Escape From Alcatraz: Alcatraz Escapees Could Have Survived? New Study Says Absolutely

Among the most famous prison escapes ever, immortalized and detailed in the Clint Eastwood film Escape From Alcatraz, three inmates escaped the island-prison’s walls in the middle of the night and disappeared into the San Francisco Bay on a June night in 1962.

This escape from Alcatraz is believed to have been short-lived, however. The three Alcatraz escapees, never being found nor heard from again, were assumed by most people and authorities to be dead, concluding they’d been swept out into the frigid Pacific by the San Francisco Bay’s notoriously powerful currents.

But a new study of the Alcatraz escape by Dutch scientists shows that the escapees may very well have survived their treacherous San Francisco Bay crossing. The findings, which are illustrated by computer model animations of the Alcatraz escapees’ worst case and best case scenarios, are based on the tides and timing of the Alcatraz escape when it occurred on the night of June 11, 1962, and will be presented at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting this week in San Francisco, reports the BBC.

“My colleague, Olivier Hoes, was working on a hydraulic model, called 3Di, which is a collaboration between different Dutch companies, agencies and universities,” explained one of the Dutch scientists, Dr. Rolf Hut. “It is a high-performance hydraulic model for simulating the movement of water bodies in deltas and bays. He was using that to simulate the movement of water in the San Francisco Bay area, and I thought we could try to re-analyse [sic] what happened back in 1962.”

The TV show, MythBusters, also inspired Dr. Hut, the hosts of the show recreating the Alcatraz escape and actually making it to land.

At the same time, Dr. Hut wanted to recreate the Alcatraz escape using the June 1962 night’s precise tidal data plugged into a computer model, creating very realistic scenarios on how the Alcatraz escapees may have fared.

Those three Alcatraz escapees were three men who’d been incarcerated on Alcatraz for robbing banks. Their names were — and maybe still are — Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin.

Famously leaving fake heads made of soap and toilet paper on their prison pillows to fool the Alcatraz guards, the three Alcatraz escapees exited the Alcatraz walls through a hole they’d tediously dug with spoons, made it to the rocky Alcatraz shore and paddled off into the night on makeshift floats made of waterproof raincoats.

The question, of course, has always been: what happened then? Could the Alcatraz escapees have made it to land? And if so, where? On the north shore of San Francisco Bay, or could they have paddled south and landed in San Francisco itself? But again, with their bodies never found and few traces except a paddle and some personal belongings drifting with the tide off Angel Island, the assumption has always been that the wayward convicts were flushed out beneath the Golden Gate Bridge into the Pacific, escaping Alcatraz only to end up out at sea in Davy Jones’ locker.

But according to the Dutch scientists and their computer model, if the three Alcatraz escapees took off at the right time, around midnight, the tides very well could have worked with them and carried them within reasonable striking distance of land and freedom.

At the same time, if the Alcatraz escapees set sail in the hours before or after midnight, they likely didn’t make it.

“We didn’t know exactly when the inmates launched their boats, or their precise starting point,” said simulation specialist Fedor Baart. “So we decided to release 50 (virtual) boats every 30 minutes between [8 p.m.] and [4 a.m.], from a range of possible escape spots at Alcatraz to see where they would end up… We added a paddling effect to the boats, as we assumed the prisoners would paddle as they got closer to land.”

The results showed that if the Alcatraz escapees set off across the bay in the before-midnight window with the outgoing tide, their chances of survival were about zero, according to Dr. Hut.

“In the worst-case scenario, where paddling was ineffective, the outgoing tide would have swept them out to the ocean and they would have died of hypothermia, for sure. The San Francisco Bay area has one of the strongest tidal currents going under the Golden Gate Bridge.”

A later start, after 1 a.m. when the tide was coming in, also would’ve been unfortunate for the Alcatraz escapees, according to Dr. Hut.

“They would have been pushed back into the Bay. And then, depending on which way they were paddling, they would have been sent into the north bay, towards Berkeley and the mouth of the Sacramento River, or pushed south towards Oakland, past Treasure Island… In both cases they would have spent so much time in the water they probably would have died of hypothermia, or they would have been picked up by the police because sunrise was at 6 a.m.”

But just like Goldilocks finding some middle grounds that were always just right, so too does it appear that the Alcatraz escapees likely could have survived if they made their run for it in the sweet spot of midnight.

“If they hit it exactly at midnight, the beautiful thing is that we see that they would have been sucked out towards the Golden Gate Bridge,” said Dr. Hut. “But the moment they were close to the Golden Gate would have been the moment the tide reverses, and that would give them a moment of slack tide, in which they could have reached the Marin headlands in the northern site of the Golden Gate Bridge.”

While the Dutch team of scientists concedes that their model doesn’t prove exactly exactly whether or not the Alcatraz escapees survived, it does illustrate the most likely scenarios.

“We’re just exploring possibilities within the scope of what we can calculate,” said Dr. Hut. “When doing historical research, there is a chance that there is an event not in the feasibility of your model. Maybe they had a friend with a boat? We are only exploring whether it was possible for them to make landfall, with no additional help or other events taking place.”

With the possibility established that the Alcatraz escapees very possibly could have survived, the mystery of what truly happened all those years ago only deepens.

[Images via Wikipedia and Reuters]