SOUTH PORTLAND, Maine — You may have heard the news last week that divers off the coast of Florida had found a substantial piece of the space shuttle, Challenger, which in 1986 broke apart just 73 seconds after lifting off from Cape Canaveral.
This was the first significant piece of Challenger wreckage to be discovered in 26 years.
What you likely hadn’t heard about is that the divers who came across the debris were part of a team working with Lone Wolf Media based in South Portland—all of whom were engaged in the making of a documentary series for the History Channel on ships and airplanes that disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle.
Producing a series like this one takes time and patience. The lead diver Lone Wolf Media worked with, Mike Barnette, has spent decades tracking down possible wreck sites.
“He has thousands,” Lone Wolf Media Producer Joe Sousa said. “He culled it down to dozens, and then those dozens we looked at over a period of like three months of individual dives.”
Lone Wolf Media Producer and Co-founder Kirk Wolfinger said Barnette and his diving partner were in the water off the coast of Cape Canaveral, Florida when they came across what they thought was a wing from the long-lost plane they were hoping to find.
“But it was filled with materials they had not seen before,” Wolfinger said. “They were tiles, heat shield tiles. They brought one up just to see what it was, if somebody could identify it. Pretty quickly NASA identified it as a piece of the space shuttle Challenger.”
“It was just kind of gobsmacking,” Sousa said. “Because we were looking for Flight 19, which is a famous Bermuda Triangle disappearance, and we find the Challenger. And it sort of just goes to show you when you’re operating in these waters off the Florida coast near the Bermuda Triangle, you really never know what you’re going to find.”
Once the piece was identified, the word came unequivocally from NASA: hands off, don’t touch. The space agency had to notify Congress and the families of the lost Challenger crew and figure out what to do with the remnants.
“It’s a very sensitive thing,” Wolfinger added. “It’s been a long time [that] we’ve been sitting on this. Now we’re finally ready to release the information."
Lone Wolf Media's six-part series, “The Bermuda Triangle: Into Cursed Waters,” can soon be seen on the History Channel. The first episode will air at 10 p.m. on Nov. 22.