In 1958, the US Air Force lost a nuclear weapon off the coast of Georgia, near Tybee Island. The weapon is thought to be irretrievably lost, despite a brief glimmer of hope in 2004.
So, I was pretty surprised to see a story claiming that a Canadian couple found it on a diving holiday. But it’s not true.
Barbara Johnson of the World News Daily has a completely fictitious story about a Canadian couple finding the Tybee bomb on a diving holiday. Let’s be super clear: This story is complete and total bullshit. Although, you know, you might have guessed that from the author’s bio: “A former pornstar, she has rapidly reached the summit in her new profession thanks to her good looks and ‘social” skills.'” Her recent body of work includes stories like “California Man Gets 25-Pound Penile Implant to Become Pornstar.”
I’ve archived the story so you don’t have to give Ms. Johnson your clicks or worry about her deleting the post or its tell-tale pictures. It’s easy to establish the story is fake, using a reverse image search.
Here are the three pictures from the story: Two of “Navy” divers with the “bomb” and one of the happy couple who “found” it on a diving vacation.
A simple reverse-image search shows the images are taken from elsewhere on the internet. The captions are just made up.
- The first image is actually a DPA image of a (presumably German) diver with a World War 2-era munition.
- The second image, of the happy Canadian couple, is from a wedding website in Australia. Their real names are Aimee and Sam, not Jason and Christina.
- The third image is an image of an IDF diver on a mine-clearance exercise.
So, I think we can basically conclude that the story is a total fabrication. The Tybee bomb is still missing. The reference images are below.
Update | Local WOTC reporter Don Logana picked up the phone and did what any good reporter would do. “I spoke with Tybee Police, Ocean Rescue and city officials,” Logana writes, “who all say they would have known if anything like this had happened.”