Famous U. S. treasure hunter, Tommy Thompson found a trove of gold coins and bars on the floor of the Atlantic ocean back in 1988. The treasure came from the SS Central America, which sank to the bottom of the sea during a hurricane in 1857, along with at least three tons of California gold and its 425 crewmembers.
The gold lay on the ocean floor for 180 years until Thompson, an engineer from Columbus, Ohio, built a robot capable of diving to 8,000 feet to retrieve the massive booty. The only problem is that Thompson needed investors to fund his expeditions, investors who say they were never paid their share of the discovery. Per the Chicago Tribune:
Many tried to find it, but none succeeded until a young, shipwreck-obsessed engineer from Columbus, Ohio, built an underwater robot called “Nemo” to pinpoint the Central America, then dive 8,000 feet under the sea and surface with the loot. “A man as personable as he was brilliant, Thompson recruited more than 160 investors to fund his expedition,” Columbus Monthly noted in a profile. He “spent years studying the ship’s fateful voyage . . . and developing the technology to plunge deeper in the ocean than anyone had before to retrieve its treasure.”
Two of the expedition’s biggest investors took him to court in the 2000s, accusing him of selling nearly all the gold and keeping the profits to himself.
This post was published at Zero Hedge on Dec 17, 2016.
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