Monday marks 110 years since the Titanic was launched in Belfast.
The “unsinkable” vessel was lost when she struck and iceberg on her maiden voyage a year later.
The tragedy, which cost 1,500 lives, has gone down as one of the worst maritime disasters ever.
Since the liner sank on April 15, 1912, there has been a host of conspiracy theories about what might really have happened.
Here James Moore reveals six of the strangest…
FLAMING WRECK
Some say a fire was the real cause of the sinking.
The theory goes that a blaze which broke out in one of her coal bunkers several weeks before her voyage had continued to rage, damaging the ship’s structure, so that it was too weak to withstand the iceberg’s impact.
Photos of the ship showed black marks. But engineering experts doubt whether this would have been the effect.
MUMMY'S CURSE
This theory goes that there was a cursed Egyptian mummy, the remains of Prince Amen-Ra aboard the ship, said to be linked to a series of untimely deaths after being dug up in the 19th century.
Writer William Stead told stories of its curse aboard the ship on the night of its sinking, then perished.
In an eerie echo Stead had written an earlier story about a steamer sinking with not enough lifeboats!
However, a log of the ship’s cargo found in 1985 didn’t mention a mummy.
SUB SUPPOSITION
NASA uproar as telescope detects 'titanium bubbles' that explain how stars explode
Surviving passengers reported hearing explosions when the ship began sinking and others saw mystery lights at sea nearby, leading some commentators to suggest that it was actually a German U-boat that sank the Titanic.
But the First World War didn’t break out until two years later making the notion far-fetched, though a German sub did torpedo the Lusitania liner in 2015.
MURDER MYSTERY?
It has been suggested that millionaire American banker JP Morgan, who decided not to sail on the Titanic at the last minute, somehow arranged for the ship to sink to kill rivals millionaires Jacob Astor, Isidor Straus and Benjamin Guggenheim who all died aboard, for business reasons.
There’s little evidence to back it up.
DOUBLE DARE
Titanic’s near identical sister ship, the RMS Olympic, was damaged in a collision with another ship in 2011.
The story goes that the owner’s the White Star Line didn’t have the funds for repair because they’d been at fault and switched the near identical Titanic for the Olympic in a complex insurance fraud scam.
However, relics from the wreck appear to confirm the lost ship was The Titanic and financial experts say the blag would not have worked.
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ALIEN ATTACK
In 2012, scientist Dr Josef Hostettler put forward the zany idea that large holes had been found underneath the hull of the sunken ship which could only have been caused by lasers from some kind of underwater alien craft and also pointed to reports of other strange phenomenon from vessels in the area at the same time.
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