Borehole 10-X camera images

About This Document

In August 1971, with Borehole 10-X reamed to 27 inches, Triton Alliance and CBC Halifax lowered a remote-controlled underwater camera roughly 230 feet down into the water-filled cavity. Dan Blankenship watched on a monitor in a shed at the surface with driller Parker Kennedy. He later described the images as showing the outlines of three rectangular shapes, one with a curved top and what he read as a handle, along with a pickaxe lying beside several logs. He also reported a severed human hand drifting past the camera for several seconds, seen also by Kennedy; no photograph of it survives, since an attempt to shoot the monitor with a flash camera produced only a picture of the glare. Kerry Allard, a project coordinator who reviewed the clearer stills, described a cavern roughly 12 by 18 feet and 7 feet high, with what looked like a tunnel opening toward shore.

The tape sat unexamined for more than twenty years before a 1993-95 computer enhancement and a March 1995 public screening at the Western Shore firehall, where not everyone in attendance found the images convincing. Marine geologist Gordon Fader, who later reviewed the original footage directly, has said he could not make out the objects Blankenship describes, calling it grainy underwater video shot through moving silt on an outdated monitor. The most direct test came in 2016, when diver John Chatterton became the first person since Blankenship's own 1970s dives to stand in the chamber; he reported a natural sinkhole rather than a tunnel entrance and read the supposed chest as a rock.