All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
April 28, 2015 - Skeptoid
16:20
Skeptoid #464: The Lake Michigan Triangle

There is a region in the Great Lakes where, some say, ships and planes mysteriously disappear. Not so much. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|

Time Text
Selling Books Over Real Phenomena 00:14:34
You've heard of the Bermuda Triangle, but have you heard of the Lake Michigan Triangle?
Yes, that's a thing.
At least it is according to some people who are in the business of selling books.
Vortexes, mysterious disappearances, ley lines, UFOs, and inexplicable bursts of Earth energies are said to all be here.
Then why haven't you heard of it before?
The Lake Michigan Triangle is today unskeptoid.
A quick reminder for everyone, you're listening to Skeptoid, revealing the true science and true history behind urban legends every week since 2006.
With over a thousand episodes, we're celebrating 20 years of keeping it focused and keeping it brief.
And we couldn't have done it without your curiosity leading the way.
And now we're even offering a little bit more.
If you become a premium member, supporting the show with a monthly micropayment of as little as $5, you get more Skeptoid.
The premium version of the show is not only ad-free, it has extended content.
These episodes are a few minutes longer.
We get rid of the ads and we'll replace them with more Skeptoid.
The extended premium show available now.
Come to skeptoid.com and click Go Premium.
You're listening to Skeptoid.
For Brian Dunning, this is guest host Jeff Wagg for Skeptoid.com.
The Lake Michigan Triangle The Great Lakes region has had many planes, ships, and people go missing.
Some have suggested that a triangle exists here, causing strange things to happen to ships and planes alike.
Could there be another region like the Bermuda Triangle in America's heartland?
Yes, let's dispense with the Bermuda Triangle right away.
As has been reported in detail on Skeptoid before, the Bermuda Triangle was the creation of Charles Berlitz, and it has been established beyond a doubt that there is nothing statistically anomalous about the region.
Lloyds of London provides pretty strong evidence that this heavily traveled sea corridor is no different from many others because they don't charge any insurance surcharge for the ships plying those waters.
They do charge more for ships sailing near Somalia, where pirate attacks account for most missing ships.
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, the Bermuda Triangle remains one of the most recognized paranormal regions in the world, but it's far from the only one.
There are many other triangles, some on land, some on sea, and all are as dubious as the one Burlitz made.
The Lake Michigan Triangle is not nearly as well known, but it has been featured in many articles, books, and in the official register of the paranormal, the In Search of television program.
The late Leonard Nimoy narrated an episode entitled Great Lakes Triangle, which aired on November 2nd, 1978.
The earliest reference I can find to a Great Lakes triangle is the book, The Great Lakes Triangle, by pilot Jay Gurlay.
Released in 1977, it was advertised that this triangle was deadlier than the Bermuda Triangle.
In the first chapter, Gurlay reveals that the number of incidents recorded in this region is greater than in the Bermuda Triangle, according to a Rear Admiral of the U.S. Coast Guard.
This isn't a surprising statistic.
As busy as the region described by the Bermuda Triangle is, it's mostly water.
Gurlay's region includes a large amount of land, including a number of major cities such as Toronto and Chicago.
There is simply more activity here, and much of it is private aviation.
The introduction to Gerlay's book describes an area principally between longitudes 76 degrees west and 92 degrees west, and between latitudes 41 degrees north and 49 degrees north, in which several hundred peculiar events have been recorded.
The cartographers amongst you probably recognize those coordinates as describing a rectangular shape rather than a triangle.
I was surprised to learn that Gerlay did not include a map of the region, at least in the first printing of the paperback.
It seems he's using the word triangle to mean a paranormal area rather than just a shape.
The Great Lakes rectangle just doesn't have the same ring, especially when one is trying to sell a book just a few years after Berlitz's effort hit the bestsellers list.
Gurlay's work is basically a compilation of air and sea accidents that have been somehow mysterious.
He went through the newly computerized lists of incidents and pulled out dozens that had some element of mystery.
A ship completely disappeared.
A plane's compass or radio stopped working.
A rogue wave was reported.
And of course, these things have happened.
But until Gourlay, they were just stories of things that happened in open water.
One of the books Gourlay references is Strange Adventures of the Great Lakes by Dwight Boyer.
This book is your standard sea stories book, chronicling some of the harrowing tales of life on the Great Lakes.
For those who may not realize, these lakes truly are great.
They can be properly referred to as inland seas, and though their water is fresh, they have the same hazards as the ocean.
Sudden storms, rapidly changing conditions, hidden obstructions, all these have claimed their share of craft.
Boyer's book is entertaining, and while it's not a scholarly work, it contains no mention of triangles, vile vortices, ley lines, or anything else paranormal.
Of interest is the fact that it was published in 1974, the same year as Berlitz's Bermuda Triangle, and just three years before Gourlay's work.
Of further interest is how different the same stories are told.
Here is the version of the story of the William B. Davik, as described on page 86 of the Great Lakes Triangle.
The William B. Davik similarly disappeared without a trace on November 11th, 1940.
No one knows for sure what happened to the William B. Davik.
And later in the same paragraph, presumably she sank after a collision with the Anna C. Minch, a 1,880-ton steamer also lost on November 11th in Lake Michigan.
That's a solid hypothesis, but let's look to see what the source that Gerlay used, Boyer's Strange Adventures, says on page 101.
Although experienced Marine men know that radio telephone aerials are frequently among the casualties in a really stiff blow, there should have been word or a sighting by now.
Well, it seems that there was a storm.
What else can we find?
The first inkling of disaster was a telephone message from an Associated Press reporter advising Marine Superintendent Captain Thomas E. Zeeland that the Davik had apparently foundered.
Bodies were even then coming ashore in the vicinity of Ludington.
Later, several of those bodies were identified as crew members of the Davik.
Also found were the ship's lifeboats, life rings, and a specific wicker chair.
I'm at a loss to ascertain how Gerlay didn't consider these artifacts traces.
Hey everyone, I want to remind you about a truly unique and once-in-a-lifetime adventure.
Join me and Mediterranean archaeologist Dr. Flint Dibble for a skeptoid sailing adventure through the Mediterranean Sea aboard the SV Royal Clipper, the world's largest full-rigged sailing ship.
This is also the only opportunity you'll have to hear Flint and I talk about our experiences when we both went on Joe Rogan to represent the causes of science and reality against whatever it is that you get when you're thrown into that lion pit.
We set sail from Málaga, Spain on April 18th, 2026 and finished the adventure in Nice, France on April 25th.
You'll enjoy a fascinating skeptical mini-conference at sea.
You'll visit amazing ports along the Spanish and French coasts and Flint will be our exclusive onboard expert sharing the real archaeology and history about every stop.
We've got special side quests and extra skeptical content planned at each port.
This is a true sailing ship.
You can climb the rat lines to the crow's nest, handle the sails.
You can even take the helm and steer.
This is a real bucket list adventure you don't want to miss.
But cabins are selling fast and this ship does always sell out.
Act now or you'll miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Get the full details and book your cabin at skeptoid.com slash adventures.
Hope to see you on board.
That's skeptoid.com slash adventures.
One of the strongest stories of Great Lakes incidents is of a 727 flying into Lake Michigan instead of leveling off, despite having three experienced pilots on board looking at the altimeter.
Though the flight data recorder was not recovered, everything indicates that the plane was operating normally.
In fact, at the very moment of impact, the captain was talking with the control tower about his altimeter.
Gurlay cites a line from the National Transportation Safety Board report, which reads, The board is unable to determine the reason for the aircraft not being leveled off at its assigned altitude of 6,000 feet.
NTSB incident reports are available online and I was able to pull up the exact document he was referencing.
And he's right.
It says exactly that.
However, it also says on page 36 that it's possible the pilot was reading the altimeter wrong.
Due to a quirk on this aircraft, if you viewed the altimeter from the side, it was easy to make an error of 10,000 feet.
The first digit of the altitude was obscured by the bevel.
Pictures were included in the document that illustrate how easy this mistake is, and it had caused another 727 to crash earlier in the year.
Gurlay cited this document, but didn't mention this very plausible explanation.
These are examples of how stories are told when one wants to foster the idea that there is something strange going on.
Two ships colliding in a storm is a good sea story.
A ship simply vanishing is a good ghost story.
Gurlay is careful to say that he doesn't know what happened to his list of missing vessels, but he's not shy about offering suggestions.
These include some natural phenomena such as rogue waves, sage waves, which could have their own article, and magnetic anomalies.
But he's not shy about offering UFOs and the whole panoply of explanations found in Berlitz's book.
In fact, Berlitz is referenced heavily throughout the Great Lakes Triangle, and Gurlay's later work often deals with UFOs and other such phenomena.
Author Hugh Cochran thanks Jay Gurlay in his own book, Gateway to Oblivion, The Great Lakes Bermuda Triangle, and from there he expands upon the idea that the Great Lakes are host to vile vortices, UFO hotspots, earth energies, and an entire catalog of unproven phenomena.
Not to be undone, Cochran also created his own area, the Marysburg Vortex, where over a hundred ships have disappeared.
How could Gurlay have missed this?
He didn't.
He simply included it in his squarish triangle.
It's not difficult to create your own square triangle or vortex.
Simply pick three or more points on the earth, research all the disappearances and accidents in that area, and list them using only the bits of data that fit the idea that something strange is going on.
I've managed to do this in my own kitchen, where I've cut myself badly three times in an area of roughly three square feet.
It also happens to be where I do the chopping for cooking, but that's not useful data in my kitchen triangle hypothesis.
You may be wondering why this episode is called the Lake Michigan Triangle and not the Great Lakes Triangle.
That's because someone has created a new triangle in Lake Michigan, and that's the one that's getting the most attention these days.
This triangle uses the corners of Benton Harbor and Ludington, Michigan, and Manitowoc, Wisconsin.
It will not surprise you to learn that this area includes more than half the lake and includes nearly all the major shipping routes.
It also includes many of the most dramatic disappearances from the other books, such as the 727 incident mentioned earlier.
Though the plane didn't crash in the triangle, it flew into it, and that's good enough.
The Lake Michigan Triangle has been mentioned on William Shatner's Weird or What.
It has a place entry on the Atlas Obscura, and the Travel Channel's Mystery at the Museum reported on it using material that seems in line with Gurlay's work.
But they added a fact.
In 2007, underwater archaeologist Mark Hawley found a mysterious pattern of stones 40 feet under the lake in Grand Travers Bay.
And to add intrigue, one of these stones supposedly bears a carving of a mastodon.
The Travel Channel's program quotes them as being a North American stonehenge and suggests that it's possible that these stones are responsible for the disappearances.
While Hawley's discovery remains unconfirmed, I find it safe to say that these stones have not caused any shipwrecks unless a ship with a very deep draft happened to hit one.
So while I wasn't able to determine who came up with the current Lake Michigan triangle, I have crossed the region by plane and ship, and every time I emerged on the other side unscathed.
There was a very thick fog during a ferry crossing, which I interpret to be just that, a very thick fog.
If I were writing a book about paranormal places, I'd refer to it as a sudden, mysterious, or unexplained fog.
But I'm not.
I'm writing a skeptical piece for Skeptoid, and as such, my skepticism says that the Great Lakes and Michigan triangles are more about selling books than about describing any real phenomena.
Remember Skepticism And Support Us 00:01:41
Skeptoid is not just a hobby.
It's a non-profit public charity.
Just as you depend on a new show every week, we depend on your monthly micropayment.
If you're not already a supporter, please come to skeptoid.com and click on support Skeptoid and make this a two-way street for many years to come.
You're listening to Skeptoid, a listener-supported program.
I'm Jeff Wagg for skeptoid.com.
You can reach me at collegeofcuriosity.com.
Hello, everyone.
This is Adrian Hill from Skookum Studios in Calgary, Canada, the land of maple syrup and moose.
And I'm here to ask you to consider becoming a premium member of Skeptoid for as little as five US dollars per month.
And that's only the cost of a couple of Tim Horton's double doubles.
And that's Canadian for coffee with double cream and sugar.
Why support Skeptoid?
If you are like me and don't like ads, but like extended versions of each episode, premium is for you.
If you want to support a worthwhile nonprofit that combats pseudoscience, promotes critical thinking, and provides free access to teachers to use the podcast in the classroom via the Teacher's Toolkit, then sign up today.
Remember that skepticism is the best medicine.
Next to giggling, of course.
Until next time, this is Adrienne Hill.
From PRX
Export Selection