On April 14, 1912, the Titanic collided with an iceberg, damaging the hull's plates below the waterline on the starboard side, causing the front compartments to flood. The ship then sank two hours and forty minutes later, with approximately 1,496 fatalities as a result of drowning or hypothermia. Since then, many conspiracy theories have been suggested regarding the disaster. These theories have been refuted by subject-matter experts.
Pack ice
Captain L. M. Collins, a former member of the Ice Pilotage Service, based a conclusion on three pieces of evidence and going off of his own experience of ice navigation and witness statements given at the two post-disaster enquiries, that what the Titanic hit was not an iceberg but low-lying pack ice. His book, called The Sinking of the Titanic: The Mystery Solved (2003) goes into further detail about the events.
There were no reports of haze the entire night of the sinking, but at 11.30 pm the two lookouts spotted what they believed to be haze on the horizon, extending approximately 20° on either side of the ship's bow. Collins believes that what they saw was not haze but a strip of pack ice, ahead of the ship. Each witness had a different description of the ice. high by the lookouts, high by Quartermaster Rowe on the deck, and only very low in the water by Fourth Officer Boxhall, on the starboard side near the darkened bridge. "An optical phenomenon that is well known to ice navigators" where the flat sea and extreme cold distort the appearance of objects near the waterline, making them appear to be the height of the ship's lights, about above the surface near the bow, and high alongside the superstructure explains what probably happened by the witnesses' descriptions. The Titanic made a turn by rotating one-third of the way from the bow, which caused her rudder to hard over and crushed her starboard side into an iceberg. This would have caused the ship to flood, capsize, and sink within minutes, damaging the starboard side of the hull and potentially the superstructure.
Olympic exchange hypothesis
One of the controversial and elaborate theories surrounding the sinking of the Titanic was advanced by Robin Gardiner in his book Titanic: The Ship That Never Sank? (1998). Gardiner draws on several events and coincidences that occurred in the months, days, and hours leading up to the sinking of the Titanic, and concludes that the ship that sank was in fact Titanics sister ship , disguised as Titanic, as an insurance scam by its owners, the International Mercantile Marine Group, controlled by American financier J.P. Morgan that had acquired the White Star Line in 1902.
Researchers Bruce Beveridge and Steve Hall took issue with many of Gardiner's claims in their book Olympic and Titanic: The Truth Behind the Conspiracy (2004). Author Mark Chirnside has also raised serious questions about the switch theory. British historian Gareth Russell, for his part, calls the theory "so painfully ridiculous that one can only lament the thousands of trees which lost their lives to provide the paper on which it has been articulated." He notes that, "since the sister ships had significant interior architectural and design differences, switching them secretly in a week would be nearly impossible from a practical standpoint. A switch would also not be economically worthwhile, since the ship's owners could have simply damaged the ship while docked (for instance, by setting a fire) and collected the insurance money from that "accident," which "would have been far less severe, and infinitely less stupid, than sailing her out into the middle of the Atlantic with thousands of people, and their luggage, on board, and ramming her into an iceberg."