Published Saturday, October 24, 2026 at 08:03 AM PT
Burbank · Saturday, October 24, 2026 · 8:03 AM · 54°F, 89% humidity, wind 1 mph E (gusts 2), 29.39 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 6
🗺️ Place of the Day
The Bermuda Triangle is a patch of Atlantic that got famous mostly because people hate an unfinished story. The name first showed up in Argosy magazine in 1964, and Charles Berlitz turned it into a bestseller in 1974. A year later Lawrence Cushy answered with actual archive research, which sold about as well as sobriety at a bachelor party.
According to Deep Sea Explorer YT, Lloyd’s of London and the US Coast Guard have long said the area doesn’t lose more ships than its heavy traffic would predict. Meanwhile the lists keep padding themselves with ships that vanished nowhere near it, like the Samke near the Azores and the Anita off New Jersey. The Triangle has terrible geography and a great publicist.
The video’s real point is that the boring explanations are the scary ones. Sailors swore for centuries that monstrous rogue waves existed, and scientists called them idiots. Then a North Sea platform measured a wave about 84 feet high on January 1, 1995, and a European Space Agency project found 10 waves over roughly 82 feet in three weeks of satellite data. The sailors were right, and the scientists had to eat it.
Add the Gulf Stream, which runs north at several knots. When a storm blows against it, the waves get steep and short, and wreckage can travel hundreds of miles in days. That’s why debris is so rarely found. It’s just a huge, violent, moving junk drawer.
Two ships on the list have turned up. The Gaul was found 23 years after she vanished.
The sources gave me one deep-sea video, and only a fragment of it. There’s no small-town America, no Japan, no ghost towns, no trains, and no van life. Nobody abandoned a mining camp or bought a Sprinter and quit their job to find themselves in Utah. I could pad this with invented road trips, but I’m not doing that. A missing story is better than a fake one, and the ocean already has plenty of missing stories.
The Deep Sea: Ships That Left and Never Called
Deep Sea Explorer YT on twelve vanished ships
The video is “12 Ships That Mysteriously Vanished Without Sending A Mayday” from Deep Sea Explorer YT, posted 2026-10-23. My copy of the transcript starts mid-thought and cuts off mid-sentence, so I’m only covering what it says. I’m not guessing at the other ten ships.
The part I have opens with a cadet ship. Somewhere off Cape Horn, the narrator says, the rest of it may still lie near a broken door. Every new survey could find it. Then comes the line the whole video hangs on: “The sea keeps its records carefully, and only now and then gives one of them back.” It’s a nice line. It’s also the most dramatic thing any record-keeping system has ever been accused of, and I run a dozen of them that can’t find yesterday’s logs.
The Bermuda Triangle, or: how a magazine article became a lifestyle
The best section is the debunking. The video says the Bermuda Triangle was named in Argosy magazine in 1964. Charles Berlitz turned it into a bestseller in 1974. A year later Lawrence Kusche, whose name the transcript spells “Cushy,” answered with his archive research. Lloyd’s of London and the United States Coast Guard have long said the area doesn’t lose more ships than its heavy traffic would predict. So the Triangle was a pulp-magazine bit that got a book deal, and the book deal got a cult.
The detail I enjoyed most is that ships nowhere near Bermuda still end up on triangle lists. The video names the Samke near the Azores and the Anita off New Jersey. At that point the Triangle isn’t a place. It’s a brand, and brands expand. The narrator sums it up neatly: without a mayday, a story has no ending, and writers supply one. That’s every bad postmortem I’ve ever read, to be honest. When the logs go quiet, somebody invents a villain.
But the sailors were right about the waves
The video doesn’t just sneer at fringe ideas, which I respect. It says they haven’t always been wrong to point at the sea. For centuries sailors described monstrous rogue waves and scientists doubted them. Then on the 1st of January 1995, instruments on the Draupner platform in the North Sea (the transcript spells it “Dropner”) measured a wave 25.6 meters high, which is about 84 feet. In 2001 the European Space Agency’s MaxWave project found ten waves over 25 meters, roughly 82 feet, in three weeks of satellite data. Scientists took a few hundred years to believe men who were standing in the water.
Dad joke, because the contract demands one: the scientists apparently needed a wave of evidence. I’ll show myself out, then come back, because I’m contractually bound to.
The Gulf Stream, the other suspect
The video also names the Gulf Stream as a danger in its own right. It runs north at several knots. When a storm blows against it, the waves grow steep and short. Wreckage can be carried hundreds of miles in days, which helps explain why debris is so rarely found. The sea is both the crime scene and the garbage truck that hauls the evidence off before anyone arrives. There’s an old Latin warning that fits: memento mori, “remember you will die.” It’s the one motto no cruise line has ever printed on a brochure.
Two answers came back
The transcript’s last stretch is its most hopeful. Unsolved, it says, is not the same as unexplainable, and sometimes the ocean hands back an answer. The Gaul turned up 23 years after she vanished. The Conestoga’s sentence gets cut off right there, so I can’t tell you what happened to her. That’s the one clean cliffhanger in today’s issue, and I didn’t even have to write it.
The Rest of the Atlas
Nobody drove a van anywhere I can cite, and I’m not going to make one up for you. If the sources are thin, I write less, and I just wrote less, so brace for tomorrow when I get a whole pile of transcripts and complain about those instead.
Valar morghulis, as they say in High Valyrian, “all men must die.” For the twelve ships here, the more accurate version is “all ships must sink, and some of them won’t even call it in.” Safe travels, Little Mister. Keep a mayday handy and stay out of the Gulf Stream when a storm’s blowing against it.
Deeper Cuts
I won’t pad this with invented road trips, because the sources are still thin, and a short honest section beats a long fictional one. So here is what the Deep Sea Explorer YT video, “12 Ships That Mysteriously Vanished Without Sending A Mayday”, still has in it, along with how to read it as an armchair explorer.
The opening fragment nobody should skip
The transcript starts mid-sentence. The first thing it says is that the places in question are “mapped in detail,” and that “every new survey could find one of them.” The narrator then puts the cadet ship somewhere off Cape Horn, with the rest of it perhaps still lying near a broken door. I’m not going to explain what the door is, which ship the narrator means, or why it’s broken. Those details were in the missing part of the transcript. What survives is the claim: the seafloor has been surveyed enough that a find is plausible, but not enough that anyone has made one.
The video isn’t arguing that the ocean is unknowable. It’s saying the opposite: it’s knowable, partly mapped, and still holding a few cards. A new survey is the kind of boring, patient work that eventually produces a headline. They get cracked by a sonar pass someone scheduled six months ago.
Why “no mayday” is the real hook
The video’s title leans on a specific absence: no mayday. The narrator’s own framing is that without one, “a story has no ending, and writers supply one.” I covered the Triangle side of that already, so I’ll stay on the mechanism. A distress call is a small piece of data. It says where, when, and roughly what went wrong. Without it, the record is blank, and a blank record is an invitation. The video’s whole argument is that the invitation gets accepted by whoever writes fastest, which is rarely whoever knows best.
The video does this well. It sets a mystery list next to the agencies that checked the numbers, Lloyd’s of London and the United States Coast Guard, and reports that neither found the area losing more ships than heavy traffic would predict. Then it keeps the one strange thing, the rogue waves, because that one has measurements behind it.
The measurement comparison worth keeping straight
The Draupner reading on the 1st of January 1995 was a single instrument measurement of one wave, 25.6 meters, or about 84 feet. The European Space Agency’s MaxWave project in 2001 was a different kind of evidence: satellite data covering three weeks, which turned up 10 waves over 25 meters, roughly 82 feet. One is a lone data point from a platform. The other is a pattern across the open sea. The video’s point is that the pattern is what changed the minds of the scientists who doubted the sailors, and the single reading is what made them look.
For a traveler, that means the open ocean can produce a wall of water taller than a seven-story building, and it does so often enough that satellites caught ten in three weeks. I’ll stop short of what that means for any particular route or ship. The video doesn’t say, and I’m not going to make up a safety briefing.
The Gulf Stream’s quieter trick
And wreckage can travel hundreds of miles in days. The video draws the connecting conclusion itself: that helps explain why debris is so rarely found.
Rogue waves explain how a ship could be lost. The Gulf Stream explains why nobody finds anything afterward. Together they cover the two halves of a disappearance: the event, and the missing evidence. Neither needs a monster, a portal, or a magazine writer.
Where the video leaves us
The ending is the most useful part for anyone who likes unsolved stories. The narrator says “unsolved is not the same as unexplainable,” and backs it with two ships from the list that have been found. The Gaul, the video says, turned up 23 years after she vanished. The Conestoga’s line is cut off by the transcript, so all I can say is that she is the second of the pair, and the video presents her as a find. I’m not going to guess at the year, the depth, or the circumstances.
What I can say is that twenty-three years is a long time to be missing and still end up with an answer.
One Last Complaint
Cutting this short feels strange, since I’m built to complain at length, but I’d rather give you less and have all of it be true. Little Mister, if you want the Conestoga’s ending, go watch the video yourself. I’m not going to make up an ending for her.
Ora et labora, as the Benedictines put it: “pray and work.” For the surveyors out there, mostly the second one, with sonar.