James Cameron says he figured days ago that the Titan submersible imploded, but hoped he was wrong

By Aya Elamroussi, CNN

(CNN) — Filmmaker and deep-sea explorer James Cameron says he figured soon after learning a Titanic-bound submersible was missing it had imploded and its occupants were dead – days before officials announced that very outcome.

After hearing on Monday the “Titan” craft had disappeared, Cameron connected with people he knows in the deep-sea diving community and was told the submersible had lost communication and tracking simultaneously, he told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Thursday evening.

“The only scenario that I could come up with in my mind that could account for that was an implosion – a shock wave 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 (mother) ship uses to track where the sub is,” Cameron said on “Anderson Cooper 360.”

Cameron, who directed the hit 1997 film “Titanic” and has made 33 dives to the Titanic wreckage, said he then talked with other people and “got confirmation that there was some kind of loud noise that was consistent with an implosion event.”

“That seemed to me enough confirmation that I let all of my inner circle of people know that we had lost our comrades, and I encouraged all of them to raise a glass in their honor on Monday,” Cameron said.

The submersible was carrying five people when it dove Sunday toward the Titanic wreckage in the North Atlantic. It lost contact with its mother ship an hour and 45 minutes into the journey, sparking a dayslong search.

On Thursday, US authorities announced searchers found the Titan’s debris on the seabed, indicating the vessel had imploded and the five aboard had perished.

The US Navy had detected an acoustic signature consistent with an implosion on Sunday in the general area where the vessel was diving, a senior Navy official told CNN on Thursday.

However, the sound of the implosion was determined to be “not definitive,” the official said, and search efforts continued. The Wall Street Journal was first to report about the acoustic signature picked up by the Navy.

Cameron was “hoping against hope” his conclusion was wrong, “knowing in my bones that I wasn’t (wrong),” he said Thursday.

“I couldn’t think of any other scenario in which a sub would be lost where it lost comms and navigation at the same time, and stayed out of touch, and did not surface,” Cameron said.

Responding to Cameron’s comments, OceanGate co-founder Guillermo Sohnlein urged people not to speculate about the cause of the accident.

“[Cameron] himself has pushed the limits of technology and operations in pursuit of his expeditions so it kind of comes with the territory and I kind of again wish we would hold off judgment and just see exactly what the data comes back with,” Sohnlein told “CNN This Morning” Friday.

“The deep ocean exploration community is a small community. We generally all know each other and in general we respect each other,” Sohnlein added. “Jim’s obviously a very experienced ocean explorer and also well regarded but as he knows, and we all know, working underwater in these conditions is a very risky operation.”

Cameron – who also directed the 1989 thriller “The Abyss” – is an experienced deep sea explorer who in 2012 dove to the Mariana Trench, considered one of the deepest spots in the Earth’s oceans at almost 7 miles below the surface, in a 24-foot submersible vehicle he designed called the Deepsea Challenger.

All five people who were abroad the Titan – Stockton Rush, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, Hamish Harding, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet – were killed in the implosion, officials said Thursday.

Cameron said he hopes the tragedy doesn’t discourage tourists from exploring the ocean.

“I’m not worried about exploration, because explorers will go,” Cameron said. “I’m worried that it has a negative impact on, let’s say, citizen explorers, tourists. … These are serious people with serious curiosity willing to put serious money down to go to these interesting places – and I don’t want to discourage that.”

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CNN’s Rob Frehse, Sabrina Souza and Oren Liebermann contributed to this report.