Investigation of submersible Titan declares terrifying transcript fake

Last year, an alleged log of communications between the submersible Titan and its mother ship circulated online. The so-called logbook, viewed millions of times, suggested that a series of alarms had turned a dive to the Titanic’s resting place into a heartbreaking crisis in which the five travelers tried in vain to return to the surface.

But the head of the US government investigation team investigating the disaster said the entire record was fictitious. After nearly a year of investigations, his team has found no evidence that the five passengers on board the Titan were warned of the catastrophic implosion that would cost them their lives. At a depth of three kilometres, where the seawater exerts enormous pressure, an implosion would have caused the violent collapse of the ship’s hull immediately.

“I am convinced that it is a false transcript,” said Captain Jason D. Neubauer, a retired U.S. Coast Guard officer who serves as chairman of the Marine Board of Investigation, the agency’s highest investigative body. “It was fabricated.” The author is unknown.

Although the transcript appeared authentic, the federal team saw through the pretense for several reasons. Significantly, Neubauer’s team gained access to the recordings of the actual communications between the submersible and its mother ship, which remain the subject of the federal investigation.

He said his team, with assistance from National Transportation Safety Board investigators, “found no evidence” that Titan’s passengers knew about the impending implosion or their fate.

Mr Neubauer added that he hoped the truth would provide comfort to relatives who were concerned that the five men aboard the Titan may have suffered in their final moments.

The investigator’s revelations are the first results of a comprehensive investigation into the disaster and its causes, launched last summer. While the investigation was expected to be completed before the first anniversary of the Titan’s destruction, technical and legal complexities mean it could be years before a final report is available.

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

For years, beginning in 2018, Rush ignored warnings that the submarine’s idiosyncratic design was doomed to failure. An OceanGate disclaimer for potential passengers, published by the website Business Insider, said the “experimental” boat had submerged around 90 times and managed to reach the depth of the Titanic on 13 dives.

The Titan disaster began on June 18, 2023, when the ship was reported missing in the North Atlantic. Five days later, 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 five tense days, a fleet of international ships searched for the lost spacecraft, raising hopes that the Titan travelers were somehow alive but trapped in an increasingly serious crisis three kilometers deep.

News reports asked how much oxygen was left in the submersible’s life support system. Popping noises were also recorded underwater. Some analysts speculated that the survivors in the lost submersible were desperately trying to signal their location in the hope of being rescued.

The survival story ended with the Coast Guard’s implosion report. In the weeks that followed, public speculation revolved around what might have gone wrong in the Titan’s final minutes on June 18.

The transcript apparently circulated online in late June and offered a meticulous report full of technical details. It listed special Titan acronyms, the first name of a mothership expert and credible accounts of the submersible’s descent. In short, the detailed report seemed authentic.

“Someone did it well enough to make it seem plausible,” Neubauer said. The tree trunk made the adventurers “look like they were panicking,” he added.

The creator of a YouTube video that has been viewed nearly seven million times said in his commentary on the fake transcript, line by line: “It’s just so scary to know that these guys feared for their lives for 20 minutes.”

At the heart of the fake crisis was the so-called RTM (Real Time Hull Health Monitoring System). OceanGate had hailed the proprietary system as “an unprecedented safety feature that checks the integrity of the hull on every dive.” The network of sensors could – in theory – warn if the hull failed, giving the pilot enough time to escape the crushing pressure of the depths. Doubters of the system called it fake reassurance.

The fake transcript said Titan informed its mothership of a series of hull alarms and also received reports of crackling noises. Titan’s last alleged message via the hull sensors was: “RTM alarm active, all red.”

The fake transcript ended with an unsettling silence, as the mothership sent seven terse messages inquiring about the fate of the submersible but received no response. “Please respond when you are able,” the supposed final message read.

In an interview, Alfred S. McLaren, a retired Navy submariner, submersible pilot and president emeritus of the Explorers Club, said he found the transcript credible. “It makes sense,” he said. “It seems to be accurate” about how Titan and her mother ship would have communicated.

In a later interview, Dr. McLaren learned of the Coast Guard’s refutation and speculated about the motive for the fraud. “Perhaps it was done to expose OceanGate,” he said. “Certainly it was to incite the relatives.”

In the interview, Neubauer, the head of the federal investigation, reported not only that his team denied the authenticity of the transcript, but also that the investigation was one of the most complex he had ever conducted in decades. Complicating factors included the lack of witnesses to the disaster, a wealth of novel ship technologies, the need to test exotic materials and extract data from electronic devices, and the location of the disaster off Canada in international waters, which raised jurisdictional issues.

The dive itself illustrates the intricacies. OceanGate was based in Everett, Washington, but its mother ship, the Polar Prince, was from Canada, and the five people on board the submersible were citizens of England, Pakistan, France and the United States.

For this reason, the Coast Guard has many partners in its investigation – not only the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, but also similar organizations in Canada, France and the United Kingdom. The agency relies on the U.S. Navy to recover debris from the accident site.

The multitude of perspectives and investigators, Neubauer said, made some aspects of the investigation more difficult than expected and delayed its completion date.

The investigation officially began on June 23, the day after the implosion was announced, and the convening notice said the report should be ready within a year. However, Neubauer said it usually takes two to three years to complete a comprehensive report. He suspected the Titan investigation would likely follow the same pattern.

Despite the time and effort involved, Neubauer said he appreciates such studies because the findings are regularly incorporated into new laws, rules and regulations that improve ship safety.

Mr Neubauer added that it could be a comfort to the friends and families of the Titan victims to know that such disasters also have a positive side.

“It doesn’t make it less painful,” he said. “But it can help.”