Am curious how long this has been there and whether perhaps the “banging” was not related whatsoever.
I believe they confirmed in the press conference the bangs were not related due to where the debris was found.
They did.
The underwater banging noises that were picked up by the authorities earlier this week do not appear to have had any relation to the site of the submersible’s wreckage. “There doesn’t appear to be any connection between the noises and the location on the sea floor” where the debris was found, Mauger said. Previously, the Coast Guard had said that they repositioned their search efforts around where those noises were detected.
So if they weren’t related, then what were they?
This is the real mystery.
Extra noises of the all the search and rescue assets in the vicinity and the natural biases of the human operators to want to decipher patterns from the background noises = false positives. There’s precedent for that:
https://www.forces.net/usa/banging-sounds-heard-during-search-sunken-us-submarine-uss-thresher
