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What was responsible for the loss of a NASA space capsule deep in the mid-Atlantic?

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It's not losing a needle in a haystack, it's like losing the head of the needle in a haystack.

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What is the underwater secret behind ship disappearances in the Devil's Sea?

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It is the Bermuda Triangle of the Pacific, and in many ways it is just as deadly.

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And is a ticking time bomb at the bottom of the Baltic Sea about to go off?

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One can only imagine how horrifying that would be to be confronted with the spectacle of your impending doom.

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The underwater realm is another dimension.

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It's a physically hostile place where dreams of promise can sink into darkness.

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I'm Jeremy Wade. I'm searching the world to bring you the most iconic and baffling underwater mysteries known to science.

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Shipwrecks can't just disappear, or can they?

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It's a dangerous unexplored frontier that swallows evidence.

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We know more about the face of Mars than we do our deepest oceans.

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Where unknown is normal and understanding is rare.

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At the dawn of the space race, a pioneering suborbital flight is about to put the USA in pole position.

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Boy, that sounds safe.

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But things go horribly wrong when the capsule splashes down into the Atlantic.

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American dreams, along with years of research and development, sink to the ocean floor.

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Exactly what happened on that fateful day remains a mystery.

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But can a fresh investigation by an amateur sleuth succeed where officials have failed, and finally reveal the answer?

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July 21st 1961.

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Returning to Earth after his pioneering suborbital flight, Commander Gus Grissom splashes down into the Atlantic Ocean in the Liberty Bell 7 capsule.

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A recovery helicopter arrives to secure the capsule and take it back to base.

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But suddenly, without warning, the spacecraft's emergency hatch blows off, leaving a gaping hole in its side.

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Gus Grissom is in the capsule and water is now flooding in.

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The astronaut holds himself out through the narrow hatch and into the sea.

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But his ordeal is only just beginning.

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The man's in outer space one minute, and the next minute he's on the surface of the Earth, and this is where he has the highest possibility of dying.

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The retrieval helicopter focuses on the capsule, but it struggles to maintain control.

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Liberty Bell 7 is taking on water and getting heavier by the second.

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The helicopter is dragged downwards.

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Inside emergency lights come on, the engine is close to failing.

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As the chopper's propeller creates a churning wash of air and water, Grissom, beneath, struggles to stay afloat.

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And there's, you know, all this prop wash coming down on Gus.

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They're not paying any attention to him, they're concentrating on getting the spacecraft.

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He's in his space suit, and his space suit starts filling up with water.

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He's taking on water, and he's losing points.

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With the capsule now weighing a thousand pounds more than the retrieval helicopter can handle,

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the pilot is forced to make a tough, split second decision.

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He cuts the cord.

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Liberty Bell 7 sinks to the bottom of the ocean.

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Nearby, Gus Grissom is facing a similar fate.

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He's fighting to keep his nose above the water, literally, until the backup recovery helicopter comes in.

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And then there's the iconic picture that everybody remembers about Liberty Bell 7 of Gus, like a dead fish being hauled up into the backup recovery helicopter.

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Why the mission goes so badly wrong is one of NASA's greatest unsolved mysteries.

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And for some, a blemish on its reputation.

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To lose Liberty Bell 7 in the moment was horrible.

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It represented the high point of NASA's space program.

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It was an emblem of America itself.

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So to have it in one's grasp and to lose it, it was seen as a real loss of pride in the American space program.

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The public want answers. What went wrong and who was to blame?

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You know, was it a human error? Was he scared? Did he have some kind of nervous reaction?

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Was it mechanical error? Did the engineers do something wrong?

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With the physical evidence lost deep under the Atlantic, people look to Grissom for answers.

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But the astronaut can shed little light on those fateful moments.

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Only two moves I remember making.

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And grabbing the instrument panel and pulling myself out.

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NASA's initial investigation finds no fault in Grissom's actions.

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But some are skeptical.

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Highland error is, of course, a potential. There's always a potential.

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It's very easy to blame the organic matter in the cockpit.

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Gus Grissom's reputation as a flyer with the right stuff is called into question.

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An astronaut hero falls to Earth.

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Grissom's mission was part of Project Mercury, the United States' manned spaceflight program.

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The space race with the Soviet Union is in full flow.

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Expectations are great and the stakes are high.

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Rockets are exploding left and right.

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And these guys have to figure out how to fix them and ride them and not get killed.

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The race to the moon is on, so every mission needs to drive progress.

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Grissom's flight tests several innovations, including significantly a quick-release emergency hatch.

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The hatch is sealed with 70 titanium bolts embedded in an enclosed explosive casing.

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The push-button plunger detonates the charge and releases the hatch.

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For safety reasons, detonation is a multi-step process.

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The hatch must first be armed before pressure is applied to the plunger to detonate the charge.

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Although Grissom's memory of the Splashdown disaster is hazy, there is one thing he remembers with clarity.

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Grissom claims that he armed the explosive bolts but that he didn't, in fact, detonate them.

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But not everybody is convinced.

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But there are rumors immediately after this happened that Grissom panicked and that he prematurely detonated the hatch.

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Later astronauts who detonate the plunger suffer bruises. One even suffers a laceration.

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Grissom didn't have those bruises.

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But the damage to Grissom's reputation is done.

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Grissom was victimized because of the loss of Liberty Bell 7 and was really almost shamed as a result of it.

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And he really never recovered from that.

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And it was the defining moment of his career.

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To lose that spacecraft really hurt.

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He was dogged for the rest of his life over what he referred to as the hatch crap.

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In 1967, Gus Grissom is killed in the Apollo 1 launch fire, with the mystery of what happened in the Liberty Bell capsule still unsolved.

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It's now 1999.

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Salvage expert Kurt Newport is armed with cutting-edge technology and an unerring desire to find Liberty Bell 7 and bring her home.

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The mission to recover Liberty Bell 7 brought together the best marine recovery people in the world at the time.

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Newport gets all of the tracking data, all of the telemetry he can find about the flight of Liberty Bell 7.

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And he begins to sort of zero in on an area where he thinks it might be.

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Operating at depths of up to three miles, the team's submersible uses sonar to locate objects on the seabed.

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But can it spot a nine-foot high capsule in a search area which covers 24 square miles?

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These capsules are unbelievably tiny. To lose a space capsule in the middle of the ocean, it's not losing a needle in a haystack.

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It's like losing the head of the needle in a haystack.

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But they're very systematic. They call it mowing the lawn.

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You go back and forth in grids and you look for your best possible targets.

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He decides to start with target 71.

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The controllers send their submersible towards it. They point their video cameras at it.

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Kurtz says that things got some height to it. Let's keep moving in.

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And as they slowly move in through the darkness, the words of the United States appear on the side of this object.

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And he has found Liberty Bell 7 after 38 years.

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But will the capsule provide the key to the mystery of what happened and restore the reputation of astronaut Gus Grisson?

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The loss of the Liberty Bell 7 capsule deals a severe blow to the American space program and leaves her commander's reputation in tatters.

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Finally, in 1999, the lost capsule is raised from the ocean floor. But can she help solve the mystery of what went wrong?

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It was an opportunity to finally look at the physical hard evidence of the condition of the capsule and to understand what happened.

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However, crucially, the hatched door is not found. And despite extensive investigation, the capsule does not provide definitive answers to the many questions that remain.

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The investigations are wound up, but some people are still determined to find answers.

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Years pass before NASA agrees to open up its archive to writer and Grissom biographer George Leopold.

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I think that the loss of Liberty Bell 7 is probably one of the great mysteries.

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With the passage of time, he's hoping that a cold, objective eye will unearth some fresh clues.

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One piece of eyewitness testimony stands out. Lieutenant John Reinhardt, one of the retrieval team, is first on the scene.

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His job is to remove the capsule's antenna before attaching the winch hook from the helicopter.

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He was in the helicopter opening with a hook and a snipper, and he said that when he touched this ungrounded spacecraft,

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he saw an arc.

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A powerful electrostatic discharge.

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You've got a helicopter hovering over a spacecraft and there's vortex that's got a lot of energy in it.

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And when metal touches metal, some of that energy is probably going to get transferred, and that's what John Reinhardt thought he saw.

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He was the closest person to the spacecraft when he sees this arc, and at that moment, the hatch blows.

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So that leaves us with, you know, the possibility that maybe it was the electrostatic discharge that blew the hatch.

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Upon further investigation, Leopold learns that in sea helicopter rescues, static electricity discharge is a common phenomenon between surface water and hoisting devices.

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What's more, he finds evidence that NASA was aware of this.

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The procedure that the Coast Guard of the US Navy uses is that you would never touch something in the water with a helicopter over it until it's grounded.

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And in fact, during the practice sessions, the recovery guys used to joke around with the NASA guys who'd come out with them and say, you want to try it?

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And they get zapped.

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NASA's procedures should really have included grounding the spacecraft before anybody touched it.

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Over the years, other theories have been put forward for the premature detonation of the Liberty Bell 7's hatch bolts and the subsequent loss of the capsule.

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But NASA didn't reach a definitive conclusion.

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They were in a hurry. They wanted to get on the next flight.

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So they basically reproduced as many scenarios as they could think of, and then they moved on.

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So in the end, you really don't know exactly what happened.

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But with the final piece of evidence, the hatch door itself, still under the sea, the mystery endures.

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But one thing seems clear. With what we now know, surely it's safe to conclude that astronaut Gus Grissom had the right stuff all along.

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Conflicts fought out on our seas leave behind a potentially lethal legacy.

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Discarded mines and all kinds of other dumped hardware and unexploded ordnance often hidden deep beneath the waves.

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Can new technology be used to make the world a better place?

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Can all kinds of other dumped hardware and unexploded ordnance often hidden deep beneath the waves?

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Can new technology find a way of locating and diffusing this underwater time bomb before it's too late?

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2005, the Baltic Sea.

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A Dutch fishing vessel is trawling the relatively shallow waters of this semi-enclosed, brackish body of water between Scandinavia and Europe.

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They're basically scouring the sea floor and they're pulling up in addition to fish. They're also pulling up anything that's on the sea floor.

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The trawlers crew are hauling in their catch when they notice something strange in the nets.

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Their nets were arrayed on the seabed catching fish as normal but they caught something very unusual.

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The details of what happens in the next few minutes remain unknown but the conclusion is clear.

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An explosion rips through the boat, killing three men.

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Elsewhere on the Baltic coast, beachcombers find what they think are pieces of amber in the sand.

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They're picking them up and putting them in their pockets and the heat of their body is warming these up and it's causing people to have very serious chemical burns.

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Around the same time, scientists studying fish in the Baltic find some specimens containing cancerous tumours.

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Multiple mysterious incidents in the same body of water are caused for alarm but are they linked?

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And if so, what's going on under the cold surface of the Baltic Sea?

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Surrounded by nine different countries and a historical boundary between Eastern and West Europe, the Baltic Sea has been the front line in conflicts from the Crimean to the Cold War.

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But it was World War II that really set fire to this region.

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There was a non-stop mine warfare going on. Millions of mines were laid in these waters.

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But they were not the only munitions dropped into the Baltic.

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At the end of the war, an estimated 300,000 tonnes of ordnance, bombs, shells and ammunition were dumped into the depths.

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The immensity is really unthinkable. We don't have accurate maps as to where this was dumped or by who.

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So really it's anybody's guess as to the extent of this problem.

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Now, 75 years later, this explosive underwater legacy is thought to be responsible for dozens of deaths and serious injuries every year.

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A new evidence reveals that there's an even greater danger at the bottom of the Baltic.

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Hidden in the depths of the Baltic Sea are hundreds of thousands of tonnes of World War II munitions, with a combined explosive force capable, it is estimated, of flattening a city.

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We know these ticking time bombs are there on the seafloor.

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There's a high risk of fishermen ringing up this unexploded ordnance from the seafloor.

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This, it turns out, is exactly what the unlucky Dutch crew hauled up in their nets.

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One can only imagine how horrifying that would be to be confronted with the spectacle of your impending doom.

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But in addition to this obvious volatile danger, there's something more insidious going on.

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Some describe these unexploded ordinances, or UXOs, as weapons that wait.

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In the ocean, these metal canisters can degrade over time. That leads to the potential for toxic materials to leak into the environment.

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The beachcombers who suffered serious burns unwittingly picked up pieces of phosphorus used in incendiary devices.

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And the Baltic marine life displaying abnormalities tested positive for the chemical compound TNT.

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TNT is one of the most common explosives used in the world today and certainly was used in the 20th century in the context of the First World War and the Second World War.

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As well as being highly explosive, TNT is poisonous.

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It's toxic to life. It can cause cancer. It can bioaccumulate in the environment, meaning small organisms take it in, larger organisms eat those.

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These materials can then be transmitted up the food chain to the animals above them. And so this is how it's ending up in fish.

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We're talking about the potential for a biological catastrophe.

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The massive quantities of World War II munitions hidden on the bottom of the Baltic Sea now pose a multifaceted threat.

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The extent of the problem is phenomenal. Where is this stuff? It's everywhere, but nowhere.

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How do we find them? How do we neutralize them? How do we keep them from causing any kind of environmental damage?

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Specialist divers are normally at the heart of such clean-up operations.

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They're bomb disposal experts, but they're also divers. They combine these two very, very high skill sets.

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Their work is complex and hazardous.

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A traditional method was that once a mine was found, it would either be hoisted aboard a ship if it was considered safe and disarmed on the ship, or it would be disarmed in the water.

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That's very complicated. It's very expensive. It's also very dangerous.

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Over the years, dozens of military divers have been killed in mine-clearing operations. So a different approach is needed.

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Operation Open Spirit is an international maritime mission to clear the Baltic, led by the navies of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.

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It's using the latest technology, like the Rimas Autonomous Underwater Vehicle, specially developed to search out mines.

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The Rimas 600 is one of the most advanced of the AUVs available. It has great imaging equipment, it has great sensory equipment to find mines.

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And it's very, very maneuverable. But what they do mainly is they keep divers out of the water.

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The self-piloting mini-submarine uses sonar to locate mines.

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They can literally survey miles and miles of seabed per day.

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Once a mine is found, the Rimas AUV can destroy it using a directed explosive charge.

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It's a significant advance on using divers.

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But with hundreds of thousands of pieces of dangerous munitions on the sea floor, even with the latest tech, this deadly task could take years.

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The latest underwater technology is being used to find and destroy World War II weaponry on the Baltic sea floor. This painstaking process could take years.

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But recently a team of scientists at Kiel University in Germany has made a remarkable breakthrough.

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They have come up with an ingenious way of neutralizing TNT, the most abundant explosive in the Baltic and one that is starting to poison the environment, by employing the services of a mysterious microscopic organism.

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There are microorganisms that can take energy or metabolize TNT. They exist. Scientists have found them.

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The bacteria essentially consume the TNT, breaking it down into its component elements.

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We call it biotransformation because it's taking energy and it's transforming it into something else.

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Basically, the idea is that you enclose the munitions with some sort of membrane that has this bacteria and the bacteria will transform the TNT into non-toxic materials.

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So far, the microorganism has only been tried out in the laboratory. How it will work in the sea itself is still unknown.

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It's super hard. This is not easy science. We have to redesign the experiment and figure out what this looks like in the field.

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There's a lot of unknowns, but the potential is there.

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Introducing a new bacteria into the sea has risks. So whether this turns out to be the silver bullet for a dangerous wartime legacy or another environmental time bomb, we wait and see.

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The reputation of history's most famous pirate, Blackbeard, has long been debated. For some, he's a brilliant leader of men, a generous captain who commanded great loyalty.

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For others, he's a ruthless brute who exploited his crew and stole their share of the treasure.

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Can the latest research into the wreck of his flagship shed light on the mystery of the true character of this ultimate pirate?

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June 1718. For months, Blackbeard and his pirate fleet have been terrorizing the Caribbean and the east coast of the American colonies.

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With his famous flagship, the Queen Anne's Revenge, in need of maintenance, Blackbeard sails his flotilla north up the coast from Charleston in search of a place to lie low.

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Blackbeard has just mounted a highly successful raid on Charleston, so his fleet, which includes the Queen Anne's Revenge, is fully loaded with all the things he's captured.

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At the end of 18 months of raiding, his ships are probably in need of repairs, refitting, and they're looking for a place to dock up their ships.

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Led by the fleet's smaller ships, the Queen Anne's Revenge heads for the secluded port of Fishtown. The flotilla sails in through a series of narrow channels known today as the Beaufort Inlet.

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Blackbeard's fleet enters Beaufort Inlet and they're going at full speed, full sail.

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As the pirates navigate the tight waterway, something happens to Blackbeard's flagship. The 100 foot fighting ship crashes at speed into a shallow sandbar.

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The main mast cracks and some of the ship's timbers rupture, so from that point onward, on the sandbar the ship is not seaworthy, but it is still fully laden with all his plunder.

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The treasure on board is transferred to smaller vessels in the pirate flotilla. But there's no room for the majority of the crew.

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So Blackbeard selects a few essential personnel and leaves the rest on a nearby island.

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The basic facts of what happened to Blackbeard's ship and his crew have never been in dispute, but the same can't be said of the pirate captain's motives.

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There is no debate that what happened is the Queen Anne's Revenge runs aground. The debate is on whether or not it was intentional or whether it was unintentional.

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So was this an accident? Or part of a plan? One rare eyewitness account strongly suggests a pirate plot.

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David Herriot is a guy who was captured by Blackbeard and later became a very important member of his crew.

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He says that Blackbeard deliberately ran his ship aground and this is in the historical record.

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Putting his flagship out of action would have given Blackbeard the excuse to leave behind many of his crew. But to what purpose?

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In a pirate crew, as in any crew, there's shares that get divided up. If a captain cuts crew in half, that all of a sudden means more spoils for the captain and the people that he chooses to share the spoils with.

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But what Blackbeard gained in treasure he would surely lose by leaving behind his famous ship? Or would he?

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One thing to bear in mind here is that this ship was very, very recognisable up and down the eastern seaboard of what is now the United States and the various navies that were coming for him.

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The question for Blackbeard was always how long would the Queen Anne's Revenge continue to be an advantage? How long before she attracted so much attention that the Royal Navy was forced to send out larger ships to fight him?

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For almost 300 years Blackbeard's flagship and the pirate captain's true intentions are lost to history.

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But then in 1996 underwater archaeologists exploring the Beaufort Inlet make an astounding discovery.

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The Queen Anne's Revenge was found. The really interesting thing is what will this site tell us? Will it really tell us what happened on that fateful day? Did he mean to destroy his ship or was it an accident?

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Did the notorious pirate Blackbeard deliberately run his ship aground in a ruthless bid to downsize his crew and make off with a larger share of the loot?

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Off the coast of North Carolina the scattered remains of the Queen Anne's Revenge could hold the answer.

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The Queen Anne's Revenge is the only pirate ship that we've ever found that has been archaeologically identified as a pirate ship.

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The site of the wreck has been studied continuously since it was found and it turns out to be an absolutely extensive site. It's absolutely huge.

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The discovery of the ship's anchors proves particularly significant and could help unravel the mystery of what happened to Blackbeard's flagship.

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One of the key things we're looking for is the positioning of the anchors where they've used them to try and pull the ship off, to try and pull the ship away from the banks.

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The largest anchor was found directly astern and in a position where you could literally pull the ship back on it.

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The location of the anchors on the seabed suggests that the sailors mounted a complex mission to heave the Queen Anne's Revenge off the sandbar.

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That does beg the question, why did they take so much trouble to try and get the ship hard aground off the sandbar?

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Why would you do this if you were actually purposely trying to destroy your ship?

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And it's not just the anchors. Experts think that the positioning of the ship's heaviest cargo is further evidence of an attempt to save the stricken vessel.

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The evidence on the seafloor shows that the crew might have been actually moving the goods and cargo and the cannon within the boat to try to move the weight around to refloat the Queen Anne's Revenge.

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If Blackbeard was trying so hard to save his flagship, surely he had no intention of running her aground, but how else did she end up on the sandbar?

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To my mind, what we have here is an absolutely massive maritime screw-up.

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You have to remember in this period they don't have the charts we have these days. They don't have the understanding of the depths and moving the sandbanks, which we have regularly charted by oceanographic vessels.

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Sandbars in this area shift, which means that depths change and that you really kind of have to be on a constant, vigilant look out.

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More likely he was navigating blind.

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Unfamiliarity with the inlet's dangerous shallows might not have been the only factor. Blackbeard's flagship was also in poor condition.

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The Queen Anne's Revenge has been at sea for a year. She's got a lot of barnacles on her. This is not a ship you want to be taking this close inshore at this speed.

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If the running aground was accidental, it's likely that the decision to maroon the crew wasn't a selfish act, but an unavoidable one.

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He's faced with a situation where he knows now he can't remove the ship from the sandbar. He's also not got the space on the slips and brigs left to remove all the crew from the Queen Anne's Revenge.

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Perhaps Blackbeard had no choice, but leaving the crew did mean keeping the gold.

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The odds are it was unintentional, but he certainly did turn it to his advantage.

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It's a tantalising theory, but what other evidence could still be found? For many, the site holds more secrets.

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Through modern archaeology, the hope is we can find out the answers to all these questions. The hope is we can discover the information that's necessary to tell us what happened to the Queen Anne's Revenge and what Blackbeard was thinking when his ship went down.

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Fire breathing sea dragons are the stuff of ancient legends. But where do these myths originate?

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Stories from an area of ocean south of Japan renowned for the disappearance of many ships suggest a dramatic new interpretation of this age-old mystery.

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August 1944, the Philippines Sea in the western Pacific Ocean. A Japanese fighter aircraft is returning from a routine mission.

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A Japanese pilot sorting what looked like some sort of large dragon-like creature, fire-breathing creature swimming in the water.

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Could there be some kind of sea dragon out there? And could it be linked to multiple ship disappearances?

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An area of the western Pacific known as the Devil's Sea or Dragon's Triangle is notorious for ship disappearances.

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And in 1944, an eyewitness account describes something strange in the water.

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The pilot's official report describes a serpent-like monster navigating through wildly churning waters, emitting huge flames.

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It's a part of the ocean that we don't have a clear understanding of what's going on there.

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The extraordinary sighting takes place in an infamous section of the Pacific.

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The Devil's Sea is located to the south of Japan, skirting the coast of Taiwan and extending into the Philippine Sea.

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For a thousand years, it has been notorious.

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This is an area where ships have gone missing for a very, very long time.

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The Devil's Sea has been swallowing ships since at least the 13th century.

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During the reign of Kubla Khan, who was the grandson of Genghis Khan, the Chinese embarked on a period of exploration.

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Kubla Khan's navy was lost in this area and potentially as many as 40,000 sailors drowned as a result.

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Across the region, scholars attempted to come up with explanations for this unfathomable tragedy.

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One of the founding theories was that they were being swallowed by a sea dragon, and that's early Chinese mythology, of course.

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These ancient cultures, when they see things, how do they explain them? What is it? It's a sea monster.

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Over the centuries, the Devil's Sea's lethal reputation has grown as the number of ships that have been lost in its waters has increased.

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It is the Bermuda Triangle of the Pacific, and in many ways, it is just as deadly.

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Some cases have involved enormous vessels, including the largest British ship ever lost at sea, the MV Darbyshire.

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Huge ships like the Darbyshire twice the size of the Titanic being lost. How in the world is that possible in any part of the world?

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Many argue that high numbers of disappearances simply reflect high volumes of traffic.

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It's a very active part of the ocean. There's a lot of transit that occurs in that particular part.

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And when historic cases have been investigated, the culprit for many vanished ships in the region turns out to be one thing.

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It's an area that's prone to typhoons, and some shipwrecks are known to have been the victim of severe typhoons.

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But these tropical cyclones can't explain away all the disappearances in the Devil's Sea.

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In 1953, a Japanese research vessel is sent to study the area.

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She's equipped with the latest in oceanic surveillance technology, and expectations are high that she might shed light on the Devil's Sea phenomenon.

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But she too vanishes.

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I guess that's a little irony there. It's an out to look for lost ships. Itself is lost.

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The research ship disappears in good weather conditions, but a crew member on one of the vessels sent to search for her reports something remarkable.

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He states that a section of sea in the area where the research ship is thought to have vanished appeared to boil and spew smoke.

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An incident over 30 years later, a nearly 6,000 miles away of Tahiti could hold the key to this mystery.

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The Oceanographic Research vessel Melville is studying atmospheric nuclear testing in the Pacific.

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The scientists on board have already noted some unknown intermittent underwater rumblings.

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Then, all of a sudden, the ship starts to shake violently.

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The sea around the ship becomes a boiling soup, spitting and churning, and the crew are absolutely terrified.

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Speculation is that what it may have been observing was actually volcanic activity.

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They may have been floating above the epicentre of a new volcano forming.

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Miraculously, the underwater volcano does not sink the Melville, and her crew live to tell the tale.

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But could what they experience shed light on some of the mysterious ship disappearances elsewhere in the Pacific?

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The Devil's Sea straddles four major tectonic plates, and it turns out is dotted with underwater volcanoes.

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This entire region is part of the Pacific Rim of Fire.

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So there's this very active system that exists right beneath the waters where these events occurred.

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So in geologic terms, the edges of the Devil's Triangle, at least the eastern edge of the Devil's Triangle,

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is an area that is very seismically and volcanically active.

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So could underwater volcanoes be the real phenomenon behind the Sea Dragon legend,

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which started with the loss of Kubla Khan's navy and which was still inspiring reports centuries later during World War II?

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If you're a pilot and you see underwater volcano, you might call it a fire-breathing dragon,

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especially if lava is being spit into the air.

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Underwater volcanoes could be the culprit, but catching them in the act is an elusive science.

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So whether subsea eruptions are a factor in all the disappearances in the Devil's Sea may never be known.

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As more and more research is done in the coming years, we will start to understand what is going on in that particular part of the Pacific.

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In my experience, there is often a real phenomenon behind even the most extraordinary legend.

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And maybe underwater volcanoes do play a part in the Sea Dragon myth,

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but there's rarely a single answer to a complex mystery.

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So in the case of the Devil's Sea, we keep on looking.