The hunt for Bin Laden's body
Yeah... good luck with that...
Earlier this week, a treasure hunter announced that he had found Osama Bin Laden's body. Closer examination of this story revealed that this isn't ENTIRELY true.
Bill Warren hails from California, although he is currently based out of Azerbaijan. Warren owns an under-sea salvage company… a.k.a., he hunts for sunken treasure. Exciting, right?
Here's the catch: Warren doesn't claim to have found Bin Laden's actual body. Instead, he believes that he has located the exact spot in the ocean where it was dumped. And he is currently working to drum up funding for an attempt to venture to the bottom of the ocean and fetch it.
Okay, so, yeah. There are some problems here.
Problem #1: It's a darned big ocean. Warren claims to have located the dump site based on "satellite images shared by a Pentagon source." I would love to see those satellite images. I have this feeling they just show, you know. THE OCEAN.
Problem #2: It's an ocean, not a swimming pool. If you drop something in the middle of the ocean, currents are going to carry it pretty far away. Even the body of something as large as a whale can drift hundreds of miles away before finally settling to the bottom.
Let's be charitable and assume that Warren DOES have the EXACT spot where Bin Laden's body was dumped. Best-case scenario, that's a starting point - for a search that will have to span a hundred miles in each direction.
Problem #3: It's an ocean, not a stasis chamber. Bin Laden's body was dumped just over a year ago, as I type this. I once watched a nature special which featured time lapse photography of a whale carcass at the bottom of the ocean. It only takes 5-7 years for AN ENTIRE WHALE CARCASS (bones and all) to disappear without leaving a trace. It would no doubt take a lot less time for one puny little human carcass.
Problem #4: it's a fund-raising attempt. I would be a lot less skeptical, except for the fact that Warren is using this "information" to stump for funding. If he announced that he was going after Bin Laden's body with his own money, it would give his claims a lot more credibility.
I get why people are interested in dredging up Bin Laden's body. And I can definitely see the side of the skeptics who feel that it didn't really happen, or that it wasn't Bin Laden's body. But unfortunately, this is one of those mysteries that will probably go unsolved forever.