SIMON LUDGATE
Director / Producer / Writer
SIMON LUDGATE
|
| Into The Bermuda Triangle
This show for a new strand on National Geographic US called Naked Science was a fascinating challenge - prove if the Bermuda Triangle exists or not scientifically. Think
about that – the Bermuda Triangle myth started in the early fifties and has
grown into one of Where
do you start with a subject like that? In an
attempt to tease out the ghosts, we reflew the doomed Flight 19 Avenger bomber
route of the 7 planes which disappeared somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle a few
months after WW2 ended. They were featured at the start of Close Encounters when
they were “discovered” in the
Using a
newly renovated Avenger bomber we took off at the identical time of day as
Flight 19 and flew the same course with five cameras running. At
3.50, some of the instruments in both the Avenger and the camera plane started
to malfunction. The same time
as Flight 19 reported having problems all those years ago. We filmed the
instruments as they malfunctioned and recorded the time. It made
my spine literally tingle – a very strange experience indeed and we were
relieved to land safely almost five hours after we’d set off from Fort
Lauderdale. We
interviewed scientists about magnetic rock on the floor of the ocean,
meteorologists about electricity in the upper atmosphere, inventors who claimed
to have discovered how UFOs fly and fishermen who had witnessed the sudden
disappearance of a whole boat. The net
result was an amazing bank of scientific fact, crazy theories and some beautiful
underwater photography of crashed planes with mysterious damage. Then we
met some Danish scientists who were tracking the earth’s electro magnetic
field by satellite and comparing it with the data from a US project from 20
years earlier and they found, at our request, that a triangular patch between
Bermuda, Miami and Costa Rica, otherwise known as the Bermuda Triangle had
decreased its magnetic field by 6% in the last 20 years. That’s
pretty significant in magnetic terms. The Danish scientists suggested that this sort of
differential in local fields could be responsible for storing huge amounts of
electrical power in the upper atmosphere. Florida
is the electrical storm capital of the world as it is – there are more
discharges of electrical energy in Florida than anywhere else (we met someone
who measures this!) and electrical power can affect guidance systems, distort
metal, even affect its molecular structure. To our
minds this was the clearest scientific explanation for the Triangle’s
notorious reputation yet. We’re still waiting for the Pulitzer Prize people to call!
|
|
|
