Researchers who were working on a new Science Channel documentary claim that they found hexagonal clouds being formed in the area, creating winds of 106 kph (65 mph) which act as “air bombs” and are capable of sinking ships and bringing down planes.
All this is well and dandy, but there’s just one little gap in the explanation. There is NO SUCH THING as the Bermuda Triangle mystery! And despite all the hullabaloo and kerfuffle on the issue, the fact is that there are actually no “unexplained” plane and ship disasters in the area, irrespective of what has been the general opinion.
The conspiracy theory started back in the 1950s when a journalist named Edward Van Winkle Jones wrote a story for the Associated Press citing grave concern over a large number of missing ships and planes in the region of ocean bordered by Florida, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico, and called it the Bermuda Triangle.
The idea was built on when Charles Berlitz published his best-selling book The Bermuda Triangle in 1970, which triggered a tsunami of speculation over UFOs and rogue “creatures” making the triangle a no go area.
All these wild speculations and fabricated stories were debunked when journalist Larry Kusche discovered there was actually no mystery behind the lost ships and planes, and concluded that all the reports were either reporting mistakes or outright fabrications.
Benjamin Radford explained this for Live Science:
“In some cases there’s no record of the ships and planes claimed to have been lost in the aquatic triangular graveyard; they never existed outside of a writer’s imagination. In other cases, the ships and planes were real enough – but Berlitz and others neglected to mention that they ‘mysteriously disappeared’ during bad storms. Other times the vessels sank far outside the Bermuda Triangle.”
Although there have been some real boats and ships sinking in the area, their sinking was not at all a mystery, since all these occurrences could be related to some natural disaster or due to negligence and malpractice of the drivers.
After this, Kusche even published a book on the subject called The Bermuda Triangle Mystery – Solved, in 1975, but as we all know the “curious” human nature feels compelled to rather believe on some fancy stories than in scientific evidence.
So what did the researchers find in the area? After analysis of imagery from a NASA satellite, they were able to spot hexagonal-shaped clouds which ranged between 32 and 88 kilometres (20 and 54 miles) wide and were located roughly around 240 kilometres (149 miles) off the coast of Florida, over the Bahamas.
Steve Miller, commented on the unusual straight-edged cloud appearance:
“You don’t typically see straight edges with clouds. Most of the time clouds are random in their distribution.”
Randy Cerveny from the University of Arizona told the Science channel,
“These types of hexagonal shapes over the ocean are in essence air bombs. They are formed by what are called microbursts and they’re blasts of air that come down out of the bottom of a cloud and then hit the ocean and then create waves that can sometimes be massive in size and they start to interact with each other.”
These clouds have been associated with sea level winds of up to 160 kilometres per hour (99 miles per hour), which makes them theoretically powerful enough to create waves more than 14 metres (45 feet) high and capable of bringing down any vehicle.
But until this publication is verified and peer reviewed, we will have to take these claims with a pinch of salt.