An All-Star Cast Explores The Triangle

Starting Monday, Dec. 5, at 9 pm/ET, Sci Fi Channel will explore The Triangle -- as in the inexplicable Bermuda phenomenon -- over the course of a three-part, six-hour miniseries event. The premise: Sam Neill's shipping magnate, fed up with losing carriers and cargo to the deep blue sea, recruits a ragtag group of experts -- Eric Stoltz, Catherine Bell, Bruce Davison and Michael Rodgers included -- to make some sense of the oceanic mystery of the Triangle once and for all. At the helm, so to speak, are producers Dean Devlin (Independence Day) and Bryan Singer (X-Men).

Sorting through the volume of rumors, theories, half-truths and pure speculation about the Bermuda Triangle was a daunting task. "Just go to Google and type 'Bermuda Triangle,' and billions of pages show up," Devlin tells TVGuide.com. "I don't know how much academic research is being done on it, but there are amateurs everywhere who are jumping in the same way we did.

"One of the fun things we did," he continues, "is right after we decided to pursue this project, we hired some researchers to gather information. We were expecting to get a few pages of crib notes, but we kept getting reams and reams and reams of paper with all these different theories. Clearly, it's a deep well of mystery -- one we hopefully tap into in these six hours."

Indeed, not every semivalid Triangle hypothesis could possibly make it into the Sci Fi Channel miniseries. "The choices came out of what was organic to the story we were telling," says Devlin, who then recounts one of his first fascinations with the Triangle. "I remember as a little boy hearing a radio program where a pilot in the Bermuda Triangle was freaking out and then suddenly there was only static, you couldn't hear his voice. Then he came back very calmly saying [something] and no one knew what it meant. Years later, they realized it was the name of a German watch. I always remembered that and it haunted me."

Scouring through his researchers' fruit, did Devlin uncover anything especially surprising? "I didn't know before we did this that Christopher Columbus actually experienced an event in the Bermuda Triangle, in an area known as the Sargasso Sea," he says. "He even had written about it in his journal."

Compelling evidence or not, Devlin says he didn't need to be a believer in the Triangle's mystery to produce a miniseries about it. "I've always said that I don't believe in Santa Claus, but I could make a great movie about him if I set my mind to it. So it wasn't my belief that propelled us forward; I just thought it was an intriguing story. However, I have to say that as we got into it, you have to start asking questions, and your skepticism starts to fall aside. You have to open up your mind to the possibilities." -- Additional reporting by Allison Corneau