A video of the alleged farewell of the crew of the submersible “Titan” is circulating on social networks. The vessel disappeared on the 18th, and four days later the US Coast Guard reported that the structure had suffered an explosion, resulting in the instant death of all five crew members on board.

Crew farewell video is fake — Photo: TikTok/Reproduction/ND

The material is being distributed as if it were genuine, but it was created using artificial intelligence based on images from an interview given by OceanGate founder and CEO Stockton Rush in 2019, Reuters reported. Until last Friday (23), over 3.2 million Facebook and Instagram users have seen this content.

A TikTok user posted a video to his account last Thursday (22) but claimed that the images were designed by artificial intelligence, unlike other internet users.

“My friends, my family, today is my last oxygen night here at the bottom of the sea,” one of the alleged crew members laments in the video. “We were stuck here at the bottom of the ocean during our expedition to the Titanic. The atmosphere here is dark and dreary. This is my goodbye, friends. Thank you.”

Of the five people pictured in the video, only one was actually a member of the Titan’s crew – OceanGate CEO and founder Stokeson Rush. The rest, no. Reuters has determined that a video similar to the one used in the posts, featuring the same people and scenery, was posted on the OceanGate YouTube channel in September 2019.

The US Coast Guard believes the Titan exploded on Sunday (18) when the ship was reported missing. Therefore, everything suggests that the crew did not even imagine that they would die. They also did not suffer from lack of oxygen and died a quick and painless death.

Implosion is a process in which objects collapse, collapsing on their own, as explained to R7 by physics professor Leandro Tessler from the State University of Campinas (Unicamp). The process occurs when the external pressure is greater than the pressure that the object can withstand. In these cases, it grinds up and turns into something that looks like a stepped soda can.

Other cases of loss under water

This is not the first time that an underwater vehicle, such as a bathyscaphe or a submarine (a vessel larger than a submarine), has disappeared into the ocean and met a tragic end. In 2000, the nuclear submarine Kursk (K-141) sank in the Barents Sea with a crew of 118 and was found at a depth of 118 meters. The accident is considered one of the greatest underwater tragedies in history.

More recently, in November 2017, the submarine ARA San Juan sank off the coast of Argentina with 44 crew members. The ship was found only after more than a year of searching, at a depth of 900 meters.