Titanic sub conspiracy theories spread like wildfire

Explosions, the most famous ship sinking in the world, an elaborate network of wealthy and influential financiers plotting to kill competitors, and an elaborate cover-up over a hundred years ago.

It has all the hallmarks of a gripping thriller, but after news that the submersible Titan—which had been descending to view the wreck of the Titanic when it disappeared on Sunday—imploded under pressure, killing five people, it is a yarn being woven by conspiracy theorists.

Some are now claiming that the Titanic was sunk in 1912 in a plot to kill those who objected to the establishment of a Federal Reserve by the financial dynasties in favor of it who had orchestrated a fresh tragedy to deter investigation of the wreck.

U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger announced on Thursday that one of the deep-sea robots drafted to look for the OceanGate-owned submersible found a debris field “consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber” near where communications had been lost.

It confirmed the worst-case scenario, that Titan had imploded under the extreme pressure of the sea around it, taking the lives of billionaire Hamish Harding, OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, former French Navy diver Paul-Henry Nargeolet, British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman.

Questions have been raised about the construction methods and safety of the submersible. One of the company’s former employees sued the company over safety issues in 2018, while explorer Chris Brown told CNN on Wednesday that he was scheduled to go to the Titanic wreck on the vessel before pulling out over the perceived risks.

But some suspect the incident was devised in the service of a cover-up.

“What if this is all a ploy to keep people from visiting the Titanic wreckage? If that’s the goal, why?” Stew Peters, a right-wing commentator, asked on his eponymous talk show. “Maybe because if people explore the Titanic too much, they would discover that it wasn’t an iceberg that sank the Titanic.”

Peters spoke with Zach Vorhies, a former Google engineer who published an “expose” on the company in 2021 and who offered a conspiracy theory narrative to the Titan story in a Twitter thread on Thursday.

“The thing about this submarine which is really weird is that it was actually funded by the Rothschild dynasty,” Vorhies told Peters. “And what’s also really interesting is there is a new treaty that’s getting implemented that makes it so that citizens… can’t go visit there without a permit.”

On Twitter, he pointed to conflicting accounts regarding the presence of an iceberg around the time the Titanic sank, and argued that an iceberg would not be able to cut through the ship’s one-inch steel hull.

The hull was three-quarters of an inch, one study shows, while research for the U.S. Department of Commerce found the metal on the Titanic to be overly brittle in low temperatures.

“I believe if people go down there, what they’re going to find is that there isn’t an implosion in the hull due to an iceberg,” Vorhies said. “What they’re going to find is an outward buckling of the hull because explosives were placed on the Titanic to blow it out.”

Rather than find one big gash, researchers followed by a documentary crew in 1997 discovered that the wreck had six thin openings in the hull, the New York Times reported at the time. At an inquiry into the sinking in 1912, it said, one of the architects at the company that produced the ship predicted such a scenario.

Vorhies went on to explain that four industrialists opposed to the creation of the Federal Reserve had been on the ship and perished when it went down, describing the sinking as a “piece of sabotage” to “trojan horse” the creation of the central bank.

He speculated that those behind the conspiracy were “the current stockholders of the Federal Reserve” and claimed Titan‘s demise “will be used as leverage to make the Titanic off limits by visitation.”

Vorhies was among several to note that in 2012, OceanGate announced that David de Rothschild, an adventurer and heir to the family’s banking fortune, had joined the company’s board of directors.

“Does anyone else find it strange that one of the victims of the Titanic was Martin Rothschild and one of the board of directors of the missing Titanic sub OceanGate is David de Rothschild?” one Twitter user asked. Martin Rothschild did perish on the Titanic but was not directly related to the British banking family.

Meanwhile, another claimed that the Titan implosion was “a rerun” of the Titanic sinking, speculating that it was a prelude to a new gold-backed currency being announced.

Newsweek reached out to Rothschild & Co., David Rothschild through his Voice for Nature project, and OceanGate via email for comment on Friday.