Last year, a purported transcript of communications between the Titan submersible and its mothership circulated widely on the Internet. Viewed millions of times, the so-called diary suggested that a series of alarms had turned the dive at the Titanic’s resting place into a thrilling crisis in which the five travelers struggled in vain to return to the surface.
But the head of the US federal government team investigating the disaster said the entire transcript is fiction. After almost a year of investigation, his group has found no signs that the five travelers aboard the Titan had any warning of the catastrophic implosion that was going to take their lives. At two miles deep, where seawater exerts enormous pressure, an implosion would have caused the violent collapse of the vehicle’s hull to be instantaneous.
“I’m sure it’s a fake transcript,” said Capt. Jason D. Neubauer, who retired from the U.S. Coast Guard and serves as chairman of the Marine Board of Investigation, the agency’s highest investigative level. . “It was invented.” Its authorship is unknown.
Despite the record’s air of authenticity, the federal team caught on to the simulation for a variety of reasons. Significantly, Mr. Neubauer’s team gained access to records of actual communications between the submersible and its mother ship, which remain an undisclosed part of the federal investigation.
He said his team, aided by investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board, had found “no evidence” that Titan travelers had knowledge of the impending implosion or their fate.
Their hope, Neubauer added, is that the truth will comfort family members concerned that the five men inside the Titan may have suffered in their final moments.
The investigator’s revelations are the first to emerge from an exhaustive investigation launched last summer into the disaster and its causes. While there were expectations that the investigation would conclude before the first anniversary of the Titan’s destruction, a combination of technical and jurisdictional complexities means a final report could take years.
The five men aboard 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 authority on the Titanic; and Stockton Rush, 61, founder and CEO of OceanGate, the American company that built the submersible and conducted its tourist dives. He was also the pilot of the Titan that day.
For years, starting in 2018, Rush ignored warnings that the submarine’s maverick design was doomed to fail. An OceanGate waiver for prospective passengers posted on the Business Insider website said the “experimental” ship had dived beneath the waves about 90 times and managed to reach the depth of the Titanic in 13 dives.
The Titan calamity 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 Titanic wreckage near the Titanic’s resting place, announced that the submersible had suffered a “catastrophic implosion.”
Over the course of five tense days, a fleet of international ships searched for the missing ship, raising hopes that the Titan’s travelers were somehow alive, but trapped in an increasingly grim crisis two miles below the surface.
News reports asked how much oxygen might be left in the submersible’s life support system. Noises of underwater banging were also detected. Some analysts suggested that survivors of the missing submersible were desperately trying to pinpoint its location in the hope of being rescued.
The announcement of the Coast Guard’s implosion ended the survival narrative. Public speculation in the following weeks focused on what might have gone wrong during Titan’s final minutes on June 18.
The transcript reportedly began circulating on the Internet in late June, offering a minute-by-minute report rich in technical details. It featured specialized acronyms for Titan, the name of a mothership expert, and credible depictions of the submersible’s descent. In short, the detailed report had an air of authenticity.
“Someone did it well enough to make it seem plausible,” Neubauer said. The search made the adventurers “look like they were panicking,” he added.
The creator of a YouTube video that has nearly seven million views said in his line-by-line commentary on the fake registration: “It’s so scary knowing that these guys spent 20 minutes fearing for their lives.”
The fake crisis centered on what the transcript called RTM, short for Real Time Hull Health Monitoring system. OceanGate praised the patented system as “an unparalleled safety feature that evaluates hull integrity on every dive.” The network of sensors could, in theory, warn that the hull was failing and give the pilot enough time to escape the crushing pressures of the depths. Those who doubted the system called it false tranquility.
The fake transcript said Titan reported a series of hull alarms to its mother ship, as well as reports of crackling noises. Titan’s last supposed message over the helmet’s sensors read: “RTM alert active, all red.”
The fake transcript ended on a worrying note of silence, as the mother ship sent seven terse messages inquiring about the submersible’s fate but received no response. “Please respond if you can,” the purported last 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 about right” in terms of how Titan and his mothership would have communicated.
Informed in a later interview of the Coast Guard’s rebuttal, Dr. McLaren speculated about the motive for the fraud. “It may have been done to embarrass OceanGate,” he said. “It was certainly guaranteed to agitate the relatives.”
In the interview, Neubauer, head of the federal investigation, spoke not only of his team’s dismissal of the transcript’s authenticity, but also of how the investigation was one of the most complex he had ever faced in decades. Complicating factors, he said, included a lack of witnesses to the disaster, a host of novel technologies on ships, the need to test exotic materials and extract data from electronic devices, and the disaster site off Canada in international, which created jurisdictional problems.
The dive itself illustrates the entanglements. OceanGate was based in Everett, Washington, but its mother ship, the Polar Prince, was from Canada, and the five people aboard the submersible were citizens of England, Pakistan, France and the United States.
As a result, the Coast Guard investigation has many partners, not only the National Transportation Safety Board in the United States, but also similar bodies in Canada, France and the United Kingdom. The agency is relying on the U.S. Navy to recover debris from the crash site.
The multitude of angles and investigators, Neubauer said, has made some aspects of the investigation more difficult than expected and pushed back its completion date.
The investigation officially began on June 23, the day after the implosion was announced, and its call called for a report to be completed within a year. However, Neubauer said, a major report typically takes two or three years to complete. He suggested that research on Titan would likely follow the same pattern.
Despite the time and effort, Neubauer said, he valued such investigations because the findings regularly become new laws, rules and regulations that improve ship safety.
Neubauer added that friends and family of Titan victims could take comfort in knowing that such disasters have positive aspects.
“This doesn’t make it any less painful,” he said. “But it can help.”