The Navy first detected the Titan sub's implosion soon after it went missing: WSJ

A secret detection system registered the sound of an implosion near the since-discovered debris site, defense officials told The Wall Street Journal.

• The Navy detected the Titan’s implosion soon after it lost contact, per The Wall Street Journal.

• Defense officials told the outlet the Navy began listening for the vessel right after it went missing.

• A top-secret detection system used to find enemy submarines registered the sound.

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At least some in the upper echelons of the US military were aware of the Titan submersible’s fate days before the rest of the world, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

The US Navy first detected the sound of the Titan’s likely implosion soon after the vessel lost contact with its mothership on Sunday while on an exploratory dive to the Titanic shipwreck more than two miles beneath the surface, The Journal reported Thursday.

A top secret acoustic detection system that is used by the Navy to identify enemy submarines first registered the sound of an implosion near the since-discovered debris site on Sunday, US defense officials told the outlet.

The Navy did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.

Navy officials began searching for sounds from the missing Titan almost immediately after it lost contact, according to the newspaper.

“The U.S. Navy conducted an analysis of acoustic data and detected an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion in the general vicinity of where the Titan submersible was operating when communications were lost,” a senior U.S. Navy official told the Journal. “While not definitive, this information was immediately shared with the Incident Commander to assist with the ongoing search and rescue mission.”

A senior Navy official told the Washington Post the service does not usually make the information public until the search for survivors ends conclusively. Until then, it’s nothing more than a “data point.”

The fact that the Navy detected the sounds — and withheld the information from the public for five days wasn’t surprising given the US’s decades-long history of using devices to detect underwater activity, Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the Post.

“I would be surprised if they hadn’t heard it,” he said.”They suspected what happened but couldn’t be sure. What you’re looking at is just lines on a graph. And if you try to convince people you weren’t doing a search because the lines on a graph indicated an implosion, that wouldn’t be acceptable to many.”

Coast Guard officials on Thursday said the Titan appears to have suffered a “catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber,” imploding and shattering its debris 1,600 feet from the famous shipwreck.

The five passengers’ death would have been instantaneous, Stefan Williams, a professor of marine robotics at the University of Sydney whose lab works with uncrewed submersibles, previously told Insider.