Discovery Channel’s Bermuda Triangle Documentary

About 90 percent of the television watching I do is divided between three cable channels: the History Channel, Discovery, and The Learning Channel. The one thing that really annoys me about all three is that along with a lot of good material they occasionally run features that are too credulous of pseudo-scientific claims.

At first I thought Discovery’s recent Science Mysteries feature on the Bermuda Triangle was cut in just this mould, but they actually managed to demolish the whole Bermuda Triangle nonsense. PBS’ Nova did a thorough debunking of the Bermuda Triangle myth many years ago, and the Discovery documentary felt like an update of that debunking. To illustrate that what happens in the Bermuda Triangle is hardly unique, Discovery humorously invented their own “Casablanca Triangle” around the northern coast of Africa. They then proceeded to recount all of the mysterious and unexplained loss of ships, planes and people in the “Casablanca Triangle” over the years (this area, for example, is where the Mary Celeste disappeared).

But the coup de gras was the part that had me fuming at the beginning but laughing out loud at the end. The documentary began with a recounting of a mysterious yacht that was found floating, completely abandoned, in the Bermuda Triangle. The last log entry was over a year ago and when the naval vessel that discovered the yacht tried to salvage the ship and sail it to a nearby port, they experienced all sorts of mysterious electrical failures.

At the end of the show they revealed that in fact the yacht had been stolen while in port and apparently abandoned by the unknown thieves. The mysterious electrical problems? Somebody, probably the moron thieves, had managed to reverse some of the engine wiring so that rather than charging the battery, when the motor was running it was actually discharging the battery.

The point, of course, is that this is exactly how most of the alleged incidents of mysterious disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle morph from rather boring incidents into outright science fiction (the layer upon layer of myth and outright lies that have piled on the rather boring story of the disappearance of Flight 19, for example, is a perfect example of just how much mileage can be milked from an incident simply by omitting the relevant facts).