Robert Duane Ballard is an American retired Navy officer and a professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island who is noted for his work in underwater archaeology and marine geology. He is best known by the general public for the discoveries of the wrecks of the RMS Titanic in 1985, the battleship Bismarck in 1989, and the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown in 1998. He discovered the wreck of John F. Kennedy's PT-109 in 2002 and visited Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana, who saved its crew.
A shipwreck is the wreckage of a ship that is located either beached on land or sunken to the bottom of a body of water. Shipwrecking may be intentional or unintentional. There were approximately three million shipwrecks worldwide as of January 1999, according to Angela Croome, a science writer and author who specialized in the history of underwater archaeology.
Wreck diving is recreational diving where the wreckage of ships, aircraft and other artificial structures are explored. The term is used mainly by recreational and technical divers. Professional divers, when diving on a shipwreck, generally refer to the specific task, such as salvage work, accident investigation or archaeological survey. Although most wreck dive sites are at shipwrecks, there is an increasing trend to scuttle retired ships to create artificial reef sites. Diving to crashed aircraft can also be considered wreck diving. The recreation of wreck diving makes no distinction as to how the vessel ended up on the bottom.
The beholder is a fictional monster in the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game. It is depicted as a floating orb of flesh with a large mouth, single central eye, and many smaller eyestalks on top with powerful magical abilities.
Harlem Nights is a 1989 American crime comedy-drama film starring, written, and directed by Eddie Murphy. The film co-stars Richard Pryor, Redd Foxx, Danny Aiello, Michael Lerner, Della Reese, and Murphy's older brother Charlie. The film was released theatrically on November 17, 1989, by Paramount Pictures. The film tells the story of "Sugar" Ray and Vernest "Quick" Brown as a team running a nightclub in the late 1930s in Harlem while contending with gangsters and corrupt police officials.
Paul Chadwick is an American comic book creator best known for his series Concrete, about a normal man trapped in a stone body.
Brother Jonathan was a paddle steamer that struck an uncharted rock near Point St. George, off the coast of Crescent City, California, on July 30, 1865. The ship was carrying 244 passengers and crew, with a large shipment of gold. Only 19 people survived, making it the deadliest shipwreck up to that time on the Pacific Coast of the United States. Based on the passenger and crew list, 225 people are believed to have died. Its location was not discovered until 1993 and a portion of the gold was recovered in 1996. The ship was also instrumental in setting off the 1862 smallpox epidemic in the Pacific Northwest, which killed thousands of Indigenous people in the region.
The Deep is a 1977 adventure film based on Peter Benchley's 1976 novel of the same name. It was directed by Peter Yates, and stars Robert Shaw, Jacqueline Bisset and Nick Nolte.
Treasure hunting is the physical search for treasure. For example, treasure salvors try to find sunken shipwrecks and retrieve artifacts with archaeological value. In many instances, it takes treasure salvors months or years of searching before they even find the lost ship(s) for which they are searching. It is a very expensive process which is why archaeologists rely on treasure salvors for the information recovered. In many instances, discovery of a wreck only occurs after searching tens of thousands of nautical miles and recovery would be impossible for archaeologists due to the depth of the wreck. In Florida, treasure salvors generously donate 20% of material found on each site to the state for display in museums while also meticulously cataloguing each artifact for archaeologists and contributing much knowledge to the understanding of the wreck itself.
The Antikythera wreck is a Roman-era shipwreck dating from the second quarter of the first century BC.
Lords of the Deep is a 1989 American science-fiction horror film co-produced by Roger Corman, about an underwater colony being attacked by alien life forms. Actors included Bradford Dillman and Priscilla Barnes.
The 1715 Treasure Fleet was actually a combination of two Spanish treasure fleets returning from the New World to Spain, the "Nueva España Fleet", under Captain-General Don Juan Esteban de Ubilla, and the "Tierra Firme Fleet", under Don Antonio de Echeverz y Zubiza. At two in the morning on Wednesday, July 31, 1715, seven days after departing from Havana, Cuba, all eleven ships of the fleet were lost in a hurricane along the east coast of Florida. A 12th ship, the French frigate Le Grifon, had sailed with the fleet. Its captain was unfamiliar with the Florida coastline and elected to stay further out to sea. Le Grifon safely returned to Europe.
Waxwork II: Lost in Time is a 1992 American dark fantasy comedy film written and directed by Anthony Hickox. It is a sequel to the 1988 film Waxwork. The film premiered in the Philippines on March 26, 1992, while it was given a direct-to-video release in the United States on June 16, 1992.
Edward Lee Spence is a German-born American archaeologist. He is a specialist in the field of underwater archaeology.
Tom Sawyer Island is an artificial island surrounded by the Rivers of America at Disneyland, Magic Kingdom and Tokyo Disneyland. It contains structures and caves with references to Mark Twain characters from the novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and provides interactive, climbing, and scenic opportunities. At Disneyland in 2007, the attraction was rethemed and expanded as Pirate's Lair on Tom Sawyer Island, adding references to Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean film series.
Gary Gentile is an American author and pioneering technical diver.
Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep, also known as Deadly Water, is a 2006 television natural horror B movie produced by Nu Image Films and Brightlight Pictures as a Sci Fi Channel original film. It premiered on the Sci Fi channel on September 23, 2006. Directed by Tibor Takács and starring Charlie O'Connell, Victoria Pratt and Jack Scalia, the film focuses on a marine biologist and a sailor who join forces to find lost Trojan treasures while battling the giant squid who killed the sailor's parents when he was a child and a treasure hunting mobster; who wants the items for himself. The film was primarily panned by critics for the special effects, far-fetched plot and scarcity of scenes involving the titular creature.
Charles T. Meide Jr., known as Chuck Meide, is an underwater and maritime archaeologist and currently the Director of LAMP, the research arm of the St. Augustine Lighthouse & Maritime Museum located in St. Augustine, Florida. Meide, of Syrian descent on his father's side, was born in Jacksonville, Florida, and raised in the adjacent coastal town of Atlantic Beach. He earned BA and MA degrees in Anthropology with a focus in underwater archaeology in 1993 and 2001 from Florida State University, where he studied under George R. Fischer, and undertook Ph.D. studies in Historical Archaeology at the College of William and Mary starting the following year.
Leigh Bishop is an explorer and deep sea diver known for his deep shipwreck exploration and still underwater photography.
Frankenstein is a British horror-adventure film series produced by Hammer Film Productions. The films, loosely based on the 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley, are centered on Baron Victor Frankenstein, who experiments in creating a creature beyond human. The series is part of the larger Hammer horror oeuvre.
