Missing Titanic Sub: Scientist Recalls His Own Near-Catastrophic Voyage

It’s the story captivating the world: The life-and-death mission to find the submersible Titan exploring the Titanic wreckage two and a half miles deep on the ocean floor.

“Extra” has the latest on the search for the OceanGate vessel from ABC’s Gio Benitez. We also talk to Dr. Michael Guillen, who had his own close call on a mission to explore the Titanic in 2000.

Adventurer and British billionaire Hamish Harding is just one of the five people, some who paid a quarter million, to board that tiny vessel on Sunday. A support ship lost contact with the Titan a little more than an hour after it went underwater.

Benitez told “Extra’s” Billy Bush, “You're talking about these five guys who are really smart individuals… you have [Stockton Rush] the CEO of this company on board, and then you also have the foremost expert on Titanic research [Paul-Henri Nargeolet] who they call Mr. Titanic down there and so it's very sad and troubling to try to figure out what is going on here.”

As for the rescue effort, he said, “You have three countries involved in this effort. you have the U.S., Canada, and now France, which has sent a ship over, and that ship can apparently reach down and grab anything that is that far down, two and a half miles under the sea. The problem is it can't do that unless it knows where that sub actually is.”

Scientist Dr. Michael Guillen knows what those on board are going through, saying, “I lived through hell.”

He told Billy of relating to the passengers, “I’m just dying a thousand deaths here. It’s bringing it all back to me... It’s just making me sick.”

Guillen recounted his experience at the bottom of the Atlantic, “Everything was going fine… we even had a moment of prayer at the bow of the ship.”

Things took a turn, however, when they “got caught up in a high speed underwater current.”

“We got slammed in behind the blades of the propeller… shards of Titanic came showering down on our little submersible. I knew this was going to be a life or death situation.”

Sharing his thoughts on the Titan, he said, “Pure speculation is that they must have suffered more than just a catastrophic communications failure. They must have suffered a more catastrophic failure that involved the entire ship.”