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This week, the world was captivated by the search-and-rescue mission that unfolded in the North Atlantic Ocean in the wake of the disappearance of the Titan, the OceanGate vessel that went missing shortly after it descended to visit the wreck of the Titanic.
The odds were stacked against the various organizations that flocked to the area in the hopes of tracking down the submersible, and our Thursday, the United States Coast Guard confirmed the Titan had suffered a “catastrophic implosion” that claimed the lives of the five people aboard after identifying its tail fin that in a debris field located near the shipwreck.
Things took an interesting twist on Thursday evening when The Wall Street Journal published a report that suggested the rescue mission may have been the ultimate exercise in futility, as the United States Navy apparently detected a noise consistent with the implosion days before the news was shared with the rest of the world.
While it largely managed to keep that information under wraps, there was apparently one notable name who also learned about the fate of the Titan well before everyone else: James Cameron.
Cameron has previously admitted the primary reason he made Titanic in the first place was to get the chance to visit the wreck himself, and he’s used some of the money he made from that film (and his other box office behemoths) to repeatedly dive to some of the deepest parts of the ocean.
That expensive hobby has also allowed him to make plenty of connections in the fairly exclusive deep-sea diving community, and during an interview with Anderson Cooper on Thursday night, the director revealed he’d been informed about the aforementioned noise the Navy detected the day after the Titan went missing.
Here’s what he had to say:
“We’re all kind of heartsick from the outcome of this, and I’ve been living with it for a few days now…
I was out on a ship myself when the event happened on Sunday; first I heard of it was Monday morning. I immediately got on my network—because it’s a very small community in the deep submergence group—and found out some information within about a half-hour that they had lost comms and tracking simultaneously.
The only scenario I could come up with in my mind that could account for that was an implosion; a shockwave event so powerful that it actually took out…the transponder the ship uses to track the sub…
I got on the horn again with some other people—tracked down some intel that was probably of military origin, although it could’ve been research, because there are hydrophones all over the Atlantic—and got confirmation there was some kind of loud noise consistent with an implosion event.
That seemed to me to be enough confirmation that I let all of my inner circle of people know that we had lost our comrades, and I encouraged everybody to raise a glass in their honor on Monday.”
That right there is some impressive “Dwayne Johnson learning about the death of Osama bin Laden” energy.