With all of our modern technology, satellite tracking, transponders, radar, and sonar to this day a prevailing mystery haunts the ocean realm. It is a manifestation we know as ghost ships. No, not paranormal ships that haunt the sea, even though there are many who believe in these too, such as the legend of the “Flying Dutchman “but we are talking about ships that for some unknown reason are abandoned by the captain and crew, they are abducted, did an inter dimensional portal swallow the crew as they tried to escape the ship? Could it be there is some type of insurance fraud being perpetrated but if that’s true, why would the cargo and food storage be entirely intact? If there’s no salvage value there’s less insurance to be awarded either.

Vanishing crews

A 150 year mystery still unsolved to this day is the Mary Celeste, a triple masted schooner designed for cargo shipping was located off the Azores in Atlantic waters in 1872, still afloat, somewhat underway, and disheveled most likely from rough seas. Her complete manifest was intact along with food stores, but inexplicable the crew and captain were strangely vanished. The Mary Celeste was later hauled back to port, revamped, given another name, and a new owner, but the next captain did try to pull off a crime and grounded the ship in an attempt to collect insurance for loss, but was arrested. The public’s imagination was stoked by the Mary Celeste mystery with some speculating that a sea monster had devoured the crew.

The silent ship

In 2019 a British Artic Patrol ship the, HMS Protector, stumbled upon a ghost ship as it crested the horizon of the dark waters just before dawn. The warship observed the vessel as it quietly drifted by, no crew, no navigation, the British sailors refused to board the empty and hauntingly disturbing vessel so it was allowed to pass on its journey to nowhere. One crew member took photos and released them on the internet. The ghost ship was identified as the Alta, a merchant freight ship that had been bought and sold several times and was now registered out of Tanzania, but records showed erratic transponder locations from satellite data indicating captains may have been trying to conceal the actual location of a ship that might have had contraband aboard. Never the less, the ship had been adrift for years and still is floating in the Pacific somewhere.

Alone on the seas for so long

A merchant vessel commissioned in 1931 was off the coast of Alaska when the ice shelf during a very cold winter extended out into the sea and trapped the ship. Part of the crew left after abandonment while others camped ashore awaiting efforts to break out the ship or perhaps for weather conditions to allow for the vessel to float free from the ice pack. One morning to the amazement of the camped sailors, the ship had broken away from the ice and was gone! It was drifting down the northwest coast along Canada the last time it was spotted. In 1989 after almost 30 years adrift a photo was taken of the ship identifying it. Lost in 1961 it was still floating on the high seas unmanned and on a course for the unknown.

Another haunting sighting

The ocean is monitored much like outer space as NORAD tracks space debris, satellites, spacecraft, and space stations as well as orbital missile threats. Satellite and Coast Guard surveillance keeps track of huge glaciers that can be a threat to shipping lanes in the South Seas near the Antarctic as well as northern Atlantic waters where glaciers calve off from Greenland and Iceland. However, ghost ships are hard to track since their transponders no longer operate and millions of square miles of oceans are impossible to completely keep watch over. These ships can be a threat to shipping lanes and commercial vessels since they are not being navigated by human operators, but occasionally there are surprises that cannot be identified. There have been the sightings of a US Naval World War II destroyer seen at a distance but never identified. The US Navy has been unable to account for this ghost warship. Some sightings are said to be mirages (optical illusions) that look just like ships on the horizon but are merely reflections of heated and bent light rays from over the horizon somewhere.

Afraid to board here

In 2021 a merchant marine vessel was spotted off the coast of Thailand. It was known to have vanished for at least two years and had been unaccounted for leading some investigators to assume fraud or illegal activity, but like many others, no crew or captain, cargo still intact. In all these incidents emergency life boats have been detached and launched into the sea even when food is till cooking on the ship’s galley. So, what happened so suddenly that the entire crew chaotically abandoned ship along with a meal being prepared by the cook? Members of the Thai maritime authority were extremely superstitious about boarding the ship.

Set adrift one more

Many of these abandoned ghost ships set adrift will end up beached on a distant shore. You would think that would be the end of it, but amazingly they will often get caught in the riptide and pulled out to sea once more, making the mystery that much more enticing. Some of these ghost vessels when run aground will remain until hauled for salvage or a government decides simply to leave them there as the effort involved is not worth the cost. The US Navy has actually sunken a few of their mothballed fleet off the coast of Florida and other areas to provide a habitat for fish populations and even coral.

Another mystery from the Devil’s Triangle

One maritime vessel spotted aimlessly adrift within the Bermuda Triangle yielded an interesting find. While investigating the ghost ship below on the surface on the bottom of the ocean floor were two green crystalline pyramids. They both contained openings for sea water to enter and flow through to be expelled. The team theorized that the flow of water through these structures provided power like a hydroelectric dynamo from the water moving through the structure. Were these power stations of some kind for perhaps a lost civilization like Atlantis? It is known that the abundance of artifacts all over the ocean floor indicates the existence of technological civilizations unaccounted for by modern archaeology and trying to assign the label of erratic’s on all these unexplained pieces of ultra-ancient history would render theories of today subject to great rethinking.  So, remains the legacy of ghost ships to this day.