As far as legendary pop culture stories go, few are weirder than the Titanic “PCP chowder” incident—a real, actual event that happened during filming on the future blockbuster in August of 1996, in which at least 50 cast and crew members, including star Bill Paxton and director James Cameron, were dosed with angel dust someone slipped into the soup they were all sharing. A story told, on more than one occasion, by the late Paxton in his days making the talk show rounds, it has all the stuff of urban legend—including Cameron supposedly making himself throw up to get the drug out of his system, and Paxton riding out the high by going back to his trailer and drinking a case of beer—except with a ton of evidence and police reports to back it up.
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And now, even more information about the incident is due to come to light, it seems, as Nova Scotia’s information and privacy commissioner has ordered Halifax police to un-redact at least some of their reports on the investigation, which was closed without naming a culprit in 1999. The commissioner apparently found that censors had been too over-zealous in their efforts to hide information in the publicly available record, including third-party accounts of the events that occurred that wild Canadian night. You can read the order yourself—although it’s fairly dense with legal-ese, we’ll warn—but the upshot is that some intrepid knowledge seeker filed an information request, was unhappy with how much black ink was on the info they got back, and has now successfully petitioned for more info.
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According to CTV News, the info could be publicly available as soon as May, potentially kicking off what we imagine could be one of the funniest, weirdest true-crime investigations of all time. (It’s always nice to have a mass poisoning incident that everyone is alive to laugh about afterward, ya know?) Anyway, please enjoy maybe the coolest thing James Cameron has ever said, in an interview where he described the incident from 2009: “People are moaning and crying, wailing, collapsed on tables and gurneys. The D.P., Caleb Deschanel, is leading a number of crew down the hall in a highly vocal conga line. You can’t make this stuff up.”