A Book To Remember – The Wreck of the Titan – IOTW Report

A Book To Remember – The Wreck of the Titan

Did you know??

There was a novella written in 1898 about an “unsinkable” ocean liner that sinks after… hitting an iceberg…… on the starboard side……… in the North Atlantic……… in April………….. with only the amount of lifeboats necessary by law on deck………. with the majority of the passengers going down with the ship.

How is this author not considered a time traveler?

16 Comments on A Book To Remember – The Wreck of the Titan

  1. Tut tut. It is common when confronted by an apparently uncanny knowledge of the future in a fictional account not to consider all of the other fictional accounts of events in the future that never came close to actually occurring.

  2. DID I KNOW???
    I used to think I knew a hell of a lot till I came here 40+ years ago. Now I don’t know
    much at all. People watch tv 10+ hours a day and then go to the movies, then reference what they have seen.
    I grew up not being allowed
    to watch tv or go to the movies. So my usual reply is, WHO?
    But I actually heard about this from my father who heard it from his father.
    My fathers hobby was reading books from the 1800’s

  3. In that vein, the Twilight Zone episode “Will The Real Martian Please Stand Up?” which first aired in May of 1961 is also eerily prescient. The basic plot is that police are called to investigate a crashed UFO, and they find it empty, with tracks in the snow leafing to a roadside diner. They go in the diner but can’t determine which of the occupants is an alien in disguise. While there, they find out the road they came on is blocked and the bridge in the other direction has been closed.

    All of the people in the diner were on a bus headed in the direction of the bridge, and now they are stuck. Just as the police give up on finding the alien, news comes that the bridge is open. The cops leave and he bus leaves. A little later one guy from the bus comes back in the diner and says the bridge collapse, killing everybody but him. The Cook at the Diner asked how that guy survived, and it turns out he’s an alien here to scout earth for takeover. But then it turns out the cook is a stronger different alien who kills the first alien.

    Now fast forward in time and space to Point Pleasant, WV, 1966

    “About a month after [the initial UFO sightings], John Keel got an assignment to go there as a news reporter,” explains Coleman. “He sort of showed up, had a very low kind of profile; John was on a contract to write a book about UFOs.”
    As Keel began to talk to people and gather information, the journalist found himself getting more deeply involved in the events, to the extent that “There were entities that communicated with John by phone.” Coleman explains that as Keel analyzed the events, he found Point Pleasant to be “a vortex of phenomena, and couldn’t really tell one from the other. It was a scary situation for John.”
    Whatever one thinks of the validity of Keel’s claims, there’s no arguing the horror of what happened next. Keel had begun to be given “prophecies” by the entities he was dealing with in Point Pleasant, one in particular that said that “when President Johnson turned on the Christmas lights at the White House, the whole northeast was going to go into a blackout.” However, by that point, Coleman says that Keel had “started to get fooled by the phenomena.
    “On December 15, John Keel is in his apartment in Manhattan,” Coleman continues. “[Waiting for the blackout] with his bottled water and his batteries, and nothing happens. About six minutes later, on the TV set across the bottom: ‘Bridge collapses across Ohio River.’ And he just freaks out.”
    Keel “freaked out” because the bridge in question was the Silver Bridge, which crossed the Ohio River between Gallipolis, Ohio, and – you guessed it – Point Pleasant, West Virginia. “67 people fell into the river. 46 died. They found 44 bodies,” says Coleman. “Several people who died were related to witnesses of Mothman.”

    http://m.ign.com/articles/2001/12/06/the-real-story-of-the-mothman-prophecies

    Keel’s book “The Mothman Prophecies” spawned two movies, “Men in Black” and “The Mothman Prophecies”. Did it also foreshadow Christmas 1966 in Point Pleasant? I read Keel’s book back in the 70’s, but I didn’t see that Twilight Zone episode until last month. Raised the hackles on my neck, I’m not kidding.

  4. Morris Sabin

    Wish I had time to read. I’m to busy working. The Israeli or European view of the average American work ethic is extremely miscalculated. But that’s OK. Our advantage.

  5. And to further my TLDR, here’s a fuller description of the above-mentioned Twilight zone episode…

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_the_Real_Martian_Please_Stand_Up%3F

    But here’s the scariest para, if you’re still reading:

    “Several odd and sinister events occur. The jukebox starts and stops on its own, the lights flicker on and off, and most alarmingly, sugar bowls explode on the tables. As the troopers draw their weapons, a pay phone rings and the caller informs them that the bridge is safe to cross, although the bus driver has his doubts.”

  6. @brad
    I’m an Electrical Engineer and my father was a Doctor.
    I work about 7 to 8 hours a day, but instead of tv I usually read a book.
    My wife on the other hand watches tv and goes to movies with her friends.
    She has a huge tv in her study. She is a psychiatrist.
    I find your knowledge of guns very interesting so I have been reading about different
    weapon systems and the inventor of same.
    Like John Browning and of course Major Uziel Gal the designer of the Uzi.

  7. The idea of sinking the TITANIC was to doom as many opponents** of the proposed Federal Reserve System as possible, on board as passengers. If the Rothschilds used FUTILITY as a guide, then it would be similar to today’s use of 1984 as an Operation Manual.

    ** Benjamin Guggenheim, Isidor Straus, and David Astor.

  8. Actually, the story of these incredible coincidences was the prologue to Walter Lord’s “A Night To Remember” which was the first modern history of the Titanic. Very popular book that was made into a very good movie.

  9. @I wasn’t around till 66 tho:

    Yes, several books about it. Killed a pastor and several children near Lakeview, Oregon during WWII, but cause of their deaths kept secret until after the war.

  10. I actually read Wreck of the Titan when I came across a modern re-print overseas in 1998 (the summer after the blockbuster movie Titanic had come out and anything even remotely related to Titanic was hugely popular). I read it once, then loaned it to one of my shipmates who never returned it before he separated from the Navy, so I cannot remember the details of the book, just that it closely mirrored the real ship’s fate.
    And yes, I had known of the book Wreck of the Titan long before 1998, as I have always been very interested in Titanic and Dr Ballard’s explorations of the wreck, and I came across references to the book among the other things I was reading back in the ’80’s.

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