Imagine a long hair, stretched across a flat surface. Imagine looking at it closely, until it stops being just a line and gains depth, minute as it may be. Imagine it is alive. Imagine it writhes. Now picture it in a little puddle, this long winding thing looking for food. When it curls up, it rests at the bottom, indistinguishable from the debris that surrounds it. But when it stretches, it can touch both ends of the puddle, and it can not only drag in insects that try to drink from it, it can even pluck them from the air and drag them down.

Imagine it so thin that it's nearly one-dimensional, concealed when seen from the side, almost invisible from the front.

Can you picture that? Now zoom out. A puddle, a bathtub, an Olympic pool, a lake, a sea.

The Atlantic Ocean.

Imagine a thing that can reach any shore at any time. Sea Serpent legends, Kraken stories, tales of the Leviathan--what if they're all the same thing, seen from different angles? Congratulations--now you have an idea of the scale of what we call the Bermuda Beast.

It's a sorry nickname, I'll admit it, born of habit and lack of understanding. We don't even know if it's a beast, and its reach certainly isn't limited to Bermuda or its infamous Triangle. No, it soon became obvious that the whole world was its hunting ground, and that the number of disappearances within the Triangle area was just the law of large numbers in effect. Airplanes, battleships, those make the news. Missing whale pods do not. Messy eaters like sharks leave marks on the bones of their prey, but what of something that simply makes you disappear?

The Bermuda Beast isn't just a crackpot theory anymore. We have the photographic evidence, we have the sonar readings, and we disregarded them at first because we thought they represented natural occurrences. Giant kelp, waterspouts. But waterspouts can't explain every sighting. Waterspouts can't explain reported behavior. Put plainly, waterspouts don't come out of a calm sea to pluck Boeings out of the sky or grasp onto the hulls of ships to pull them under.

We don't know what it is, how sentient or how big it is. We don't even know if it's an animal, a colony, or something else altogether. All we know is that we have to share a planet with it... and that, eventually, we will be forced to come into contact with each other beyond the scale of a plane or two.

I want you to go back to picturing the hairlike creature in the puddle.

It's alive; we've established that much, and we also know that living things tend to grow. What will it do if it becomes too large for its puddle? Will it curl up and not make use of this new useful trait, or will it reach further beyond and look for food in the nearby anthills?

The Bermuda Triangle is expanding. One day, it will encompass the Earth.