The Unsettling Disappearance of USS Cyclops



In March 1918, the nearly 20,000 ton USS Cyclops vanished without a trace while sailing through the Bermuda Triangle. What happened to collier and the 309 souls on board remains a mystery to this day.

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Sources:
A Passage to Oblivion: The Last Voyage of the USS Cyclops by Gian Quasar
https://www.history.navy.mil/research/publications/documentary-histories/united-states-navy-s/coal.html
https://www.shipscribe.com/usnaux/AC/AC04.html
https://maint.loc.gov/law/help/statutes-at-large/60th-congress/session-1/c60s1ch166.pdf
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/baltimore-bound-uss-cyclops-vanished-100-years-ago-its-fate-remains-a-mystery/2018/03/15/f50a3682-279f-11e8-bc72-077aa4dab9ef_story.html
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1969/july/cyclops-mystery
https://unwritten-record.blogs.archives.gov/2021/10/28/her-loss-remains-unknown-the-mysterious-disappearance-of-the-uss-cyclops-ac-4/
https://navyhistory.org/2013/06/unanswered-loss-uss-cyclops-march-1918/
https://doughboy.org/from-all-walks-of-life-sailors-of-the-uss-cyclops/

Chapters:
00:00 USS Cyclops
1:10 Chapter 1: One-Eyed Monster
5:58 Chapter 2: Balmy Tropical Nights
10:26 Chapter 3: The Final Voyage
13:55 Chapter 4: Searching for the Monster
17:02 Chapter 5: Exploring the Enigma
20:35 Chapter 6: Proteus & Nereus

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38 thoughts on “The Unsettling Disappearance of USS Cyclops”

  1. Has a ship ever been built with a double hull that is packed with a high density foam that could help prevent a ship from sinking? Maybe double wall with foam injected in between as well.

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  2. There is a caviat to "no records of the Cyclops in German records." In the book, "The Devils Triangle" by Richard Weiner, The author offers all the clues he can find for the incidents he writes about, including the Cyclops. He mentions there is one German reference to A ship named Cyclops, sunk by Captain Doenitz (Later Admiral).The ship was a collier flying a neutral flag in the North Sea. My bet is if someone reads the incident log and goes to the coordinates of the torpedo attack, The Cyclops will be found.

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  3. I've known of this case for years, and it pleases me to see that you give no credence to the German spy and mutiny theories,for which there are no evidence.
    It's more likely that Cyclops went down in a storm,possibly after having mechanical problems.
    No other account of this case i have seen ever mentioned the fortunate Mr Nervig's later film editing career, let alone 2 Oscars.
    So thank you for sharing that fact.
    An excellent account of this classic true story.👍👏

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  4. I guess if all three disappeared there's a chance the U-boat responsible made it back to the Mediterranean before being sunk (the only ones claimed that year were all sunk there) I feel like it might be a mix or bad boat design and attack because two of them made it all the way to WW2 and what are the chances they just happened to sink during wartime, I assume they would be busier though.

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  5. I have heard that the last hanging in USN history happened aboard USS Cyclops shortly before her disappearance. True or not?

    However, given that 3 out of 4 of this class all foundered for whatever reason, we can safely assume the basic design was fundamentally flawed, regardless of old-school skippers, bucko mates, and the general problems up and down the whole shipping industry regarding putting modern-ish (even today) steam ships out there with sailing ship means of communications and navigation.

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  6. There's a story out there that a diver, IIRC a Navy diver, that found a ship that could've been the Cyclops or one of the sisters. They were searching for a different wreck. He said the ship had structures like the Cyclops/sisters. Years later a search using the spot reported by the operation revealed nothing.

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  7. Banging and clanging hull plates indicative of stress loads under normal load out and then overloading the ships structure with a denser heavier bulk cargo probably caused a catastrophic breakup at the keel for all those ships. There must have been a design flaw not factored in for the extra dense bulk cargo. Wonder if computer modelling would provide a answer?

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  8. You were so close too. I'll give you credit, you kind of read a book (unlike most idiots that put videos up about Cyclops), but how could you possibly get this wrong after that!? Proteus and Nereus were not sister ships to the Cyclops. No matter how many time you repeat the lie, it will never be true. When the Cyclops came under budget, they spun those costs off into the Neptune, not the Proteus and Nereus. Don't believe me? Open you eyes! They look absolutely nothing alike. Jupiter, Cyclops, and Neptune were an experimental class to test out new propulsion systems. Jupiter was built with a Turbo-Electric, Neptune was built with a Geared Turbine, and Cyclops was the control ship with the classic Vertical-Triple-Expansion. Proteus and Nereus were shorter, narrower, and had alm0st completely different stern layouts due to their single stacks. At a passing glance, they might look a bit similar to the Cyclops, but you really should know better. By this metric, Orion, Jason, Vulcan, Mars, and Hector might as well be sister ships. Everyone just dumbly lumps Proteus and Nereus with the Cyclops because they all went down in the Triangle. What happened to the Proteus and Nereus is barely a mystery. Both ships were in such bad condition after being mothballed that the Navy sold them into merchant service with SIn-Mac Lines in 1940. Sin-Mac being Sin-Mac barely addressed the poor condition of the vessels and rushed them both into service down u-boat alley in the Atlantic loaded with cargoes they were never designed to carry. Doesn't take a genius to connect those dots. I hope you read this comment and don't just ignore it, because you seem to put in the leg work on your videos and do these ships some justice, but you dropped the ball on this one big detail. The problem is that when you perpetuate these lies, every uninformed ship historian immediately believes you and will smugly perpetuate those lies to anyone who will listen. I know this, because I used to believe the Proteus-class myth, until I discovered one day that the story was completely wrong and all I had to do was look at a picture, see that somethings not right, and do a little more research. You've got a decent channel here, don't just become another video factory with low quality control. When it comes to ships, there usually a bunch of sources with conflicting accounts, so it's difficult to suss out what's right and what's wrong at times, but I can guarantee you that you are very wrong on this one. Just take a closer look.

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  9. Given the description of the ship "conforming to the shape of the sea", I'd guess that these ships broke in half in heavy seas. The Cyclops was a main character in a Clive Cussler "Dirk Pitt" novel of the same name, Cyclops..

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  10. Fascinating story; thanks for making and sharing this. I like how this tale spans decades and involves both Theodore Roosevelt (US President when the Cyclops was built) and Franklin Roosevelt (who declared Cyclops "lost with all hands").

    As for what happened to the Cyclops, I think you're right: it was bad weather + shifting cargo. The Bermuda Triangle truly is a very dangerous stretch of ocean. Not because of anything supernatural, but because it's Hurricane Alley. Weather there can shift from good to bad in minutes flat, often killing the unwary.

    As with other unexplained disappearances (Amelia Earhart; MH-370; etc), I hope Cyclops is eventually found so that this mystery can be solved and so that any lessons which can be learned from it are learned.

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  11. That last part about the unfinished lives gave me chills. I appreciate the seriousness and solemnity that you have with these cases, especially these that have been bastardized to ridiculousness with conspiracy theories.

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  12. Mention it's 2 sister ships that also disappeared in the carribean as well!. The Nereus and Proteus 26 years later after the cyclops. My grandpa's brother was on the Proteus as ships carpenter. Hope you mention them in this video

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  13. I only just made the connection, but the USS Cyclops was the subject of one of Clive Cussler's novels that I must have read when I was nine or ten. I think I'll read it again after this video. Great work, as always!

    Reply

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