The astronaut who hid his observations from space from NASA and became a treasure hunter

When Leroy Gordon Cooper boarded the Mercury spacecraft for a NASA mission, he never imagined he would become a treasure hunter. It was May 1963 and it was another six years before Liam Armstrong set foot on the moon. The United States and the Soviet Union were in the middle of the Cold War, and both countries wanted to prove their supremacy in space.

With that pressure, Cooper arrived at the Mercury mission, which orbited the Earth 22 times in its solo flight. Their mission lasted 34 hours, 19 minutes, and 49 seconds, and one of their objectives was to locate Soviet missile sites near the United States. The suspicion was strong, as barely seven months had passed since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

But the astronaut’s goal was another. While successfully completing the NASA mission, Cooper also made other observations from the spacecraft. The system flew over the Caribbean Sea and found anomalies, particularly magnetic readings that indicated material had been found at the bottom of the sea.

Cooper let his mind wander from the Soviet missiles and realized the origin of the anomalies: they were shipwrecks, happened centuries ago, and still hold treasure.

Upon returning to Earth, the location of the wrecks became the astronaut’s best-kept secret. The coordinates he wrote down in a notebook were collected on a map, which led him on a journey to the sea in search of hidden treasures.

Between Europe and America there were hundreds of crossings corresponding to shipwrecks, sunken ships lost along the way to storms, pirate attacks or accidents.

Cooper believed that one of the ships he found at the bottom of the sea was the Santa Maria, in which Christopher Columbus traveled in 1492 on his voyage to America. But the astronaut died in 2004 without fulfilling his dream of discovering all the secrets. and treasures.

The shipwrecks are still in the same spot, perhaps waiting for another adventurer to try to find out their position.