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Over several decades something quite bizarre has been happening over an area in the western
United States, an area that encompasses the highly secretive military base known as Area
51.
There have been over 2000 tragic incidents involving planes, some of which just vanished
into thin air.
In fact, more weirdness has been going down in this place called the Nevada Triangle than
has in the famed Bermuda Triangle.
It might sound like something from the Twilight Zone, but trust us, strange things have been
happening and they have been well-documented.
Let’s investigate.
First, where exactly is the Nevada Triangle?
Yep, it’s partly in Nevada, but it also covers parts of California.
If you look on a map imagine drawing a triangle with the northern point at Reno.
Then draw a straight line down to Fresno and go forward until you reach Arizona.
Inside the triangle is the infamous city of Las Vegas.
The aptly named for this show Death Valley National park is also there, as is Area 51.
There’s a whole lot of wilderness inside the triangle, with large parts of it being
desert and mountains.
There have been a fair few bodies that have ended up in this gigantic wilderness, as well
as plane wreckages.
That’s why some people call it the, “graveyard for planes.”
Why so many planes just can’t seem to get through this area has been speculated over
for a long time.
The accidents aren’t made up.
There really have been a very unusual number of strange tragedies, and if you take it that
2000 planes have gone missing over 60 years, then that works out at around three a month.
Yep, that’s pretty insane and we intend to find out why.
Maybe one of the most well-known casualties of the Nevada Triangle was a man named Steve
Fossett.
Mr. Fossett was a very successful businessman but is better known for breaking lots of records
in boats and planes.
He became the first man ever to circumnavigate the globe in a balloon and in a fixed-wing
aircraft.
Needless to say, Steve knew his stuff.
In fact, it would be harder to find a more skilled pilot.
We could mention all of his successes and records, but that’s an episode in itself.
We will say that as well as flying and breaking records at the same time, he also climbed
some of the world’s highest peaks, competed in car races, and when that didn’t provide
enough excitement, he ran ultramarathons through mountains and did the odd iron man.
But Steve didn’t get through the Nevada Triangle.
On September third, 2007, at around 8.45 in the morning, he got in a single-engine Super
Decathlon light aircraft at a private airfield in Nevada.
We don’t really know why he went flying, but some people have theorized that he was
either going for the fun of it or scouting locations.
He didn’t submit a fight plan, but there was nothing especially weird about that.
What is weird, is that Steve never make it back that day.
His plane vanished.
It was fitted with something called an emergency locator transmitter, which, in the event of
trouble, should send a signal out.
But that didn’t happen, though the transmitters are known to malfunction on occasion.
Or maybe that’s just what THEY want you to believe.
A huge search covering thousands of square miles ensued, but given that it was thought
he went down in the mountains, this search was incredibly difficult.
The search crews consisted of many people, and while Steve didn’t turn up they actually
found the wreckages of another eight missing planes.
Since they just couldn’t find Steve or his plane, leading technology companies got in
on the act by taking images of the area.
Believe it or not, even psychics reached out and said perhaps they could help.
Spoiler alert: they couldn’t.
If Steve had gone down, given his remarkable survival skills maybe he could have lasted
out in that cold wilderness, but as time passed people gave up hope.
After more than two weeks the searches were called off and Steve was presumed dead.
They started again, and then were called off again.
It was said to be the most complex search in modern U.S. history, but it didn’t pay
off.
Almost exactly a year later a hiker found some documents in the Eastern Sierra Nevada
and those documents turned out to belong to Steve.
They were found about 65 miles (100km) from where he had taken off.
A search resumed and it was discovered that the crash site was on a mountain ridge in
a place called the Ansel Adams Wilderness.
Steve hadn’t mysteriously disappeared off the face of the planet as some people had
said.
Parts of the plane were found, but where was Steve, or what was left of him?
Well, not long after and some bones were found and they were identified as Steve, while a
pair of tennis shoes with animal bites on them were also found.
It was assumed he’d likely died on impact and then wild animals had dragged parts of
his body away over a period of time.
The National Transportation Safety Board later issued a statement regarding the cause of
the crash.
It said the reason was likely, “The pilot's inadvertent encounter with downdrafts that
exceeded the climb capability of the airplane.
Contributing to the accident were the downdrafts, high density altitude, and mountainous terrain.”
So, that’s arguably the most famous case of death in the Nevada Triangle.
Bigger planes have gone missing, too.
One of the better known tragedies was in 1969 and involved a plane nicknamed “The Gambler’s
Special” because it often carried folks who liked to bet in the Nevada casinos.
That plane hit a cliff, slid down into the snow, and all 35 people on board died.
It seems the pilot took a different route and that didn’t turn out well.
Again, getting to the wreckage was incredibly difficult.
We’ll give you a feel-good story now about a man named David Steeves.
Steeves was an Air Force Lieutenant and was flying a training jet when things took a turn
for the worse and he had to eject from the plane.
The man was in the middle of nowhere and while a massive search happened they couldn’t
find him.
It was presumed he must have died, although they didn’t find the plane.
With broken ankles and in the freezing cold he crawled for 20 miles over mountains that
were later called “impassable.”
The crawl took him 15 days and he had no food or shelter.
How he survived is a miracle.
Thankfully, he eventually crawled to an empty cabin and got his hands on some canned ham
and some fishing hooks.
With the state of his body he couldn’t go anywhere, but he at least got some food.
While he was hanging out in the cabin his friends and family mourned him, but after
52 days some hikers came across David… and this story would have a happy ending if David
didn’t die in an air crash eight years later.
Even well trained pilots have come undone in this area countless times and in some instances
no wreckage or bodies were found.
That’s may not sound too surprising, given the Nevada Triangle’s inhospitable terrain,
but this hasn’t stopped some conspiracy theorists speculating that stranger things
are at work and some of those missing planes might be linked to secret U.S. military skullduggery,
Area 51, and even aliens.
But let’s stay on Earth for the time-being and look at something called “Mountain Waves.”
No, these aren’t ocean waves somehow lapping up against the tops of mountains, but fast-moving
winds that happen at a mountain side and create oscillations of air above the mountain.
If one occurs while a plane happens to be flying over, it might suddenly get carried
on the wind, and in some cases lose control, similar to a boat being carried on a wave
and dumped on the other side.
That’s fine for surfers in the ocean for surfers, it’s less good for an airplane
pilot being thrown over a mountain into the rocks below.
Weather over the mountains is often unpredictable, and besides mountain waves you also get things
called downdrafts that spoil a pilot’s otherwise peaceful day.
One expert explained on a Nevada radio station, “It’s quite easy for a small plane to
get caught in the downdraft on the downwind side and not have the power or just the capability
to get out of the way of that.”
These can create microbursts of wind and can send a plane out of control.
Maybe the most famous incident of a microburst taking a plane out was in 1985 when Delta
Flight 191 crashed.
137 people died and 28 others were injured.
Professor Kelly Redmond, a climatologist with the Desert Research Institute in Reno, talked
to the Nevada radio station KNPR about what was going on in the Nevada Triangle.
He certainly didn’t think all the accidents had anything to do with secret weapons or
mischievous extraterrestrials.
He said it was simply bad weather.
He added, “When the winds are coming up, they come up kind of smoothly on the west
side and then they have this very rapid descent and there is a tremendous amount of turbulence
that can be caused by such situations.”
He said the planes that went missing or crashed were all small planes.
When they get caught in a downdraft they just sometimes don’t have the power not to be
taken away.
He said a downdraft can hit a plane so hard it could be like the Niagara Falls hitting
something.
He said an experienced pilot such as Steve Fossett could get out of all sorts of tricky
situations, but with a downdraft no level of skill will save you at times.
He also said in such a vast area some planes just misjudge where they are.
Pilots take off to see the wonderful scenery of the Sierra Nevada mountains and end up
becoming food for insects and foxes.
So is there really a huge mystery here?
Well, you don’t have to click around much to find online sleuths saying some of those
planes were likely brought down by aliens or were target practice for the U.S. military,
after all, there are plenty of people in this world that believe the military hides more
dark secrets than a teenage boy’s browser history.
Some theorists believe aliens might have abducted those people, but as yet there is no solid
proof in this world of aliens abducting people unless you listen to a handful of folks that
all seemed to live in small towns in rural America in the 1950s.
We’re gonna go out on a limb here and posit that the Nevada Triangle is just an area with
sometimes harsh weather for pilots.
Either that, or some pilots just needed a bit more training when traversing such a wild
landscape.
That said, if you’ve seen our video about what was the inspiration for the TV show,
“Stranger Things”, you’ll know there are some people in this world of ours that
believe that U.S. military has already developed technology that can make things disappear
and reappear, aka, teleportation.
Were the planes teleported?
Well, parts of missing planes have been turning up for years, so it’s a hard theory to sell.
If you have read the Missing 411 books written by former police officer David Paulides, you
will have seen that he says in the USA there are places where clusters of people just go
missing.
The Nevada Triangle is one.
He thinks something strange might be afoot, but if you look at these places you can explain
why they are death hotspots.
Lots of people just go missing in this area of the Nevada Triangle and sometimes they
aren’t in planes, but hey, it’s full of mountains and forests and wild animals.
So, how do you explain someone who doesn’t come home after going hiking in a treacherous
landscape?
Did he fall?
Was he attacked by a bear?
Did he freeze to death?
How dare you be so rational; you know the answer is he was teleported by the Air Force
who had done a deal with some green guys who’d just popped over from the Andromeda Galaxy.
We apologize if our unravelling of this mystery took some of the magic out of it, but we just
couldn’t find many reasons for these disappearances that couldn’t be explained by well understood,
naturally occurring weather phenomenon or even simpler explanations.
Or are you still not convinced?
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Do you believe the U.S. government really is hiding strange things from us including
whatever supernatural power is making people disappear in the Nevada Triangle?
Tell us in the comments.
Now go watch “What Happens At & What Do We Know About Area 51?”
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.