Evidence revealed as fake during investigation of Titan submersible

US News

From News.com.au

A year-long investigation has revealed that the disturbing transcript of communications between the doomed submersible Titan and its mother ship – a document that has been shared millions of times on the Internet – was in fact a fake.

The logbook is said to contain details of the last communication between the submersible attempting to reach the Titanic with five passengers on board and the mother ship.

When the logbook documents were published last year, there was widespread suspicion and many questioned whether the transcripts of the two ships were actually authentic.

According to the New York Times, The head of the US federal government team investigating the accident – ​​including the nature and authenticity of the communications protocol – is convinced that the entire protocol is fake.

Captain Jason D. Neubauer, a former U.S. Coast Guard officer and chairman of the Marine Board of Investigation, said his investigation team found no evidence that those aboard the Titan knew of an impending fatal implosion.

“I am convinced that it is a false transcript … it was invented,” he said, as the ^ “New York Times: The New York Times”.

The logs, published by an anonymous author and shared online by millions of people, allegedly revealed minute-by-minute communications between the submersible and the mother ship. The logs contained realistic descriptions of what happened on board in the final moments before the ship imploded.

The transcripts also contained acronyms and technical terms that were unique to that submersible, which further convinced readers at the time that the transcript was authentic.

The logs partially revealed that the crew aboard Titan was in a state of panic and hull alarms were going off inside the submersible before communications abruptly lost.

Mr Neubauer hopes that the truth surrounding the transcript will provide some comfort to the families of the five men aboard the Titan, as they did not have to suffer in their final moments.

The five men on board the Titan were businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his son Suleman, 19; airline executive Hamish Harding, 58, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77. Stockton Rush, 61, the founder and chief executive of OceanGate – the American company that built the submersible and operated its tourist dives – was also on board that day as a pilot. OceanGate reportedly charged wealthy passengers up to US$250,000 per person to board the Titan and view the wreck of the Titanic.

On this particular voyage, Titan had hoped to reach the wreckage about 4,000 meters below the ocean surface on June 18, 2023, when the disaster began to unfold.

Despite warnings from OceanGate inside and outside the company that there could be “catastrophic” problems with the submersible if it reached extreme depths, the trips to the depths of the ocean floor were carried out anyway.

Five days later, on June 22, the first debris from the Titan was discovered near its resting place and it was officially declared that the submersible had suffered a “catastrophic implosion”.

The now-debunked transcript reportedly circulated in the days following the discovery of the debris. The wording and coding gave the impression that “they (the passengers on board) were panicking.”

“Someone did it well enough to make it seem plausible,” Neubauer said, adding that the most disturbing element of the fictional transcript was the silent ending from the submersible as the mothership desperately tried to find an answer.