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An elite team is investigating the Bermuda Triangle with the aid of a secret weapon -- a map, decades in the making, marking the location of unidentified undersea wrecks and anomalies.
The Bermuda Triangle is the most notorious stretch of ocean in history, evoking fear and endless fascination. Bounded by Florida, Bermuda and Puerto Rico, these waters have swallowed countless ships and planes and their crews—some vanishing without a trace.
NASA leaders recently viewed footage of an underwater dive off the East coast of Florida, and they confirm it depicts an artifact from the space shuttle Challenger.
The artifact was discovered by a TV documentary crew seeking the wreckage of a World War II-era aircraft. Divers noticed a large humanmade object covered partially by sand on the seafloor. The proximity to the Florida Space Coast, along with the item’s modern construction and presence of 8-inch square tiles, led the documentary team to contact NASA.
(WSVN) - Two deep sea divers found something off the coast of South Florida that is giving one family some closure. Karen Hensel shines 7 Spotlight on a story of service, survival and discovery that spans more than six decades.
On Jan. 31, 1957, First Lt. Richard McCombs was on a training mission when his plane’s engine failed.
The newspaper headline at the time: “Marine pilot safe in ocean ditching.”
Jimmy Gadomski, found plane: “He was able to put it down safely, but it was still a crash.”
The Marine managed to get out of his Douglas Skyraider, an attack bomber, just before it sank about a mile off of Key Biscayne.
Jimmy Gadomski: “We were able to learn that the pilot did survive.”
Florida divers Jimmy Gadomski and Mike Barnette were the ones who found his plane this past July, more than 66 years after the plane went down.
On Wednesday, crews loaded the “Mechan H2O” onto a dive boat, headed a mile and a half offshore, and then pushed it overboard.
The steel sculpture now stands on the famed Lady Luck artificial reef 100 feet below the surface.
The Lady Luck, which is a 324-foot tanker, was sunk in 2016.
Jimmy Gadomski has a background in shipwreck salvage and was the lead diver on the project.
Much more sophisticated technology has since come to the rescue. While technical divers are still essential to the recovery of sunken artefacts, a host of equipment is making it easier to pinpoint the location of wrecks.
Blue Water Rose, for example, a 24-metre commercial vessel operated by Blue Water Ventures International to search the Pulaski wreck is fitted with a side-scan sonar, caesium magnetometers, Overhauser gradiometers and advanced mapping and metal-detection software. It is also fitted, like many such ships, with prop wash deflectors that blow water straight down to create holes in the sand that divers then search for artefacts, pieces of iron, wood, anything that can establish the identity of the wreck. It is in one such hole that Gadomski found his most significant piece yet, the base of a candlestick with the inscription “SB Pulaski”, which established the identity of the wreck – and conferred rights to the salvage company.
“They wanted to get more bottom time ” he says. “They were getting 20 minutes 25 minutes at first. Now we’re getting an hour on the bottom. But you can’t go right to the surface like you would on a normal dive. We’ll stay down there and accumulate nitrogen which puts us in decompression. We do staged stops.”