Frightening viral ‘transcript’ from Titan submersible’s fatal dive to Titanic declared fake

WASHINGTON – In 2023, a purported transcript of communications between the Titan submersible and its mother ship circulated widely on the internet.

Viewed millions of times, the so-called log suggested that a series of alarms had turned a dive to the resting place of the Titanic into a heart-pounding crisis in which the five voyagers struggled in vain to return to the surface.

But the head of the US federal government team investigating the disaster said the entire transcript is fiction.

After nearly a year of investigation, his group has found no signs that the five voyagers aboard the Titan had any warning of the catastrophic implosion that was to take their lives.

Over 3km down, where seawater exerts vast pressures, an implosion would have made the violent collapse of the vehicle’s hull instantaneous.

“I’m confident it’s a false transcript,” said Captain Jason Neubauer, who retired from the US Coast Guard and serves as chair of the US Marine Board of Investigation, the agency’s highest level of inquiry. “It was made up.”

Its authorship is not known.

Despite the so-called log’s air of authenticity, the federal team saw through the pretence for a variety of reasons.

Significantly, Capt Neubauer’s team gained access to the records of the actual communications between the submersible and its mother ship, which remain an undisclosed part of the federal investigation.

He said that his team, aided by investigators from the US National Transportation Safety Board, had “found no evidence” that Titan’s voyagers had any awareness of the imminent implosion or their fate.

His hope, Capt Neubauer added, is that the truth will console relatives concerned that the five men inside the Titan may have suffered in their last moments.

The investigator’s disclosures are the first to emerge from a comprehensive inquiry that began in the summer of 2023 into the disaster and its causes.

While there were expectations that the investigation would be concluded before the June anniversary of the Titan’s destruction, a mix of technical and jurisdictional complexities mean that a final report could take years to complete.

The five men aboard the submersible were Mr Shahzada Dawood, 48, a British Pakistani businessman; his son Suleman, 19; Mr Hamish Harding, 58, a British airline executive; Mr Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, a French Titanic authority; and Mr Stockton Rush, 61, a founder and chief executive officer of OceanGate, the US firm that built the submersible and ran its tourist dives. He was also the Titan’s pilot that day.

For years, starting in 2018, Mr Rush had brushed aside warnings that the sub’s maverick design was destined to fail.

An OceanGate waiver for would-be passengers posted by website Business Insider said that the “experimental” craft had plunged beneath the waves some 90 times and succeeded in reaching the depth of the Titanic on 13 dives.

The Titan calamity began on June 18, 2023, when the craft was reported missing in the North Atlantic. On June 22, the Coast Guard, citing the discovery of debris from the Titan near the Titanic’s resting place, announced that the submersible had suffered a “catastrophic implosion”.

During the five tense days, a fleet of international vessels searched for the lost craft, raising hopes that the Titan voyagers were somehow alive but trapped in an increasingly grim crisis over 3km down.

News reports asked how much oxygen might be left in the submersible’s life-support system. Underwater banging noises were also detected. Some analysts suggested that survivors in the lost submersible were desperately trying to signal their location in hopes of rescue.

The Coast Guard’s implosion announcement brought the survival narrative to an end.

Public speculation in the following weeks turned to what might have gone wrong during Titan’s last minutes on June 18.

The “transcript” apparently began circulating on the internet in late June and offered a minute-by-minute report rich in technical details.

It recounted specialised Titan acronyms, the first name of a mother ship expert and credible depictions of the submersible’s descent.

In short, the detailed report had an air of authenticity.

“Somebody did it well enough to make it look plausible,” Capt Neubauer said. The log made the adventurers “look like they were panicking”, he added.

In an interview, Captain Alfred McLaren, a retired Navy submariner, submersible pilot and president emeritus of the Explorers Club, said that he had found the “transcript” credible.

“It makes sense,” he said. “It seems on the money” in terms of how Titan and its mother ship would have communicated.

Told in a subsequent interview of the Coast Guard refutation, Capt McLaren speculated on the fraud’s motive. “It may have been done to embarrass OceanGate,” he said. “It certainly was guaranteed to stir up the relatives.”

In the interview, Capt Neubauer told not only of his team’s dismissal of the so-called transcript’s authenticity, but how the investigation was one of the most complex he had ever encountered over the decades.

Complicating factors, he said, included the lack of witnesses to the disaster, a wealth of novel vessel technologies, the need to test exotic materials and to extract data from electronic devices, and the disaster site off Canada in international waters, creating jurisdictional issues.

The dive itself illustrates the tangles.

OceanGate was based in Everett, Washington, in the US, but its mother ship, the Polar Prince, was from Canada, and the five people aboard the submersible were citizens of England, Pakistan, France and the United States.

As a result, the Coast Guard investigation has many partners – not just the US National Transportation Safety Board but also similar bodies in Canada, France and Britain.

The agency relied on the US Navy to recover debris from the accident site.

The multitude of angles and investigators, Capt Neubauer said, has made some aspects of the inquiry more difficult than expected and pushed back its completion date.

The inquiry officially began on June 23, 2023, the day after the implosion announcement, and its convening notice called for a finished report in a year.

However, Capt Neubauer said, a major report typically takes two or three years to complete. He suggested that the Titan inquiry would probably follow the same pattern.

Despite the time and effort, Capt Neubauer said, he valued such investigations because the findings regularly get turned into new laws, rules and regulations that improve vessel safety. NYTIMES