A video showing some passengers inside a submarine recording the underwater view has recently been shared falsely claiming that the clip shows the final moments of the five passengers before OceanGate's Titan submersible met a tragic accident under the ocean.
BOOM found that the video is from 2021 and does not show the last moments of the five passengers who went on an expedition to find the Titanic shipwreck in June this year.
Five people reportedly lost their lives after they took part in a trip organised by OceanGate Expeditions to visit the historic Titanic wreckage. Their journey began on June 16 with a submersible that went missing on June 18, reported news agency Reuters. After a series of search operations, on June 22, the U.S. Coast Guard declared the explorers dead and said that the vessel was destroyed due to an implosion.
The video is being shared with a caption that says, "In the last scene, you can see five people sitting in the submarine. They also made a video of the Titanic, but what do they know that death is waiting for us in the Titanic and they will never return alive."
Click here to view the post on Facebook.
Another user shared the same video on Twitter and wrote, "OceanGate reveals footage captured of the Titanic before the implosion!"
Click here to view the tweet.
Fact Check
BOOM performed a relevant keyword search to find news reports about the recent journey of Titan submersible and found a news bulletin by 10 Tampa Bay interviewing Aaron Newman, the same person who can be seen in the now viral video.
Interestingly, the news bulletin was published on June 22 after the submarine went disappeared on June 18 and amid no reports of missing passengers found to be alive.
We further noticed that the video report carried a segment of the viral clip from 53 seconds to 1 minute 4 seconds in its news bulletin where Newman can be spotted with his fellow passengers including a woman.
The report also states that the visuals are from 2021 when the visuals were recorded inside the submarine during a dive at that time.
The video was also aired by CBS News mentioning the same on June 22, 2023. Newman, in the CBS News bulletin, opens up about his experience about the Titan ride in 2021 and mentions it as 'comfortable but not luxurious' when asked by the news presenter.
For further confirmation, we ran another keyword search to find names for the missing passengers of the Titan submersible and found a report published by The New York Times on June 23, 2023.
The report mentions the name of the passengers as Hamish Harding, Stockton Rush, Suleman Dawood with his father, Shahzada Dawood, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet. Their pictures can be seen in the article.
However, we were unable to spot the woman passenger who is visible in the viral video in the above pictures of the recent passengers.
Taking a cue, we searched videos uploaded by OceanGate Expeditions YouTube channel and found a video from March 12, 2022, where the same woman was identified as a nautical archeologist Dr Bridget Buxton at the 1 minute 20 seconds timemark.
The video can be seen below.