Diver Discovers a Strange Vehicle in the Detroit River | Drain the Oceans

I've lived in this area my entire life. Right on the United States border. Just a half a mile across the river from Detroit. I've been a scuba diver and a diving instructor for over 25 years. I was a broke university student and it was the only place I could dive.

Because of wind and waves, the visibility is very limited, so usually less than five feet and sometimes as little as one foot of visibility. So, when you can only see this far in front of your face, it's going to limit the people who are actually going to want to do that dive. There is a very strong current in the river, and it can really drag you down the river quickly. It's an extremely dangerous environment, to say the least.

I found that every single dive was an adventure. You could find bottles and cars and boats and shipwrecks and guns. And it just hooked me, and I’ve continued to do it until this day. I was speaking with a local diver. He said he had found a vehicle that was upside down, laying in the middle of the Detroit River. And it was something that definitely should not have been there. Since this was not something that was well known, I wanted to follow up and see it for myself.

Now, remember, with only a foot of visibility in the river, it's easier said than done. I do a search pattern, so you just do a zigzag on the bottom of the water. Just going back and forth and just seeing what you can find. I actually saw it coming out of the gloom. Wooden spokes for a vehicle that told me this vehicle was very early. At that point, I did not know anything more about the history of it. I didn't know what kind of vehicle it was, but I really wanted to try and find out.

I dove a couple of more times, and I used my underwater video camera with a high-powered light to really document and get this evidence together. Just so I could try to build a model of what I was seeing underwater. And what I saw was amazing. The vehicle was upside down. It was buried in the sediment. So all I could really see was the bottom part of the wheels. I could see the engine poking out, but I really couldn't see anything more of the top side of the vehicle.

There was a wooden floorboard, and there was a truck bed. So very quickly, I determined that this was not a car at all. It was actually a truck lying close to the back was a heavy chain. We also saw a crank handle on the front of the vehicle. You would actually have to crank that motor to get it started. So the truck was old enough not to have an electric starter motor, but what kind of truck was it?