During his round-the-world eco (Unfinished due to a wreck off the coast of Brazil) lone navigator Matteo Miceli (that we awarded at the last VELAFestival with the Passion award, for his nonetheless great feat), would have been warned by the European Sentinel-1A satellite of the proximity of a dangerous iceberg, and thanks to this warning the navigator would have been saved from the collision. At least according to the Corriere della Sera.
SAVED BY A SATELLITE?
L’article, which appeared on December 14, 2014 in Corriere della Sera (on December 19, a similar piece on the website of ESA, the European space agency), stated that Matthew “was in the area of the Prince Edward Islands in the sub-Antarctic Indian Ocean about 1,000 kilometers southeast of South Africa when he was alerted by satellite that a 4-kilometer-long iceberg was floating in the area surrounded by smaller, extremely dangerous chunks of ice.”.
MICELI: “THEY MADE IT ALL UP.”
But a year later the Roman navigator, who evidently had not yet read the piece, comes up with a facebook post where he comments on the article with a sarcastic, “Even? They didn’t tell me.”, thus suggesting that what came out in the newspapers was made up out of thin air. Hoax? Or was the good Miceli warned but was asleep? Anyway, his post generated a lot of comments!
