James Cameron, the director of 1997’s Titanicsaid in an interview Thursday that he correctly guessed the fate of the Titan submersible less than 24 hours after it went missing on Sunday—then watched the “futile” search, “hoping against hope that I was wrong .”
Cameron, a prolific deep-sea explorer himself, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that he missed the first news of OceanGate Expeditions losing contact with its submersible, which was already at sea on a ship. On Monday morning, however, he spoke to his colleagues in what he called the “deep sinking community.”
Learning from them that communications and tracking were lost simultaneously, Cameron said he began to suspect an implosion, “a shockwave of events so powerful that it took out” tracking, a secondary system that have their own fail-safes.
“I got on the horn again with other people, tracked down some intelligence that probably came from the military, although it could have been research – because there were hydrophones all over the Atlantic – and got confirmation that there was a type of force. noise consistent with an implosion event,” the director continued.
“This is enough confirmation for me. I let everyone in my inner circle of people know that we lost our partners. And I encourage everyone to raise a glass in their honor on Monday.
Cameron said he received the information from “credible sources” and “I took that as a factor… I can’t think of any other scenario where a sub would be lost where communications and navigation would be lost.” same time and remained. untouched and did not come out.”
He told BBC News that the next few days “felt like a long and horrible charade where people were running around talking about banging noises and talking about oxygen and other things. .”
“I know that the sub that’s sitting on the bottom is the last known depth and position of it,” he said. “That’s where they really found it.”
On Thursday, the US Coast Guard confirmed in a press conference that debris evidence found near the wreck of the Titanic suggested a “catastrophic implosion” had occurred, killing all five people on board. .
Cameron said he knew “the [his] bones” that he was right even before the announcement. “So it’s not a surprise now.”
On CNN, Cameron added that he believed the sub’s passengers “had some warning, that they heard some acoustic signature of the hull starting to delaminate.” Cameron believes he heard delamination—the process when water begins to force the layers of fibers apart—“in their ears, not through the sensor system in the last moments of their lives, and that a terrifying prospect.”
He said it was “unthinkable” that the company in charge of the Titanic’s submersible mission, OceanGate, did not go through the appropriate safety procedures. He confirmed that he had no business with OceanGate and did not try to warn CEO Stockton Rush of his safety problems, thinking “they might have solved it. [safety issues].”
In an earlier interview Thursday, he told ABC News that several of his deep-sea colleagues had written to OceanGate officials in the past, warning that their submersible was too experimental and its safety needed to be certified.
“I was struck by the parallels with the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned about the ice ahead of his ship, and yet he flew headlong into an iceberg one night no moon and a lot of people died because of it,” said Cameron.
“For us, this is the same tragedy where warnings were ignored. To happen in the same exact place with all the diving happening around the world, I think it’s amazing. It’s really surreal.”
A diving expert who has participated in more than 30 deep-sea expeditions, Cameron in 2012 piloted an experimental craft of his own design on a record-breaking dive into the undersea valley of the Mariana Trench. .
He “knowingly” did not seek certification for his vessel, he said The New York Times on Thursday, because it’s a scientific—and solo—mission.
“I would never design a car to carry passengers and not have it certified,” he said.