Mysterious Bermuda Triangle ‘ghost ship’ discovered 95 years after it vanished

The long-lost wreck of the SS Cotopaxi a steamship referenced in movies, memes and myth has been discovered off the coast of St. Augustine, Florida almost a century after vanishing near the Bermuda Triangle.

“It was incredibly exciting,” Michael Barnette, the diver, author and researcher who helped find the wreck, said via email. “I’ve done a countless number of shipwreck dives but this one truly stood out.”

Mr Barnette is the lead explorer of “Shipwreck Secrets,” a new Science Channel series that will feature the discovery of the Cotopaxi in its premiere episode.

The SS Cotopaxi set off from Charleston, South Carolina and was bound for Havana, Cuba on Nov. 29, 1925, and then vanished. No trace of the ship or its crew of 32 were ever identified, which made the vessel ripe for both folklore and pop culture.

In Steven Spielberg’s 1977 classic “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” the Cotopaxi reappears in the middle of the Gobi Desert.

And in recent years, social media memes have suggested the Cotopaxi had suddenly appeared, empty and intact, as a “ghost ship” floating off the coast of Cuba. That one was passed around so often that Snopes published an entire page debunking it.

As it turned out, the ship wasn’t quite missing.

Mr Barnette and his team combed through historical documents, including paperwork from the ship’s insurer, to find a previously unknown distress call sent by the Cotopaxi on December 1, 1925. By mapping the ship’s route, the coordinates of the signal and other hints from the documents, they honed in on a site discovered 35 years ago known as the “Bear Wreck.”