James Cameron: As Soon as I Heard About Missing Sub, I Knew 'in My Bones'

One person who was not surprised by Thursday's devastating news about the fate of the doomed Titanic submersible: Titanic director and deep-submergence enthusiast James Cameron. In interviews with the BBC and CNN, Cameron, who himself has been on 33 dives to the wreckage of the Titanic, says as soon as he heard that the Titan sub had lost communication and tracking simultaneously he had a bad feeling. "I 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 tells the BBC.

"The only scenario that I could come up with in my mind that could account for that was an implosion," he told CNN. "A shockwave event so powerful that it actually took out a secondary system that has its own pressure vessel and its own battery power supply which is the transponder that the ship uses to track where the sub is." He says he got in touch with others in the deep submersible community and very quickly got the information: "They were on descent. They were at 3500 meters, heading for the bottom at 3800 meters," when "comms and navigation" were lost. While he spent the next few days hoping to be proven wrong, he also felt the search efforts were "futile." It felt, he said, like "a prolonged and nightmarish charade." (More James Cameron stories.)