In Too Deep — Outside/In

This week, we're bringing you an adventure from our friends at the Outside Podcast. Trapped in a shipwreck on the ocean floor, running out of oxygen, body temperature falling, how long could you survive? Intrepid producers Robbie Carver and Peter Frick-Wright take a deep dive on this one.

In 1991, a man named Michael Proudfoot was SCUBA diving off the coast of Baja, Mexico. The details of his story are everywhere. And, more or less, the same. Exploring a shipwreck, Proudfoot breaks his regulator and surfaces in an air pocket deep in the belly of the ship. He finds a tea-kettle full of fresh water, and eats sea urchins to survive. But as producers of the Outside Podcast— Robbie Carver and Peter Frick-Wright — dig deeper and deeper into the tale, it becomes harder and harder to tell what's real and what isn't.

This is a story about deep-sea fact checking. Fact checking to the point of no return. What happens when you can't prove a story -- a really great, big fish of a story -- right or wrong?

Outside/In was produced this week by:

Outside/In was produced this week by Sam Evans-Brown with help from: Taylor Quimby, Hannah McCarthy, and Jimmy Gutierrez.

Special thanks to Robbie Carver and Peter Frick-Wright for sharing their reporting and story from the Outside Podcast. You can hear more here.

Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

If you’ve got a question for our Ask Sam hotline, give us a call! We’re always looking for rabbit holes to dive down into. Leave us a voicemail at: 1-844-GO-OTTER (844-466-8837). Don’t forget to leave a number so we can call you back.