Just Revealed: A Shocking Update Connected to an Expedition Investigation

I really am just stunned sitting here about this news. I knew Stockton Rush and I knew Hamish Harding, too. Josh Gates from Expedition X is breaking the news and it’s horrifying. The submersible felt wrong.
Back in May 2021, somewhere in Puget Sound off the coast of Washington, Josh Gates sat inside Ocean Gates Titan submersible on a test dive with CEO Stockton Rush. The plan was simple. Film a documentary episode about the Titanic wreck, bring millions of viewers to the ocean floor, make incredible television.
But as the dive went on, Gates felt something he’d felt before in haunted Romanian forests, abandoned tunnels under Jerusalem, and remote Himalayan valleys where local guides refused to go after dark. That same gut feeling.
Something is very wrong here.
Two years later, in June 2023, that same submersible imploded during a Titanic expedition.
Stockton Rush and four passengers died instantly.
The implosion happened so fast their bodies were never recovered. And Josh Gates, the guy who spent two decades investigating monsters and mysteries around the world, had to explain to reporters why he’d walked away from one of the biggest opportunities of his career.
At 48 years old, Gates has visited over 100 countries. He’s camped in Chernobyl.
He’s spent the night in King Tut’s tomb.
He’s eaten things that would make most people vomit just looking at them. He holds a degree in archaeology from Tufts University. He’s won an Emmy. He’s discovered actual human remains buried beneath one of the seven wonders of the world. And he’s built a television empire with seven different shows across multiple networks. But the decision that might matter most happened in a moment of pure gut instinct when he told his network president they shouldn’t do the Titanic dive that something bad was going to happen and then it did. Joshua Marshall Gates was born August 10th 1977 in Manes Tur by the Sea Massachusetts.
His father, Lee, worked as a commercial deep sea diver, traveling to exotic locations for underwater construction and salvage operations. His mother, Sonia, was British, so they made annual trips across the Atlantic to visit family. Young Josh grew up with a passport and a feeling that the world was way bigger than his small coastal town.
He started scuba diving at age 10. His father taught him the mechanics, sure, but more importantly, the mindset. How to stay calm when something goes wrong underwater. How to trust your training when your instincts are screaming. How to know when to push through and when to call it quits in surface. Those lessons would matter later in ways his father couldn’t have predicted.
Gates was president of his high school class. The kind of kid who was good at everything without trying too hard.
Smart enough to get into Tufts University. Charismatic enough to run for student government and win. But underneath all that normal success was a kid obsessed with Indiana Jones, the Goonies, and the idea that the world still had mysteries worth finding.
At Tufts from 1995 to 1999, he made a decision that seemed crazy to everyone, including his parents. He declared a double major in archaeology and drama.
Two of the lowest earning degrees you could pick. He joked about it years later. Maybe if I’d minored in philosophy, I could have made it a complete disaster.
But the combination made sense to him.
He wanted to find things and tell stories about finding things.
During college, he joined University of Maryland archaeological excavations at Cesaria Maritima in Israel. The ancient city’s harbor was underwater, so he got to mix his scuba skills with real archaeological work. He was part of a small team digging up underwater ruins, learning how to document artifacts the right way, how to work with academic institutions. Oh, who balance the thrill of discovery with the slow, careful patience real archaeology needs. After graduation, Gates moved to Los Angeles with his archaeology degree and zero plan for what to do with it. He waited tables. He took acting classes. He appeared in commercials for BMW, CocaCola, Dish Network. He narrated audio books in studios reading other people’s adventure stories while waiting for his own.
The break came in 2002 when he was a contestant on ESPN’s reality show Beg, Borrow, and Deal. Teams raced across the country with no money, depending on strangers kindness and their own smarts.
During the show, Gates got a Boston Bruins logo tattooed on the bottom of his foot. The kind of wild thing you do at 25 with cameras rolling and you’re trying to prove you’ll do anything.
That willingness to do anything caught the eye of producer Neil Mant. In 2007, Sci-Fi Channel wanted a show investigating cryptids and paranormal stuff around the world. They’d seen too many hosts who believed every shadow was Bigfoot. They wanted someone different, someone who could travel, someone with real credentials, someone who could balance skepticism and open-mindedness, someone who didn’t take himself too seriously. They wanted Josh Gates.
Destination Truth premiered June 6th, 2007.
The idea was simple. Gates and a small crew traveled to remote spots, checking out reports of supernatural creatures and haunted places. Each episode had the same flow. Research and interviews, crazy travel to super far places, overnight investigations with thermal cameras and audio gear, then evidence analysis with real experts back home.
The show’s magic was Gates himself. He had the school background to ask smart questions. He had the strength to hike through jungles, climb mountains, and spend nights in places most people avoid, even in daylight. He had the funny, self-mocking humor to joke about the cars, planes, and helicopters that always broke down in the middle of nowhere. And he had rearded al curiosity about why people believe the things they do. Over five seasons and 55 episodes, Destination Truth hit 75 countries across six continents. They checked out the Yeti in the Himalayas, the Chupacabra in Mexico, sea monsters in Iceland, haunted spots in Romania, Japan, Egypt, and tons more places where guides took them far and then said, “No way they’re going farther.” The Yeti episode became the show’s biggest moment.
March 2008, Season 2, Episode 1. Gates and his team tked four days through the Himalayas, following local stories of large two-legged creatures up high near a river. They found footprints, not bare tracks, not human prints. Something else, something with a foot over a foot long, clear toes and a walking pattern that looked two-legged. They made plaster casts back in the states. They showed them to Dr. Jeffrey Meldrum, an expert in primate movement who’d studied it for decades. Meldrum looked closely, measured compared to known animals. His take was careful but big. The print looked anatomically real and didn’t match any known primate.
That footprint cast is now at Walt Disney World’s Expedition Everest ride.
Real evidence from a TV investigation sitting in a theme park about the legend it was trying to check out.
But the Yeti episode wasn’t the scariest. That goes to Romania.
September 2009, season 3, episode 1. The team went to investigate Hoya Bachu Forest, said to be the most haunted forest in the world.
The trip started rough. On the flight to Romania, the plane’s roof literally ripped off. Not a small tear. The whole roof section peeled back in the air.
They landed okay, but it set the mood.
That night’s forest investigation became destination truth legend. Crew member Evan Stone was doing a solo check with a thermal camera when something threw him backward. Not tripped him, threw him. He hit the ground hard. When he got up and checked, he found deep bleeding scratch marks under his thick gloves. Three parallel scratches that shouldn’t have been there couldn’t have been there. The gloves were still whole. Whatever scratched him went right through without ripping the fabric.
The episode pulled 2.1 million viewers, the highest rated in the show’s history, and it scared everyone who worked on it.
The real behindthe-scenes stuff on Destination Truth, was often more dangerous than what aired. Gear broke all the time. Cars caught fire in the African bush. Engines died in the Amazon, forcing the crew to paddle dugout canoes through piranhafilled waters. The plane thing in Romania wasn’t fake. It happened. They kept filming because that’s what they did.
Gates got super sick during the Nan Medall investigation, throwing up so hard he had to be carried out of the ancient ruins. Researcher Aaron Ryder had a bad dirt bike crash that needed stitches right there on a picnic table with an IV bag hanging from a tree. No hospital nearby, just a medic with a suture kit doing what he could.
In Vietnam’s Halong Bay, a nearby boat almost hit Gates and his cameraman during an underwater shoot. They came up and saw a fishing boat coming straight at them. The captain had no idea they were in the water. They dove and the boat passed right over close enough to hear the propeller slicing the water above them. Gates later called Destination Truth. No exaggeration. One of the hardest shows to produce in reality TV history. It wasn’t five seasons of almost non-stop travel to remote spots with a tiny crew and gear that broke constantly.
The miracle isn’t that they made 55 episodes. The miracle is that nobody died.
The show ended in 2012 when Gates’s contract with NBC Universal ran out. In March 2014, he posted on Facebook that Destination Truth had taken its last trip. The tone was sad. It had been an amazing run. They’d seen and been to places most people never will. But it was done. XM except it wasn’t really done. It was just changing.
Expedition Unknown premiered January 8th, 2015 on Travel Channel. Same host, same humor, totally different goal.
Instead of chasing cryptids and haunted houses, Gates teamed up with real archaeological groups to check out historical mysteries. The change was on purpose and big. Destination Truth was entertainment first, investigation second. The point was great TV in scary places. Expedition Unknown would be investigation first, entertainment second. The point was to do real archaeological work and bring viewers right to the front lines of actual exploration.
Gates started using ground penetrating radar, 3D scanning tech, DNA analysis, proper digging methods with real archaeologists, and local officials watching. He wasn’t just visiting sites and talking about them. He was getting dirty doing the real archaeology he’d learned at Cesarea Maritima 20 years before. The show moved to Discovery Channel in 2018 and has run for 16 seasons and over 230 episodes. And unlike Destination Truth, which looked at hundreds of mysteries and found almost no solid proof, Expedition Unknown, started making real finds.
In 2020, the team dug up a huge German bunker complex in Normandy that had been buried since D-Day 75 years earlier. In 2023, working with Project Recover in Chuke Lagoon, Micronesia, they found a downed World War II plane and remains of missing servicemen from Operation Hailstone. At Sakara in Egypt, Gates helped excavate mummies from 4,000y old tombs. But the biggest find came in October 2024.
Gates went to Petra, Jordan. The ancient city carved into red sandstone cliffs.
The treasury building, famous from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, gets hundreds of thousands of tourists every year. Most snap pics of the front and leave. Almost nobody knows it’s a tomb, and almost nobody knew another tomb was hidden right underneath it. Working with the American Center of Research, Jordan’s Department of Antiquities, and the Petra Development Authority, Gates’s team used ground penetrating radar under the Treasury. The scans showed a void, a chamber sealed for over 2,000 years. The dig took weeks, carefully clearing sand and rock, recording everything. When they finally broke into the chamber, they found 12 complete human skeletons with ceramic pots and artifacts around them. One skeleton held a ceramic cup that looked eerily like the Holy Grail from the Indiana Jones movie shot right there. Archaeologists called it maybe the most important tomb ever found at Petra. The artifacts went back over 2,000 years to when Petra was a busy trade city. The discovery hit news around the world, and Josh Gates, the guy who started chasing Bigfoot, was now part of real archaeological finds that experts will study for decades. The change was complete. From monster hunter to archaeologist, from entertainment to science, from hunting creatures that probably aren’t real to uncovering proof of human civilizations that definitely were.
On October 17th, 2025, Expedition Unknown won the daytime Emmy for Outstanding Travel and Adventure Program. Gates stood on stage with the Emmy, probably thinking about that kid at Tufts, double majoring in archaeology and drama. Those two impractical degrees his parents worried about. They’d turned out perfect after all. But before all that, before the Emmy, before Petra, before switching from cryptids to archaeology, there was the submersible.
May 2021, Josh Gates sat in the Titan submersible with Ocean Gate CEO Stockton Rush. The dive was meant as a test, a chance for Gates to try the sub before agreeing to a full Titanic episode. The plan was to film a big documentary, Descend to the Wreck, show viewers the most famous shipwreck ever, make incredible TV.
The Puget Sound Dive was shallow, nothing like Titanic Depth, but problems started right away. The sub acted weird.
Systems didn’t work right. Rush didn’t seem worried. He brushed off Gates’s questions, joked about the vehicle’s quirks, acted like serious issues were no big deal. Gates’s instincts kicked in hard. The same instincts that kept him safe in a 100 dangerous spots worldwide.
The instincts his dad taught him in those early scuba days. When something feels wrong underwater, trust it. Don’t explain it away. Don’t let someone talk you out of it. If it feels wrong, it is wrong.
After the dive, Gates told his crew, “We’re not doing this.” They pushed back. This was huge. A chance to film one of Earth’s most iconic spots. The network had approved. Budget was set.
Everything was lined up.
Gates called the network president himself.
I’m really sorry. This was a big deal for you to approve, and I appreciate it, but we shouldn’t do this. It’s a mistake. Something bad is going to happen here.
He walked away from the Titanic episode, walked away from what would have been one of expedition Unknown’s biggest moments, and he did it all on a feeling.
June 18th, 2023, the Titan sub started its drop to the Titanic.
Stockton Rush was on board with four passengers, including British billionaire Hamish Harding and French Titanic expert Paul Enri.
About 1 hour and 45 minutes down, the sub imploded. The pressure at that depth is insane.
When the hull gave way, it gave way completely and instantly. All five died before their brains could even register it. The debris was found days later after a huge search. The implosion was so bad that getting remains back was impossible. The world mourned.
Investigators looked into what went wrong, and Josh Gates had to tell reporters why he said no to being on that sub. His statement was straight.
Titan did not perform well on my dive.
Ultimately, I walked away from a huge opportunity to film Titanic due to my safety concerns with the ocean gate platform.
There’s more to the history and design of Titan that has not been made public.
Much of I was t concerning. He explained more about the test dive later. Stockton seemed completely unaware of how bad this dive had gone from our perspective.
Once I saw that was where he was willing to go to get this operation running, a kind of fear set in for me that was so much deeper than anything I experienced while riding in the sub.
Gates’s video from that May 2021 test dive shows up in the 2025 HBO documentary Implosion: The Titanic Subaster.
a record of the warning signs that were there the whole time if anyone had listened. Josh Gates is 48 years old now. He lives in Los Angeles. He’s divorced with two kids, Owen Indiana and Isa Amelia, named after his childhood heroes Indiana Jones and Amelia Heheart.
He travels about 200 days a year. He’s been to over 100 countries. He’s a fellow of the Explorers Club and a trustee on the board of the Archaeological Institute of America.
He’s producing and hosting multiple shows right now. Expedition Unknown just kicked off its 16th season with scans of the Great Pyramid in 3D, Anchor’s 40th anniversary treasure hunt, and a search for Alexander the Great’s tomb.
Expedition X keeps going with paranormal stuff, led by Teams Gates overseas, but doesn’t usually join. Expedition Files was Discovery Channel’s top new series of 2024.
He’s also touring the country with Josh Gates Live, doing theater shows where he shares stories and answers questions from fans who followed him for almost 20 years. His thinking hasn’t changed since his 2011 book, Destination: Truth: Memoirs of a Monster Hunter. The real secret to chasing the unknown is in the looking, not the finding. The journey matters. He calls himself an open-minded skeptic. He doesn’t just brush off paranormal claims, but he needs proof before believing them. He’s been to places spooky enough to make him wonder if something’s out there science can’t explain yet. He asks questions instead of giving answers.
In a 2020 interview, he talked about his spiritual side. In the first episode of Expedition Unknown, Search for the Afterlife, I openly said I was raised Christian and like a lot of people, drifted away from church as I got older.
Now I have two small kids, a family, and I’m starting to ask those questions again. That honesty is what makes Gates special. He’s not pretending he has all the answers. He’s just really curious, really interested in why people believe what they do. Really respectful of local cultures and traditions, even when he doesn’t share them. So what’s the real story here? What’s the truth behind a career spent chasing mysteries worldwide?
It’s that gut feelings matter. Josh Gates walked away from the Titanic dive because something felt wrong. He couldn’t explain exactly what. He couldn’t point to one broken part or bad design. He just knew, and he trusted that knowing, even when it cost him something massive.
Two years later, his gut was proven right in the worst way. Five people died because they didn’t have that same feeling. Or they did and ignored it, or they trusted someone else’s confidence more than their own doubts.
Gates has spent two decades going to risky places, haunted forests, abandoned nuclear sites, war zones, deep jungles where help is days away, underwater caves, mountaintops.
He’s done it all. Survived it all. Not because he’s reckless, but because he knows when to keep going and when to