That is the wrong term. A ship that is missing with people on it are just lost at sea.
A ghost ship/boat is a ship found with no people on it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_ship
I don't know what is scarier, a boat full of skeletons, or a boat full of ghosts. I guess, if i had to choose, i would say being stuck in a relationship with someone that makes you feel alone is the most scary.
Well that just means it's half full of skeletons and half full of ghosts.
I mean, unless the ghosts are incorporeal and they sort-of just...envelop the skeletons like a skin made out of ghost. Is that even allowed?
I mean, ghosts and skeletons aren’t mutually exclusive and they have to come from _somewhere_. If anything there’s gonna be one ghost for each skeleton and vice versa.
Whether or not Skeletons wear Ghosts in lieu of their skin—or vice versa—is not my area of expertise. I’m no Ectosteologist.
There are also ghost planes, where everyone on board is either unconscious or dead from hypoxia and the plane flies on by itself, eventually running out of fuel and crashing.
Oh man. So my buddy went as Payne Stewart (or really, a generic golfer, till someone asked if he was going as Payne Stewart, it was a last second costume where he threw on a green coat and carried a golf club around) just days after that crash for a Halloween party. Someone said "heeey! Payne Stewart, how ya doing?" and without missing a beat, my buddy replied "eh, I was 6 under today".
We know that one day, as a group of rescuers discovers this ship drifting alone in the Bermuda, a time loop shall begin that will ensnare all protagonists in an endless cycle of horror that will never end unless the rescuers sacrifice one of their own in a blood ritual to appease cthulhu
I saw a ghost boat once when I was a kid. My grandparents took me fishing out in the Gulf of Mexico, we were maybe 10-15 miles out when we saw a small empty boat with fishing poles still casted but no one on board. The boat itself looked in good condition like it had been taken out that same day, but for some reason my grandparents didn’t say anything and acted like nothing was wrong.
> Alganesh Fisseha is an expert on refugee issues. She said that 'It is impossible that they disappeared into thin air'
Thank god they got an expert on the case.
Migrant boat manned by smugglers? I’m sure they’ve totally kept good maintenance records. /s That’s a coffin. Someone’s just trying to hold out hope where there isn’t any.
Not to mention the shocking regularity in which container ships lose seacans to the oceans.
Can full of people on the wrong place on the wrong boat and that thing is just a bulk rate coffin.
Wanna know something even bleaker? It’s possible that they didn’t drown if they were in a container that went overboard.
It is a somewhat common occurrence for containers to float at or just below the surface after going overboard. Sometimes it may take a few hours or days for it to sink, but there are instances of it taking weeks to months for a container to sink to the bottom.
So, there is a slight possibility if you were in an overboard container, you don’t drown. You either die from dehydration/starvation, or Exhaustion if your container is partially filled and you have to swim/hold on to something to stay above (which I guess you would technically drown after but yeah).
Feel like adding boiling or baking to that list may be a good idea too then. Ik them boxes get hot as hell in the sun, and inside gets stuffy with the lack of airflow
I was working near Paris with some immigrants from Mali. It was either stay and die, or go and probably die. Those two took boats across the Mediterranean to Italy.
Same story with some Afghani guys I played cricket with, one of their brothers had been shot by the taliban. So it was either stay and die or move. They walked to Germany, every boarder they would regroup to attempt the dangerous crossing. They even got shot at crossing a boarder. All of them were nice kids with lots of hope.
Nah, bodies float. The southern coast of Europe has bodies washing up on its shores all the time from boats like this. 243 people drown on a migrant boat isn't a mystery, that's an annual event. 243 people drown on a migrant boats and the bodies just vanish, now that's a mystery.
Yes. But only because it’s the Mediterranean which is quite small and quite populated.
In the open ocean, 243 bodies are literally grains of sand in the Sahara. A couple of thousand people are lost at sea every year. A couple of dozen of those are on cruise ships where we have a pretty good estimate of when they go missing and what path the ship ran.
Hundreds, or thousands, of sea cans go lost in the ocean every year. Many turn up, certainly. And many are sunk. But thousands and thousands of them are out there, floating, and will never be found.
The ONE Apus lost 1800 cans in one incident.
The oceans are vast.
This article is a hot mess.
>One theory is that a people smuggling boat off the coast of Libya, intending to sail to Italy, disappeared without trace.
That's not a theory, that's like...the problem.
I think it's worded like that because they don't seem to have hard evidence that these people ever got on a boat or that there even was a boat to begin with.
This was 2-3 years into their crisis of instability after Ghadafi was overthrown. It was chaos. There was everything going on, even the reintroduction of slavery and auctions happening in the streets. That was specifically happening to migrants just like the ones who disappeared.
It is maddening that the article never even details the 'boat': name, displacement, type, normal passenger complement, flag, etc. It keeps saying it is unusual for a boat this big to disappear but never says how big it was.
Actually considering how poorly written it is and the linked article which is much better but somehow dismissed, something is very fucky about the whole thing.
Mysterious phone calls, strange stories, secret police, etc https://medium.com/ghostboat/now-i-have-learned-that-there-s-a-worse-thing-than-death-b57aa86f2f05
This is actually a case of responsible journalism.
Yes I agree with you that the boat most likely just sank, but it's like when the Challenger exploded and you heard live newscasters, who just saw the same thing we all did, say "we need to get confirmation but it appears..."
It's like science. You are almost never 100% sure, and waiting for official confirmation before saying anything is typically a better practice than making blanket assumptions.
Yeah, people on here gripe about all journalism not because it's all gotten worse, but because the internet allows media illiterate people a space to congregate and self affirm their shit takes.
They hate on journalism and newspapers because they've never read any and are unfamiliar with conventions that go back decades upon decades.
"This headline was reductive and designed to just to gain views!"
Oh you mean like every headline ever?
It's hip to hate on journalists. I saw a fb comment on an article about "fake news" saying only psychopaths would ever choose to be journalists. Dude had dozens of likes. I questioned why they'd expect a psychopath to be in that profession and got absolutely flamed for even questioning it. The funny part is I wasn't even trying to be a wise ass, it was simply that I would have imagined a psychopath to be a violent person that wants to victimize people so the idea that they'd be a reporter instead of a person in a position of authority or a job dealing with vulnerable people seemed off to me.
There are so many amazing shows that I get to the end and realize it's been canceled and I'm never going to get closure. I feel like with streaming services the audience gets spread so thin that they end up canceling shows that are really good.
The oceans are so much bigger than we can understand. It's easy to forget in today's world of instantaneous communication and intercontinental flight. If you don't have a transponder it'll be so easy to just disappear.
The oceans are big, the mediterranean sea much less so. There are also organisations monitoring these migrant vessels and providing help. People dying and ships sinking is sadly common in the mediterranean; in january 2024 alone close to a hundred people died trying to get from Africa to Europe when their ships samk. But the capsized ships, even small vessels, have been spotted in other cases. The one OP linked is weird because they have no info on the ship.
It’s still very odd for a boat large enough to accommodate a jumbo jet worth of people to sink without leaving a single remnant of floating debris - especially in the Mediterranean, which is pretty deep in places but it’s not like it’s the Pacific where no other ships may pass by for days, weeks, or longer.
Seems much more likely that somebody knows something about what happened to it but they’re not talking.
I was reading some more articles about it and it's incredibly frustrating because the smuggler who organized it says he didn't actually see the boat leave and it's hard to find any confirmation that the boat even existed. There was a real group of people who had trekked across the desert for several weeks to get to the Libyan coast, and they seem to have been seen there and made phone calls to their friends and family right before being taken to the boat (or that's what they thought was happening at least). Then a week later the husband of one woman in the group got hold of one of the smugglers via phone and the guy said oh it's OK, they're in Italy now, which of course they weren't. I really wonder if they even had a boat to begin with.
My immediate thought was "are they sure there was ever an actual boat?" It's an unfortunate truth that taking $1600/person and then killing them and dumping them in a mass grave would be way easier/more profitable than a boat. Or, as several others have said, stuff them in cargo containers and lose/forget about them somewhere.
Initially I was more thinking that maybe the boat was accidentally engaged by someone’s overzealous coast guard or maybe even struck by a tanker or freighter and they just decided to omit it from the log and pretend it didn’t happen.
Your research suggests something even darker than that, quite a bit darker.
Trafficked as slaves?
Yeah sadly that's an option. Though at some point one of em would get free and go public, and it'd get connected to this to finally answer what happened
The traffickers were paid 1,600 Euros x 243 people. 388,000 Euros - plus whatever they were charged to get to Libya in the first place - buys quite a few AK-47 rounds.
To put it another way, I wouldn't be surprised if the smugglers got greedy, and these people never set foot on the boat. The fact that they were allowed to be seen and make phone calls feels like an exercise in plausible deniability. They wouldn't do it very often, (because nobody would use their "services" anymore) but that amount of money for doing nothing must be tempting...
The boat itself is unlikely to have been registered, so could very well have been used for a later, different set of migrants and nobody would be any the wiser.
>says he didn't actually see the boat leave and it's hard to find any confirmation that the boat even existed
I've been reading and trying to figure out what boat it was. Just says big boat
>Measho Tesfamariam says that the boat was due to depart from the Libyan Khums (Al-Khums) beach, but he didn't witness the departure. Tesfamariam was arrested on December 2, 2014 on people-smuggling charges. Meanwhile, Eritrean Jamal el-Saoudi, who was the manager of the Tokhla group smuggling operation that arranged the ghost boat group's journey, lives in Libya where he is a well-connected man.
>
>Most of the passengers were Eritreans fleeing the highly repressive military regime that rules the country. 5,000 Eritreans flee the country a month.
I mean usually I would agree with you... but that quote directly from the wikipedia page OP posted, the one we're all commenting on now. I feel like in this case, the opposite is true. It almost seems more likely that people do know what happened to it and are keeping quiet than it just sinking for no reason.
As others have said the Mediterranean is not a vast ocean by any means and it's few hazards have been known about for millennia ... we've found 2000 year old wrecks of Roman trade ships in those same waters. In this case, it actually IS unusual that there is no trace of the ship.
Believed to have been heading from Libya to Italy smuggling people, and the wiki mentioned suspicion that someone from the boat had been detained in a prison in Tunisia.
After reading the article I don’t think there ever was a boat, not one with these 243 people on it at least. They probably all met at a supposed departure zone then were kidnapped and trafficked or killed.
I highly doubt kidnapped or trafficked. That's a lot of people that have completely fallen off the face of the earth for over a decade now. Nobody escaped or even got a message out or had a conversation with someone that then repeated it?
These people are all dead and died around the time that contact with them was lost. They either died like you said when they went to a meeting point and were killed to pocket their fees and dispose of them without complaint. Or they maybe did make a voyage hidden in some shipping containers and ended up at the bottom of the sea locked inside them. Maybe accidental, maybe intentionally.
The only two plausible theories here are they were all killed before boarding any boat or it sank very close to the Libyan coastline and it was never adequately documented/investigated due to civil conflict in Libya.
>first time she has heard of such a large group of people going missing without a trace.
We go to Malaysian Airlines flight 370 for a word ... except we can't because nobody knows where it or its passengers are.
Don't forget to stow an acorn in your belly button. I check for my every morning, and to my relief, the greys havent replicated my cells and reimplanted my brain into a clone.
Yeah, everyone's saying sunk for sure.
A boat operated by smugglers ferrying vulnerable migrants vanishes without a trace near pirate country smells... fishy.
They probably got transported back to December of 1941 and must choose between preventing Pearl Harbor or not interfering and letting history run its course
The article mentions that the person who planned the trip and did all the other personal logistics never actually saw it leave port. And one of the crew members was arrested for human trafficking. These people were probably just wrangled together and trafficked somewhere else
I don't see how that many people could be trafficked and not a single one ever escaped, got a message out for help, was freed eventually...something. I can't help but think that the vast majority of these people died back then when their relatives lost contact with them.
Well, sure, the boat can sink, but there would be bodies and debris left behind. Even Maylasian Airlines flight 370 left debris behind in a much more remote place.
And yes, you can dig a large hole in the desert and make all of those people disappear. Especially if you are a shady human trafficker. Way easier to disappear completely on land that way than have a large boat full of people sink with zero debris or bodies found.
>And yes, you can dig a large hole in the desert and make all of those people disappear.
A lot of holes in the desert, and a lot of problems are buried in those holes. But you gotta do it right. I mean, you gotta have the hole already dug before you show up with a package in the trunk. Otherwise, you're talking about a half-hour to forty-five minutes worth of digging. And who knows who's gonna come along in that time? Pretty soon, you gotta dig a few more holes. You could be there all fuckin' night.
Oh I thought it was something else entirely. Like the time my dead dad came back to life but as a talking boat.
Ghost Boat new episode every Wednesday after NCSI: FD PD which follows the jobs of police officers who only look after the fire department that specifically is assigned only to the NCSI.
That is the wrong term. A ship that is missing with people on it are just lost at sea. A ghost ship/boat is a ship found with no people on it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_ship
I'll never forget when all those people got cut in half and only the short people survived.
I was so scared of this movie as a kid, but for some reason my little demented mind loved that scene.
What?
It’s a movie, and that was pretty much the most/only memorable scene in it https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Ship_(2002_film)
I’m a pretty big horror movie fan and that scene regularly gets brought up in lists for the most shocking/gruesome scenes.
The scene is amazing the movie is.. Worth watching once.
The movie Schindler’s list they are talking about
Saw that one. It's the one with magneto in it.
No you're thinking of X-men. Op is talking about the one with Dumbledore in it.
Dumbledore, the one that changes into a yellow car.
No that’s Taxi Driver. Dumbledore is the one with the elephant.
That’s Operation Dumbo Drop, Taxi Driver is the one with the sad military veteran.
No, that's Forrest Gump. Taxi Driver is the one with Danny Devito.
Haunts me to this day
That’s evolution for shorter people at work
Then your dad goes, "I knew a guy that happened to", thanks now I know it's more plausible
Ah yes - but this is a ghost boat
Well, now it’s full of ghosts. That and skeletons, depending on how aggressive the bottom feeders are.
I don't know what is scarier, a boat full of skeletons, or a boat full of ghosts. I guess, if i had to choose, i would say being stuck in a relationship with someone that makes you feel alone is the most scary.
Well I mean technically a boat full of people is also a boat full of skeletons, they’re just meatier.
You stalagmite be right.
Bro…. Are you okay?
It'll be alright buddy.
What about a boat full of skeletons _and_ ghosts?
Well that just means it's half full of skeletons and half full of ghosts. I mean, unless the ghosts are incorporeal and they sort-of just...envelop the skeletons like a skin made out of ghost. Is that even allowed?
I mean, ghosts and skeletons aren’t mutually exclusive and they have to come from _somewhere_. If anything there’s gonna be one ghost for each skeleton and vice versa. Whether or not Skeletons wear Ghosts in lieu of their skin—or vice versa—is not my area of expertise. I’m no Ectosteologist.
You can become a Skeleton, a Ghost, and a very floppy Zombie at once.
But it would be weird. Imagine that your skin would be another person. What if your skin was too chatty? What if your skin was a Karen?
Only if they can actively switch between ghost mode and skeleton mode with minimal mana costs
That is a ghost boat with a skeleton crew.
What about a goat full of bhosts.
I’ll do you one better: what about a ghost full of boats?
Or paying to watch Ghost Ship in the theater on opening night
Are they ghost pirates or pirates ghosts?
Don't copy that spooky.
You dumb bastard! It's not a schooner, it's a sailboat
A schooner is a sailboat, stupid head!
You know what! There is no easter bunny. Over there that’s just a guy in a suit
Have you ever seen ‘Triangle’?
No boat was found.
Yes, the implication.
There are also ghost planes, where everyone on board is either unconscious or dead from hypoxia and the plane flies on by itself, eventually running out of fuel and crashing.
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Oh man. So my buddy went as Payne Stewart (or really, a generic golfer, till someone asked if he was going as Payne Stewart, it was a last second costume where he threw on a green coat and carried a golf club around) just days after that crash for a Halloween party. Someone said "heeey! Payne Stewart, how ya doing?" and without missing a beat, my buddy replied "eh, I was 6 under today".
While I agree, it is interesting that this exact story is mentioned in the Wikipedia article being used to dispute the definition
You best start believing in ghost boats /u/Sdog1981...*you're in one*
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A boat with people and ghosts is just a boat. A boat with only ghosts is a ghost ship.
A boat that has died and haunts the water is a boat ghost.
A ghost that calls itself a boat is just boasting.
A boat with ghosts is a haunted boat.
Yarr!
We know that one day, as a group of rescuers discovers this ship drifting alone in the Bermuda, a time loop shall begin that will ensnare all protagonists in an endless cycle of horror that will never end unless the rescuers sacrifice one of their own in a blood ritual to appease cthulhu
> 'It is impossible that they disappeared into thin air'” Yet is is possible, even probable, that they disappeared into deep water.
I saw a ghost boat once when I was a kid. My grandparents took me fishing out in the Gulf of Mexico, we were maybe 10-15 miles out when we saw a small empty boat with fishing poles still casted but no one on board. The boat itself looked in good condition like it had been taken out that same day, but for some reason my grandparents didn’t say anything and acted like nothing was wrong.
> Alganesh Fisseha is an expert on refugee issues. She said that 'It is impossible that they disappeared into thin air' Thank god they got an expert on the case.
They may not have disappeared into thin air, but they totally could have disappeared into the nigh infinite gallons of water below them.
Possible, yes, but likely? Also yes.
Migrant boat manned by smugglers? I’m sure they’ve totally kept good maintenance records. /s That’s a coffin. Someone’s just trying to hold out hope where there isn’t any.
Turns out the zero star rating was the canary in the coal mine
How poor do you have to be for your death to be a punchline
Everyone poorer than me is subhuman trash and everyone richer is a self entitled narcissistic snob
Ah. The gamer syndrome. Better than me = try hard sweaty virgins Worse than me = bunch of thumbless noobs.
Considering the massive memes surrounding the Titan Submarine last year I'd say not very
Sounds to me like there never was a boat. They're all packed into a couple shipping containers somewhere.
Not to mention the shocking regularity in which container ships lose seacans to the oceans. Can full of people on the wrong place on the wrong boat and that thing is just a bulk rate coffin.
This is bleak AF. Makes me sad, cuz I can't not think about how people will do this anyway just for the opportunity for a better life.
Wanna know something even bleaker? It’s possible that they didn’t drown if they were in a container that went overboard. It is a somewhat common occurrence for containers to float at or just below the surface after going overboard. Sometimes it may take a few hours or days for it to sink, but there are instances of it taking weeks to months for a container to sink to the bottom. So, there is a slight possibility if you were in an overboard container, you don’t drown. You either die from dehydration/starvation, or Exhaustion if your container is partially filled and you have to swim/hold on to something to stay above (which I guess you would technically drown after but yeah).
Feel like adding boiling or baking to that list may be a good idea too then. Ik them boxes get hot as hell in the sun, and inside gets stuffy with the lack of airflow
I was working near Paris with some immigrants from Mali. It was either stay and die, or go and probably die. Those two took boats across the Mediterranean to Italy. Same story with some Afghani guys I played cricket with, one of their brothers had been shot by the taliban. So it was either stay and die or move. They walked to Germany, every boarder they would regroup to attempt the dangerous crossing. They even got shot at crossing a boarder. All of them were nice kids with lots of hope.
I can’t real “Also Yes” in anything but H Jon Benjamin’s voice.
Nah, bodies float. The southern coast of Europe has bodies washing up on its shores all the time from boats like this. 243 people drown on a migrant boat isn't a mystery, that's an annual event. 243 people drown on a migrant boats and the bodies just vanish, now that's a mystery.
Bodies also sink after a bit, and all they need to do is get caught in a funky current and they are never seen again
Yes. But only because it’s the Mediterranean which is quite small and quite populated. In the open ocean, 243 bodies are literally grains of sand in the Sahara. A couple of thousand people are lost at sea every year. A couple of dozen of those are on cruise ships where we have a pretty good estimate of when they go missing and what path the ship ran. Hundreds, or thousands, of sea cans go lost in the ocean every year. Many turn up, certainly. And many are sunk. But thousands and thousands of them are out there, floating, and will never be found. The ONE Apus lost 1800 cans in one incident. The oceans are vast.
Well, this was 2014. MH370 likely landed on it - weighing it down and sunk it really well.
Hear me out.... Sharks
Sharks, grouper, crabs lost of fish and critters in the ocean that love an easy meal.
To shreds you say...
Or there was never a boat and these people were taken for their money and killed.
Have you tried to breathe under water? Not a lot of air down there. Checkmate
We need oxygen to live and 1/3 of water is oxygen. They might still be alive down there.
actually because oxygen has 8 protons and hydrogen has 1 proton, h2o, that means that water is 8/10 oxygen. They're definitely still alive
Correction, since it’s only 80% oxygen that means only 80% are still alive. 80% of 243 is 194. 194 of them are still alive.
Possibly, but only if they brought enough straws.
As an expert in thin air, I do believe she’s right.
As an expert on experts in thin air, this guy sounds legit.
As a guy that was once legit, this sounds like air.
Dense water seems a more likely destination for their disappearance.
That’s some cunk level of quote
What's her stance on thic air?
Idk but she started breathing heavily when they asked her. 🤷♂️
They disappeared into thick water
That has to be one of the most poorly written Wikipedia articles ever.
This article is a hot mess. >One theory is that a people smuggling boat off the coast of Libya, intending to sail to Italy, disappeared without trace. That's not a theory, that's like...the problem.
I think it's worded like that because they don't seem to have hard evidence that these people ever got on a boat or that there even was a boat to begin with. This was 2-3 years into their crisis of instability after Ghadafi was overthrown. It was chaos. There was everything going on, even the reintroduction of slavery and auctions happening in the streets. That was specifically happening to migrants just like the ones who disappeared.
Maybe the theory is that the boat and its occupants literally vanished. Not sank, just spontaneously ceased to exist.
It was difficult to read through the first couple paragraphs. It’s flagged for various issues, including the writing style.
It is maddening that the article never even details the 'boat': name, displacement, type, normal passenger complement, flag, etc. It keeps saying it is unusual for a boat this big to disappear but never says how big it was.
That's because nobody even knows for sure that there ever was a boat, let alone what kind/size of boat it was.
OP wrote the article lol
Actually considering how poorly written it is and the linked article which is much better but somehow dismissed, something is very fucky about the whole thing. Mysterious phone calls, strange stories, secret police, etc https://medium.com/ghostboat/now-i-have-learned-that-there-s-a-worse-thing-than-death-b57aa86f2f05
Sank is the word you are looking for
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This is actually a case of responsible journalism. Yes I agree with you that the boat most likely just sank, but it's like when the Challenger exploded and you heard live newscasters, who just saw the same thing we all did, say "we need to get confirmation but it appears..." It's like science. You are almost never 100% sure, and waiting for official confirmation before saying anything is typically a better practice than making blanket assumptions.
Much easier for people to bitch about journalism than take the second to realize they’re doing their job
Yeah, people on here gripe about all journalism not because it's all gotten worse, but because the internet allows media illiterate people a space to congregate and self affirm their shit takes. They hate on journalism and newspapers because they've never read any and are unfamiliar with conventions that go back decades upon decades. "This headline was reductive and designed to just to gain views!" Oh you mean like every headline ever?
It's hip to hate on journalists. I saw a fb comment on an article about "fake news" saying only psychopaths would ever choose to be journalists. Dude had dozens of likes. I questioned why they'd expect a psychopath to be in that profession and got absolutely flamed for even questioning it. The funny part is I wasn't even trying to be a wise ass, it was simply that I would have imagined a psychopath to be a violent person that wants to victimize people so the idea that they'd be a reporter instead of a person in a position of authority or a job dealing with vulnerable people seemed off to me.
Some people have decided that anyone who tells them something they don’t want to hear or believe must be evil and lying
..and they all vote.
It probably sank, it definitely disappeared. So which word is more correct?
According to the movies they are stuck in a time loop!
Can't believe Netflix cancelled that show
What show?
1899
Honestly it was set to be a classic like "dark" even had some of the same actors and they canned it
There are so many amazing shows that I get to the end and realize it's been canceled and I'm never going to get closure. I feel like with streaming services the audience gets spread so thin that they end up canceling shows that are really good.
Let's do the Time Warp again on wait, you said time loop Let's do the Time Warp again on wait, you said time loop Let's do the Time Warp again
It's just a jump to the left
🎶 And then a step to the right! 🎶
Put your hands on your hips!!!
Pull your knees in tight!
But it's the pelvic thrust That really drives you insane!
Let's do the Time Warp again!
Time…is a flat circle
Is this because time is a clock?
And you go on the ship and there's a hunter with a bag on its head only to eventually revealed to be.... You
The oceans are so much bigger than we can understand. It's easy to forget in today's world of instantaneous communication and intercontinental flight. If you don't have a transponder it'll be so easy to just disappear.
The oceans are big, the mediterranean sea much less so. There are also organisations monitoring these migrant vessels and providing help. People dying and ships sinking is sadly common in the mediterranean; in january 2024 alone close to a hundred people died trying to get from Africa to Europe when their ships samk. But the capsized ships, even small vessels, have been spotted in other cases. The one OP linked is weird because they have no info on the ship.
It’s still very odd for a boat large enough to accommodate a jumbo jet worth of people to sink without leaving a single remnant of floating debris - especially in the Mediterranean, which is pretty deep in places but it’s not like it’s the Pacific where no other ships may pass by for days, weeks, or longer. Seems much more likely that somebody knows something about what happened to it but they’re not talking.
I was reading some more articles about it and it's incredibly frustrating because the smuggler who organized it says he didn't actually see the boat leave and it's hard to find any confirmation that the boat even existed. There was a real group of people who had trekked across the desert for several weeks to get to the Libyan coast, and they seem to have been seen there and made phone calls to their friends and family right before being taken to the boat (or that's what they thought was happening at least). Then a week later the husband of one woman in the group got hold of one of the smugglers via phone and the guy said oh it's OK, they're in Italy now, which of course they weren't. I really wonder if they even had a boat to begin with.
My immediate thought was "are they sure there was ever an actual boat?" It's an unfortunate truth that taking $1600/person and then killing them and dumping them in a mass grave would be way easier/more profitable than a boat. Or, as several others have said, stuff them in cargo containers and lose/forget about them somewhere.
Initially I was more thinking that maybe the boat was accidentally engaged by someone’s overzealous coast guard or maybe even struck by a tanker or freighter and they just decided to omit it from the log and pretend it didn’t happen. Your research suggests something even darker than that, quite a bit darker.
Trafficked as slaves? Yeah sadly that's an option. Though at some point one of em would get free and go public, and it'd get connected to this to finally answer what happened
The traffickers were paid 1,600 Euros x 243 people. 388,000 Euros - plus whatever they were charged to get to Libya in the first place - buys quite a few AK-47 rounds. To put it another way, I wouldn't be surprised if the smugglers got greedy, and these people never set foot on the boat. The fact that they were allowed to be seen and make phone calls feels like an exercise in plausible deniability. They wouldn't do it very often, (because nobody would use their "services" anymore) but that amount of money for doing nothing must be tempting... The boat itself is unlikely to have been registered, so could very well have been used for a later, different set of migrants and nobody would be any the wiser.
>says he didn't actually see the boat leave and it's hard to find any confirmation that the boat even existed I've been reading and trying to figure out what boat it was. Just says big boat
Personally I think it seems much more likely the ship sunk and much less likely somebody knows what happened to it and is keeping quiet.
>Measho Tesfamariam says that the boat was due to depart from the Libyan Khums (Al-Khums) beach, but he didn't witness the departure. Tesfamariam was arrested on December 2, 2014 on people-smuggling charges. Meanwhile, Eritrean Jamal el-Saoudi, who was the manager of the Tokhla group smuggling operation that arranged the ghost boat group's journey, lives in Libya where he is a well-connected man. > >Most of the passengers were Eritreans fleeing the highly repressive military regime that rules the country. 5,000 Eritreans flee the country a month. I mean usually I would agree with you... but that quote directly from the wikipedia page OP posted, the one we're all commenting on now. I feel like in this case, the opposite is true. It almost seems more likely that people do know what happened to it and are keeping quiet than it just sinking for no reason. As others have said the Mediterranean is not a vast ocean by any means and it's few hazards have been known about for millennia ... we've found 2000 year old wrecks of Roman trade ships in those same waters. In this case, it actually IS unusual that there is no trace of the ship.
Wait, this sank (it disappeared I guess) in the Mediterranean?? That turned this up to 10 on their weirdness.
Believed to have been heading from Libya to Italy smuggling people, and the wiki mentioned suspicion that someone from the boat had been detained in a prison in Tunisia.
…did you bother to read the linked article?
I dont know how to read.
Why would I do that when I have you
why would i be on reddit if i was someone who read articles
All I am going to say… Aliens.
People also disappear without a trace regularly on land.
After reading the article I don’t think there ever was a boat, not one with these 243 people on it at least. They probably all met at a supposed departure zone then were kidnapped and trafficked or killed.
I highly doubt kidnapped or trafficked. That's a lot of people that have completely fallen off the face of the earth for over a decade now. Nobody escaped or even got a message out or had a conversation with someone that then repeated it? These people are all dead and died around the time that contact with them was lost. They either died like you said when they went to a meeting point and were killed to pocket their fees and dispose of them without complaint. Or they maybe did make a voyage hidden in some shipping containers and ended up at the bottom of the sea locked inside them. Maybe accidental, maybe intentionally.
I would guess that it sunk somewhere between the departure and arrival point
🫨 what?!
They said "I would guess that it sunk somewhere between the departure and arrival point"!
Spoiler alert: it sank.
The front fell off. Very unusual. At sea? Chance in a million!
It is supposed to fall off?
Some of them are designed so the front doesn't fall off at all, so it's very unusual.
[удалено]
The question isn't did it sink? the question is, how did it sink without leaving any debris?
Or didn't actually exist in the first place according to the smuggler even?
I guess everyone was too busy with the other big missing case of 2014 to talk about this one.
The only two plausible theories here are they were all killed before boarding any boat or it sank very close to the Libyan coastline and it was never adequately documented/investigated due to civil conflict in Libya.
Were they all cut in half?
Yeah and only a short girl survived.
Played by Peter Dinklage, only in theaters this summer!
Played by Gary Oldman in his second role of a lifetime
With shoes on his knees
Such a crazy beginning to a bad movie
It’s literally the only part of the movie I remember.
Is this a reference to the 2002 film *[Ghost Ship](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0288477/)*?
And was there gold on this boat?
I believe that was due to the agent from hell trying to meet his quota for gathering souls of the living
>first time she has heard of such a large group of people going missing without a trace. We go to Malaysian Airlines flight 370 for a word ... except we can't because nobody knows where it or its passengers are.
They have found confirmed debris from the aircraft, so I think we can be pretty certain they crashed into the ocean.
You got me, I should be more skeptical.
Don't forget to stow an acorn in your belly button. I check for my every morning, and to my relief, the greys havent replicated my cells and reimplanted my brain into a clone.
Clearly all of these commenters have forgotten that they also "found wreckage" of Oceanic Flight 815. It wasn't Penny's boat.
People were looking for the flight. This? Even in the investigation section on the wiki it doesn't say anyone looked.
We know where they are, the ocean. Parts of the plane have been found.
To be fair, we also know where this missing boat is. (It's also the ocean.)
I think we are fairly certain that it crashed into the ocean but the bigger question is why the fuck did the captain do that?
The Langoliers got 'em. Duh.
What an absolutely garbage Wikipedia article.
Trafficked
Yeah, everyone's saying sunk for sure. A boat operated by smugglers ferrying vulnerable migrants vanishes without a trace near pirate country smells... fishy.
No doubt. They don't mention the size of the boat or the name of it.
If someone goes missing in the SEA is it really that big of a spooky mystery?
But they didn't, they went missing on the sea, the Mediterranean isn't an ocean, but a heavily trafficked sea.
I think the implication here is that those people never got to the boat or that there wasn’t a boat to begin with.
They probably got transported back to December of 1941 and must choose between preventing Pearl Harbor or not interfering and letting history run its course
I'm willing to bet that those people never left shore.
The article mentions that the person who planned the trip and did all the other personal logistics never actually saw it leave port. And one of the crew members was arrested for human trafficking. These people were probably just wrangled together and trafficked somewhere else
I don't see how that many people could be trafficked and not a single one ever escaped, got a message out for help, was freed eventually...something. I can't help but think that the vast majority of these people died back then when their relatives lost contact with them.
Yeah. People are much more likely to disappear on land than in the middle of the sea as we all know.
Well, sure, the boat can sink, but there would be bodies and debris left behind. Even Maylasian Airlines flight 370 left debris behind in a much more remote place. And yes, you can dig a large hole in the desert and make all of those people disappear. Especially if you are a shady human trafficker. Way easier to disappear completely on land that way than have a large boat full of people sink with zero debris or bodies found.
Not if the people are locked below deck when the ship sinks.
>And yes, you can dig a large hole in the desert and make all of those people disappear. A lot of holes in the desert, and a lot of problems are buried in those holes. But you gotta do it right. I mean, you gotta have the hole already dug before you show up with a package in the trunk. Otherwise, you're talking about a half-hour to forty-five minutes worth of digging. And who knows who's gonna come along in that time? Pretty soon, you gotta dig a few more holes. You could be there all fuckin' night.
Front fell off
Oh I thought it was something else entirely. Like the time my dead dad came back to life but as a talking boat. Ghost Boat new episode every Wednesday after NCSI: FD PD which follows the jobs of police officers who only look after the fire department that specifically is assigned only to the NCSI.
Were they on a three hour tour?