“Titanic” director James Cameron has accused officials of dangling “false hope” to the public over the missing Titan submersible, claiming that he knew on Monday — three full days before the US Coast Guard confirmed its passengers were dead — that the vessel had imploded. Cameron said he was told that a “loud bang” was heard at the exact moment that the submersible lost contact with the mothership, which spelled bad news.
“We got confirmation within an hour that there had been a loud bang at the same time that the sub comms were lost,” he told CNN. “A loud bang on the hydrophone. Loss of transponder. Loss of comms. I knew what happened. The sub imploded.”
Cameron added that he sent an email to several colleagues, writing, “We’ve lost some friends. It’s on the bottom in pieces right now.”
However, no official announcement was made regarding Titan’s fate until Thursday afternoon after debris confirmed to be from the missing vessel was found on the seabed floor. A spokesperson for the Coast Guard said in a statement that the debris indicated that there’d been a “catastrophic implosion” that instantly killed those on board.
James Cameron has a serious issue with how the news around Titan has been handled, saying that the families of those on board had hope “dangled” in front of them when most already knew that the mission was doomed.
“I watched over the ensuing days, this whole – sort of- everyone running around with their hair on fire search, knowing full well that it was futile,” he said. “Hoping against hope that I was wrong, but knowing in my bones that I wasn’t.”
Cameron added: “It certainly wasn’t a surprise today, and I just feel terrible for all the families that had to go through all these false hopes that kept getting dangled as it played out.”
