In December 1978, the MS Munchin set sail from a port in northern Germany.

The giant freight container ship was one of the biggest ships of its time.

It was nearly 900 feet long, about the length of three football fields,

and carried thousands of tons of cargo.

The Munchin started on its way across the Northern Atlantic, the same journey it had made dozens of times before.

On the Atlantic, the weather got worse and worse, buffeting the ship with hurricane force winds.

It was a bad storm, but the Moonchin was considered to be practically unsinkable.

But a few hours later, just after 3 a.m., a nearby freighter received a very weak, very garbled SOS signal from the Munchin, and then...

The Munchin disappeared.

During the next few weeks, over a hundred ships and planes combed the area, desperately trying to find out what happened to the Munchin

in one of the largest search and rescue operations in shipping history.

They only found a couple clues. A few life jackets scattered among the waves, a raft that looked

like it had been violently sheared off the side of the ship, even though it had been hung over 60

feet above the waterline. Ultimately, the sinking of the MS. Munchin

was declared impossible to explain. Something extraordinary must have destroyed the ship.

There were theories among the search and rescue teams that the Munchin had run into a mythical

rogue wave.

Rogue waves are waves that tower above the rest of the ocean.

They are at least twice the size as the biggest waves surrounding them and seem to come out of

nowhere. In stormy seas, rogue waves can become monster swalls of water, looming

60, 80, sometimes over 100 feet high. But the problem was that rogue waves were the stuff of legends.

Maritime tales akin to mermaids or leviathens,

...