This is Planet Money from npr.
Ten years ago, Mike Purcell was on one of his missions on a ship in the Caribbean Sea off the coast of Colombia.
And for about a week, every night, he had been sending out his autonomous underwater vehicle to search the sea floor.
I bet if you go along that coast of Columbia, every four miles, there's.
A ship, a sunken ship.
This autonomous vehicle that Mike helped develop is like a little underwater drone.
It would scan the bottom of the ocean and record whatever it came across.
And one day, it came across a very, very big object.
Yeah, we see something in the sonar that is a possible yes.
A possible yes.
Mike gets called in for all kinds of jobs like this.
He was once asked to find Amelia Earhart's plane.
No luck.
Another time, to locate this Air France plane that went down between Rio de Janeiro and Paris.
That one they did find.
This time,
a private group
and the Colombian government wanted his help finding a 300-year-old shipwreck that was the stuff of legend.
The Spanish galleon, the San Jose.
It was one of the most famous shipwrecks and maybe the most valuable one.