Nelly: Actually, I wanted to tell you, I do feel a magnetic field emanating! Philippe: I like to imagine that Bermudians have a certain magnetism. Nelly: When you live in Bermuda, do you feel anything rare in a human sense on a day-to-day basis – because of the amount of magnetite and magnetic power in this area? The ship sunk in 1864 off shore of Bermuda Mary Celestia by water colourist Edward James. And that is supernatural in nature because it’s a big natural thing with lots of natural phenomena happening out there on the grandest scale. So there’s a bunch of factors that are quite incredible. It can be flat and calm, and it can be incredibly rough. The seamount that Bermuda sits on is 9,000 feet high.So you’re in the middle of the major oceans, there’s no continental shelf. We forget that Bermuda is literally in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Bermuda has been a place where lots and lots of ships have met their final moments. It’s not that we embrace the mystery, but there are over 300 shipwrecks around Bermuda, starting in the mid 1500s, all the way into the mid 1900s. And the interesting thing is that Bermuda can support it. Every month I get two or three serious calls and enquiries about coming to Bermuda to do documentaries, and to talk about the Bermuda Triangle. But the amount of interest internationally that we get monthly is phenomenal. It doesn’t really factor in our daily lives. Philippe: You know, as a Bermudian, we’re quite blasé about the whole Bermuda Triangle thing. So what do you say to people when they visit you?! You spend your time looking for wrecks and all of the unfortunate people who find themselves getting lost because of the magnetic fields in your area. Pretty much every day we receive phone calls from people telling us that there are aliens – and that they are all in the Bermuda Triangle! There are so many conspiracy theories to do with the area. Nelly: I work at the SETI Institute to search for extraterrestrial life. So Bermuda is a phenomenally big anomaly in the middle of the ocean. I’m a novice in this world, but the interesting thing is that while there’s a lower iron signature, it’s actually more concentrated, so there’s more of it. It’s slightly lower in iron than magnetite, which is around 33%. Instead of magnetite, we actually talk about ‘Bermudite’ here, which is a version of magnetite that is very specific to the Bermuda seamount. It has a volcanic history that is quite unique. Philippe: When you’re talking about magnetite, and the impact of essentially the three largest atolls in the Atlantic, Bermuda is a very strange anomaly. Nelly: And it’s believed that is why the Bermuda Triangle is really magnetic, because it’s sitting on 500-foot thick matter which is composed of around 500 billion tonnes of magnetite…

So that’s quite a massive declination of your magnetic compasses when you’re trying to navigate! So we don’t have to go searching for otherworldly theories. Where they mention Bermuda, there is a warning in the bottom right hand corner that alerts mariners to expect compass variations or magnetic anomalies of up to 14-degrees. If looking for proof of a Bermuda Triangle phenomenon, you don’t need to look much further than the British Admiralty charts, the very charts that they use to navigate to Bermuda or in the Atlantic. We lean towards a supernatural reason when we get caught up in a world of things that we can’t explain or understand. Philippe Max Rouja: I’ll start by saying that the Bermuda Triangle invites that much scrutiny because there’s so much that seems to happen around Bermuda. When you dive in Bermuda, do you have to be very careful because your instruments stop working in certain spots?

Philippe Max Rouja, as ‘Bermuda’s Custodian of Historic Wrecks’ you must quite regularly excaperience strange and dangerous phenomena. Here, Philippe joins award-winning designer Nelly Ben Hayoun to clear up a few myths about the Devil’s Triangle

Bermuda triangle fish store