On 15 April 1912, the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank while in the Atlantic Ocean.
At least that's the textbook version of history.
But one unsatisfied conspiracy theorist on TikTok is convinced the Titanic never sank.
"I am not wrong!" says the TikToker.
According to TikTok user _mia.w22_, she was a "Titanic kid."
"Meaning, I literally knew every single fact about the Titanic, like my ass would sit and watch documentaries for hours and hours and hours. But when I heard this theory, everything went, like, it made sense?"
According to TikToker, White Star Line, the company that made the Titanic also made three identical ships: The Titanic, the Britannic, and the Olympic. But it was allegedly the Olympic that sank, not the Titanic. She accused White Star Line of intentionally sinking the Britannic and making it seem like the Titanic so they could get an insurance payout. She claims that the Olympic was already an old ship, and it was more expensive to repair than to make a new one.
"The Olympic was on the water for a while, she was reaching retirement and [White Star Line] knew that.
"They were like, it was a lot of money to make the Titanic and it's gonna be even more money to repair the Olympic, so what if we just sent the Olympic instead, sank that h**, claim the insurance money and then just scrap the Olympic like it was the Titanic for some spare parts."
Mia claims a lot of prominent people who were supposed to be on the ship knew the ship was going to sink, including banker J.P Morgan and chocolatier Milton Hershey, both of whom allegedly canceled their trips on the Titanic.
But someone claims her conspiracy theory is full of... holes.
"It's very easy to distinguish between the Olympic and Titanic. Just look at the B-deck promenade. On Titanic, it is fully open but on Olympic, the front half of the B-desk promenade is covered. That's very easy to see. She asserts that the Olympic was coming to the end of service life. The Olympic only went into service the previous year. She actually was not scrapped until 1938, some 26 years later. Brittanic was not torpedoed. It was very clearly a hospital ship and it would have been catastrophic for Germany to deliberately torpedo it. It did indeed hit a German mine. No historian worth their salt would dispute the fact it hit an underwater mine. Just a little bit of misinformation can be quite dangerous."
"I find it so strange how young people keep finding well-known things and then making TikTok about them as if they’ve discovered some new thing," says one man commenting on her TikTok.
"My god—well done you! You’ve discovered something no one else had ever thought of. This has been a conspiracy theory for literally decades, it’s not exactly ‘news,’" another one says.
In fact, there are many conspiracy theories surrounding the sinking of the Titanic, and they span decades.
One conspiracy theory alleges that J.P. Morgan, who actually owned the ship liner White Star Line, planned the disaster to kill his rivals.
The other conspiracy theory is that the Titanic never sank.
So far, no one has proved these two claims are true.
In fact, Reuters did an extensive fact-check on the claim that J.P. Morgan sank the Titanic to push forward plans for the U.S. Federal Reserve.
