James Cameron the director of the Titanic said he knew days ago that the search for the missing submersible was “futile”.
The deep sea expert has made more than 30 dives to the Titanic wreck and knew within 24 hours or the Titan disappearing that an implosion had been heard.
His shocking claims were aired during an interview with veteran journalist Anderson Cooper on CNN on Friday.
“I’ve been living with it for a few days now, as have some of my colleagues in the deep submergence community,” he said.
“I tracked down some intel that was probably of a military origin, although it could have been research – because there are hydrophones all over the Atlantic – and got confirmation that there was loud noise consistent with an implosion.”
Cameron said this did not surprise him because he felt the Titan’s hull was “fundamentally unsuitable”.
“I was out on a ship myself when this happened on Sunday,” he said.
“The first I heard of it was on 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 with about a half hour that they had lost comms and they had lost tracking simultaneously.
“The only scenario that I could come up with in my mind that could account for that was an implosion. A shockwave event so powerful it actually took out a secondary system that has its own pressure vessel and its own battery power supply, which is the transponder that the ship uses to track where the sub is.”
Cameron said he let his inner circle know of the implosion and they raised their glass to the crew on Monday.
‘”Then I watched over the ensuing days this whole sort of everybody-running-around-with-their-hair-on-fire search, knowing full well that it was futile, hoping against hope that I was wrong but knowing in my bones that I wasn’t.”
The US Coast Guard confirmed the five people aboard the missing sub died in what appears to have been a “catastrophic implosion” on Friday.
A Canadian robotic diving sub discovered a debris field on the seabed, made up of five significant fragments of the Titan including the sub’s tail cone and and two pressure hull sections.