Chelsea, have you ever been bothered by the fact that there's no real educational avenue to studying UFOs?
I have been very... it's kept me up at night.
Good. I'm glad. It's not just general insomnia, because now we can put that insomnia to rest.
The University of Michigan is now offering a two-week long course on ufology.
Here's the description that they provide for this.
Unpack the myths and facts surrounding UFOs. Following the release of the US Pentagon UFO report, there has been a surge of interest in unidentified aerial phenomena, UAPs.
People across the world are gripped by the history of UFOs and the stories told by those who have witnessed them.
On this two-week course, you'll hear from multidisciplinary experts to understand the importance of investigation and possible explanation for UFO sightings.
The course will guide you through various UFO reports, a crucial aspect of the study of UFOs, and as you explore each one, you'll learn the factors make a UFO report compelling and begin to understand what conclusions can be drawn.
You'll have the opportunity to not only watch, but also analyze UFO videos.
You'll develop the skills and basic techniques used to analyze videos to critically observe UFOs within the course and beyond.
With a firm understanding of the history of UFOs, you'll start to explore the position of UFOs within the larger conversation of science and culture.
Learning from the experts at the University of Michigan and beyond, you'll hear from top researchers and scholars in the field to develop your knowledge of the study of UFOs.
And this course is designed for anyone interested in learning more about UFOs. You don't need any prior knowledge or experience.
I wonder what that means for people who do have prior experience. Would it be too basic?
I hope you're going to learn a lot. And sadly, the University of Michigan does not offer any credits for this course.
So it's not like you can just top up your bachelor degree with this one course to get your science because it is taught under the heading of science.
Is it a pre-rec for anything? Like physics or something?
It is not, sadly.
And I wonder who these experts are.
I don't know.
They have instructor right underneath it, but it says teach out experts.
And how much is this?
It just says it's a two week program.
I could teach this.
It is live until March 7th of 2022 if anybody would like to take it. Probably in the Michigan area.
I don't know if you can sign up for it if it's just online.
Maybe I should talk to UBC about this. We can get one.
There's enough UFO people in the average community that could just talk crazy for two weeks straight.
It's true. I probably could.
Yeah, easy. I'd love to put that exam together.
But yeah, I thought that was some pretty good topical news.
That was good. And it made me have many questions.
And finally some relief. I can sleep at night.
So if you are interested, check it out.
It is known as UFOs scanning the sky's teach out through the University of Michigan online.
And it is available once again through March 7th of 2022.
And with that, let's get this episode rolling.
From the unexplained to the mundane, come join us on a journey to the fringe.
Hello and welcome to Journey to the Fringe where we make learning fun.
We are your edutainers today. Taylor and Chelsea here hosting this podcast.
And today we are going to teach you about a fairly basic concept, shapes.
And we're going to stay on one shape.
That is the mysterious triangle that is found all throughout the planet
and is captivated people for some reason for a long time.
We are going to focus on those weird areas of the world
that people have decided to categorize as both mysterious and three sided in structure.
Chelsea is going to start you off with the Bermuda Triangle.
And from there we are going to move on to an Alaskan anomaly.
Chelsea, why don't you take over?
Yeah, I'll do that. I guess there's other triangles other than the ones we're talking about.
Many triangles.
Yeah, like the pyramids, other ones.
Those aren't really triangles.
What? I thought they were triangles.
No, they're pyramids.
Oh, right. They're not called the triangles.
And depending on what angle you would look at a pyramid from,
does not necessarily transfer over nicely into a two dimensional triangle.
Okay, well, I'm all out of ideas other than the ones I just I wrote down about.
Maybe mountains.
They're also like pyramids. They're mountain shape.
Okay, so on with the Bermuda Triangle,
which is the most infamous of all triangles other than the Isosceles.
Definitely not the pyramids.
The Devil's Triangle, I'm not really sure why it also goes by that name,
because it might be because he owns it, but none of my resources actually referred to him owning it,
is loosely defined as the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean.
If you can picture that area in your mind, it's like it's a giant triangle shaped area between Florida,
like the Miami area, if you want to be specific, Bermuda and Puerto Rico,
which is about 500,000 square miles to be exact.
And this is an area where an estimated 20 plus aircraft,
50 plus ships and peoples that have gone with them have disappeared under mysterious circumstances.
This has nothing to do with mysteries or anything, but it's just a random interesting fact.
The deepest point at the Atlantic Ocean, which is the Milwaukee depth,
is located in the Bermuda Triangle. The Puerto Rico Trench reaches a depth of 27,493 feet,
which is 8,300 meters at the Milwaukee depth, which I didn't know that.
Sounds creepy.
It seems kind of misleading to name it after another geographical location that's nowhere near it.
Yeah, I'm not sure about that and why they did it, probably just to confuse.
Probably to actually get some travel revenue towards Milwaukee when people think they're going to the Milwaukee.
Sponsored by the beer.
In regards to all the mysterious happenings in the devil's shape,
I will be getting to some more well-known cases, which are points towards the mystery.
But what is typical of the mysteries in the Triangle?
Well, they may or may not include these compass problems, electronic fog,
which is one of our favorites around here.
Ships found completely abandoned for no apparent reason and no distress signals.
Ships are in planes that have completely disappeared and wreckages or many ships and aircraft
that have never been recovered ever yet, probably, maybe never, as well as people who have gone missing.
And with that, do you have any questions?
Not at this point, no.
Okay, now's time for the stories.
You thought there'd be more waiting, but there's not.
So gather round, I will tell you some, of the more famous ones.
I had heard of all of these ones, so that's clearly what I wanted to include.
I don't like going with the lesser-known ones.
First is the USS Cyclops, which is a US military craft.
And I would have to say is probably one of the first larger mysterious mysteries,
which really catapulted the infamy of the Triangle.
There are some before this, but this one's the first documented one in, like, modern-day records.
This incident resulted in the single largest loss of life in the history of the US Navy not related to combat.
USS Cyclops, which was a 542-foot-long Navy cargo ship, carrying a full load of manganese or with over 300-ish men on board.
It set sail from Rio de Janeiro 16th of February 1918 to Baltimore,
with its route taking the Cyclops through the Triangle, and everything was normal aside from one tiny thing.
Commander Warley had submitted a report that the Starboard engine had a crack cylinder and was not operative.
I mean, this doesn't sound good.
I'm not sure that, I mean, I'm not a sailor at all.
I don't even know if that's good to sail, but the commander seems confident.
There was nothing saying he wasn't right.
I've also seen how cheap managers can be.
With that being said, the ship, you'll see what happens to the ship, so who knows whether it was a mystery or Commander Warley's improper judgment.
There was also an unscheduled stop that the ship made.
She, they call her, I thought that meant Commander Warley at first, but it means the ship made in Barbados because the water level was over the Plymsel line,
which indicated that it was overloaded, but investigations in Rio prove that the ship had been loaded and secured properly.
So this meant that probably the, what was it they're carrying again?
Manganese.
Manganese. That sounds like a monkey.
It means that they're probably carrying too heavy of a load of manganese for the boat, but anyhow, this seemed fine and it was loaded on and secured properly.
So other than that, it was smooth sailing for the USS Cyclops.
Do you think that's why they call it Cyclops because it was missing a engine that was cracked?
You know what? That's actually a pretty fair question.
They couldn't have changed the name.
So this is 1911.
It's carrying too much load and it has one engine.
Yeah.
So basically if any storm touches this thing, it's done.
It's missing an engine.
We can't say have one because we don't know how many it had in the first place.
Okay.
It could have zero engines now.
It could have zero.
It could have three and it could need four.
We're missing some information.
I'm sorry.
That was all my journalism here.
We're copying of information.
We're on the smooth sailing part as a reminder and that is until March 4th, 1918.
That's when everything changes and goes from smooth sailing to not smooth sailing.
It goes from sailing to probably not sailing anymore.
It up and vanishes without a trace somewhere between Barbados and Chesapeake Bay.
Cyclops never sent an SOS distress call despite being equipped to do so.
And an extensive search followed but no record was found.
No remains of the ship or crew.
I wonder if they searched the bottom of the ocean floor because I am pretty sure Manganese is heavy.
They would have no way to do it at the time.
Especially if it was at that deep hurt.
Oh my God.
Woodrow Wilson himself is quoted as saying, only God in the sea know what happened to the great ship about the Cyclops.
That is concluding the end of this captivating story.
There is another weird thing though that makes it even weirder.
It has nothing to do with the triangle though.
Well, kind of.
I misspoke.
It kind of does.
So in 1941, two of the Cyclops' sister ships, Proteus and Nereus,
similarly vanished without a trace along nearly the same route or the exact same route.
I'm not sure.
It was like similar.
It probably wasn't the exact same route because that would be too weird.
During World War II, also carrying heavy loads of metallic ore, spooky.
I wonder if they're missing an engine and we're overloaded.
No, but they were probably taken down by a U-boat.
Those things were all over the ocean.
Were they?
Were things never seen again?
I mean, there's a lot of ships that sank during World War II that we don't really know necessarily the location of.
That's scary.
Onto the next one because that makes me have bad feelings.
Okay, Flight 19.
Have you heard about this one?
I believe so.
Yes, this is the Air Force One, right?
Yeah, but don't spoil it.
So, yes, as Taylor spoiled for you already, just kidding.
It was a training flight of five TBM Avenger Torpedo bombers, which contained 14 men, which he alluded to when he said that.
I'm not sure what you call a pack of TBM Avenger Torpedo bombers.
Um, would it be like a murder?
Like crows?
I think you can call it a squad or a squadron.
Squadron, okay.
Not sure where I got... well, murder sounds better to me.
Murder sounds more right for a military squadron.
Yeah, it does. Or crows.
The squadron they take off from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, of course.
December 5, 1945, to conduct practice bombing runs.
The flight plan was scheduled to take them due east from Fort Lauderdale for 227 kilometers, north for 117 kilometers, and then back over to Fort Lauderdale 230 kilometers to complete the exercise.
Except the squadron slash murder never returned to the base and the leader of the missions compass had started to malfunction.
Well, they don't know exactly what happened to the murder slash squadron.
I put murder because I forgot what it was when I was writing it and I just found out that it's a squadron.
They suspect that with the leader's compass malfunctioning that they got severely lost and flew until they ran out of fuel and had to basically like flying to the ocean and abandon ship.
If you like twists, then I have a good one for you.
The same day a rescue plane and its 13 man crew, which was deployed to rescue the squadron, it was a PBM Mariner, if you find that important, also disappeared.
It was gone.
With an asterisk.
This one did have signs of its fate as a tanker off the coast of Florida reported seeing an explosion and searchers observed a widespread oil slick when searching for the lost squadron.
That and the Mariner did have a history of explosions due to vapor leaks.
So black to flight 19 that other one might be explained.
It just tragic that it went looking for another one and it commonly exploded.
Yes, it was a commonly known thing.
So back to the lost squadron after a massive week long search failed to turn up any signs of the squadron at all.
The official Navy report declared that it was quote as if they had flown to Mars.
They're not sure though, because I'm sure nobody actually checked Mars to check that off the list.
It could have been a lot of places that they didn't scratch off and here we are.
We have no idea what ever happened to flight 19 and it is a great deal of years later.
Okay, so next one I have is Ellen Austin, which is a weird name.
Which is a weird name for a ship. It has a first and last name.
Oh, it's not a person. Okay.
It's not a person. I also thought it was going to be a person with a first and last name like that.
No middle name for Ellen.
Ellen was an American 210 foot long white oak schooner, which is a type of boat.
If you weren't sure.
As I'm not up on my boats, obviously, or airplanes.
We don't know how many engines they need. And I guess some boats don't need engines.
You can just use paddles.
But I don't think many canoes are going missing in the free meter triangle.
Mostly because I don't think canoes are really native to Florida or South Florida.
Search it. Maybe some kayaks.
And a schooner, I think doesn't need a engine because it has.
I shouldn't even talk. I have no idea.
Okay. In 1881, this is actually before the Cyclops.
I misspoke on the Cyclops one as I do sometimes.
Ellen Austin was going to New York from London when she stumbled upon an unknown ship drifting aimlessly near the Bermuda Triangle.
I'm not actually sure that that route would take you by the Bermuda Triangle.
But here we are.
That's the mystery of the triangle.
Yes. She somehow got there.
The captain of Ellen Austin, which was Captain Baker, tried to make contact to no avail.
So he decided to observe the ship for two days to make sure it wasn't a trap.
After two days, the captain entered the ship with his crew and the ship seemed in perfect condition other than the fact that it was completely missing its crew, which was weird.
There's like no people on board at all.
The whole shipment was still packed away and intact.
The captain is thinking quick on his feet and he decides to tow it back with Ellen Austin so that the captain places a prize crew on the ship to set sail together.
However, after two days of sailing on calm waters, a squall separates the path of the two ships in which the found ship vanishes.
That nobody knows anything about.
It was empty, but it's not now empty.
It has some of the crew from Ellen on there.
Days pass after the storm and they're looking for the ship, obviously.
He wants his crew back.
They're on board.
And a lookout finally spots the vessel through his telescope eyeglass thing only to realize that it was drifting aimlessly again.
So that's bad news.
And after hours of effort, Ellen Austin caught up with the vessel unknown, but no one was on board.
Spooky.
That's the end of the story.
Those are my stories.
So what's causing all these mysterious mysteries in the Bermuda Triangle?
There's many different theories.
So first I'm going to start with natural.
Natural theories behind the Bermuda Triangle include magnetic anomalies, water spouts, or huge eruptions of methane gas from the ocean floor.
There are no actual magnetic anomalies explaining the compass problems reported in the area.
That is that compasses will naturally have magnetic variations in relation to the magnetic poles.
Being that magnetic compass north and geographic north are mostly the same, aside for a small number of places which will cause some fluctuation.
For example, as of 2000 in the U.S., those small number of places were on the line from Wisconsin to the Gulf of Mexico, which is called the Igonic Line.
Notice how I didn't say any word close to New York and London being on that list close to the Bermuda Triangle, as one of my stories did.
I just went with it.
I read that and thought, hmm, that's weird.
But now that I read it out loud, I was like, yeah, that can't be right.
Next point, the Gulf Stream, which is a river within an ocean, part of which originates in the Gulf of Mexico and flows through the Straits of Florida.
Things can be carried away and essentially lost in the giant ocean and never seen again when they get swept into the Gulf Stream.
It's also known to cause quick changes in weather.
As far as natural explanations go, I'm going to end off with methane.
Another popular one focuses on the large fields of methane hydrates on the continental shelves.
It has been proven that these bubbles can sink ships by decreasing the density in the water.
Any sinking ships could then be rapidly dispersed by the Gulf Stream.
That being said, it's not happened or been known to have happened anytime in recent history in the Bermuda Triangle.
They've done demonstrations of how that would work and the ship just literally drops into the ocean.
Yeah, I have seen it, I think, particularly on Bermuda Triangle shows them actually do that.
But it's not a known thing to have happened in the Bermuda Triangle, but I thought I would mention it anyway.
But yeah, it basically just takes the ship right down. They can't sail in it.
As soon as the ship's underwater, it's basically just going to get water on it and not be able to come back up.
It did say if it sunk fairly quickly and then that dispersed, it could just then technically get swept away in the Gulf Stream.
That is natural explanations.
Now on to, as far as skeptics go with an explanation, they say that there's literally no more hazard in the Triangle
than there is in literally any other spot in the ocean.
And tons of aircraft and vessels operate in this area every day with no incident.
Rendering the number of disappearances pretty much significant.
This area is one of the world's most heavily traveled shipping lanes.
So the ratio of regular operation to disappearances really basically non-existent, like I said.
Others say that the Bermuda Triangle is a manufactured mystery perpetuated by writers who purposefully or unknowingly make use of misconceptions,
faulty reasoning, and sensationalism.
There was a study released by a insurance company that provides insurance for ships that said it's no more expensive to
insure a ship going through the Bermuda Triangle because they literally don't see it as a threat at all.
Nothing is more apt to happen there than anywhere else.
Underwriters don't really care about their the ones who make the rates for everything.
They'll look at the risk and say what the rate of insurance will be, like X dollars per million dollars of liability.
They really don't have any skin in the game for whether or not to be skeptic or not.
They're just saying what's going to make this company money.
They're also assessing risk rates, so the rates would be higher if...
Yeah, if there was actually a risk in that area that was quantifiable, then the insurance companies would know about it.
Yeah, and they would be either saying you don't travel through there or you're paying a hefty sum to travel through the Bermuda Triangle, which is not happening.
Are you curious about the paranormal bias now?
Does that have you thinking? Does it have you losing sleep at night?
Okay, obviously. There is that it is the leftover technology from Atlantis, of course.
I guess we really have to encapsulate everything under the sun with the paranormal,
but this does come with reason as some connect the Bimini Road off the island of Bimini in the Bahamas with Atlantis,
which is an underwater rock formation made of limestone.
Yeah, which is where what's his name said Atlantis would be?
Edgar Cayce.
Edgar Cayce, the sleeping psychic.
Yes, there's that, but other than that, there's literally nothing really happening more over by the road of Bimini or anything.
It's literally just Edgar Cayce saying that.
Thank you for saying that because that is right and I didn't have it in my notes.
Others say that BT Bermuda Triangle holds a parallel universe causing a time space warp that sucks the objects around it into a parallel universe.
Can we focus on the fact that you decided at this point to save time by acronyming BT and try to explain it?
There's a few things that it's been called by. I like to like space it up. BT, the devil's shape.
I called it that once, I think.
The devil's shape. So the triangle is the devil's shape?
Yeah, because it's the devil. It goes by the devil's triangle. So then I like to call it the devil's shape.
It probably doesn't make sense, but I liked where I was going with it.
Okay, and then there's that the UFOs. That was completely my creation. It doesn't go by the devil's shape at all.
But if it catches on, then here we are. Then there's UFOs.
I will just leave it at that on UFOs because it could go a million different ways, either that it's inhabited by UFOs or UFOs or like zapping out airplanes and boats.
If you get where I'm going with the paranormal, yeah, basically anything that's not a ship sinking and they can't find it is where you'll find all the paranormal.
That's the end of my BT segment.
Okay.
For me to triangle if I lost you. In which case that's bad.
That is some high level name use there. I don't know if you watched it in your research.
If you watched the channel, let me know. LEM, I, N, N, O on YouTube before for its view on the yacht love pass in Russia and his theory on what happened there.
He also has a video on flight 19 explaining what he thinks actually happened.
I think it's a really good video and a pretty simple explanation.
If I recall right, he had a pretty good one on the Diatlov process. That was a little while ago that we watched it, right?
There was a malfunction of the wood stove in the tent, which caused everybody to have to leave because it was too smoky.
And then they were just kind of stranded.
Yeah, but the guy was missing a ton.
Yeah, but that's also the first thing that predators will go for if they found a dead body.
Yes. Okay. What does he say about his simple explanation is the head pilot in that crew on flight 19 had just been shipped to the new location at Florida Waterdale on the opposite side of Florida.
So he was used to flying in the opposite directions for going to the ocean and back because they were in training.
They were very tired and he got disoriented and forgot which direction land was.
He was always describing which direction he was flying.
He would say towards land or away from land and be flying the wrong direction and giving bad advice as to where he was.
Yeah, I guess that's another natural explanation from it that it's human error, which I mean, if you're going with this, what is it called? Arkham's razor?
Arkham's razor. The simplest answer is likely the right answer.
Which is, I mean, you put humans in anything and we're going to fuck it all up.
Yeah.
And that seems to be the simplest answer.
That and I really, I'm glad that my memory is actually working on this one. I didn't have to write it down.
The Bermuda Triangle came to being because of, like I said, these people writing about these mysterious circumstances.
Yeah, my little search.
It came from a 1964 science fiction writer by the name of Vincent Gabbas.
Yeah, it wasn't necessarily, I didn't read science fiction, but there were people like perpetuating that it was a mystery and they did coin the Bermuda Triangle.
That very well is probably correct information, but it's all coming from people who kind of elaborated stories and had things kind of a little bit wrong, but it made for good books.
Like that's why the Bermuda Triangle is so famous today because people are so like they want a mystery.
I love mysteries and of course I'm going to read about them because I love them.
Yeah.
I don't care if they're true or not. I just want a good story.
And this is also the time that this term is coined is right around the exact same time that John Keel's kind of getting into everything and becoming more notable.
John Keel, who's famous for the Mothman prophecies and many UFO investigations and men in black.
He's also notably a war propagandist like worked for the military during World War Two and the war propagandist.
Yeah, I wonder if that has anything to do with people coming back from the war kind of getting back into everything.
That would be 20 years later, but that spin that's coming off it.
Yeah, probably not something that he wanted to be widely known.
I think you dragged out everything that we needed to know about the Bermuda Triangle.
Oh, good.
It wasn't in my notes, but that I remembered.
Okay. And with that, I think we can move on to a more intriguing triangle or at least location.
I think the term triangle, although it helps to confine an area into settled grounds, it doesn't necessarily mean that we're looking in the right direction.
I just feel like people are stuck on the idea of it being triangles.
It's a nice convenient shape.
Yeah, it's the simplest shape.
Super strong.
You only need to remember three locations for it, not like a hexagon where you'd have to remember the six locations that it pinpoints around.
Oh, no, that's just inconvenient.
Yeah, or dare I say a heptagon.
No, you may not.
No, let's just stick with a triangle.
And maybe that's also why it's called that, for we are trying to come up with something here.
Ah, yes.
Now where we're going to go is much further north and much further west to the new lands of Alaska.
The area in Alaska between three points, Anchorage on the west, Barrow in the very top north, and Juno on the southern coast, which actually does kind of come down.
Do you know what part of what you're looking at a map Alaska creeps down like really far down on BC?
Yes.
Juno's down there.
Yes.
It's actually funny to watch because if you actually look at a map with regards to this, a lot of this Alaskan triangle will actually seep over into the Yukon territory.
This area is considered mysterious and dangerous in its own right, especially compared to the Bermuda Triangle, which Chelsea, how many people had gone missing in the Bermuda Triangle over the course of it?
Or how many vessels?
I'm not.
I don't have a person count.
It was about 20, 20 airplanes, 50 ships, and their peoples.
In the Alaskan Triangle from 1988 to present, over 16,000 people have mysteriously disappeared.
Oh my God.
And the missing rate in Alaska in itself is ridiculous.
In 2007, 2,833 people were reported missing, and the state's population is only 670,000.
That is terrifying.
Has David Pilates did a 411 missing in Alaska?
I have no idea.
I'm sure he has, but they have a missing persons rate that is at least double the national average.
It's four in 1,000 per annum.
Oh, and Barrow's like right at the very top of Alaska.
Without further ado, I'm going to get into a few of the cases that are more notable in this area,
which stem back to my first one's going to go to 1950, and the newest one's probably going to be in about 2013.
So first is the case of the Douglas C-54D Skymaster.
So at 11.15 a.m. Alaskan Standard Time on January 26, 1950, a Douglas C-54 Skymaster with the U.S. military,
departed Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage headed for Great Falls, Montana.
The plane held 36 passengers and 8 crewmen.
The passengers included two military dependents, the pregnant wife of an Air Force Master Sergeant and her young son,
but the rest of the passengers were military personnel.
It was scheduled to take 8.5 hours, and the forecast was good weather with clear skies for most of the journey.
The excellent visibility afforded the passengers a view of some of the most rugged, beautiful scenery on the planet.
And this area as well, I don't know if you know this, but the highest point in North America is actually in Alaska, and it's in this area.
I believe I did know that.
You can't remember the name of the mountain. It's very anglicized.
I'm sure it definitely has another name, but it's Mount McKenzie or something like that.
Tallest mountain in North America?
Mount McKinley?
Mount McKinley.
Okay, good. I hope that's it because I'm just going by, yeah, Mount McKinley.
Also, the phone is Denali.
Yeah, that's in Denali National Park, I think.
Yeah.
Yeah, Denali.
This is super rugged territory.
So you get to see this beautiful scenery that you can't really see anywhere else in North America.
The plane reported its position to communication stations as it passed, and after two hours, the Skymaster passed over the border into the Yukon,
and when the plane crossed over, the Snake Radio Range located near Favour Creek Yukon territory.
The pilot called the station, estimated the aircraft would reach the next reporting point at Aishihik in 20 minutes.
His call did not raise any concerns and appeared routine.
He did not mention any problems with the plane and the weather remained favorable.
The Aishihik stations never received a communication, and the Bear Creek communication was the last ever received from this plane.
When the C-54 failed to arrive on time in Montana, it was listed as missing.
An intensive search followed, which included the US Army, US Air Force, Canadian military, and civilian aircraft.
They failed to find any clues about what happened to the plane.
One Canadian forest ranger reported seeing a low flying plane on January 26, matching the description of the missing plane,
and it was flying about 40 miles southwest of Snake.
He said the plane just disappeared, and then he heard a loud explosion and then columns of black smoke.
Searchers found the site incredible, but they found no evidence of a plane in any condition at all in the area indicated.
The searchers received other reported sightings of the plane in several different directions, but no remnants of the missing plane were ever found.
Experts believe whatever happened to the Skymaster was sudden and destructive and likely caused by structural failure, navigational error, or crew incapacitation,
which basically means they got no idea.
Where did it go?
No idea.
And that's several different eye ranking and powerful military organizations.
Possibly Mars again.
Yeah, I mean, I'll get into the areas that come into question, but I'm going to go on to the next one, and this is a really prominent one.
This is a member of Congress in the US.
In 1972, two prominent politicians, House Majority Leader Hale Boggs and Representative Nick Begik,
along with aid Russell Brown and bush pilot Don Jones, mysteriously vanished in the region while on their way back from Anchorage,
while flying in their Cessna 310 aircraft.
An intense search lasted for 39 days, including 400 aircrafts and SR-71, dozens of boats, including 12 from the Coast Guard.
The search area covered 32,000 square miles, which is about the size of South Carolina.
No evidence of the plane was ever found, and the men were declared dead.
At the time, conspiracy theories claiming the disappearance was orchestrated or cover up by then FBI Director J. Edgar Booper in response to an intense political struggle to handle Boggs.
To this day, no traces of the plane or men have ever been found.
And after this incident, Congress passed a law mandating installation of emergency location transmitters in all US civilian areas.
And unlike a lot of the triangles you'll see out there, as people are describing, there are modern-day missing vessels out this way.
On September 9th of 2013, Alan Foster, a professional charter pilot with more than 9,000 hours of flight time, was flying his recently purchased PA-32-360 from Atlanta to Anchorage.
He was only 360 miles from home when he landed at Yucatown, Alaska, to refuel.
After he departed Yucatown, he called the Juno Flight Service for a weather update, telling them he would stay in Cordova if it wasn't good enough to make it to Anchorage.
18 minutes later, radar showed a transponder target confirmed as Foster's plane at 1100.
The aircraft was never seen again, and despite an extensive search, no one has ever cited any sign of Foster or his plane.
One of the problem the searchers encountered was Foster's failed to register an ELT beacon or his aircraft.
Perhaps this was something he planned to do when he returned home.
Oh no, he put it off until later.
And you should always not do that, unless you don't want to. Then you can wait.
Exactly.
And this is not just a thing that happens to vessels in this area.
We have this story that I have dubbed the Adventure of Cocoon Boy, and this is Richard Lyman Griffiths from Spokane, Washington.
He had invented a wilderness survival cocoon, and in the summer of 2006, he headed into the wilderness of southeast Alaska to test his invention.
No one reported him missing for a year.
When authorities began searching for him, they learned a bus dropped off Griffiths along the Alaskan Highway.
He stopped at a lodge near the White River where he left some of his gear and told people he planned to hike upriver to McCarty, a small town in the Ringel St. Elias National Park.
He was never seen again. Since Griffiths told friends he might spend the winter in Alaska, no one worried about him until the spring.
But finally, a friend called Canadian Mountain reported him missing.
His friend had no idea where Griffiths was planning to go to test his wilderness cocoon, and no trace has ever been found of Griffiths or his bright orange cocoon.
Okay, well Griffiths made a lot of mistakes along the way.
He did, but he had a bright orange cocoon.
I guess, but there were many other things he did wrong. He did one thing right.
He brought the orange cocoon. He did not take notes from his listening journey to the spring. I'm fairly confident.
I mean, I don't think that coming back a year later from being taken by the elves would have helped him with the bright orange cocoon.
I mean, maybe if they came back a year and a day later, that's the problem.
Right. I hope he didn't write a down wrong like I just said it. A year and a day. Might have been there.
This area is also not protected from UFO sightings.
There's a very famous one that actually has a very in depth Wikipedia article that I'm going to read to you.
Protected?
There are UFO sightings within the triangle as well.
I thought you said protected area of UFO sightings.
Yeah, it's a UFO reserve.
Is it?
Oh, but it'd be cool if it was.
Yeah, it would.
Anyhow, Japan Airlines Flight 1628 was en route from Paris to Tokyo with a cargo of Beaujolais wine.
The flight was scheduled to refuel and wreck of it and an anchorage at 5.09 p.m. on November 17, 1986.
Japan Airlines 1628 under the control of Captain Kenju Tarachi.
Tarachi got it.
Yeah, you got it right there.
Another control of Kenju Tarachi was about 104 miles northeast of Fort Yukon.
The flight controller asked the pilot to adjust his heading to fly south of Fort Yukon and Fairbanks.
The copilot complied and turned the plane left above 15 degrees.
Meanwhile, Captain Tarachi saw bright lights shining through his window.
Lights were to the left and below JAL 1628.
And the pilot assumed they were military planes.
Captain ignored the lights until he realized they were keeping pace with his aircraft.
Tarachi quickly contacted the anchorage center and asked what aircraft was in the position.
The anchorage center flight controller said there were no military aircrafts in the area and the ground raider did not show any aircraft traffic other than Flight 1628.
The mysterious lights began moving erratically.
They suddenly appeared directly in front of the JAL plane.
And Tarachi said the inside of the cockpit brightened like the sun had lit it up and he felt the warmth of the UFO's thrusters on his face.
That is terrifying.
Tarachi said he and his crew were not immediately frightened, but instead watched in amazement as the lights pulsed and kept pace with the jumbo jet.
When Tarachi reported the strange lights, the anchorage center controller said he saw nothing on his radar.
The plane's radar though showed a large green dot round object 7 to 8 miles away.
When the cargo plane arrived above Ilson Air Force Base near Fairbanks, it was a clear night and the bright city lights lit up the sky.
Tarachi looked out his window and saw the silhouette of a gigantic spaceship following their plane.
He later said the UFO was twice the size of an aircraft carrier.
He could only guess this was the mother ship of the smaller UFO's the plane had previously encountered.
The massive unidentified aircraft struck fear in Tarachi and he attempted a base of maneuvers to avoid it.
The UFO mirrored his every move.
The anchorage center controller offered to scramble a military jet, but Tarachi declined, fearing the enormous spaceship would consider such an action computational.
When a United Airlines passenger jet flew into the area near the Japan airline cargo plane, the air traffic controller asked the United flight crew to get a visual on the situation.
Tarachi said that as soon as the United Airlines plane or worknight view of the UFO disappeared and he did not see it again.
One week after the Japan Airlines 1628 incident, John Callahan, the FAA division chief of accidents and investigations in Washington DC, received a call from a flight control supervisor in Anchorage.
The Anchorage flight controller told Callahan that the Anchorage FAA office was full of media and asked him what they should do.
Callahan asked what happened and the Anchorage official replied it's the UFO.
Callahan asked what UFO? The Anchorage official explained that a week earlier, a UFO chased a 747 across Alaska skies for approximately 30 minutes.
Callahan told his Anchorage associates to get the data together and immediately ship it to DC. Callahan said he wanted everything including the radar recordings and the recordings between the controller on the ground and captain Tarachi.
Callahan also contacted the military, but the Air Force refused to send their tapes.
When Callahan received the tapes, he listened to a three-way conversation between the Anchorage Air Force traffic control, Elmendorf Air Force Base, the Norav Regional Operations Control Center, and Captain Tarachi on Japan Airlines 1620.
He also played the tape of the ATC radar sightings. Callahan noted there was no sign of UFOs on the ATC radar.
Still, from listening to the conversation, it was clear those at Elmendorf with their more sophisticated radar saw the UFOs were tracking their maneuvers.
The military controller noted the UFOs were traveling at thousands of miles per hour as they swirled around the 747.
One of the most surprising findings Callahan discovered was near the end of the incident when the United Airlines flight arrived.
At that moment, Captain Tarachi no longer saw the giant UFO, the United pilot never saw the craft.
Military radar, though, clearly showed the UFO and it had tucked in behind the United flight and began following it.
When Elmendorf's Norav Regional Operations Control Center notified the United crew to inform them, a giant unidentified aircraft was following them.
Callahan's boss told him not to tell anyone about the UFO incident until they could meet with intelligence and security personnel.
The following day, as boss set up a briefing, the meeting included three FBI agents, three CIA agents, and Ronald Reagan's scientific study team.
Callahan and his staff presented everything they had and answered questions. When the meeting concluded, one of the CIA agents swore the participants to secrecy and told them this meeting never happened.
The agents admitted UFOs were not stealth bombers, which were then in development, or any other military aircraft type.
The CIA confiscated all the original voice recordings and radar tapes conducted to the UFO incident, but they did not know Callahan had copies of everything at his office.
Callahan said he believed Captain Chorochisaw three UFOs and Reagan's scientific team agreed with him.
I was going to say 30 minutes is a long time.
Yeah, and to be actually caught on the radar is just crazy.
Like, you could have a sighting like that for two minutes and it would feel like an hour. I can only imagine what 30 minutes was doing, especially when there's more than one.
And I do like that he thought that one was the mothercraft. He must have taken that university course and knew what he was talking about.
And then after that, he took a time travel course.
Yes, exactly. He's from the future.
That was Japanese. To add just a little bit more mystery to the Alaskan Triangle. Did you know there is their own type of Bigfoot within the Alaskan Triangle?
Definitely.
It is called the Kushaka. The Tlingit and Simshian native people, indigenous to Southeastern Alaska, tell stories about a mystical shapeshifting demon called the Kushaka.
No, not a demon.
Kushaka roughly translates to the land otter man.
Oh, that is creepy. I wish I just would have left that at not hearing it.
According to the legend, this creature appears to travelers in an irresistible form such as a child screaming for help.
The Kushaka lures his victims to a river where he either tears them to shreds or turns them into another Kushaka.
Fuck, am I supposed to ignore children screaming for help now?
Yeah, write that down on your notes in fact, during to the fringe notepad.
You better have it handy, everyone listening. That's not a threat, really. I'm sorry. You should just have it just for times like this.
You should put a note on your notepad that you need to have it ready for times like these.
Yes, we give very valuable information such as this one, ignore children screaming for help because they could lure you irresistibly and tear you to shreds by a river.
Or turn you into a giant land otter man.
Yeah, and we just saved your life.
Or better than death. Like I have no frame reference point for this.
Neither do I. I've never had either. I would prefer not to have either either.
Yeah, and there's always tales. Have you ever heard of Fort Lock, Alaska?
No.
It's seemingly abandoned in the late 40s due to Kushaka attacks.
There's a way more story to it than that though, and it could be an episode in itself.
See, okay, I need to write that down right now. What is it called?
Fort Lock, Alaska and the Kushaka.
Okay, see, when you look at somewhere like Alaska and you look at first nations stories and stuff like that, I'm more apt to believe things like that, especially if they're abandoning towns on account of otter man.
Yeah, and there's a lot more to it than that, but that is one of the tales as to why this town was abandoned.
Okay.
And I don't feel like focusing on it today because that is outside of the Alaskan Triangle, surprisingly enough.
Don't worry, I'm adding it to the list.
Okay, but that is as much intrigue and lore as I can spread on the Alaskan Triangle for one episode.
That was a good one. I like that more than the Bermuda Triangle.
And that is part of being the final frontier on Earth, really. This is one of the last sparsely inhabited zones on the planet because it is so uninhabitable.
Yeah.
Now, what exactly is going on here? Well, one theory claims that the Alaskan Triangle lies on what is known as the vial vortices, causing the area to have powerful electromagnetic and electromagnetic anomalies and negative energy vortices.
And this was a term coined in the 70s, which is really somebody trying to explain weird areas in the world.
I forget his name. I didn't write it down. But the most famous example of the vial vortices is the Bermuda Triangle.
And according to the theory, the vial vortices also exist in Algerian megaliths, Himmuktu, the Indus Valley in Pakistan, Himmukhulia volcano in Hawaii, and the Devil's Sea near Japan, the South Atlantic anomaly, and the North and South Poles.
These energy vortices create various strange phenomena, and they can allegedly induce disorientation, confusion, and hallucinations. They can also cause electrical instruments to malfunction.
And the person who came up with this theory did at least face it off originally, Lane Line.
Yes.
Which is, I think, why they are triangular in shape.
Yes.
But what was not mentioned by him as a vial vortices is Alaska.
Ah.
All those other places are the places he said that the vial vortices would be.
I did look at that for the Bermuda Triangle as well, and that was not one of them.
Yeah. That guy's theory is either just incomplete or didn't take everything into account.
I would assume incomplete, and both of them.
So, according to the theory of the vial vortices, positive energy vortexes also exist, and there are areas people actively search out to find inspiration or to recharge and feel uplifted.
Humans have purposely built monuments in some of these areas, including the Egyptian pyramids, Stonehenge, Sedona Desert, and Arizona, and also believed to be in this positive vortex.
There is also a theory that there is a giant black pyramid in the Alaskan Triangle.
Yes, I was going to say that.
And that is as far as I'm going into that theory, because it's going to be its own episode at some point.
And, sorry, I will say one more thing on it.
The energy from this pyramid causes people planes and boats to disappear.
On a much more mundane answer to what's going on here, Alaska has more than 3 million lakes and 1,000 glaciers, and hikers and mountain climbers can fall into deep crevices.
Also, airplanes can slam into mountains, barking in avalanche that covers the wreckage with snow in a matter of moments, and leave no trace of the aircast's final resting spots.
Gouché.
Also, accidental injuries occur at twice the national rate in Alaska and are the third leading cause of death.
People wandering into the wilderness unprepared for what to expect in authorities rescue hundreds of individuals every year.
Many times the cold temperatures cause bodies to sink to the bottom of the water as well, rather than float, adding another challenge to actually finding missing persons in the area.
Oh, creepy.
But, to leave it on a high note, most hikers survive their wilderness adventures in the Alaskan Triangle without suffering even a scratch.
And most planes and boats in the area reach their destination without an issue.
Alasa is truly a mysterious and undiscovered place.
It is still safe and fun to go see now.
Any questions, Chelsea?
No, I think I was going to bring up the black triangle just briefly.
Pyramid.
Right, the pyramid.
Now my brain is confused.
Yeah, wow, Alaska's so mysterious.
I had no idea.
That was a good one.
I'm impressed.
No questions though.
Just a comment, really.
Yeah, I've had a lot of fun actually reading these stories and it just happened at such a rate.
Yes, part of it is just the fear undiscovered nature of this vast untouched nature.
But part of it is, is these end up being some mysterious missing persons.
It was a lot of fun to read in a kind of morbid sort of way.
Yeah, it is.
I always enjoy in a kind of morbid way again, the reading like mysterious missing people because it's so creepy, which is also why the Bermuda Triangle is so popular.
Because people like those, well, people like me like those kind of things, which just perpetuate something that's wrong.
But it could be right and we could just read things that are actually right and stop listening about the Bermuda Triangle.
I will happily have a go on my face, but it turns out the Bermuda Triangle is powered by the Atlantis Pyramid.
True, it could be that.
There is a lot of research behind that one.
Well, yeah, that is today's episode.
There are many different triangles out there that we could continue the series on with.
No other shapes though, unless we wanted to touch on the hexagon of Saturn, but nobody's ever gone missing there.
There's no other mysterious shapes other than the Pentagon probably.
What is a Pentagon but five triangles?
Oh my God, it is.
And I'll leave you with that thought.
With that, we are done with our shape lesson for today.
Congratulations, you can make it part of the way now through kindergarten.
That's what you get for listening from us.
And while we learn about all the other shapes on other podcasts, we have been Taylor and Chelsea here telling you about those triangles out there and how mysteriously mysterious they are.
We will be going up for our next shape and or next topic next week.
I don't think it'll have a shape.
Everything's got a shape.
The next episode, I wonder what shape it'll take.
I don't know.
Anyhow, I have been Taylor here with Chelsea talking to you about triangles.
And that's all for listening and we will see you next time.
Thank you for listening to Journey to the Fringe.
We are there.
And if you really want to communicate with us and give us ideas for new episodes or tell us that we're wrong and terrible, either way, please send us an email at journeytothefringeatgmail.com.
For now, I'll see you in the next episode.