Creepy pasta

The titanics sinking was planned

What if the Titanic never sank at all?

That's the thinking behind one particular conspiracy theory. According to this idea, the Olympic - the Titanic's older, nearly identical sister ship - was actually the one that went down near Newfoundland.

But what would've been the point of switching the ships in secret?

In the book "Titanic: The Ship That Never Sank?" researcher Robin Gardiner wrote that the whole disaster was the result of an insurance scam by the International Mercantile Marine Co., which owned the White Star Line. The Olympic and the Titanic were both White Star Line vessels.

According to Gardiner's theory, the trouble started when the Olympic crashed into a warship in 1911, and was blamed for the accident in an ensuing inquiry. As a result, the White Star Line - an IMM subsidiary - was unable to receive an insurance payout.

Gardiner theorized that the line fixed up the Olympic as best as it could, and masqueraded it as the Titanic. By allowing the wounded ship to continue on under an assumed name, the company could collect the insurance payment when it sunk.

The alleged intent wasn't to kill anyone onboard - if the plan had gone off without a hitch, the ship would have sunk slowly and close to another ship that could subsequently rescue the crew and passengers. So what went wrong? According to Gardiner, the liner ended up accidentally running over a darkened rescue ship, which passengers and crew members would later mistake for an iceberg.

The blog Ultimate Titanic reported that, despite Gardiner's theory, all numbered items pulled from the wreck of the Titanic bore the construction number 401. The Olympic's construction number, on the other hand, was 400.

What's more, "Conspiracies at Sea: Titanic and Lusitania" author J. Kent Layton wrote that, before the Olympic was broken up for scrap, its woodwork was sold. ""Never, not once, as a single piece of woodwork from the Olympic turned up with the number '401' stamped on the reverse," Layton wrote.