Death of an Aquanaut Revealed
“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 by Dave Dutch
"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
DEDICATION by William J. Bunton
As harshly unsettling as this narration will read to some after 50 years of suppressed ambivalence, the writing of this historical tragedy is in part an overdue reconciliation of the truth based on the facts as I experienced them. And of equal importance, it is also a belated though much-deserved tribute to my long-ago comrades: those now-forgotten and never-acclaimed “SEALAB Aquanauts” of the 1960s. It was they, willing to risk their lives to achieve a visionary goal, who quite suddenly had to additionally confront the ultimate humiliation of failure in a misguided though valiant effort to inhabit the unknown hostilities of the deeper ocean depths.
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.
ADDITIONAL INFO: 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.]
Sales open Saturday, July 11, 2025
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LEARN MORE about the SEALAB program at "The Man in the Sea Museum" in Panama City Beach, FL.
"We offer self guided tours, merchandise, and aim to create an family friendly environment to learn about military diving history to increase the awareness of Bay County's history. Our museum believes in shaping the future by preserving the past and present, and sharing our knowledge with the world. We invite you to see things anew through the lens of our outstanding collections.
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