Mysteries from our past lost to the mundane truth — thanks to the Internet

Iwas chatting with someone the other day when the subject of the Bermuda Triangle came up.

It occurred to us that it had been years since we’d heard anyone talk about that allegedly mysterious expanse of ocean east of Florida notorious for the disappearance of ships and aircraft.

When I was a kid, you heard about the Devil’s Triangle so often that I ruled out ever visiting the area.

Come to think of it, I’ve never been to Florida or the Caribbean. See what a little bad publicity can do for a place?

It’s not just the Bermuda Triangle you seldom hear about nowadays.

When was the last time, for instance, that someone brought up crop circles? What about spontaneous human combustion, the supposed phenomenon where someone suddenly just burns up, often while sitting quietly in a chair watching the television? They don’t even have to be watching U.S. presidential coverage or a Canucks game for this to happen.

How about acid rain or the hole in the ozone layer — environmental issues we were told to worry about before carbon pollution and climate change became the big fear?

Or what about Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster or, closer to home, the Ogopogo, the large, bumpy, aquatic creature some claim lives in Okanagan Lake? When was the last time you read about someone’s encounter with a UFO or aliens?

There are several reasons these topics don’t come up. Two disappeared for a good reason.

Acid rain and the ozone hole (actually, a thinning of the ozone layer) are real things we more or less fixed — at least in North America. In 1991, the U.S. and Canada signed an air-quality agreement in which both countries agreed to cut emissions of sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, two compounds linked to acid rain. According to a 2014 report tracking the deal’s effectiveness, Canadian sulphur-dioxide emissions decreased 58 per cent from 1990 levels while nitrogen oxides declined 45 per cent. (U.S. emissions fell 78 and 47 per cent, respectively.)

The thin spot over Antarctica is decreasing (and expected to return to 1950s levels by 2080, according to National Geographic) thanks to a unanimously agreed 1987 United Nations treaty, the Montreal Protocol, that phased out the production of ozone-gobbling halogenated hydrocarbons — say that fast three time — such as chlorofluorocarbons, better known as CFCs, used in refrigerants and hairsprays.

Unlike climate change, acid rain and the ozone hole were environmental problems that were widely accepted, with simple and inexpensive solutions the world could agree upon.

The other topics we no longer talk about that much are different because we have more or less decided that they are not real and never were.

You’re not more likely, for example, to be lost at sea in the Bermuda Triangle than in other patches of ocean. The Devil’s Triangle craze, including suggestions that little green men, Atlantis or mysterious magnetic fields were behind the disappearances, was linked to a lot tall tales by authors looking to make a few quick bucks.

The most recent ‘victim’ of the area, the container vessel SS El Faro, was lost with all hands Oct. 1 last year. The cause? The nearly Category 5 Hurricane Joaquin that packed winds of 250 km/h. What ship wouldn’t sink if caught in that?

Crop circles? Just a bunch of prankster-artists with an morethan-usual interest in geometric patterns.

Spontaneous human combustion? Again, no mystery. Just drunks falling asleep and dropping cigarettes into their chairs and clothes, the human body in rare cases providing enough drippings to fuel the flames through a process known as the wick effect.

Bigfoot? Nessie? Ogopogo? Give me a break. If these creatures were real, we’d have found a body by now. An Oxford DNA study this summer of hairs purporting to be from Bigfeet (is that the plural?) were revealed to be from “bears, wolves, raccoons, porcupine, deer, sheep, at least one human, and a cow,” a Time article reported.

And Ogopogo is now so off the radar of even people in the Okanagan that Kelowna city council earlier this year considered dropping the mythical beast as its mascot. (They decided to keep it in the interests of an innocent tradition.)

Aliens? A recent study by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics concluded that we’re likely alone in the universe. Even if life exists elsewhere, it’s almost certainly too far away to ever reach us.

The Internet is wonderful, but has certainly killed a lot of the mystery in the world. The X-Files may have said the “Truth is out there,” but for the most part, the truth is pretty mundane.