Was SS Cotopaxi spotted by Coast Guard 90 years after disappearance? Fact Check

A news story online claims that the ship SS Cotopaxi had been intercepted by the Cuban Coast Guard heading to Havana, 90 years after it initially went missing in the Bermuda Triangle.

FALSE

The news story was originally published by the website WorldNewsDailyReport.com in 2015, which read in part –

The Cuban Coast Guard announced this morning, that they had intercepted an unmanned ship heading for the island, which is presumed to be the SS Cotopaxi, a tramp steamer which vanished in December 1925 and has since been connected to the legend of the Bermuda Triangle.
The Cuban authorities spotted the ship for the first time on May 16, near a restricted military zone, west of Havana. They made many unsuccessful attempts to communicate with the crew and finally mobilized three patrol boats to intercept it.
When they reached it, they were surprised to find that the ship was actually a nearly 100-year old steamer identified as the Cotopaxi, a name famously associated with the legend of the Bermuda Triangle.

Despite the claims, the 2015 was false. WorldNewsDailyReport.com is a spoof news website, with a long history of publishing nonsense “stories of interest” that lack any factual basis. The site even has a disclaimer on its About page warning readers that its content is satirical and “entirely fictional“.

With that said, the SS Cotopaxi was a real ship that really does have close ties with the infamous Bermuda Triangle, an area in the Atlantic ocean between Florida, Puerto Rico and the island of Bermuda where ships and aircraft frequently go missing, inspiring tales of supernatural intervention and time travel.

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In 2015, when the hoaxers at WorldNewsDailyReport were authoring their spoof news story, the whereabouts of the SS Cotopaxi were unknown, and had been unknown since the ship set sail from South Carolina to Havana, Cuba in 1925. With a crew of 32, the ship was delivering a large cargo of coal when only a few days after leaving the coast of the USA, she sent a distress call warning that she was taking on water.

And then the ship disappeared, with no reported sightings of any lifeboats, or any of her crew. A few weeks later the ship was officially reported as missing.

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The sudden disappearance of the SS Cotopaxi made for perfect fodder for supernaturalists and the legend of the Bermuda Triangle. So much so that Steven Spielberg included a reference to the ship in his 1970s hit Close Encounters of the Third Kind, explaining the ship’s disappearance by claiming it was abducted by aliens and subsequently discarded in the middle of the Gobi desert.

That in turn inspired by WorldNewsDailyReport spoof article, which illustrated its fake article with the same prop that featured in Close Encounters (below.)

On the left is the WorldNewsDaily image that accompanied their spoof news story. On the right a still from Spielberg’s Close Encoounters.

However, five years after the WorldNewsDailyReport article first surfaced online, the true fate of the SS Cotopaxi would be revealed, at the start of 2020, when marine biologists finally identified a wreck originally discovered in the 1980s off the coast of Florida known as “bear wreck” as the remains of the ill-fated SS Cotopaxi.

Marine biologist Michael Barnette spent years examining the unusually large “bear wreck” site, 30 miles off St. Augustine in Florida, and comparing it to historical and public records of the SS Cotopaxi, before finally matching the ship and the wreck.

The ship has helped fuel the myth of the Bermuda Triangle, and despite proponents of the legend claiming that the area is responsible for an unusually high number of missing ships and aircraft, sceptics claim this is simply untrue, and that many of the vessels purported missing are often located outside the boundaries of the triangle, as was the case for the SS Cotopaxi.

You can see a documentary on the discovery on YouTube here.

Either way, the discovery puts at end to the mystery of the Cotopaxi, and the final nail in the coffin to the fake WorldNewsDailyReport article.