♪♪
Its pristine waters are among the world's most beautiful,
but could the island paradise of Turks and Caicos
hold the answers to a long‐standing Nazi mystery?
Magnetometer, ROV‐‐
you name it, it's in our bevy of electronic tricks.
FISHBURNE: Can a team of divers follow clues
left by famous treasure seeker Roger Miklos
to hunt and find a Nazi U‐boat?
It's sitting in British waters, in the Caribbean.
INTERVIEWER: But you won't say exactly where?
No, I'm trying to keep that protected
as much as I can.
FISHBURNE: A submarine he believes
is full of gold and other priceless treasures.
ROGER: There was 18
high‐ranking Nazi officials on board,
all of them paintings.
There's 50 tons of gold on that thing.
FISHBURNE: And what can their search reveal
about the notorious Nazi regime
and the end of World War II?
The code is cracked. We now have a location.
Tonight, on "History's Greatest Mysteries,"
we follow the trail of clues
to search for the Nazis' top secret lost U‐boat
and its astonishing contents.
Using original documents never seen by anyone
other than Roger Miklos himself,
a team of divers will attempt to unlock the mystery
and find what many consider
the most elusive shipwreck in history.
Guys, I think I got a hit!
I'm Laurence Fishburne,
and tonight, can Mike Fletcher finish the mission
that Roger Miklos started so many years ago?
♪
FISHBURNE: Off the coast of Florida
and just 384 miles from Cuba,
lay the islands of Turks and Caicos.
Their beauty, color, and perfect weather
makes these islands a destination
for travelers worldwide.
But looks can be deceiving.
Under these turquoise waters,
the terrain is jagged, unpredictable,
and often deadly.
And these islands are a graveyard of sunken vessels
and lost treasure.
And that's where Mike Fletcher comes in.
MIKE: You name it, I've done it underwater.
I started out with a passion for maritime history
and specifically shipwrecks.
And then when you combine that with my ability
to dive in deep, difficult conditions,
I got really good at finding shipwrecks.
I get a lot of attention for having found the Carpathia,
which was the ship that saved the Titanic survivors.
I found three really significant submarines.
‐ Mike? ‐ I think we got ourselves
‐ a submarine. ‐ Whoo‐hoo!
MIKE: Two famous U‐boats,
so this would be the third.
I went from being a commercial diver
to a recognized, international shipwreck finder.
FISHBURNE: Mike has been finding sunken vessels
for over 40 years.
But today, he begins the hunt for a shipwreck
unlike any other in history.
Out of the blue one day,
I get a call from this guy I've never met.
And he says, "Mike, can we get you
to go on a mission for us?"
Turns out that mission was following up
on treasure hunter Roger Miklos's claim
that he had found a U‐boat full of Nazi treasure.
FISHBURNE: Forty years ago, treasure hunter Roger Miklos
claimed to have discovered a U‐boat
on the ocean floor off an island of Turks and Caicos.
During World War II,
Nazi U‐boats terrorized the Atlantic,
sinking over 2,500 ships.
NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: Official Navy pictures
of the smashing of a U‐boat
surprised on the surface by carrier‐based planes.
FISHBURNE: By the end of the war, the Allies had sunk
over 600 of these German subs.
NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: A direct hit from a depth charge!
Another Nazi menace destroyed.
FISHBURNE: But the U‐boat Roger Miklos
claims to have found was not just any German sub.
For decades there had been rumors and stories
that in the waning days of World War II,
the Nazis built a fleet
of nine specially modified cargo subs
to ferry looted gold, priceless artwork,
and possibly even top Nazi officers to South America
as they attempted to flee a crumbling Third Reich.
We do know that there's billions of dollars
in looted personal possessions, gold,
all sorts of valuable material that went missing
during the war.
It certainly made sense that some of this
could have been loaded on U‐boats
to smuggle them out of Europe and into a safe haven.
FISHBURNE: Over the years,
many U‐boats have been discovered.
But no one has yet found the specialized German subs.
Until, in 1981, Roger said he had discovered
one of these subs.
They welded all the torpedo hatches up,
removed all torpedoes,
for cargo, for all the treasure.
FISHBURNE: If he was right, it would be among
the greatest underwater finds in history,
but Roger never told anyone where the U‐boat was located.
Then in 2018, he died suddenly of a heart attack,
leaving behind only cryptic documents
and incomplete clues as to where he found the U‐boat.
But now, Mike Fletcher has those documents.
Miklos's family has hired Mike to continue Roger's mission,
and they have turned all of his records over to Mike.
It is the first time ever that anyone
other than Roger Miklos has had access
to these maps and records.
MIKE: No one else has these documents.
Roger made sure that no one else saw them.
There was a lot going on in Roger's world,
but he didn't leave us really good notes.
So much of what he leaves behind is cryptic
and you can tell he was being very secretive.
Roger's the only guy who knows where it is.
So now we have to look at his notes
and try and work backwards.
It's as if Roger's working with us from the grave.
But he's not making it easy.
FISHBURNE: For 37 years, Roger kept the location
of the U‐boat a closely guarded secret.
But why? Well, to understand that,
you need to know the story of the man who discovered it.
My name's Roger Miklos.
And I've been in the salvage business
for just about 56 years.
FISHBURNE: Born in the Florida Keys,
Roger Miklos worked as a police officer in Reno, Nevada
before the lure of sunken treasure
drew him back to Florida to seek his fortune.
Roger Miklos is here.
[cheers and applause]
FISHBURNE: At the time he says he discovered the U‐boat,
Roger Miklos was already a treasure‐hunting legend,
having collected between $200 and $300 million
in sunken treasure before the age of 40.
Roger was that perfect balance‐‐ a successful treasure hunter
who had the credibility mixed with the showmanship.
FISHBURNE: Roger's first major discovery
was the El Capitan,
a Spanish galleon laden with gold and silver
that was lost off the coast of Florida in 1715.
The gold pieces here are all that exists
left of the El Capitan's treasure.
There is no more available anywhere.
I didn't think you were allowed to keep, uh, treasures.
You see, when you salvage treasure in Florida,
they get 25% for the State of Florida, for the museums.
So then they turn the other 75% over to the salvage company.
FISHBURNE: Throughout his career as a treasure hunter,
Roger would continue to make significant finds.
The Atocha yielded 148 million.
The El Capitan yielded 86 million.
The Maravillas yielded a little over 100 million.
FISHBURNE: 35 years later, Roger Miklos
gave his final interview before his death.
Well, as far as the‐‐ [stammers]
as far as that I have‐‐ it's that U‐boat.
That's gotta be‐‐ and I'll tell you why.
Because...
You want to get into the U‐boat?
I'll tell you the story of it.
FISHBURNE: Roger never set out to find a U‐boat.
The story begins in 1981
when Roger traveled to the Caribbean
to pick out a crew for a new expedition.
ROGER: This is Captain Jon Christiansen.
He is a Viking.
FISHBURNE: Jon and Roger spent six weeks
sailing around Turks and Caicos
on the hunt for the remains of the Pinta,
one of the three ships Columbus sailed to the New World.
One day, their magnetometer‐‐
the device that detects metal objects on the sea floor‐‐
picked up something unusual.
ROGER: The magnetic field is disturbed
by iron and heavy metals, maybe a car, a refrigerator,
but it's definitely iron, man.
FISHBURNE: Roger went off on his own to investigate.
This anchor here, in the deep water,
I take the Zodiac and take a look at it.
I swam down 45 feet.
I saw the two back propeller blades
highly polished from going in the sand,
up and down and in the sand.
And then there's these enormous zeppelin fins
on this damn thing.
And I, "What the..."
FISHBURNE: Roger knew this was something extraordinary.
ROGER: And I realized, "Holy cow!
"This thing goes and goes and goes!
It's under an island!"
And I got to the top of the conning tower.
And then I noticed a glint, a goldy glint color.
They put a commission plaque in the teakwood deck
on the starboard side of the conning tower.
And I rubbed the grass off of it
and there it is, man.
"Blohm & Voss, Hamburg, 1944,"
with a German eagle and swastika on the ‐‐‐damn thing.
Now I know it's German.
This is a U‐boat.
FISHBURNE: Roger returned to the ship,
but never revealed to his crew what he had found.
The world of treasure hunting is very cloak and dagger.
When you make a big discovery like that,
there are people hiding in the weeds
waiting to take it away from you.
It's gotta be worth a fortune, man.
But I don't know anything about it.
So, I just let it sit. Nobody gonna discover this.
MIKE: Roger would've been okay
if he'd have just stayed focused on the U‐boat,
got permissions and pursued that.
FISHBURNE: Instead, Roger continued
to search for the Pinta.
Days later, his crew made a discovery‐‐
an anchor they believed to be several centuries old.
This is us at the surface transferring it
from the Captain Jack to the Heather Glynn
and I'm a little shocked, there standing.
This thing weighed about 1,400 pounds
so they really had to get it good and lashed
to swing it over on that boom.
FISHBURNE: What the crew didn't know
was that the Turks and Caicos government
had declared that Roger's permit to salvage items
from the shipwreck was invalid.
And the next morning, law enforcement officers
approached Roger's ship with orders
to arrest him and the crew.
I told Christiansen, "Pour the power on, dude.
We're outta here."
So all of a sudden, I see the two cops
jumping in their little skiff with this diesel motor in it,
and here they come, man,
firing away at us with M‐16s.
Man, the bullets are ricocheting off of my hull.
[gunfire]
I collected 168 rounds...
of bullets off of my deck.
FISHBURNE: Roger and Jon escaped,
but the government of Turks and Caicos
had now cut Roger off from ever returning
to find his submarine.
Could the sunken sub that Roger claimed to have found
be one of these modified Nazi U‐boats?
Now, after examining Roger Miklos's documents,
Mike has assembled a team to look for the U‐boat.
Diver and underwater photographer Chris Atkins.
When it comes to diving, it's Chris Atkins.
He's very trustworthy. He works hard.
He's my dive partner. He's the underwater shooter.
FISHBURNE: An undersea electronics and robotics expert,
Sam Macdonald.
MIKE: Beyond Chris and myself,
we need somebody with the tools.
We need the magnetometer, we need the side scan,
we need an ROV because we don't know how deep
we may have to go.
Sam Macdonald is the person I turn to
for underwater robotics.
She not only develops and operates this stuff,
she invents this stuff.
She brings all of the stuff we need.
SAM: What have you got for us today?
MIKE: We're gonna go to the Caribbean
and look for one of Hitler's missing U‐boats.
It was en route, according to the story,
from Germany to maybe South America
loaded with treasure pilfered out of Nazi Europe
at the end of the war.
‐ Really. ‐ Wow.
Now Roger never told anybody exactly where he'd found it.
All we know is it's in the Turks and Caicos.
But Roger wasn't allowed to go back into the country.
I am.
I've gone through that box.
I've read all the articles,
looked at the maps, read the reports,
I think I've cracked the code.
FISHBURNE: Diver Mike Fletcher is on the trail
of the lost Nazi U‐boat claimed to have been discovered
40 years ago by treasure hunter Roger Miklos.
Miklos was the only one who knew the exact location
of the sub, and he wasn't giving it up to anybody.
MIKE: I notice, watching footage with Roger,
that he often carried a briefcase.
And I know for a fact he carried a .45.
He wasn't letting anybody know what was in that briefcase.
But now I've got that briefcase.
I get to look at the records that Roger held so dearly,
that nobody else got to see.
Where is it?
Sitting in British waters in the Caribbean.
But you won't say exactly where?
No, I'm trying to keep that
protected as much as I can.
FISHBURNE: Now, Mike has assembled his team
to go look for the U‐boat.
That is, if he can decipher the mountain of clues
Roger amassed throughout his decades of research into
the murky origins of the Nazi submarine.
NEWSCASTER: This diagram, superimposed
on an ordinary U‐boat, shows that it has
special modifications for long underwater journeys.
He says it's in perfect condition.
FISHBURNE: Roger's research convinced him
that this sub had been modified to carry treasure.
ROGER: Here's the normal conning tower
and all these machine guns and stuff.
They eliminated all that, they moved the bridge forward,
they modernized the bridge, made it very narrow.
There's 50 tons of gold on that thing.
All them paintings‐‐ Leonardos, Monets,
all of the famous works of art, 600 of 'em,
distributed between these nine U‐boats.
Here's my original drawing of the way that thing is set.
This is the overhang of the island.
FISHBURNE: Roger's descriptions of the terrain
where he found the U‐boat were vague and secretive.
He said the sub was in 125 feet of water,
either partially under an island or sticking out of a cave
that had a steep slope on one side.
We're the only people
‐ to see this stuff. ‐ CHRIS: Really?
Roger Miklos was so paranoid
that somebody was gonna find his U‐boat
that he never wrote the location down.
‐ A true treasure hunter. ‐ Hmm.
I watched hours of Roger talking to camera,
read all of his documents, looked at his maps.
I think I've cracked his code.
The one thing you haven't seen is this.
CHRIS: And what is that?
There's a simple pad of paper that lists some
of the wrecks that Roger's found
in Turks and Caicos.
At a glance, it didn't mean anything to me.
But look there‐‐ French frigate.
Number 7, "1724, French frigate."
And watch what Roger says.
And I coded the U‐boat as a 1724 French frigate.
Nobody had a clue that that wasn't a French frigate.
Old shipwreck.
He just said the French frigate was code for the U‐boat?
So he's telling us that he's keeping the code.
Towards the end, when Roger's health was really failing,
it was like he had one last chance
to tell the world what he needed to say.
So by putting the yellow sheet,
Roger's words together, the code is cracked.
We now have a location.
I think we make a trip to Turks and Caicos.
♪♪
FISHBURNE: Seven weeks after the team's first meeting,
Mike heads to Turks and Caicos
to get his first look at the local topography.
It's not every day I get asked to go on a submarine hunt.
Roger makes a big, big deal about caves,
the idea that this submarine is sort of part inside a cave.
So if I was gonna take on this project,
I want to see if we can find a cave
big enough to house a big portion of a U‐boat.
We're here.
Somewhere out there, where those waves are breaking,
should be Roger's U‐boat.
We know that a likely spot would be on
a very craggy ocean bed with cliffs
and perhaps valleys.
So if I get underwater and I don't see
those topographical features,
this trip will have been a big waste of my time.
FISHBURNE: Given the vast area to look in,
Mike decides to approach the search methodically.
His first step‐‐investigate the underwater landscape.
If the underwater geography
doesn't match Roger's descriptions,
he could scrap the entire expedition.
MIKE: I'm finally gonna see for myself
if there's anything to Roger's story.
The moment of truth.
I'd never visited Turks and Caicos before,
and certainly the geography of what Roger describes,
everything's adding up.
This is a really, really craggy seabed.
It's not like anything you normally see
with big overhangs and sharp drop‐offs and gullies.
This is the overhand of the island
that goes way out there about 400 feet.
And there's a shelf that comes up.
But there's 700 islands in that chain.
And that's like looking for a needle in a haystack, man.
We haven't found the U‐boat yet,
but we're certainly in the right area
according to Roger's descriptions.
FISHBURNE: After completing his first dive,
Mike returns to local headquarters
to meet up with the team.
U‐boats are being found every day.
There's a lot of evidence before Roger Miklos
to point to this part of the world.
We know that during the war,
there was a lot of U‐boat activity
in the Caribbean, because
a lot of the Allied oil came from South America.
FISHBURNE: The Caribbean was an unexpected hotbed
of U‐boat activity, as German and Italian submarines
tried to prevent Great Britain from being supplied
with oil from Venezuela.
In addition, Britain's largest oil refinery
was on the island of Trinidad, a U. K. colony.
From 1941 to 1945, enemy subs took out 319 Allied ships,
in what historians call the Battle of the Caribbean.
By 1943, the area was under Allied control,
so why would a 1944 specialized German U‐boat
be in these waters?
Is it possible it was on its way to South America,
laden with treasure?
MIKE: That part of Roger's story
is very much supported by the historical fact.
So that's what sold me, that's what said to me,
"Mike, you're gonna have to follow this crazy man
and see if he was speaking the truth."
There's a U‐boat out there and I intend
to bring it up shortly.
FISHBURNE: Mike's research convinced him
Roger's story could indeed be true.
‐ Looks like a nice vessel. ‐ Yeah.
‐ Hi! ‐ Come on board.
Well, thank you. Wow, this is beautiful.
FISHBURNE: The team boards the Explorer II,
the dive boat that will be their home
for the next several days.
Ultimately we want to go to the we‐‐
sort of the south bottom corner of West Caicos, so...
All right, I think we can work that out.
‐ No problems? ‐ No problem whatsoever.
We got a lot of gear we gotta get on board.
‐ We should probably, uh... ‐ Yeah.
Like, have you seen how much stuff we have?
[laughter]
FISHBURNE: To track down the sub,
Mike and his team will be using
state‐of‐the‐art equipment
that Miklos could not have dreamed of back in 1981.
‐ Got it, Chris? ‐ Yeah, I'm good.
We're going out there with everything under the sun.
I've never been this well prepared.
Magnetometer, ROV, side scan,
you name it, it's in our bevy of electronic tricks.
FISHBURNE: But in the end, it will all come down
to the trail of breadcrumbs left by Roger Miklos himself.
MIKE: Roger has left us with this crazy bunch
of hidden clues about what we may or may not find.
Something tells me that this is not gonna come easy.
We're about to find out.
You really work to get inside Roger's head
and you think you've got him figured out, but...
he might surprise us yet.
FISHBURNE: Mike knows they are looking
for what Roger labeled as a French frigate,
and they know it's in Turks and Caicos.
But that's still an area covering
thousands of square miles.
So the next step is to narrow the search.
You often hear that it's a hunt for a needle in a haystack.
In this case, we've gotta find the haystack
before we can find the needle.
Guys, maybe we'll just take a table
‐ and spread the chart out. ‐ Sure.
So, complete LORAN chart.
On the pad of paper where Roger lists
a bunch of his shipwrecks,
some of those locations are clearly latitude, longitude.
But then there's the French frigate,
and there is this cryptic number beside the French frigate‐‐
143228.
Right away, I went, "That's gotta be a LORAN number,"
a system of navigation sailors used
before there was GPS.
FISHBURNE: Used for plotting
and converting measure data lines
to latitude and longitude,
long‐range navigation, or LORAN, for short,
was set up by the United States in World War II
as a special navigational aid.
Before the advent of GPS, it was used
by ship captains for decades.
SAM: I haven't seen one of these in a long time.
You've actually seen one?
Yeah, I'm not as young as I look, but...
These were state‐of‐the‐art back in Roger's day, but...
‐ We've come a long way. ‐ Nobody knows
what a LORAN chart is anymore.
For me to try and find his location based on LORAN
means I had to find an old LORAN chart,
and that was not easy.
But I did find one.
I did find one chain or one coordinate
that makes sense with what Roger's telling us.
So, French frigate, one LORAN line.
‐ Okay. ‐ 143228.
Come straight up this line, we're looking for 3228.
Bingo. French frigate.
It's the only place in the entire country
that that line crosses the water depth
that we're looking for,
somewhere between 45 and 100‐plus feet.
When I saw "French frigate" on the list
and I saw the bits and pieces of the position,
I went, "That's where we go. That's where we go first."
So there's one of two things here‐‐
a French frigate or a U‐boat.
Like any good treasure hunter would,
they're not going to put a real X on a real map
on a real location.
That's not uncommon for treasure hunters
to often code their finds, right?
‐ To keep looters from‐‐ ‐ Uh, no.
They are the sneakiest bastards on the planet.
What they do is they give you a piece of the truth,
and then they‐‐they‐‐they‐‐
‐ they're deceptive, right? ‐ They tease you.
They have to protect their finds.
‐ Oh, absolutely. ‐ Yeah.
Like, if they've got something serious to find,
they don't want their competitor finding it.
Treasure hunters are very territorial,
and they really hate to see
a competing boat on the horizon.
It's every man for himself.
ROGER: Gold changes people like you wouldn't believe.
I could tell you stories of guys I had on my boats,
and the greed just fires off like you can't believe.
FISHBURNE: All the secrecy and code underscores
how little the team really knows
about what Roger found on that day in 1981
and where it might actually be.
They're putting together a puzzle
without all the pieces.
He went to a lot of trouble to hide
whatever it is he found here.
‐ Right? ‐ Mm‐hmm.
‐ Does it make sense? ‐ It does.
Look at the torture he put himself through.
I think he found a U‐boat. I really believe that.
His story stayed consistent from the time
he first discovered it to the day he died.
‐ Exactly. Treasure hunters can be
a bit of snake oil salesmen, right?
They all want to find something,
so they tell you they found it.
But he, for his entire life,
was completely dedicated to this.
It would be the biggest tale on the planet, man.
But if anybody used their head,
there ain't no way I could come up with this bullsh‐‐
out of my head, man.
One thing about bullsh‐‐, you can't remember it
unless you're really good.
But you can always remember the truth.
No matter how hard you try,
you can always remember the truth.
It always comes out the same way twice.
SAM: This guy's a character,
but he did dedicate his entire life
Anybody who's truly a fraud
usually gives up before Roger did.
Roger found a U‐boat. I'm convinced of it.
You know, whether it's Hitler's U‐boat full of treasure,
that remains to be seen, but I believe in Roger.
I really‐‐evidence tells us. History tells us.
There's a U‐boat here.
There's a lot of what Roger says that
is plausible.
But then there's this one thing
that he claims that is on the U‐boat,
and I just went, "Wow."
FISHBURNE: In the Caribbean country of Turks and Caicos,
Mike Fletcher and his team are on the hunt
for what could be a missing Nazi U‐boat from World War II
claimed to have been discovered 40 years ago
by famed treasure hunter Roger Miklos.
INTERVIEWER: Where is it?
It's sitting in British waters in the Caribbean.
But you won't say exactly where?
No, I'm trying to keep that protected as much as I can.
FISHBURNE: After the government of Turks and Caicos
banned him in 1981 from returning to the site
where he says he found the U‐boat,
Roger spent the rest of his life
keeping the sub's location secret.
Now, after his death, the unique personality
that was Roger Miklos casts a long shadow
over the team's mission.
Roger Miklos has some very significant finds
that he has discovered over the years,
so he is a legit treasure hunter,
but he has a lot of controversy surrounding him.
FISHBURNE: One of those controversies
involves a claim Roger made
about the contents of his U‐boat.
He says his research convinced him
that the sub was filled with gold, paintings,
and maybe even Nazi officers attempting to escape Germany,
and the facts do lend credibility to Roger's theory.
Nazi subs did indeed sail the Caribbean.
And at the end of the war,
many Nazis successfully fled Germany
to live in South America.
But so far, there is no evidence to support
his last, most controversial claim.
There's this one thing
that he claims is on the U‐boat
and I just went, "Wow."
Hitler, supposedly, to the public committed suicide.
Uh‐uh.
FISHBURNE: It's an extraordinary statement,
but could it be true?
Could the bodies of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun
be entombed aboard Roger's submarine?
He's not the only one out there who thinks that
there might have been some mystery and intrigue
with what actually happened to Hitler.
FISHBURNE: Roger claimed that meeting with Nazi hunters
and retired German officers convinced him
that Hitler faked his own suicide
and escaped on a modified U‐boat.
ROGER: Hitler got away clean, and was taken
to where the U‐boats were waiting
and off they went.
MIKE: Do I believe Roger found a U‐boat? Absolutely.
Do I believe that the U‐boat
was carrying gold and paintings
looted from Europe after the war?
It's possible.
But do I think that Hitler
was onboard his U‐boat?
No.
It's obviously to me that Roger loved a good headline.
He liked to be in front of the news camera.
He needed the attention.
He needed to garner support for his idea.
He needed investors' dollars.
But more critically, he needed permits
to go back to the Turks and Caicos,
prove to the world that he had actually found a U‐boat.
Did Roger get a bit eccentric over all the years
of trying to convince the world he'd found a U‐boat?
I don't know.
Most shipwreck hunters are
a little kind of off‐base.
You become obsessed with finding that treasure.
You become obsessed with constantly looking.
MIKE: But the one thing about Roger
over all those years is that his story didn't change.
He said he found a U‐boat.
One of the nine U‐boats
ordered by Hermann Göring at the last part of the war
in 1944 to remove high command
art objects to South America.
FISHBURNE: In 1944, Hermann Göring
and U‐boat commander Karl Dönitz
ordered the construction
of a technologically advanced Nazi sub‐‐
the XVIIB,
built at the Blohm & Voss shipyards in Hamburg.
It was faster and quieter,
designed to combat new Allied strategies
against U‐boats in the Atlantic,
including depth charges and convoys.
And according to Roger, the sub he saw was branded
with a logo from the Blohm & Voss shipyard.
Now, after months of research, the team feels
they have made a breakthrough in their search,
and have identified a possible location
of what could be the final resting place
of the mysterious Nazi U‐boat.
Roger said there is
a shipwrecked French frigate there.
But we also know that Roger has said that the French frigate
is really the U‐boat.
What I know is, this is where Roger says to look.
I gotta think we're in the right spot.
FISHBURNE: But knowing where to look
is only half the battle.
Finding a U‐boat that has been submerged over 70 years
is a daunting task.
There's been a lot of passage of time, right?
Things move around under the water.
Well, and the dangerous thing is that
we know this thing is sitting on a steep incline.
Once it moves, let's say in a hurricane,
‐ if it did let loose... ‐ Yeah.
...it would plummet into the abyss.
The ocean is a huge place that's constantly changing,
so anything on the seabed
is gonna be affected by that change.
Hurricanes, earthquakes,
even a tsunami.
Shipwrecks roll over, break apart,
even fall off cliffs.
The next question is, do we dive first
or we just go out with the mag first?
How big of an area do you think we need to cover?
At least 1,000 square meters or yards.
Let's go take the magnetometer out
and see if we get a hit, and then,
at least we know where to start.
Let's hope we get a huge hit.
FISHBURNE: With such a large area to cover,
with depths hundreds of feet,
putting divers in the water is not feasible yet.
You don't just jump in the ocean and find a shipwreck.
The ocean is just so big,
thousands of miles in every direction.
Imagine trying to find something
as small as a U‐boat.
FISHBURNE: To narrow the search,
the team breaks out the first piece of gear‐‐
Sam's trust magnetometer.
So let's get her hooked up to the laptop.
Back in Roger's day, the mag was just a needle
whipping up and down on paper.
This new, sophisticated mag
will paint a chart with magnetic hits.
You're looking for a pattern that shows you
that hey, something's different than the things
that are surrounding it.
‐ Hi. ‐ Hey, Captain,
you got a couple minutes? ‐ Yeah, come on in.
Great. So we're finally gonna get
the magnetometer in the water. Weird question, but
how slow can we go in this boat?
‐ Can we go 4 knots? ‐ No problem.
Okay, so we're gonna run about 4 knots
and what we're gonna try to do
is what they call mowing the lawn.
Drive the boat in one direction for a little while,
turn around, drive it back in the other direction.
Certainly if there is something
that shows up, even if it's a small object,
we'll probably get you to stop.
‐ Okay. ‐ So we'll communicate,
if you don't mind, using this here.
‐ Okay. ‐ So we'll give you a call
when we're about to get started.
‐ Does that work? ‐ Perfect.
‐ Cool. ‐ That sounds good.
SAM: I can't wait to get there
and have a look what's down there.
We have everything that
a shipwreck‐hunting team could want.
We've got a magnetometer, we've got side scan sonar,
we've got multiple ROVs with multi‐beam sonar on 'em.
Nobody has this much equipment,
so if there's something to be found,
I think we're gonna find it.
Hey boys, how's my maggie?
She's almost ready for a swim.
Awesome.
‐ All ready for you. ‐ Good. GPS is hooked up.
MIKE: Chris, if you carry that,
Sam and I will carry the reel.
Okay, perfect. I want to be careful
'cause there's a very delicate, expensive
glass sensor in this thing.
I know you're gonna be careful.
I do think Roger is credible.
Could he be incorrect? Possibly.
But there's only one way to find out.
We have to go and see.
We are ready to deploy the mag.
Of course we're all chasing the "eureka" moment,
but it all begins with that moment
when you throw out the lines
and you're on your mission.
Watch that reel. She's gonna pull fast.
This is a very, very, important first step.
If there's something made of metal down there,
we're gonna know soon.
‐ You got it? ‐ I got it.
There she goes.
FISHBURNE: Off the coast of Turks and Caicos,
Mike, Sam, and Chris are taking a vital step
in their search for a sunken Nazi U‐boat.
There she goes.
FISHBURNE: They've deployed a magnetometer
to scan for metallic objects on the ocean floor.
SAM: As we throw the magnetometer into the water,
it feels like all of the hard work that we've done
over the past month, all the logistics
to get out here is finally coming to fruition.
All right, slowly letting it out.
You should have signal!
Connecting.
FISHBURNE: But towing this advanced piece of equipment
is not without its challenges.
The ever‐changing terrain of Turks and Caicos
makes the team's mission particularly difficult.
Turks and Caicos is absolutely paradise,
but there are some challenges.
One side of the archipelago
is just completely filled with rocks
and coral and it's super dangerous for boats to get in.
FISHBURNE: Formed by coral reefs,
the islands sit on a foundation of soft limestone.
Centuries ago, when ocean levels were lower,
acid rainwater collected in pools
and over time, began to dissolve the surrounding limestone.
The result is a topography of ridges, fissures,
sinkholes, and caverns
many of which have never been explored.
MIKE: Normally you look for a shipwreck,
it's gonna be obvious.
It's laying there on the ocean floor.
But imagine how hard it is to find a U‐boat
when it's underground.
This just happens to be underwater underground.
Are you good there, Chris?
Yeah, I'm good. How's it looking up there?
It's good. I's marking.
Magnetometer work is long and tedious.
You spend a lot of time in front of a screen.
So just let it out nice and slow.
That's good, Chris.
Just keep letting it out slow like that.
Still going.
SAM: We're gonna see a graph that's coming up
on our computer screen,
and we're looking for a big blip.
Whoa, hang on. We got something, something here.
There's something. There we go.
‐ Whoa. ‐ We got a hit?
‐We did get a little hit there. ‐ Yeah.
Like, look at all that.
Tons of stuff coming on here.
So we‐‐we hit something.
Now, was it U‐boat‐sized?
The good news is that we are getting some hits.
They're not submarine‐sized hits.
But we are showing some magnetic anomaly.
So, there's something here to dive.
But we haven't really hit our sweet spot yet,
the spot that Roger told us should be the French frigate.
If it's there and we've crossed by it,
we'll get a huge hit.
FISHBURNE: As Mike and the crew get closer
to the sunken U‐boat location,
the one constant is the unpredictable nature
of the open seas.
Chris, you notice that as we're coming more south,
‐ there's more sea running. ‐ Yeah.
Yeah, we're getting into some chop here.
‐ It's gonna get rough. ‐ Yeah.
SAM: Operating the magnetometer
in even small waves is difficult,
and now we're in really rough seas
and we really have to monitor the mag's buffer to the bottom.
It looks like the weather is turning on us a little bit.
The seas have picked up.
It's not as nice and flat calm as it was when we started.
FISHBURNE: Extending the cable helps to balance out
the variations in the water depth
caused by sudden swells,
but that comes with a risk.
A longer tether makes it much more difficult
to make quick adjustments, making it vitally important
that they maintain enough speed
to keep the magnetometer off the sea floor.
Hey, Chris, Chris!
We're not going fast enough to hold the mag up.
Captain's gotta pick up the speed
or you gotta roll tether like now.
'Cause I got 18 feet of depth and 20 feet of bottom.
We're gonna have you pick up the speed
by one knot, please.
So we can go five.
CAPTAIN ON RADIO: I'll go five.
Very good. Five would be great. Thanks.
FISHBURNE: With the ship's speed adjusted,
the magnetometer's sweep resumes.
Turning you to starboard slowly.
FISHBURNE: So far, none of the data suggests
that there is a U‐boat in the area,
but the team holds out hope.
MIKE: We're not getting a hit, but I'm still convinced
this could be the spot.
We're gonna make one more pass
across what I call the sweet spot,
and, uh, hopefully we're gonna see this great big change
in magnetic field.
Guys, I think I got a hit.
Are you serious?
What do you got?
SAM: I think that could be it.
Oh, my God.
FISHBURNE: In Turks and Caicos,
the team believes they're closing in
on what could be a lost Nazi U‐boat
when Sam gets some promising data from the magnetometer.
I think I got a hit.
‐ What? ‐ Check this out right now!
‐ Come up, quick! ‐ Are you serious?
When you find something, when you get that hit,
you can feel the‐‐ you can feel the excitement
in everybody.
What do you got?
All right, check this out. So this is where
it starts to drop on the clip a little bit...
Oh, yeah, there it is.
And then there's the classic S.
Oh, my God.
Okay, look where we are, too.
This is pretty close to the location.
SAM: I think that could be it.
Getting a hit on the magnetometer,
this means we've got an indication of metal,
and it's exactly in the area
where Roger tells us to look for the French frigate.
FISHBURNE: But a hit doesn't meant
it's a submarine yet.
Determining that will require eyes on the sea floor.
The magnetometer is not like a sonar or a camera.
It doesn't draw you a picture.
It's just going to give you an indication
that there is something different than normal,
and it happens to be metallic.
MIKE: We don't know what's there.
It could be an old car,
a sunken ship that we're not looking for,
and we gotta find out what that iron is that's down there.
FISHBURNE: The next step is to put divers in the water.
If there's something big there,
I'm ready to jump in and just swim down
and see what it is.
FISHBURNE: But once again,
the weather refuses to cooperate.
Rough seas pick up and with sunset on the horizon,
the team makes a difficult decision.
As much as we want to just jump in the water and dive,
it's pretty choppy, so we're gonna pull the mag,
we're gonna wait for it to calm down.
Maybe tomorrow, we'll do that first dive then.
FISHBURNE: The next morning, in calmer seas,
Mike and Chris decide it's safe to prep for the dive.
Can you tuck that in, too, Chris?
Yep.
I couldn't hold back Mike and Chris for a moment longer.
Once we got that hit on the magnetometer,
they needed to go in the water.
FISHBURNE: The magnetometer has given Chris and Mike
the area to explore, but it's by no means precise.
They have no idea what kind of terrain awaits them.
Just because there is something metal down there
doesn't mean it will be easy to find.
U‐boats were built to dive to great depths,
both to evade detection and to hunt their own prey.
It's possible the sub Roger says he saw,
partially submerged in a cave,
was there playing possum
and then was unable to surface
or that it was hit and sunk.
Diving in caves and in areas
like the geography that creates caves
is a step beyond the regular dive.
You're in a very unusual underwater environment
that's not like diving in a river or lake.
It's totally unique. It is this sense of adventure
that you can't imagine.
The sense of awe that no one
has been in that particular cave ever
in the history of mankind on the planet.
There's a lot of things about diving shipwrecks,
especially in low vis, that's extremely dangerous.
FISHBURNE: For Roger, it was an accident
several decades ago that changed his life.
I don't do the diving anymore.
I did the diving for 38 solid years.
I damaged my heart.
I had bought a brand‐new Scubapro tank.
But I went in and we were down at 80 feet.
All of a sudden on an exhale,
the line on the tank blew off.
I thought I was dead.
They got me out of the water
and they brought me in to Key West
where I was in a coma for seven days.
And I've got ventricular "fliberation"
on the lower part of my heart.
FISHBURNE: It's the kind of story
that stays with every deep water diver.
But when there's a potentially historic discovery
on the line, the rewards outweigh the risks.
MIKE ON RADIO: Radio check, 1‐2‐3.
SAM: Five over five.
MIKE: It's a big, big deal to find a U‐boat.
And it's that spark of history and real adventure
that drew me to U‐boats, specifically.
Although I'm not after the alleged billions
or millions of dollars in the U‐boat.
The treasure is history.
The treasure is in the hunt.
The treasure is in finding that item that's lost
that no one else has been successful at finding.
[beep]
Sam to Chris. If you read, what's your depth?
Give me a depth check.
This is a really, really craggy seabed.
It's not like anything you'd normally see.
With big overhangs and sharp drop‐offs and gullies.
The way Mike and I work is he goes down
with his handheld metal detector,
and he starts scanning the area.
But everything's covered in sand or coral
and you could have a U‐boat that's been down there
for quite a long time completely covered
and you could be looking at it with your eyes
and swim over it and not realize
that you've just swam over a U‐boat.
SAM: We see shifting of sands.
It could one day be completely covered,
six months, be open, and then covered back up again.
So, we're really looking for small artifacts,
indications that something might have been there
at one time, and then pathways of debris
that might lead us to the mothership.
MIKE: With the handheld metal detector,
if there is something even as small as a paper clip,
I'm gonna know it's there, even though I can't see it.
[beep]
SAM: Chris, just wondering what you're seeing down there.
What's the bottom conditions?
Does it look like somewhere a U‐boat might have wrecked?
FISHBURNE: It's a time‐consuming and methodical search,
and Mike and Chris make several trips
back to the surface for more air.
Anything of interest down there?
Roger that. Keep me updated.
♪
FISHBURNE: Then, something catches Mike's eye.
SAM: Amazing. What do you got?
[radio static]
Surface to Mike. Do you read, over?
[radio static]
It's something.
Don't leave me hanging, Chris. The anticipation's killing me.
What do you got?
FISHBURNE: Following the piecemeal clues
Roger left behind, Mike and his team believe
they may have found a promising lead.
Now the team's instruments
have detected iron on the sea floor...
and Mike and Chris dive down to investigate.
What do you got?
Sam, I've got something here.
MIKE: As we're following this metal trail,
we come across a metal pipe flange.
To me, this is a pressure fitting.
This is exactly the kind of thing
that you would use in the construction
of a submarine.
Most of the metal pieces are hard to identify,
except for one piece.
And that piece could be a very significant find.
And it appears to be a flange, or pressure fitting for a sub.
FISHBURNE: Sub flanges are used to connect pipes,
valves, and equipment
to provide a pressurized seal.
When compromised by a catastrophic disaster
onboard a U‐boat sub,
this would be the type of debris one would find.
We're finding these bits and pieces of iron
that shouldn't be there.
[beep]
It could lead us to a shipwreck,
but hopefully our U‐boat.
[beeping]
CHRIS: Cameras are extremely important
when you're searching for shipwrecks.
There are legal reasons
that would like to have your shipwreck hunt documented
to prove that you are the one that found it,
to prove that you also didn't do anything illegal.
FISHBURNE: Shipwreck and treasure hunting
has been around centuries.
The discovery of an old wreck
can be worth millions of dollars.
However, finding treasure or valuable property
is not always as simple as finders keepers.
A key question is whether the discovery of goods
is deemed salvage or treasure hunting.
A salvage refers to when someone
sees property drifting, lost, or abandoned at sea.
Under international conventions,
the salvager is required to return the found goods
to the original owner in return for a reward.
Treasure hunting typically means
exploration aimed at unearthing antiquities
and other valuables from shipwrecks
for financial gain.
If the find lies in international waters
and there's no one to claim ownership,
the finder is probably in the clear to keep it.
However, because of the ambiguity,
most countries have enacted laws
to establish government ownership
for the majority of shipwrecks found in their waters.
Just because you've found a shipwreck, or even pieces
that you think are part of a shipwreck,
if you don't have a permit, you can't remove it.
FISHBURNE: Treasure hunters who ignore these rules
often find themselves in trouble with the law.
Not having the correct permit
is what got Roger Miklos banned
from ever returning to Turks and Caicos.
That's where Roger seemed to run amok
of the Turks and Caicos government.
They claim he didn't take out the right permits
when he recovered an anchor.
FISHBURNE: Photography is the best way
for divers to stake their claim
when they find a wreck.
With so much more potentially at stake,
it's not uncommon for unscrupulous treasure hunters
to swoop in.
There's always somebody after your discovery
who want to tell the public they found it first,
they have rights.
It's a no‐holds‐barred fight to the death
when it comes to shipwrecks,
and especially shipwrecks with treasure.
I found a very important historical wreck,
and treasure hunters learned that I'd found it.
It led to this really precedent‐setting court battle,
trying to determine who had found it first
and who had rights.
As it turned out, it was my photographic evidence
that proved my case.
FISHBURNE: It's a lesson Roger Miklos
had to learn the hard way.
MIKE: Roger claims that he took photographs
of his U‐boat.
He also claims that all of those photographs
were lost when he was run off the island.
If just one of those photographs still existed,
this whole story would be very different.
FISHBURNE: Once Mike and Chris have documented their find,
they begin to follow the trail of parts,
hoping that it will lead to the missing U‐boat.
So, we followed the trail of bits and shards of metal
until it disappeared into the abyss.
It leads you to wonder,
was there a U‐boat here that just slid off the edge
and dumped into the abyss?
When you look at the seabed,
you can see a groove, almost a trough
that takes you all the way to the edge of the wall
and then drops off into about 3,000 feet of water.
Everything else is covered in coral.
Everything else looks like you would expect.
But this trough is kind of almost boat‐shaped.
You could imagine this U‐boat sitting there on the edge,
and over time, it's very likely
that a storm could have pushed that off the edge.
Down to 3,000 feet of water? We don't know.
Roger talks about the sub being inside of a cave
or partially inside of a cave.
But could that be Roger
trying to throw us off the scent again?
We need to find out.
FISHBURNE: Mike and Chris are in the deep waters
off Turks and Caicos
in search of an underwater cave,
attempting to get a visual of the Nazi U‐boat
that Roger described.
MIKE: There really was the right incline,
as Roger described some 45 feet down to 100‐plus.
CHRIS: Mike and I reached our limits.
We got down about 130 feet and realized
that we're over almost like an abyss,
and we can't dive down there.
FISHBURNE: Mike and Chris have no choice
but to give up and return to the boat.
MIKE: Now that we've found the shards in this gulley,
I just want to keep going down,
get into deeper water, see if there's more shards
and more evidence of something that was on the shelf.
We got to the edge, we looked over the edge.
Everything that Roger describes,
the valley leading down, the incline, it all matches.
It's time for you to send this thing down there
and look over the edge.
If the dive is beyond 100 and, say, 65, or 180 feet,
then it's time to bring in Sam with the ROV.
She can go places we can't go as divers.
CHRIS: Sam McDonald has her own company,
Deep Trekker, who makes amazing underwater ROVs
that are really, really important
for the kind of stuff that we're doing.
The ROVs allow us to look
into deep, dark spaces
that divers can't go into,
and go to those deeper depths
that the divers can't reach.
FISHBURNE: ROVs have helped locate and document
some of the world's most famous shipwrecks.
ROVs are being used in shipwreck hunting
every day now.
ROV technology was used
to take some of the first looks at the Titanic,
as well as a famous whaling ship from 1902
called the Nova Zembla.
And we even got to go inside
of the USS Arizona for the first time,
and got eyes on some of the damage
and some of the items and artifacts
that are still inside of that ship.
FISHBURNE: ROVs also helped locate two vessels
from one of the great tragedies
in the age of Victorian exploration,
the mysterious disappearance
of Britain's Franklin expedition,
sent in 1845 to map Canada's
supposed Northwest passage through the Arctic.
Though many missions were sent to find the doomed ships,
their location remained a mystery until 2014,
when ROVs found the vessels on the ocean floor.
And of course, the great thing about an ROV
is it's not limited like divers to time or depth.
You can send an ROV to the deepest spot
in the oceans.
And that has changed the whole game.
They'll go into spots that you wouldn't want to go
as a human, because there's a good chance
you won't ever come back.
And I can tell you, there's a lot of shipwrecks
with ROVs trapped in them that aren't coming home either.
So, this is the Revolution.
So, it's got six thrusters on it,
so it's gonna hold nice and steady.
But for searching, we've got the 4K HD camera,
and then the multibeam forward‐facing sonar.
ROGER: Here's my original drawing,
the way that thing is set.
She's up more at the ceiling,
then that island comes clear up here,
because I had a hell of a time getting around
to the front of the gun.
SAM: Roger tells us that this U‐boat
is on a cliff maybe partially submerged
inside of a cave.
ROGER: And it's lodged.
It's even lodged farther up than the way my drawing is.
I‐‐ you know, I did this so quick.
SAM: We're going back a lot of years here.
Things move around.
We know that there's been a few hurricanes out here.
An object as a large as a U‐boat
could be pushed by storms, hurricanes,
surges, and push it right over that edge.
I saw the two back propeller blades,
they're highly polished from going in the sand,
up and down in the sand.
Even Roger tells us,
it's going up and down, and up and down.
So, it's already got some buoyancy. So, it's tender.
Now, there's decades have passed since Roger was here.
Did it, like, go in a hurricane,
slide down that slope, and just...
drop over the edge? We can't know.
We'll cruise down that cliff and look for a cave,
and maybe there's a U‐boat hanging out of it.
You ready to get this in the water?
I wanna go find a U‐boat.
‐ Come on, let's fly it. ‐ Let's do this thing.
Let me know if you guys need a hand here.
Looks like you got it.
All right, let's do this! Let's go!
Let's go fishing for U‐boats!
FISHBURNE: The crew now deploys the ROV,
hoping it can pinpoint the location
of the missing U‐boat.
CHRIS: We're descending.
FISHBURNE: And ultimately help them find the treasure
that's been lost at sea for decades.
Still going out.
FISHBURNE: Sam steers the rover
towards the edge of the underwater cliff.
We're about 12 meters down?
‐ Twenty meters. ‐ Twenty meters down.
SAM: Descending. All right,
so if you feel tight on that tether, Mike.
‐ It is. ‐ Just keep paying out,
'cause I'm doing down.
MIKE: Going down.
ROVs, because they're providing information in real time,
have to have a tether to send that data back.
That can be a challenge.
If you're on a swinging boat, there's a chance
of the tether getting caught up on things.
Plus, you're limited to how much tether you've got.
You can only go as far and as deep
as that tether allows you to go.
CHRIS: So, you're working really hard to avoid
all hang‐ups, and of course, damaging the coral.
‐ Yeah. ‐ Yeah.
Yeah, we don't want to be,
you know, ruin anything that‐‐
‐ No. No. ‐ That nature made us.
I‐‐I would say we're probably moving
like over 200 degrees on this mooring.
So, I don't know, Sam, are you okay with this?
SAM: We're on a big boat.
We've only got a bow anchor on a 100‐foot ship.
It's gonna swing 150 feet one way,
150 feet the other way.
This is a challenge.
FISHBURNE: The crew can't afford
for the rover's umbilical to become entangled
in the boat's propeller, or even worse,
on the coral of the sea floor.
Sam guides the rover to the area
where Mike and Chris found the metal debris.
Yeah, yeah, no. A little bit over to the right.
‐ That's it, that's it. ‐ Okay, yeah, there it is.
‐ Oh, very cool. ‐ Yeah.
MIKE: Now, just sail her down that gully.
CHRIS: Yeah, follow that down. Yeah, that‐‐
MIKE: Chris, stop her when she gets
to where we found the chunks of iron.
Yeah, I'm watching for it.
It's right around...
Yeah, right around there. Right around there.
That's where Mike‐‐ that's where Mike got that hit.
‐ Okay. MIKE: Just a little more
‐ to port. ‐ Okay.
Whoa, now, see how deep an blue that is?
That's the abyss.
That's where Chris and I were not gonna go.
Okay, yeah, look here. I got like a glowy
on the‐‐ on the sonar there.
‐ Oh yeah. ‐ Yeah, look at‐‐
look at the formation.
SAM: So, the ROV goes down,
it sees the geography that Mike and Chris described.
It sees the bits of metal
that indicate something would be there,
and then off into the abyss, we see the big cliff.
Wow, this boat is swinging all over the place.
‐ Yeah. ‐ Yeah.
I think it's gonna be too difficult
to keep doing it from the back of this boat.
SAM: See this here? CHRIS: Yeah.
SAM: I would like to get a visual on that.
CHRIS: Okay. SAM: So, what is that, right?
CHRIS: Yeah. SAM: It's certainly different
than everything else we see.
‐ See this line? ‐ Yeah, you see...
So, it's making like a, you know.
There's no straight lines in nature, right?
Whoa, we're really swinging, guys.
All right, guys, I think that it's probably best
to pull this one up.
Let's go check out that one marking
that I got on the sonar.
I've taken the GPS location
that we want to go to on the Zodiac,
and then drop the little one in
‐ and see what we can find. ‐ Okay.
Okay, hauling it in.
FISHBURNE: Mike and his team are searching the waters
of Turks and Caicos
for a highly specialized Nazi U‐boat,
one of only nine commissioned in 1944.
Roger Miklos claimed he saw it here in 1981,
and that it's carrying what could be billions
in gold, treasure, and art.
The team wasn't able to dive deep enough,
so Sam is using an ROV to assist the search
at greater depths.
But the constant sway of the current
is causing the boat to swing wildly.
Whoa! We're really swinging, guys.
FISHBURNE: And the ROV is in danger
of getting snagged on the sea floor.
Sam decides it's time to move the search to a smaller boat,
the ship's Zodiac.
Okay, let's take this one out.
‐ This is the DTG3. ‐ I like this little guy.
Little wee guy.
Great for boats just like this.
All right, send that‐‐
You just throw the Deep Trekker in like that?
Just manhandled.
That's no way to treat your baby.
No way to treat your baby.
MIKE: I was really happy to just use the small Zodiac
and not have to contend with anything
swinging or moving. It worked really a lot better.
As I got deeper, the marine life got less and less,
and it just became gray rocks as I went down the wall.
It just got darker and darker.
FISHBURNE: But even with the added stability,
the rover is quickly nearing the end of its umbilical.
CHRIS: About how deep are we now?
SAM: About 275 meters.
CHRIS: Can we go much further?
‐ We got like 25 left. ‐ [groans]
SAM: It doesn't look like there's a bottom here.
MIKE: Can you see‐‐reach out with the sonar?
Is there anything?
SAM: You know what? I have the sonar range
at 50 meters, and it's not even picking up the sea floor.
‐ MIKE: Wow. ‐ SAM: I point that sonar
straight down, nothing.
SAM: So I flew the ROV to the edge of the cliff,
I turned around to face it,
and I started to descend straight down the cliff.
So, in the first probably 300 feet,
we saw corals, we saw different marine life on the wall.
I picked up on the sonar
a bit of an overhang, almost a cliff there
and so I went a little bit to the starboard side
and had a look, had the camera out.
Didn't look like what‐‐ you know,
a place where a U‐boat could really hide,
so I continued to descend.
I'm gonna be honest‐‐ this is as deep
as I've personally ever taken this stuff.
MIKE: See any more evidence of pieces or chunks
‐ as you went off the cliff? ‐ SAM: You know, sort of, maybe.
There was an area where it just sort of looked...
beaten up, like something may have scratched it,
for lack of a better description.
But if it did that, it wasn't a smooth journey,
that's for sure.
So a lot of the places in the Turks and Caicos
where Roger's U‐boat could be are either too deep
or in very enclosed spaces.
FISHBURNE: The rover follows a trail of debris
down the abyss, as Mike, Chris, and Sam
hold out hope that the trail of debris and scratches
will end in the big discovery of Roger's U‐boat.
SAM: That's the end, boys. That's it.
I got nothing left.
Like any good treasure hunt, we hit another roadblock.
SAM: I can't definitively say.
If there was a U‐boat there,
it would be on the bottom, and I just couldn't get there.
I think we can call this one checked out, truth.
Let's pack it up and head back to the boat.
CHRIS: Still so much more depth to get down.
I think we need to try to identify
the pieces that we found,
and hopefully that gives us enough reason
to come back with more tether and better equipment.
Good to go.
FISHBURNE: Mike, Sam, and Chris
make their way back to the boat.
After storing their gear, they reconvene
to discuss the state of their mission.
Let's look at what we've learned.
There may be something yet beyond
what Deep Trekker could reach today.
‐ Yes. ‐ We have these bits of iron
that may be indicative of a U‐boat,
this round flange of some sort, right?
‐ SAM: Yeah. ‐ MIKE: That's gonna be
some sort of high‐pressure piping flange.
Submarines are full of that.
According to Roger, this was like
a submarine freighter, right?
Heading to South America with the spoils of World War II.
Roger was on the trail of a U‐boat,
and he was convinced that it carried billions of dollars
worth of gold bullion and treasure.
So now as we look in deeper and deeper water
and more out‐of‐the‐way places
like the Turks and Caicos,
it's a big, big deal to find a U‐boat.
Guys, it's time to leave here. We gotta move on.
Right? 'Cause we just don't know.
But let's regroup, let's talk to the experts.
Let's just be determined to be openminded,
‐ get more information. ‐ Agreed.
‐ Let's pack it up. ‐ Okay. Let's do it.
FISHBURNE: Shortly after the team completed
their underwater search, their expedition was shut down
due to the COVID‐19 pandemic.
MIKE: We just learned that
the entire project's been shut down...
due to COVID.
I just... [sighs]
hate the thoughts of going home right now...
and truly believe that Roger's U‐boat is out there
waiting for us to find.
FISHBURNE: Two months later, they regrouped
at home base to hear intel from U‐boat expert,
Rob Carmichael.
MIKE: Sam was able to track down a U‐boat expert,
a guy named Rob Carmichael.
FISHBURNE: In 2016,
divers located a mysterious ship resting in darkness
in about 700 feet of water.
Forty‐four sailors were entombed within it.
It was a Nazi submarine.
U‐576.
It was sunk in 1942.
Look at that.
‐ Topside! ‐ Ha ha!
We got a visual.
FISHBURNE: In World War II,
the greatest concentration of U‐boat attacks on America
happened off of North Carolina's outer banks
where dozens of ships passed daily.
The U. S. military didn't want people to worry,
so news reports of enemy boats near the coast
were classified for national security reasons.
The discovery of U‐576 also revealed a submarine
that was mysteriously intact. This suggests the vessel
may have dove to the bottom intentionally
to play possum but somehow couldn't surface again,
killing all crew members inside.
Roger claims the U‐boat he found was also intact.
Is it possible that the U‐boat Roger found
may have tried a similar trick in Turks and Caicos
to avoid Allied detection
only to meet a perilous fate?
Hey Robert, it's good to see you.
My pleasure. Good to see you today.
So for the sake of everyone on the call,
Robert Carmichael is a friend of mine
who is well‐versed on all things ocean,
and so we're hoping that, Robert, you can provide us
with some expertise on the things that we've found.
We've sent you a few photographs, Robert.
Metal objects that we found with the eye
and with our handheld metal detector.
We did, however, get a large magnetic hit.
These little pieces clearly are not
part of the mag hit that we got.
They seem to be pieces scattered on a trail
leading down and dropping over into the abyss
into deep water.
The photo that I'd most like you to look at first
would be the one that I call the flange.
ROB: Yeah, it def‐‐ definitely looks like a flange.
But, uh, you know...
what does that flange
seem to be mounted to or part of?
This was just lying loose, Robert, on the seabed.
To me this could be part of a high‐pressure pressure hull,
but...that's beyond my expertise.
Well, I think you could say it's pretty certain
that it's part of a pressure system of some sort.
Does it have the appearance of some catastrophic failure?
'Cause if that flange was all by itself,
and it was part of a pressure system,
and something catastrophically failed,
maybe‐‐ maybe that would explain.
why this flange component's
not attached to its pipe member.
The history of what it is we're researching
has no affiliation with an explosion
or for that matter, a catastrophic event.
But in a storm event, like a hurricane
where everything can be turned upside down,
who could say?
Oh, boy, I understand that.
We just got back from three trips to the Bahamas
right following that gigantic hurricane
that went up the middle of the Atlantic,
that lasted for so long.
It was 550 miles in diameter,
and we saw the Gulf Stream flowing backwards for...
‐ Wow. ‐ ...uh, 10 days.
And it just moved a lot of the South Atlantic ocean
to the North Atlantic ocean.
‐ SAM: Wow. ‐ MIKE: The other images
are even less definitive.
So again, tough one.
But that's the next one I'd like you to comment on
‐ if you could. ‐ Yeah.
Not‐‐not enough to tell me anything.
You were there in person, so did it, uh,
feel like heavy metal or what was it?
Well, it is definitely iron or metal‐based.
It triggered the handheld metal detector.
It was quite corroded.
‐ Quite disintegrated. ‐ Yeah, like it's oxidized
as if it has a really high iron or steel content.
I know they're just little obscure pieces.
If there's some other compelling evidence
that would lead you to devote resources and time
to that site, I would say go back and try it again.
But based on the evidence and the imagery I just saw,
there's nothing there that says that's related to a U‐boat.
As far as I can tell, or any significant,
reason to keep spending resources in that area.
Time to move on.
‐ Time to move on. ‐ Thank you.
Bye for now.
I think Robert has pretty much told us
this is not a great indication of a U‐boat.
Yeah. When Robert was talking about the hurricanes
and the type of damage they cause‐‐
you know, the reversal of the currents underneath,
the type of changes to the sea floor that he saw,
it really struck me because we didn't see any of that.
We did a lot of survey of that cliff edge there,
and I didn't see anything in the bathymetry
that would show me that there'd been major damage,
especially the type of damage
you would think to rip a flange off a U‐boat
or that U‐boat careening over the edge.
I just didn't see any of that.
I think it's time to move on.
Okay, so basically Robert said move on,
Sam, you're saying move on.
I'm reluctantly saying move on.
‐ Just move on. ‐ No, it makes sense.
Sounds good, Mike.
FISHBURNE: The magnetometer hit proved
that there was something big at the bottom of that abyss.
But the team is still perplexed on exactly what showed up
on that magnetometer hit.
Roger was masterful at keeping everyone at bay
on the exact location of the Nazi U‐boat.
But that just pushed the crew into more speculation.
I know where that site was,
where the average person ain't got a clue.
Nobody gonna discover this.
MIKE: So for now, we're still left with a mystery
of the missing U‐boat.
And I'm wondering if Roger isn't up there...
laughing down at all of us.
FISHBURNE: Mike is back to square one
with no idea where to turn next.
MIKE: At this point, I figured we were out of options.
We're at a dead end.
Then I got an email from Jon Christiansen
who was not only Roger's trusted friend,
but he was Roger's boat captain.
And he was there with Roger in 1981
when all this went down.
This is Capt. Jon Christiansen,
captain of the Heather Glynn.
I have been a ship captain for over 40 years,
and I was very fortunate
to be in the right place at the right time
to meet Roger Miklos in 1981 in the Turks and Caicos.
MIKE: You can imagine how important it is
to hear what he's got to say.
Mike, it's Jon Christiansen. How you doing, sir?
Jon, you have no idea how glad I am to hear from you.
I understand that you've been very involved with Roger
looking for this submarine that he claims
to have located way back in the day.
MIKE: Yeah, I have. I think it's amazing
that you were the captain of his boat.
He found this U‐boat, and he managed
to keep that a secret even from you.
Yeah, he kept it a secret from a lot of people.
Roger said, "You know, the next thing we're gonna do,
we're gonna go find my submarine."
And that's when I started with,
"Well, tell me about this submarine and where is it?"
He wouldn't answer it. He would, you know,
just say, you know, "I don't know."
I have got the logbook for the, uh,
for the Heather right here.
MIKE: Amazing. Wow.
Be more than happy to share the logbooks. I can, uh‐‐
You're willing to share you logbooks with us?
FISHBURNE: After meeting with U‐boat expert Rob Carmichael,
the team has decided to move on from West Caicos.
But now, Jon Christiansen, Roger's shipmate
and captain on the Heather, the ship that made
that infamous trip to Turks and Caicos,
offered up his ship's logbook.
This logbook could be the missing piece to the puzzle.
I was blown away to think that
Jon would offer up his logbook.
This is a great piece of the puzzle.
FISHBURNE: Jon and Roger spent six weeks
sailing around Turks and Caicos.
Everywhere they went was documented in Jon's logbook.
JON: We were down there surveying different areas,
looking at different wrecks.
We dove all around all the Caicos islands.
We dove South Caicos, we dove North Caicos.
We dove Providenciales, Grand Turk.
I have got the logbook for the Heather right here.
Amazing.
That ended up with Roger down in the Turks and Caicos.
And if that's your logbook,
you had to have kept really detailed records
‐ about day‐to‐day activity? ‐ Absolutely. Yes sir. Yes.
Be more than happy to share the logbooks. I can‐‐
You're willing to share your logbooks with us?
Yes. Yes.
MIKE: This is the piece of evidence
that puts Roger in the location.
There's a witness.
This is really, really critical
to solving this puzzle.
I think this is just the beginning of
what could be a great adventure together.
I can't thank you enough.
This is not something you see every day
in the business of treasure hunting.
I wish it didn't take all these many years
and Roger passing away that we're all gonna try
to find‐‐to finally make this come to fruition for him.
Well, it's a fascinating story
that's only just started for me.
And it's continuing for me, so I look forward to it,
whatever I can do.
These are quite literally they LORAN coordinates
and the dive‐‐different dive sites that we dove on
for this extended period of time.
MIKE: Up to now, our entire search
has been focused on West Caicos.
But this logbook, it's sending us off
to East Caicos.
Two totally different parts of the country.
And even though it's a small country,
the two places are as far apart as you can get.
JON: East Caicos and even Grand Turk
it is very deep water
that are ringed by, you know, ledges that are...
Oh, boy, I tell you, they drop off 200‐300 feet.
Now, could there be a, you know, a ledge
big enough where a deep‐water German U‐boat
could actually get up underneath this ledge and hide?
It's absolutely possible. Absolutely possible.
Certainly the geography matches perfectly
to what Roger tells us to look for.
We're way more likely to find a cave in East Caicos.
I ain't giving the latitude and longitude
or GPS readings on her. You think I'm crazy?
I can't risk‐‐I've been protecting that thing
ever since I found it.
JON: He was protecting what he knew.
Submarine came up, and I said,
"I know you can't tell me where it is,
"but tell me about the geography around.
Where is it that you saw this?"
He said "It's a horseshoe‐shaped island
and it's down here somewhere."
And he was very vague about that.
And it could be that Roger was simply
throwing me off the scent.
But I do have one area in mind that I think,
based on discussions with Roger, again, you know‐‐
a horseshoe‐shaped island.
That‐‐I've got a pretty good idea what he was referring to.
MIKE: Everything's adding up.
I've gotta call the team. This hunt is back on.
Hey, guys. Just got a very important
bit of information for you.
Out of the blue, I get a phone call
from Jon Christiansen.
Roger's boat captain
back in the infamous 1981 survey.
Believe it or not, Jon's heard about us,
heard about our search.
He sent us his logbook.
Really?
What, from the original expedition?
Yeah. Every time they went to a new location,
he fixed the coordinate and wrote it in his book.
No way.
And when you put those locations together,
I come up with a new search area‐‐East Caicos.
So not in West Caicos where we were before at all.
A totally new part of the country.
Pack your bags. We're going back to the islands.
Amazing.
Looks like I'm gonna have to clear my schedule again.
[laughs] But you're in, right?
This has already been an adventure
full of twists and turns,
so I'm glad to get going again.
Okay.
Way to go, guys.
When I get this logbook, it could very easily lead us
to Roger's U‐boat.
It's telling me this search is a long way from over.
This is a find of a find of a lifetime.
It beats Tutankhamun all to hell.
There ain't nobody gonna find anything better than that.
It's been missing for 72 friggin' years.
MIKE: This U‐boat was Roger's life's work.
It must've been tremendously frustrating for him.
Maybe now we can help him fulfill that destiny
and prove once and for all
whether Roger actually did find a U‐boat.
For 40 years, the location of Roger Miklos's U‐boat
has remained a mystery.
Now, Mike Fletcher is one step closer
to solving that puzzle.
And maybe someday soon, Roger's lifelong dream
of raising his U‐boat will finally be realized,
and the world will discover what's really inside.
I'm Laurence Fishburne.
Tune in next time for another installment
of "History's Greatest Mysteries."