The SS Cotopaxi, which was built in Michigan in 1918 and vanished in the Bermuda Triangle in 1925 - has been found.

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The Cotopaxi (named after a volcano in South America) was built by the Great Lakes Engineering Works (the same shipbuilders who built the Edmund Fitzgerald), on the River Rouge in Detroit, in 1918. According to Newsweek, in December 1925, with a cargo of coal and en route from Charleston, South Carolina to Havana, with a crew of thirty-two, she vanished in the Bermuda Triangle. Even though the Cotopaxi radioed a distress signal reporting she was listing and taking on water - while in tropical storm - it soon became part of the legend of all the ships and planes that had vanished in that area.

In 1977, Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of The Third Kind  featured the Cotopaxi. In the movie, the Cotopaxi is found in the Gobi Desert, 500 miles from the nearest ocean - supposedly an olive branch from the aliens who took her and her crew in the Bermuda Triangle.

This week, we got the news that the Cotopaxi had been found, 35 miles off the coast of St. Augustine, Florida, by underwater explorer Michael Barnette. And he did it mostly through researching archives of old insurance documents. The whole story will be told on a new show on the Science Channel, Shipwreck Secrets, premiering February 9 at 8 p.m.

 

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