Announcement: The First Book Orders Will Receive A Limited-Edition Signed Copy!
About the Book
Death of an Aquanaut Revealed is a vivid memoir of events that triggered the collapse of the U.S. Navy’s SEALAB Project
“After the Navy bureaucracy took charge, decisions and procedures were dictated by Washington brass, and experienced SEALAB personnel were ignored. The result was a long series of failures that ended in disaster . . . . The high hopes and expectations of U.S. Navy aquanauts for a successful conquest of inner space went down the drain.”
Bill Barada, Former Publisher/Editor, Skin Diver Magazine
Forward
"The discovery of America was the result of courageous explorers making the trek across the Atlantic Ocean to see what lay in wait on the other side. Later, the quest to explore “inner space” was the continuation of that spirit of curiosity by the U.S. Navy applied to the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego in the 1960s. I found Bill Bunton’s account of his time as an Aquanaut during the SEALAB Project incredibly intriguing and technically spot-on. As a former Special Operations Officer, U.S. Navy Diving Officer and Oceanography major at the U.S. Naval Academy it is hard for me to fathom how much training, expertise and hutzpah it took for those men to literally “take the plunge” to a depth of over 600 feet. If you are a diver, engineer, oceanographer or just curious about the original U.S. Aquanauts you will enjoy this read. Bill has done us all a service with his writing of Death of an Aquanaut by providing an insider’s view to a story that once captured the imagination of our nation."
Dave Dutch, Lieutenant and Navy Diving Officer, USN (RET), July 18, 2020
About the Author
WILLIAM J. BUNTON
Bill Bunton was born July 21, 1933, in the small steel mill/coal mining town of East Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, and raised and schooled primarily in Detroit, Michigan. Enlisting in the United States Army Paratroops in 1950 during the Korean War, he served 22 months in Korea and Japan with the 187th Airborne Regimental Combat Team prior to being honorably discharged in 1953. In 1958, Bunton migrated to San Diego, California, and actively pursued a career as a professional deep-sea diver, which eventually led to the position of Diving Supervisor of the U.S. Naval Undersea Warfare Center. During the ensuing years, he further advanced his career by pursuing experimental diving, underwater photography, teaching, writing, and equipment development. Wanting to specialize in the Navy’s beginning involvement in deep mixed-gas “saturation diving,” in 1965 he was selected to participate in the now-historical SEALAB II and III projects. A graduate of the Navy School of Deep-Sea Divers as both a First Class Diver and Helium-Oxygen Diving Officer, Bunton was one of only a few civilians among the first group of Navy divers to be certified a Man-in-the-Sea Aquanaut. In 1969 after the sudden, inexplicable and tragic collapse of SEALAB III, he resigned his government position and began work in the commercial offshore oil industry, diving and supervising jobs off the coasts of California, Florida, West Africa, Norway and Japan. In 1973, Bunton formed a corporation in Hong Kong and for the next six years, secretly attempted to obtain an exclusive salvage permit from the PRC (People’s Republic of China). His goal was to find and salvage the Awa Maru, a World War II Japanese cargo/passenger ship granted safe passage in 1945 by the United States and its war-time allies.
Loaded illegally with thousands of tons of strategic metals, plus reportedly carrying a precious cargo of gold and diamonds, the vessel was sunk in the northern entrance of the Taiwan Strait by an American submarine – supposedly by accident. However, Bunton had one
near-insurmountable problem: The Awa Maru lay within the territorial waters of communist-controlled “Red China." Then suddenly, after six years of surreptitious dealings with ranking Peking bureaucrats and seemingly on the verge of success, a “leak” to the news media triggered worldwide headlines and caused a profound – and to this day – mysterious end to the project.
Based on his unique experiences briefly described above, Bunton and co-writer Mary Heglar wrote the book “Target: The Awa Maru.” [Note: For further elaboration, a précis is available if requested.]
