In a Wall Street Journal exclusive, it has been revealed that the U.S. Navy heard sounds of the OceanGate Titan implosion hours after it began its voyage on Sunday.
A top secret acoustic detection system, used by the American Navy to detect enemy submarines, first registered the sound of an implosion near the recently discovered debris site on Sunday, US defence officials told WSJ.
“The U.S. Navy conducted an analysis of acoustic data and detected an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the Titan submersible was operating when communications were lost,” a senior U.S. Navy official told the Journal, as reported by The Insider.
“While not definitive, this information was immediately shared with the Incident Commander to assist with the ongoing search and rescue mission.”
On the topic of withholding this information from the public, a senior advisor with the Center for Strategic and International Studies told the Washington Post:
“What you’re looking at is just lines on a graph [referring to the registered sounds]. And if you try to convince people you weren’t doing a search because the lines on a graph indicated an implosion, that wouldn’t be acceptable to many.”
In a previous interview with The Insider, professor of marine robotics at the University of Sydney, Stefan Williams, said that in the case of an implosion, the five passengers’ death would have been instantaneous.
An anticipated tragedy
Turns out the U.S. Navy was not the only one with knowledge of the detected sounds. In an interview with CNN, Hollywood director James Cameron revealed that his contacts in the deep sea exploration community had revealed the Titan had likely imploded.
Cameron is a big deep sea enthusiast, having travelled to the wreckage of the Titanic himself in 1995, prior to creating his iconic movie about the vessel’s tragic maiden voyage.
When Cameron learned from his colleagues in what he calls the “deep submergence community” that both communications and tracking of the craft had been lost simultaneously, he began to suspect an implosion, “a shockwave of events so powerful that it actually took out” the tracking and comms.
He went on to say, “I took that as a factor…I couldn’t think of any other scenario in which a sub would be lost where it lost comms and navigation at the same time, and stayed out of touch and did not surface.”
History repeating itself?
In an interview with ABC News, Cameron went on to comment on how ‘struck’ he was by the similarities between the missing Titan submersible and the Titanic shipwreck.
Namely that both catastrophes took place because of the failure to heed prior warnings. The original Titanic sank when the captain rammed the ocean liner into an iceberg (at full speed), in spite of being warned about the ice.
Similarly, Cameron criticised OceanGate for failing to heed warnings about the submersible’s experimental approach – the tourism company had been warned in 2018 by a group of industry professionals about its vessel not meeting voluntary industry standards and the possibility of “minor to catastrophic” outcomes.
In 2018, a whistleblower was fired from the company for raising concerns about the safety of its Titan submersible.
