The apparent success of the leaseback arrangement might explain how Rush was able to attract what was OceanGate’s largest ever investment in 2020, at a time when the company was working on the expensive task of replacing the Titan’s first hull that had cracked during testing. The $18 million in equity funding allowed OceanGate to rebuild the Titan and move forward with its first Titanic expedition in 2021. Around this time, documents indicate that OceanGate may have had more control in the taken-over ownership of Cyclops 2 LLC.
But by 2023, OceanGate seemed to be on a much shakier financial footing. Several witnesses at the Coast Guard hearings testified to what they perceived to be OceanGate’s financial difficulties in the run-up to the final Titanic expedition, including Rush foregoing his salary and occasionally loaning the company money from his personal funds.
Demand for the $250,000 Titanic dives appeared to be tailing off. As late as May 2023, one of OceanGate’s affiliate sellers was advertising that there were still “some very limited dates and spots available at a 40 percent discount” for that summer’s expeditions. This has not been reported previously.
If the federal investigation results in any criminal charges, they would proceed alongside a civil lawsuit currently in a federal court in Washington state. In that case, the family of famed Titanic explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet is seeking $50 million for his death aboard the Titan, with the lawsuit naming as defendants OceanGate, Rush’s estate, and a number of other individuals and companies connected to the ill-fated submersible. Rush’s estate recently filed a motion to dismiss the complaint against it, stating: “As Rush’s employer, OceanGate is liable for Rush’s alleged negligence.”
Maritime lawyer Alton Hall is skeptical that Nargeolet’s family will recover anything close to the $50 million they are seeking. A 1920 law, the Death on the High Seas Act, generally limits damages to pecuniary losses, such as future earnings. One exception would be if Nargeolet and his fellow Titan passengers, whom OceanGate dubbed “mission specialists,” qualified as seamen under another piece of legislation called the Jones Act. “There are literally books and books written on who is and who isn’t a Jones Act seaman,” says Hall. The passengers who died onboard the Titan “are not Jones Act seamen,” he believes.
An unknown question in these cases—and other cases that might be brought by the families of the two billionaires who also died on the Titan—is who might face legal consequences. The civil case against OceanGate and Rush’s estate also names as defendants OceanGate’s original director of engineering, Tony Nissen, and three companies that manufactured the Titan’s hull and viewport. However, multiple witnesses at the Coast Guard hearings testified to Stockton Rush having the final say in many commercial, engineering, and operational decisions, and his company is likely all but bankrupt. In the end, there might be little to salvage from the wreckage of OceanGate.
Another surprising omission was during Thursday’s testimony of Mark Negley, a Boeing engineer. Negley had carried out a preliminary design study for the Titan and assisted OceanGate with testing equipment and advice for nearly a decade. He testified to the challenges of building carbon-fiber structures.
The panel did not ask Negley about an email he sent Rush in 2018 sharing an analysis based on information Rush had provided. “We think you are at a high risk of a significant failure at or before you reach 4,000 meters,” he wrote. The email included a chart showing a skull and crossbones at around that depth.
Many Red Flags, Few Solid Answers
This week also saw technical testimony from other expert witnesses about the design and classification of submersibles. All were skeptical, or outright critical, of OceanGate’s decision to operate Titan using a novel carbon-fiber hull with little testing, and relying on an unproven acoustic monitoring system for live information on the hull’s integrity.
“Instantaneous delamination and collapse can occur in less than a millisecond,” testified Roy Thomas from the American Bureau of Shipping. “Real-time monitoring could not capture this.”
Donald Kramer, a materials engineer at the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), testified to there being manufacturing defects in the composite hull. He described the Titan’s wreckage as having peeled into layers of carbon fiber that matched its multistage construction, but he would not offer an opinion on what might have caused the implosion.
Neither the manufacturers of the hull nor OceanGate’s engineering director at the time of its construction were called to testify.
MBI chair Jason Neubauer said at a press conference after the hearings: “We do not have to obtain testimony from every witness. As long as we get factual information and data from the company, through forensics, and from other witnesses, it’s possible we don’t interview every witness that has been identified.”
Kramer noted that data from 2022, when an explosive bang was heard after the Titan surfaced after a dive to the Titanic, showed a worrying shift in strain in the hull. OceanGate’s then director of engineering, Phil Brooks, testified that he was probably not qualified to analyze that data, and that Rush personally cleared the submersible for its final dives.
Over the last two weeks, multiple witnesses had testified to Rush’s primary role in driving business, engineering, and operational decisions and to his abrasive personality and temper. Matthew McCoy, a technician at OceanGate in 2017 and a former Coast Guard officer, testified today about a conversation he had with Rush about getting the Titan registered and inspected.
McCoy recalled that Rush said that if the Coast Guard became a problem, he would “buy a Congressman and the problem would go away.” McCoy handed in his notice the following day.
What Happens Next
With the conclusion of the public hearings, the Coast Guard’s MBI will now start preparing its final report. That could include a definitive cause of the fatal accident, referrals for criminal investigations, and recommendations for future policy and regulations.
The Titan’s hull and viewport featured prominently in expert testimony about potential physical causes of the implosion. Regardless of which component ultimately failed, witnesses have leveled criticism at everyone from designers and manufacturers to OceanGate’s operational team and executive decisionmaking. This might make it difficult to ever fix on a single cause or to single out individuals who were to blame, with the exception of Stockton Rush.
Wreckage of theTitan’s innovative carbon fiber hull was found separated into three distinct layers, US National Transportation Safety Board engineer Donald Kramer has told a Coast Guard hearing into the fatal implosion of the OceanGate submersible in 2023.
Although Kramer would not offer an opinion on what caused the hull to delaminate into separate layers, he testified to multiple problems with the hull, beginning with its manufacture in 2020.
Using samples of carbon fiber saved from its construction, as well as dozens of pieces recovered from the seabed, the NTSB gave the most complete picture to date of the experimental nature of the Titan’s hull.
After the Titan’s first hull was found to have a crack and delamination following deep dives in 2019, OceanGate switched manufacturers to replace it.
The new manufacturer, Electroimpact, used a multistage process to wind and cure the five-inch-thick hull in five separate layers. Each layer would be baked at high temperature and pressure before being ground flat, having an adhesive sheet added, and another layer built on top. The idea of this multistep process was to reduce wrinkles in the final hull that the company believed had caused test models to fail short of their design depths.
However, Kramer testified that the NTSB found several anomalies in the fresh hull samples. There was waviness in four of the five layers, and wrinkles that got progressively worse from layer to layer. The NTSB also found that some layers had porosity—gaps in the resin material—four times larger than specified in the design. It also recorded voids between the five layers.
On Monday, Roy Thomas, a materials expert from the American Bureau of Shipping, told the hearing: “Defects such as voids, blisters on surface, and porosity can weaken carbon fiber, and under extreme hydrostatic pressure can accelerate the failure of a hull.”
OceanGate did not make any additional test models using the new multistage process.
The NTSB was able to recover many pieces of the carbon fiber hull from the seafloor, one still attached to one of the submersible’s titanium end domes. In a report issued simultaneously with Kramer’s testimony, the NTSB noted that there were few, if any, full-thickness hull pieces. All of the visible pieces had delaminated into three shells: the innermost of the five layers, a shell made of the second and third layers, and another with the fourth and fifth layers. Like an onion being peeled, the hull had largely separated at the adhesive joining the layers.
Debris of the Titan submersible on the seabed after imploding, captured on film by a remotely operated vehicle.Photograph: Reuters
After they left, the Titan was rebuilt with a new hull that was never tested to industry norms nor certified by an independent third-party agency. Patrick Lahey, CEO of submersible maker Triton Submarines, said that certifying a novel hull was not only possible but essential for safety.
“We were developing and certifying the deepest diving sub in the world at the same time they were developing this amateurish contraption,” he testified. “There was absolutely no reason they couldn’t have got it certified.”
A History of Troubled Titanic Missions
OceanGate’s first missions to the Titanic in 2021 were beset with problems, including the Titan’s forward titanium dome falling off after a dive, worrying readings on the acoustic monitoring system, and a thruster failing at 3,500 meters’ depth. One Coast Guard evidence slide showed 70 equipment issues requiring correction from the season’s dives. Things improved slightly the following year, with only 48 recorded issues. But these included dead batteries extending a mission from around seven to 27 hours, and the sub itself being damaged on recovery.
One dive in 2022 ended with a mysterious loud bang and cracking noise upon surfacing. Antonella Wilby, an OceanGate engineering contractor, was so worried about this bang she considered alerting OceanGate’s board of directors. She testified that another employee warned her that she risked being sued if she did so. “Anyone should feel free to speak up about safety without fear of retribution, and that is not at all what I saw,” she said. “I was entirely dismissed.”
On the Titan’s penultimate dive in 2023, contractor Tym Catterson admitted to failing to carry out a safety check; the Titan was left listing at a 45-degree angle for an hour, piling up those on board.
Conflicting Views on the Carbon Fiber Hull
There was conflicting testimony on the safety of the Titan’s unique carbon fiber hull. Dyer pointed out that carbon fiber could be a good fit for deep submersibles, and Nissen was adamant that computer modeling and the acoustic monitoring warning system meant that it could be used indefinitely. Lochridge, Catterson, and former HR director Bonnie Carl were all far more skeptical about the hull’s design and implementation. But all three acknowledged that they were not engineers.
Next week’s appearances by Nissen’s successor, Phil Brooks, more submersible engineers, and a carbon fiber expert from Boeing should address many of these questions. In particular, testimony next Wednesday from an engineer at the National Transportation Safety Board’s Materials Laboratory about the Titan’s wreckage may identify the physical cause of the implosion.
Where Was the Coast Guard?
At several points, investigators pointed out that the Titan should have been inspected by the US Coast Guard before carrying paying passengers. None of those questioned could say why it was not, despite OceanGate apparently contacting the Coast Guard on multiple occasions to provide notice of its underwater operations.
Lochridge also testified that OSHA had told him in 2018 that it had communicated his safety complaints to the Coast Guard. At least one of the five US Coast Guard witnesses being called next week is based in the Puget Sound, near OceanGate’s headquarters, and may be able to speak to this.
US Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Lockwood, who joined OceanGate’s board in 2013, is not on the witness list. Lochridge and Carl testified that Lockwood’s role was to provide oversight and smooth interactions with the Coast Guard.
Missing Witnesses
Nor is Lockwood the only notable absentee from the witness box. Multiple witnesses this week testified to the key roles of OceanGate employees, including Wendy Rush, Scott Griffith, and Neil McCurdy, in making crucial business, regulatory, and operational decisions throughout OceanGate’s history and on the day of the accident. None are being called to testify. Nor have any of the hulls’ manufacturers been called. The Coast Guard has not provided a reason for this other than to deny that it is because those witnesses would have asserted their Fifth Amendment rights to refuse to answer questions.
The US Coast Guard’s Titan submersible hearing kicked off with a startling revelation.
“I told him I’m not getting in it,” former OceanGate engineering director Tony Nissen said to a panel of Coast Guard investigators, referring to a 2018 conversation in which CEO Stockton Rush allegedly asked Nissen to act as a pilot in an upcoming expedition to the Titanic.
“It’s the operations crew, I don’t trust them,” Nissen told the investigators. “I didn’t trust Stockton either. You can take a look at where we started when I was hired. Nothing I got was the truth.”
Nissen’s testimony, which focused on the design, building, and testing of OceanGate’s first carbon fiber submersible, was a dramatic start to nearly two weeks of public testimony in the US Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation’s hearings into the fatal June 2023 implosion of the Titan. Its five occupants, including Rush, all likely died instantly.
Before Nissen took the stand, the Coast Guard presented a detailed timeline of OceanGate as a company, the development of the Titan submersible, and its trips to the wreck of the Titanic, resting nearly 3,800 meters down in the north Atlantic. These slides revealed new information, including over 100 instances of equipment failures and incidents on the Titan’s trips in 2021 and 2022. An animated timeline of the final few hours of the Titan also included the final text messages sent by people on the sub. One sent at about 2,400 meters depth read “all good here.” The last message, sent as the sub slowed its descent at nearly 3,400 meters, read “dropped two wts.”
The Coast Guard also confirmed reports that the experimental carbon fiber sub had been stored in an outdoor parking lot in temperatures as low as 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (–17 Celsius) in the run-up to last year’s Titanic missions. Some engineers worried that water freezing in or near the carbon fiber could expand and cause defects in the material.
Nissen said that almost from when he joined OceanGate in 2016, Rush kept changing the company’s direction. A move to certify the vessel with an independent third party fell by the wayside, as did plans to test more scale models of the Titan’s carbon fiber hull when one failed early under pressure. Rush then downgraded titanium components to save money and time. “It was death by a thousand cuts,” Nissen recalls.
He faced tough questioning about OceanGate’s choice of carbon fiber for a hull and its reliance on a newly developed acoustic monitoring system to provide an early warning of failure. One investigator raised WIRED’s reporting that an outside expert Nissen hired to assess the acoustic system later had misgivings about Rush’s understanding of its limitations.
“Given the time and constraints we had,” Nissen said, “we did all the testing and brought in every expert we could find. We built it like an aircraft.”
Nissen walked the Coast Guard board through deep-water testing in the Bahamas in 2018, during which he says the sub was struck by lightning. Measurements on the Titan’s hull later showed that it was flexing beyond its calculated safety factor. When a pilot subsequently found a crack in the hull, Nissen said, he wouldn’t sign off on another dive. “I killed it,” he testified. “The hull is done.” Nissen was subsequently fired.
The family of French explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet on Tuesday filed a $50 million wrongful death lawsuit against OceanGate, the operator of a tourist submersible that catastrophically failed during an attempt to visit the wreckage of the Titanic.
Nargeolet was one of the Titan sub’s five passengers on June 18, 2023 when it suffered a catastrophic pressure loss and imploded, causing the deaths of all on board. OceanGate had sold seats on the vessel for $250,000 each, billing the trip as a chance to “become one of the few to see the Titanic with your own eyes.”
But in the wake of the incident, it arose that industry experts had raised serious safety concerns about the project years earlier. For instance, one professional trade group warned in 2018 that OceanGate’s experimental approach to the design of the Titan could lead to potentially “catastrophic” outcomes.
Known as “Mr. Titanic,” Nargeolet participated in 37 dives to the Titanic site, the most of any diver in the world, according to the lawsuit. He was regarded as one of the world’s most knowledgeable people about the famous wreck. Attorneys for his estate said in an emailed statement that the “doomed submersible” had a “troubled history,” and that OceanGate failed to disclose key facts about the vessel and its durability.
“The lawsuit alleges serious issues with the Titan submersible,” Tony Buzbee, one of the attorneys bringing the case, said in a statement. “I think it is telling that even though the University of Washington and Boeing had key roles in the design of previous but similar versions of the Titan, both have recently disclaimed any involvement at all in the submersible model that imploded.”
The lawsuit also alleges that OceanGate failed to disclose the Titan’s flaws and purposely concealed its shortcomings to Nargeolet, even though he had been designated a member of the vessel’s crew by the company. Nargeolet would not have participated in the voyage if he had been aware of the Titan’s issues, the suit claims.
A spokesperson for OceanGate declined to comment on the lawsuit, which was filed Tuesday in King County, Washington.
After the sub’s implosion, the U.S. Coast Guard quickly convened a high-level investigation, which is ongoing. A key public hearing that is part of the investigation is scheduled to take place in September.
Aimee Picchi is the associate managing editor for CBS MoneyWatch, where she covers business and personal finance. She previously worked at Bloomberg News and has written for national news outlets including USA Today and Consumer Reports.
Five people boarded OceanGate’s Titan submersible last summer to dive down to see the wreckage of the Titanic, but less than two hours later, the vessel imploded, killing all on board. Now, a billionaire from Ohio wants to make his own attempt – an idea he had just days after the Titan met its fatal end.
Patrick Lahey, co-founder and president of Tritan Submarines, is no stranger to deep-dive expeditions. He was the second Canadian to visit the bottom of the Mariana Trench nearly 36,000 feet under the ocean’s surface. He told the Wall Street Journal that he’d spent years working to make submersibles safe for deep dives, making sure his company’s vessels were certifiably safe. Then when last year’s implosion happened – killing the vessel’s overseer and captain – there were concerns that nobody would trust such expeditions again.
But a few days after the incident, Lahey told The Wall Street Journal that he got a call from a client who seemed determined to build a safe, reliable submersible.
“He called me up and said, ‘You know, what we need to do is build a sub that can dive to [Titanic-level depths] repeatedly and safely and demonstrate to the world that you guys can do that,” he said, “and that Titan was a contraption.”
Thus, the relationship between Lahey and Ohio real estate mogul Larry Connor was born.
Connor, based in Dayton and leader of luxury apartment building investor the Connor Group, is worth about $2 billion, according to Forbes. Like Lahey, Connor also has an interest in the unknown. According to Forbes, he ventured to the Marian Trench in 2021 and also went to the International Space Station in 2022.
He told The Journal that he’s hoping to show people that “while the ocean is extremely powerful, it can be wonderful and enjoyable and really kind of life-changing if you go about it the right way.”
“Patrick has been thinking about and designing this for over a decade. But we didn’t have the materials and technology,” he told the outlet, saying that he and Lahey plan to take a sub down to the Titanic wreckage in a two-person submersible known as the Triton 4000/2 Abyssal Explorer.
According to the Triton website, the vessel is a “high-performance, flexible platform designed specifically for professional applications.” The company says it can dive to 4,000 meters below the sea and that “the world’s deepest diving acrylic sub” is commercially certified for dives over 13,000 feet.
The remains of the Titanic are about 12,500 feet underwater, giving the sub just enough certified range to reach it. The imploded Titan sub was not made of acrylic, and only had a certified range of up to 1,300 meters, according to CBS News partner BBC.
The pair has not yet said when their voyage will occur.
Li Cohen is a senior social media producer at CBS News. She previously wrote for amNewYork and The Seminole Tribune. She mainly covers climate, environmental and weather news.
Most of the time, an obituary makes headlines because of how a person lived. But every now and then, it’s because of how they died. That certainly is the case for the five men on the OceanGate Titan submersible, which imploded this past June on its way down to the Titanic.
One of them was OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, the designer of the sub. He certainly enjoyed playing the maverick. In 2022 he told me, “I don’t know if it was MacArthur, but somebody said, ‘You’re remembered for the rules you break,’ and that’s the fact. And there were a lot of rules out there that didn’t make engineering sense to me.”
But during the ten days I spent with him last year for a “Sunday Morning” story, I found him to be funny, whip-smart, and driven.
“My whole life, I wanted to be an astronaut,” Rush said. “I wanted to be sort of the Captain Kirk; I didn’t want to be the passenger in the back. And I realized that the ocean is the universe; that’s where life is.
“We have this universe that will take us centuries to explore,” he said. “And suddenly, you see things that no one’s ever seen, and you realize how little we know, how vast the ocean is, how much life is there, how important it is, and how alien.”
I also got to know P.H. Nargeolet, one of the most experienced Titanic divers who ever lived; he’d visited the wreck of the Titanic 37 times.
When asked if he still felt amazement or awe, he replied, “Yeah. You know, I have to say, each dive is a new experience. I open my eyes like THAT when I’m in the sub!”
He died that day, too, along with their three passengers: Hamish Harding, Shahzada Dawood, and his son, Suleman.
I’m tempted to say something here about how risk is part of the game for thrill-seekers like these, or maybe even the whole point. Or about how Stockton Rush was trying to innovate, to make deep-sea exploration accessible to more people. Or about how science doesn’t move forward without people making sacrifices.
But none of that would be any consolation to the people those men left behind – their wives, kids, parents. P.H. had grandchildren. For them, it’s just absence now, and grieving … for the men who died, and the dreams they were chasing.
Shahzada Dawood, and his son, Suleman; deep-sea explorer and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet; OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush; and Titan pilot Hamish Harding.
CBS News
Story produced by Anthony Laudato. Editor: Emanuele Secci.
David Pogue is a six-time Emmy winner for his stories on “CBS Sunday Morning,” where he’s been a correspondent since 2002. He’s also a New York Times bestselling author, a five-time TED speaker, and host of 20 NOVA science specials on PBS. For 13 years, he wrote a New York Times tech column every week — and for 10 years, a Scientific American column every month.
The news we followed, the people who fascinated us, the culture and trends that grabbed our attention — Google’s “Year in Search” data for 2023 sheds light on the top trending topics Americans wanted to know about this year.
From celebrities and athletes to TV shows and box-office hits, people across the country turned to the search engine for answers to pressing questions like “How often do you think about the Roman Empire?” and recipes for McDonald’s hit beverage of the year, the Grimace Shake.
While we may not have gotten all the answers, here’s what some of the top searches in the U.S. have to tell us about the past year:
The stories we followed
This year, the world was shocked by the war in Israel and Gaza, which was Google’s most-searched news story of the year. Following the deadly Oct. 7 attack on Israel by the militant group Hamas, Israel vowed to destroy the group and launched airstrikes and a ground operation into the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian territory controlled by Hamas.
A missile explodes in Gaza City during an Israeli airstrike on Oct. 8, 2023.
MAHMUD HAMS/AFP via Getty Images
The second most searched story of the year, according to Google, was the frantic search in June for the OceanGate Titan submersible, which vanished on a dive to the Titanic shipwreck site with five people aboard. Tragically, everyone on the tourist vessel was killed when it imploded under the pressures of the deep sea.
Americans also did a lot of searching for updates on hurricanes, with Hurricane Hilary, Hurricane Idalia, and Hurricane Lee rounding out the list of top 5 most-searched news stories.
The people we were curious about
NFL player Damar Hamlin became the No. 1 most-Googled person on the list after the Buffalo Bills defensive back collapsed on the field in cardiac arrest during a Jan. 3 game. Hamlin has since made a full recovery and returned to play this season. Hamlin was also Google’s most-searched athlete of 2023.
Damar Hamlin #3 of the Buffalo Bills after a game on Sept. 19, 2022.
Timothy T Ludwig / Getty Images
Actor Jeremy Renner was the No. 2 most-Googled person in the U.S. in 2023 following a New Year’s Day snowplow accident that left him hospitalized with over 30 broken bones. Renner was run over by the vehicle while trying to protect his nephew. He has since made a remarkable recovery. Renner was also the No. 1 most-Googled actor of the year.
Also high on Google’s list is the NFL’s Travis Kelce, the tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs who helped bring home a Super Bowl victory in Feburary. Kelce, who was the No. 3 most-Googled person and No. 2 most-Googled athlete in the U.S. this year, has also been publicly dating pop superstar Taylor Swift since July.
Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce have dinner at Waverly Inn on Oct. 15, 2023, in New York City.
Gotham/GC Images via Getty Images
Ranking 4th and 5th on the most-Googled people list were former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson, who was ousted from the network in April, and internet personality Lil Tay, whose death was falsely reported in August.
The nation also searched for information on a number of beloved celebrities we lost in 2023, with “Friends” actor Matthew Perry‘s death being the most-Googled of the year. Perry was found dead at his home in Los Angeles at age 54 following a ketamine overdose in October.
Matthew Perry shooting “Friends” in 1998.
Mathieu Polak/Sygma via Getty Images
Iconic singer-songwriter Tina Turner, TV host Jerry Springer, “Margaritaville” singer Jimmy Buffet, and singer and activist Sinéad O’Connor filled out the top 5 on the list of most-Googled celebrity passings of 2023.
What kept us entertained
“Barbenheimer” dominated the U.S. box office, with the Greta Gerwig-directed “Barbie” and biopic “Oppenheimer” smashing records in their July joint-opening weekend. The two films were Google’s No. 1 and No. 2 most-searched movies of 2023 in the U.S.
Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Alejandro Gómez Monteverde’s “Sound of Freedom,” the 2022 Oscar-winner “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” and the third installment of popular Marvel franchise “Guardians of the Galaxy,” occupied the third through fifth spots on the most-Googled films list.
“The Last of Us,” starring Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey and based on the popular video game of the same name, was the most-Googled television show in the U.S. in 2023. Pascal was also the fifth most-Googled actor.
Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal attend an event for HBO’s “The Last Of Us” on April 28, 2023 in Los Angeles.
FilmMagic/FilmMagic for HBO via Getty Images
When it comes to music, the controversial country hit “Try That in a Small Town” was the most-Googled song of the year, and the musician behind it, Jason Aldean, the most-Googled singer of the year in the U.S. in 2023. The track amassed widespread attention in July following the release of its music video, which depicted protesters confronting police officers.
Jason Aldean performs onstage at Country Thunder Wisconsin
Joshua Applegate / Getty Images
Recipes, memes and more
In one of the more surprising results, McDonald’s Grimace Shake was the No. 1 most-Googled recipe in the U.S. in 2023. The purple milkshake inspired a viral TikTok trend this summer, with users trying Grimace’s berry-flavored beverage and then pretending to die.
The top Google search that began with the phrase “How often…” was in response to another viral Internet trend that encouraged users to ask men, “How often do you think about the Roman Empire?” The question took the No. 1 spot on Google’s most-searched trend list in the U.S. as well.
The most-searched “Explained” query on Google was “The Menu explained,” referring to the 2022 film starring Ralph Fiennes as a celebrity chef, and Anya Taylor-Joy and Nicholas Hoult as a couple who dine in his restaurant.
And finally, the most-Googled meme in the U.S. of 2023 was Kevin James, referring to an image of the actor with his hands in his pockets and smirking at the camera.
Promotional portrait of actor and comedian Kevin James, in character for his role on the TV sitcom “The King of Queens,” late 1990s.
TONY ESPARZA / Getty Images
Google’s top search lists
See more of Google’s top-searched lists below, and read the U.S. data in full here:
The U.S. Coast Guard has found more debris and evidence from the Titan submersible that went missing and imploded in June, according to a statement from the service released Tuesday.
The Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigations, working with marine safety engineers, recovered the material on Oct. 4 in a follow-up operation to the initial recovery mission in June, the statement said.
“The recovered evidence was successfully transferred to a U.S. port for cataloging and analysis,” the statement read. “Additional presumed human remains were carefully recovered from within Titan’s debris and transported for analysis by U.S. medical professionals.”
The submersible was carrying four passengers who had paid $250,000 to go on a deep-sea expedition led by the private company OceanGate to see the wreckage of the Titanic in June. The fifth person aboard was OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who was piloting the vessel.
On June 18, the 21-foot submersible went missing about 300 miles off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, prompting an intensive search. The Coast Guard, with the help of other groups and international teams, used planes, ships and remotely operated vehicles to try to locate the craft.
After a frantic search that lasted days, the Coast Guard announced that an ROV had identified a debris field in the search area and five major pieces of debris that appeared to be from the submersible were found.
The Coast Guard and OceanGate said the passengers were believed to have died when the submersible imploded hours after its launch. Later in June, the Coast Guard confirmed that it had recovered debris and evidence presumed to be the human remains of the Titan’s five occupants, which was sent for formal analysis and testing by medical professionals.
“The MBI is coordinating with [the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board] and other international investigative agencies to schedule a joint evidence review of recovered Titan debris,” read Tuesday’s statement from the Coast Guard. “This review session will help determine the next steps for necessary forensic testing.”
Karl Stanley, a friend of late OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, isn’t surprised the Titan submersible fatally imploded last month. A prior passenger on the doomed vessel, Stanley told “60 Minutes Australia” that Rush “definitely knew it was going to end like this.”
“He quite literally and figuratively went out with the biggest bang in human history that you could go out with,” Stanley told the outlet in an interview published Sunday. “And who was the last person to murder two billionaires, at once, and have them pay for the privilege?”
“I think Stockton was designing a mousetrap for billionaires,” Stanley added.
Stanley, a submersibles expert and deep sea explorer himself, experienced this firsthand during a Titan test dive in the Bahamas in 2019. He said Sunday there were “loud, gunshot-like noises” every three to four minutes that he said were coming from the carbon fiber tube breaking apart.
Karl Stanley (not pictured) warned OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush (left) about the dangers of his sub.
Wilfredo Lee/Associated Press
“That’s a heck of a sound to hear when you’re that far under the ocean in a craft that has only been down that deep once before,” Stanley told the program.
Perhaps most troubling was a series of messages he sent Rush and shared with “60 Minutes,” which showed Stanley warned him in April 2019 about “an area of the hull that is breaking down” and later ominously added, “it will only get worse.”
“I literally painted a picture of his wrecked sub at the bottom and even that wasn’t enough,” Stanley told the news program.
“The only question in my mind — the only question is — ‘when?’” Stanley told “60 Minutes.” “He was risking his life, and his customers’ lives, to go down in history. He’s more famous now than anything else he ever would’ve done.”
“I don’t respond to offensive rumors in the media usually, but I need to now,” Cameron wrote on Twitter Saturday. “I’m NOT in talks about an OceanGate film, nor will I ever be.”
I don’t respond to offensive rumors in the media usually, but I need to now. I’m NOT in talks about an OceanGate film, nor will I ever be.
The Oscar-winning director’s fervent response comes after The Sun published an anonymously sourced story Thursday that claimed Cameron, who directed 1997’s hit film “Titanic,” was gearing up to helm a project about the fatal Titan voyage to view the Titanic’s wreckage.
The Sun’s story said the information came from “insiders.” One source was quoted as saying, “The Titan disaster is already being looked at as a major series for one of the world’s biggest streamers — and James is the first choice for director. It is a subject close to his heart.”
The source continued, “He told the story of the Titanic so compassionately it feels like a natural step for him to take this on. Retracing the steps of those on board the Titan is a massive undertaking, but there would be a lot of time, money and resources dedicated to it.”
The article also alleged that Cameron was preparing to tap several of Hollywood’s top stars, including Matt Damon, to join the series.
The fact that the filmmaker appeared in an interview with ABC News to share his thoughts on OceanGate following the disaster further fueled the rumors.
Cameron told ABC News last month: “Many people in the community were concerned about this sub and even wrote letters to the company saying that what they were doing was too experimental and what they were doing needed to be certified.”
Comparing the Titanic to the submersible, he added, “I’m struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship, and yet, he steamed at full speed into an ice field on a moonless night and many died as a result. It’s a very similar tragedy at the exact same site. It’s astonishing and really quite surreal.”
The people on OceanGate Expeditions’ Titan submersible died when the vessel is believed to have imploded thousands of feet below the water while on a voyage to see the wreckage of the Titanic in the northern Atlantic.
The world was stunned after learning the sub lost contact with the surface, kicking off widespread concern for the people aboard as the fate of the craft remained a mystery for days.
In a separate conversation with BBC News, Cameron admitted that he “felt in my bones” that a disaster was ahead for the Titan after it was announced that the vessel had vanished.
“For the sub’s electronics to fail, and its communication system to fail, and its tracking transponder to fail simultaneously — sub’s gone,” he said, adding that it “felt like a prolonged and nightmarish charade where people are running around talking about banging noises and talking about oxygen and all this other stuff.”
“I knew that sub was sitting exactly underneath its last known depth and position. That’s exactly where they found it,” he said.
The U.S. Coast Guard announced all five people’s deaths, including OceanGate Expeditions’ CEO, Stockton Rush, who was operating the sub, on June 22 after fragments of the submersible were discovered.
OceanGate, the company that owned and operated the submersible that imploded with five people on board, has suspended all exploration and commercial operations.
The company made the announcement Thursday in a banner on its website. No further details were provided. OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush was among the five people killed when the Titan sub imploded en route to the wreckage of the Titanic wreckage in June.
The Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation, along with authorities from Canada, France and the United Kingdom, are looking into what caused the deadly implosion. Investigators will look into possible “misconduct, incompetence, negligence, unskillfulness or willful violation of law” by OceanGate, the company that operated the Titan, or by the Coast Guard itself, the service branch previously said.
Debris from the Titan submersible recovered from the ocean floor near the wreck of the Titanic is unloaded Wednesday in Newfoundland.
Paul Daly/The Canadian Press/AP
The deadly implosion brought new scrutiny to OceanGate and Rush. In a resurfaced clip from 2021, Rush told vlogger Alan Estrada that he’d “broken some rules” to make trips to the Titanic possible for his company.
“I’d like to be remembered as an innovator. I think it was General [Douglas] MacArthur who said, ‘You’re remembered for the rules you break,’” Rush said. “And I’ve broken some rules to make this. I think I’ve broken them with logic and good engineering behind me.”
OceanGate is a privately held company. On the company website, OceanGate touted its “innovative use of materials and state-of-the-art technology” in developing deep-diving submersibles.
The company, which charged $250,000 per person for the Titanic voyage, had been warned of potential safety problems for years.
A professional trade group in 2018 warned that OceanGate’s experimental approach to the design of the Titan could lead to potentially “catastrophic” outcomes, according to a letter from the group obtained by CBS News.
That same year, an OceanGate employee raised safety concerns about the Titan’s design and the company’s protocol for testing the hull’s reliability. OceanGate fired the employee after he shared his complaints with government regulators and OceanGate management.
The Titan went missing last month during a voyage to the Titanic wreckage in the North Atlantic. The crew of the Polar Prince research vessel lost contact with the submersible 1 hour and 45 minutes into its June 18 dive.
In addition to Rush, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, his 19-year-old son Suleman, billionaire adventurer Hamish Harding and French explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet were on the sub.
A BBC documentary released last year captured a chilling malfunction on the doomed Titan submersible that left passengers stuck circling at the bottom of the ocean.
On one of OceanGate’s dives to the Titanic wreckage nearly 13,000 feet below the surface in the North Atlantic, its sub’s thrusters malfunctioned, causing the vessel to spin only in circles.
It was captured in the BBC’s documentary “Take Me to the Titanic.” In the footage, as the submersible reaches the ocean floor near the Titanic’s resting place, pilot Scott Griffith can be heard saying: “There’s something wrong with my thrusters. I’m thrusting and nothing’s happening.”
“Am I spinning?” Griffith said at one point. “Oh, my God.”
He explained to passengers that one of the thrusters was thrusting forward, and the other backward ― meaning they couldn’t navigate toward the shipwreck just 1,000 feet or so away.
“You know, I was thinking, ‘We’re not going to make it,’” passenger Renata Rojas told the BBC. “We can’t go anywhere but go in circles.”
Crew members were forced to wait at the bottom of the ocean while OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush worked to come up with a solution from the host ship.
Eventually, the pilot was directed to reprogram the video game controller that steers the vessel and regained control of the sub. The passengers were then able to view the wreckage they’d paid $250,000 to visit.
Rush and four other people were killed last month when the same submersible imploded during another tourist expedition to the Titanic site.
In the wake of the incident, numerous dive experts and former OceanGate employees and associates have spoken out, accusing Rush and the company of ignoring repeated warnings.
David Lochridge, OceanGate’s former director of marine operations, wrote in a 2018 email that he feared Rush “kills himself and others in the quest to boost his ego,” The New Yorker reported this week. Lochridge claims he was fired from the company after sounding the alarm on safety issues in a report.
Multiple previous passengers have also spoken about an array of glitches and malfunctions they experienced on their own Titanic expeditions.
Debris from the Titan submersible which imploded last week near the wreckage of the Titanic, killing all five people aboard, has been recovered, the U.S. Coast Guard reported Wednesday.
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The U.S. Coast Guard has launched an investigation into the Titan submersible, which imploded with five people on board while attempting a dive to the wreckage of the Titanic. Roxana Saberi has the latest.
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Talk to someone who rode on the Titan submersible, and they’re likely to mention a technological glitch: the propulsion system failed or communications with people on the surface cut out. Maybe there were problems balancing weights on board.
They are also likely to mention Stockton Rush, the OceanGate Expeditions CEO who died on the fatal trip this week. He has been described by past passengers as both a meticulous planner and an overconfident pioneer.
In the wake of the Titan’s fatal implosion near the Titanic shipwreck on Sunday, some people who embarked on the company’s deep-sea expeditions described experiences that foreshadowed the tragedy and look back on their decision to dive as “a bit naive.”
But others expressed confidence and said that they felt they were “in good hands” nearly 13,000 feet (3,962 meters) below the ocean’s surface.
‘LIKE PLAYING RUSSIAN ROULETTE’
“I 100% knew this was going to happen,” said Brian Weed, a camera operator for the Discovery Channel’s “Expedition Unknown” show, who has felt sick to his stomach since the sub’s disappearance Sunday.
Weed went on a Titan test dive in May 2021 in Washington state’s Puget Sound as it prepared for its first expeditions to the sunken Titanic. Weed and his colleagues were preparing to join OceanGate Expeditions to film the famous shipwreck later that summer.
They quickly encountered problems: The propulsion system stopped working. The computers failed to respond. Communications shut down.
Rush, the OceanGate CEO, tried rebooting and troubleshooting the vessel on its touch screens.
“You could tell that he was flustered and not really happy with the performance,” Weed said. “But he was trying to make light of it, trying to make excuses.”
They were barely 100 feet (30 meters) deep in calm water, which begged the question: “How is this thing going to go to 12,500 feet — and do we want to be on board?” Weed said.
Following the aborted trip, the production company hired a consultant with the U.S. Navy to vet the Titan.
He provided a mostly favorable report, but warned that there wasn’t enough research on the Titan’s carbon-fiber hull, Weed said. There also was an engineering concern that the hull would not maintain its effectiveness over the course of multiple dives.
Weed said Rush was a charismatic salesman who really believed in the submersible’s technology — and was willing to put his life on the line for it.
FILE – Submersible pilot Randy Holt, right, communicates with the support boat as he and Stockton Rush, left, CEO and Co-Founder of OceanGate, dive in the company’s submersible, “Antipodes,” about three miles off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., June 28, 2013. Rescuers in a remote area of the Atlantic Ocean raced against time Tuesday, June 20, 2023, to find a missing submersible before the oxygen supply runs out for five people, including Stockton, who were on a mission to document the wreckage of the Titanic. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee, File)
“It was looking more and more like we weren’t going to be the first guys down to film the Titanic — we were going to be maybe the 10th,” Weed said of the possible Titan expedition. “I felt like every time (the vessel) goes down, it’s going to get weaker and weaker. And that’s a little bit like playing Russian roulette.”
For work projects, Weed has swum with sharks, rappelled into remote caves and snowshoed through Siberia. But he and his colleagues pulled out of the dive to the Titanic.
“I didn’t have a good feeling about it,” he said. “It was a really hard choice to make.”
‘I ALWAYS FELT I WAS IN GOOD HANDS’
Mike Reiss, a writer for “The Simpsons” television show, said he had positive experiences on the dives he made with OceanGate, including to the Titanic wreck site.
“When my wife first came to me with this (idea), I said to her, ‘Well, this sounds like a fun way to get killed,’” Reiss said. “I knew (the risks) going in there. I always felt I was in good hands.”
Reiss said he went on three trips with OceanGate in waters near New York City — and that the company took safety seriously.
“Mostly it was just breathtaking how well it all went,” Reiss said of his 2022 dive to the Titanic. “It’s a 10-hour trip. And I went from sea level to two and a half miles down, and then back to sea level. And at no time did the pressure change in my ears. I didn’t get the same feeling I get in the New York elevator. To me that’s a remarkable achievement.”
Reiss said he was in a “different state of mind” on the expedition because he was so engaged.
“You’re never hungry. You’re never thirsty. They have a bathroom on board. It has never been used,” he said. “You just become a different kind of person. You even know you could die and it doesn’t bother you.”
Reiss said he did notice some issues with the Titan, although he wasn’t sure everything was a glitch.
For instance, the communications didn’t always work, like a cellphone losing service. The Titan’s compass also started “acting frantically” when they got to the ocean floor near the sunken Titanic.
“I don’t know if that’s an equipment failure or because magnetism is different two and a half miles down,” he said.
‘THE FATAL FLAW IS WHAT HE WILL BE REMEMBERED FOR’
Arnie Weissmann, editor in chief of Travel Weekly, never rode in the Titan despite spending a week aboard its support ship in late May, waiting for the weather to clear. He briefly climbed into the submersible, but the dive was ultimately canceled.
Wind, fog and waves were the stated reasons, but Weissmann wondered whether the submersible’s readiness was also a factor.
Over cigars one night, Rush told Weissmann that he got the carbon fiber for the Titan’s hull at a big discount because it was past its shelf-life for use in airplanes, Weissmann said. But Rush reassured him it was safe.
“I really felt there were two Stockton Rushes,” Weissman said. “There was the one who was a good team leader and efficient and getting the work done. And there was this cocky, self-assured, others be damned, ‘I’m going to do it my way’ sort of guy. And that’s the one I saw when we went out the back of the boat and had our cigars.”
But he also was a strong leader, said Weissmann, who recalled Rush leading lengthy planning meetings and urging anyone who was interested to read a book called “The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right” that he left in the ship’s lounge. If a repair was complex, Weissmann said Rush would tell those assigned to it to pause for five minutes after completing it to make sure it was done correctly.
Looking back, Weissmann believes Rush had a fatal flaw: overconfidence in his engineering skills and the perception that he was a pioneer in an area that others weren’t because they were sticking to the rules.
“But in the end, for sure, the fatal flaw is what he will be remembered for — even though he was a three-dimensional human being like everybody else,” Weissmann said.
“You have to be a little bit crazy to do this sort of thing,” he said.
His submersible mates included Rush, French diver and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet and two passengers from England.
“Imagine a metal tube a few meters long with a sheet of metal for a floor. You can’t stand. You can’t kneel. Everyone is sitting close to or on top of each other,” Loibl said. “You can’t be claustrophobic.”
During the 2.5-hour descent and ascent, the lights were turned off to conserve energy, he said, with the only illumination coming from a fluorescent glow stick.
The dive was repeatedly delayed to fix a problem with the battery and the balancing weights. In total, the voyage took 10.5 hours.
He described Rush as a tinkerer who tried to make do with what was available to carry out the dives, but in hindsight, he said, “it was a bit dubious.”
“I was a bit naive, looking back now,” Loibl said.
OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, the owner and pilot of the doomed Titan sub, had offered millionaire Jay Bloom and his son discounted tickets to ride on it, and claimed it was safer than crossing the street, a Facebook post from Bloom said. The sub suffered a “catastrophic implosion” on its dive to view the Titanic earlier this week, killing Rush and the other four people on board.
On Thursday, just hours after the Coast Guard announced that the wreckage of the sub had been found, Bloom, a Las Vegas investor, revealed texts he had exchanged with Rush in the months leading up to the trip.
In one text conversation in late April, Rush reduced the price of the tickets from $250,000 to $150,000 per person to ride the submersible on a trip scheduled for May. As Bloom contemplated the offer, his son Sean raised safety concerns over the sub, while Rush — who once said he’d “broken some rules” in its design — tried to assure them.
“While there’s obviously risk it’s way safer than flying a helicopter or even scuba diving,” Rush wrote, according to a screen shot of the text exchange posted by Bloom.
Bloom said that in a previous in-person meeting with Rush, they’d discussed the dive and its safety.
“I am sure he really believed what he was saying. But he was very wrong,” Bloom wrote, adding, “He was absolutely convinced that it was safer than crossing the street.”
This photo provided by OceanGate Expeditions shows the submersible vessel named Titan used to visit the wreckage site of the Titanic.
OceanGate Expeditions via AP
Ultimately, the May trip was delayed until Father’s Day weekend in June, and Bloom decided not to go.
“I told him that due to scheduling we couldn’t go until next year,” Bloom wrote. “Our seats went to Shahzada Dawood and his 19 year old son, Suleman Dawood, two of the other three who lost their lives on this excursion (the fifth being Hamish Harding).”
Bloom wasn’t the only one who backed out of the trip. Chris Brown, a friend of Harding and self-described “modern explorer,” told CNN earlier this week he decided to not go because it “seemed to have too many risks out of my control” and didn’t come across as a “professional diving operation.” David Concannon, an Idaho-based attorney and a consultant for OceanGate Expeditions, said over Facebook that he canceled due to an “urgent client matter.”
The U.S. Coast Guard said it would continue its investigation of the debris from the sub, found near the Titanic shipwreck site, to try to determine more about how and when it imploded.
Industry experts and a former employee’s lawsuit had raised serious safety concerns about OceanGate’s operation years before the sub’s disappearance. In 2018, a professional trade group warned that OceanGate’s experimental approach to the design of the Titan could lead to potentially “catastrophic” outcomes, according to a letter from the group obtained by CBS News.
“Titanic” director James Cameron, an experienced deep-sea explorer who has been to the wreckage site more than 30 times, said that “OceanGate shouldn’t have been doing what it was doing.”
James Cameron, director of the blockbuster film Titanic, has criticized the engineering of the lost Titan submersible, calling its design “fundamentally flawed.”
In an interview with ABC News, Cameron — who designs submersibles himself, some able to dive to depths three times below the Titanic site — said OceanGate Expedition’s vessel should not have been constructed from carbon fiber.
OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who was one of five passengers killed onboard the Titan submersible that disappeared on Sunday, defended the use of carbon fiber in 2017, claiming the material was lighter, cheaper and easier to transport while still being durable under pressure. Traditionally, submersibles are constructed using titanium, steel or other materials that can withstand immense pressure underwater.
Cameron, 68, told the news outlet that members of the “small” deep-diving community had been warning about safety flaws in the Titan’s design since Rush boasted about the use of carbon fiber in the hull.
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He claimed many “very concerned” engineers and deep-sea divers wrote letters to OceanGate insisting the Titan was too experimental to carry human passengers.
All 5 aboard Titan submersible dead after ‘catastrophic implosion’
The Titan launched on Sunday and was reported overdue that afternoon about 700 kilometers south of St. John’s, N.L., prompting an exhaustive search involving American and Canadian organizations.
On Thursday, U.S. Coast Guards said debris had been found on the ocean bed. Authorities said all five people aboard the submersible — identified as Hamish Harding, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, Paul-Henri Nargeolet and Rush, who piloted the vessel — died when the Titan imploded.
“I’m struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship, and yet, he steamed up full speed into an ice field on a moonless night,” Cameron told ABC News. “And many people died as a result and for a very similar tragedy where warnings went unheeded to take place at the same exact site…”
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In a separate interview with the BBC, Cameron further disparaged the Titan’s construction and claimed the company “cut corners.”
He said OceanGate did not certify the submersible because “they knew they wouldn’t pass.”
Cameron, who has completed 33 diving voyages to the Titanic wreck, said he would not have boarded the Titan submersible.
When it was announced on Sunday that the Titan lost communication, Cameron said he “felt in my bones what had happened.”
“For the sub’s electronics to fail and its communication system to fail, and its tracking transponder to fail simultaneously – sub’s gone,” he told the BBC.
Experts warned Titan submersible didn’t follow industry safety standards
Cameron said the days-long search for the submersible felt like a “prolonged and nightmarish charade” because he, and others in the deep-diving community, knew the vessel and its passengers were likely lost.
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“In the 21st century, there shouldn’t be any risks,” Cameron said. “We’ve managed to make it through 60 years, from 1960 until today, 63 years without a fatality … So, you know, one of the saddest aspects of this is how preventable it really was.”
The filmmaker has been an oceanography enthusiast since childhood and has made dozens of deep-sea dives, including one to the deepest point on Earth — the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean.
