapters truly anomalist?

Is the bermuda triangle more dangerous than the rest

Of the world's oceans?

We'll analyze the planet's most infamous curse with a

Skeptical forensic mind.

So here it is, this is it, this is the bermuda triangle.

You know, florida, bermuda to puerto rico.

You know, it's about 500,000 square miles.

The fact is there have been countless incidents,

Millions on the world's oceans since the first

Seafaring people set out nearly 50,000 years ago.

Most of these are easy to explain, you know,

Bad weather, human error, faulty equipment.

The ocean's a big bad place,

But I'm interested in the events here that have some

Mystery surrounding them,

Where it's harder to put your finger on the cause.

So I've hand selected some of the most cryptic occurrences

And created incident maps of the areas surrounding the

Bermuda triangle.

You can see there's hundreds and hundreds of ship wrecks

And plane crashes.

This cluster here has gotta be flight 19.

The disappearance of flight 19 is the foundation of the

Bermuda triangle legend.

In early December in 1945, five navy planes took off from

Florida on a training mission with 14 men on board.

Those planes, the infamous flight 19,

Disappeared without a trace,

But then one of the rescue planes that goes looking for them

Also completely vanishes

And now you have the seeds for a mystery.

300 boats and planes searched the water for five days,

Not one shred of wreckage was ever found.

This concrete shipwreck off the coast of bimini is the

Last witness to the missing planes.

While it can't tell its story in words,

I'd love to find some shrapnel of evidence of what happened

To flight 19, something to ease my skeptic mind and keep

The hope for a magical world alive.

As lovely as this location is,

As lucid and clean the water, I can't help but think that of

The 27 young men who flew over this stretch of unforgiving

Ocean and vanished forever in the darkness of the coming night,

All those families ripped apart,

Children left behind without ever knowing what happened,

Without closure, without understanding.

Did those young men fall victim to a mysterious

Geo-physical curse?

What happened out there in the darkness?

This is actually the lead ship of flight 19.

Wow, the exact same plane as this as flight 19?

Yes.

The final words of the men on flight 19 have been

Studied and poured over.

Every sentence and word analyzed in depth by the

Navy's after-action report.

And then, of course, reanalyzed by armchair

Historians and hacky cursed tv shows.

Walk me through it, what happened to flight 19, what's the deal?

It was a training flight for navigation

Training, believe it or not.

So we just back from the sapona, which we dove on.

That was their target.

So we know they dropped their bombs on the sapona.

What was their path after that?

Due east. Due east.

- For another 60-70 miles. - Okay.

Then make a turn to the north, northwest.

What happened? It's a big mystery to this day.

Nobody knows exactly what happened to them.

Nobody knows, but there are theories.

Colleen stirling is the lebron james of aviation

Probability analysis.

You maybe didn't know there was a lebron james of that.

After two years of searching for air France flight 447,

Colleen was brought in as part of a small team to reanalyze the data,

They found the wreckage in less than five days.

Well the first thing we did is looked at the

500-page navy report that came out.

The communications, all the radar hits that they had,

And we wrote a chronology.

The key transmissions.

Everything is mapped based, right.

So I'll put like where they launched from and the time,

And then I'll draw the line where they were supposed to go

And then I can calculate with the wind and their heading how

Long it should have taken them to get to their

First turn point.

I thought about that first turn point and then I said,

Well, where could they have gone from there?

They were trying to go back to the northwest,

But the wind was blowing them and they may have not made the

Turn sharp enough and might have got significantly blown

To a different heading.

Powers.

What is your compass reading, powers?

I don't know where we are.

Must have gotten lost after that last turn.

Mt-28, this is ft-74,

What is your trouble?

Ah, both my compasses are out and

I'm trying to find fort lauderdale, florida.

So this is the compass here.

- That's the magnetic compass. - That's the magnet compass.

So he would be looking at this, what else would he be looking at?

He would look at that and then hit down on

His instrument panel.

He'd have what's called the gyrocompass here that you set

This with this knob to agree with this.

- To agree to that. - This bounces around.

Sure. That one is very stable.

Taylor, who's the flight lead was talking about

The compass didn't look right.

He was starting to get confused.

Don't they know they have to get back?

Taylor thought that they needed to fly to the

Northeast because he thought they were over

The florida keys.

How did he think he was?

It's very hard to imagine him getting that lost.

He doesn't seem to have his wits about him on this flight.

Then you hear them arguing on the radio,

It's really sad.

I bet.

We've just passed over a

Small island and we have no other land in sight.

Turn on your emergency iff gear or

Do you have it on?

Iff gear was off,

I'm turning it on now.

What's iff gear?

Iff is an acronym for identification friend or foe.

Okay.

Right here, for example, see this says 1,200.

In an iff they would have given them a code to squawk.

To put as friend.

Put in there and they would be picked up on their radar.

- He didn't have it on. - He didn't have it on.

Should he have had it on?

Especially if I want help in finding out where I am.

Right.

Ft-28 to three,