A gripping, technically detailed log of the last minutes of the Titan submersible before it imploded nearly a year ago during a quest to visit the wreckage of the Titanic is fake, federal investigators said Monday.
“I’m confident it’s a false transcript,” Jason Neubauer, a retired U.S. Coast Guard captain who now chairs the Marine Board of Investigation, told The New York Times. “It was made up.”
It is not known who authored the phony report.
It was June 18, 2023, when the tiny submarine-like craft lost contact with its mother ship. Five people were aboard, including the CEO of the company that built the submersible and ran the tour.
Debris was discovered five days later, with the Coast Guard declaring that a “catastrophic implosion” had crushed the craft and doomed the occupants. A formal U.S. Coast Guard inquiry began June 23 as investigators recovered evidence and human remains from the sea floor, 12,500 feet down.
In the five days after the sub went missing, the world held out hope that the submersible could still be intact and that the passengers and pilot were surviving on the 96 hours of oxygen stored onboard.
It didn’t take long for the supposed transcript to surface and get shared by numerous YouTube and TikTok creators, albeit with lots of disclaimers about whether it was authentic. Snopes described the report as “unconfirmed.”
But there were many holes. For one thing, The Times reported, the transcript did not match the records of the communications between the two vessels, which have not been made public. Neubauer told the newspaper that National Transportation Safety Board investigators had “found no evidence” that the five men had any inkling that the Titan was about to fail.
The transcript made it sound as if the men knew what was happening and were panicking, Neubauer said. His hope is that their relatives will now know they did not suffer.
