Well, hello everyone out there in Acorn land for another installment of Jay’s Acorn Blog. It’s been some time since we’ve had a good mystery, and I figured it was just about time to delve into a great one that I’ve never heard of before. With this being said, it’s really a mystery wrapped in a conundrum. The authenticity of the story is even in question, but the US Coast Guard has referenced it, so one would think it has to be true. Well, sit back and let’s read about the Mystery of the SS Ourang Medan.
The story starts off in the Straits of Malacca, a narrow stretch of water, 580 miles long, located between the Malaysian Peninsula and the Indonesian island of Sumatra. This is the main shipping channel between the Indian and the Pacific Ocean and is one of the world’s most important shipping lanes.
The Mystery Begins
It was in June of 1947, and World War II had just ended a couple of years before, and the world was getting back into a normal routine with commercial shipping starting to rebound. It was a calm late night, and the weather couldn’t have been nicer. At least two ships along with a handful of land-based radio stations picked up an SOS that was sent in two parts. What was transmitted was very alarming, and I’m sure radio operators decoding the message were very unnerved by what was sent. What they heard was, “All Officers, including the Captain, are dead. Lying in chartroom and bridge. Possibly whole crew dead,” and then a couple of minutes later, “I die.”
The two American ships which picked up the mysterious messages thought it was important to investigate this ship’s whereabouts. With British and Dutch listening posts help, the coordinates of the vessel thought to be transmitting the messages were triangulated to determine its location. The messages were coming from the middle of the Indian Ocean, well off any known shipping channels and thousands of miles from the Malaccan Straits. The stricken ship’s coordinates were given to the nearest vessel, which was the American merchant ship the Silver Star. With an SOS, it’s the responsibility of any nearby vessels to render aid whenever possible, and the Silver Star didn’t hesitate in altering its course to intercept the ship in distress. With the coordinates and the messages sent, I’m sure the Captain of the Silver Star wanted to take precautions when they came upon the vessel in question.
It was two to three hours later when the Silver Star spotted the mystery ship, and it was relayed to the Captain that the name of the vessel was the SS Ourang Medan. Even as the rescue ship pulled alongside, no signs of life could be seen visually. All efforts to contact the crew failed, forcing the Captain of the Silver Star to organize a search party to board the SS Ourang Medan.
Once aboard the ship, the search party fanned out looking for the crew and Captain. What they found was described as being horrific. Some bodies were found on the main deck with the victim’s eyes being wide open, and their faces lay twisted in sheer terror. Their arms reached upwards and appeared that they all had tried to fight something off, but they were frozen in place where they fell. The Captain was found on the bridge as one might have expected. The other members of the bridge crew were found in the wheelhouse and chartroom. The radio operator, who presumably sent the distress call, was found at his station with his finger still in a position to type out a message in Morse Code. The engineering crew were found at their stations with the same look of horror on their faces. Even the ship’s dog didn’t escape the wrath of the unknown assailant. He was discovered in the corner with a snarl and bearing his teeth, again frozen in place.
Another odd thing that was noticed is that the bodies seemed to be decomposing right before the rescuer’s eyes at an alarmingly fast pace. The temperature was well above 100 degrees F, but this wouldn’t account for this extreme rate of decomposition. The mystery even gets stranger when temperatures around the vessel seemed to be cooler in some spots on the ship. Measurements were taken, and some locations were hovering around 45 degrees F with no explanation as to why this difference.
With all of these findings, the search party was eager to get off the ship, but not before the Captain of the Silver Star decided to attach a tow line to the stricken vessel with plans on towing it to the closest port for salvage. Soon after both ships were underway, smoke appeared to be coming out of the number 4 cargo hold of the Medan, and the Captain ordered for the tow line to be cut. Right after this happened, the SS Ourang Medan exploded with such force that it lifted the ship out of the water, and it sank very rapidly.
Is this Story True?
Not much new information appeared about this story until an official US Coast Guard report appeared in May 1952, where the crewmembers of the Silver Star were interviewed. The grim details were laid out of what was found on the SS Ourang Medan when the rescue crew set foot on the boat. Coast Guard reports are very organized and investigated thoroughly to weed out fact versus fiction and this investigation was no different. Many claim that this story was a hoax, but according to the US Coast Guard, this strange story is true.
One primary argument that many skeptical people bring up is that the SS Ourang Medan was not registered at the time it sank. Officially this ship never existed. We will discuss this a little later in the story. As for the Silver Star, its name was also in question during the timeframe of this mystery. It was bought by the Grace Line shipping company and renamed earlier in 1946 from Santa Cecilia to the Silver Star. Many claim that the ship’s name took place after the incident, so this story is false. One point to bring up is that this is 1946 and changing the name on a ship took time to be recorded. It’s not like today where you hit enter into a computer, and its instantly changed.
Just the Facts, Ma’am
Even though I’ve never heard of this mystery before doesn’t mean that people haven’t looked into the story. For example, Otto Mielke published a booklet in 1954 where he investigates this mystery. The name of the booklet is “Das Totenschiffin der Südsee” and can still be found online today. Another person, Vincent Gaddis wrote a book called “Invisible Horizons: Strange Mysteries of the Sea-True stories that defy logic…” who spent many years looking into the facts about this case. He mentions the names of the American ships that initially went in pursuit of the SS Ourang Medan and had knowledge of the ship’s route, cargo, and names of some of the crewmembers and Captain. Even with all the information, there are still debates on what year this incident took place which doesn’t help the credibility of the story.
Deadly Cargo?
The next logical question is, what was the ship carrying? The bodies found aboard the ship showed no signs of trauma, so what could explain the cause of death and the positions the bodies ended up in? The simple answer is some sort of chemical exposure. Many speculate that the ship was carrying an illegal load of toxic chemicals or weapons, which somehow broke open, killed everyone on board and caused the boat to explode. The reason why the search party wasn’t affected is because once these chemicals turn into a gas, they disperse very rapidly and are carried off by the prevailing winds with no evidence left behind except for the bodies.
If the ship were carrying a load of dangerous chemicals, it most likely would have been illegal at the time or in the best-case scenario, extremely negligent. If they were carrying chemical weapons, this was and still is illegal by international standards. In 1925 the Geneva Protocol was ratified by 33 nations outlawing all chemical weapons. So, if you were to attempt to transport such chemicals, it would have to be done in secrecy. An excellent way to do this would be to use a ship not properly registered or changing the ship’s name after it left port by painting over all old names and markings. Some other methods you could use to obfuscate would be to utilize a foreign crew and alter or destroy all records of the ships past voyages. This would have been extremely easy to do back in 1946 with the lack of computerized records.
The reasoning behind why someone would go through all this trouble, is so a nation interested in obtaining such illegal weapons could disallow knowledge if discovered. Remember, this is right after World War II, and the Allies were attempting to scoop up as much technology from the Axis powers as possible. To the victor goes the spoils, and there were a lot of spoils to grab to include technical information from Japan and Germany. The US and the Soviet Union were in an information race against each other. They were collecting everything they could to expand their knowledge base in many areas to include biological and chemical weaponry. Now the story is turning into a conspiracy. I told you this would be interesting.
Many believe the ship was carrying nitroglycerin and potassium cyanide, or even various nerve agents such as Tabun, which the Japanese were working with during World War II. Many chemicals do not react well with salt water, and if there was a breach in one of the holds abord the SS Ourang Medan, this could release toxic gasses, fire, and even explosions could have resulted.
Let’s look a little deeper into the nerve agent Tabun. This is a nasty substance that the Japanese army, Unit 731, was looking to help the empire of Japan win the war with. Unit 731 was designed to be a secret research and development unit meant to create the most dangerous chemical and biological weapons known at that time. The Unit was formed in 1932 and conducted experiments on captured Australian, American, Russian, Chinese, and British prisoners, some of which were the worst war crimes ever committed during World War II. Tabun is a highly toxic nerve agent which blocks neurotransmitters responsible for telling the muscles to relax, amongst many other troubles it creates in the human body. This could explain why the bodies were found the way they were, with the appearance of arms reaching skyward, looking as if they were fighting off an adversary.
In the End
When looking into this mystery, you will find 1001 different ideas of what happened. Some believe it was another Philadelphia experiment gone wrong, yet others blame UFOs for this mystery. Whether it was natural or paranormal which caused these unnatural deaths, it seems this spooky story will live on for some time.
Now please tell me what you think. Was the mystery of the S.S. Ourang Medan an actual event or just an old mariner’s tale designed to scare everyone or caution people from voyaging too far into the unknown? Either way this is a spooky story in which we will never know exactly what happened. Well, until next time, be safe and don’t go sailing on any boats with mystery cargo. Just my public service announcement from the Acorn Blog.