Disappearance of Ben McDaniel

Benjamin J. McDaniel
McDaniel in diving gear
Born	(1980-04-15)April 15, 1980 Memphis, Tennessee, US
Disappeared	August 18, 2010 (aged 30) Vortex Spring, Florida
Status	Missing for 7 years, 2 months and 9 days
Nationality	American
Known for	Disappearance while scuba diving

Coordinates: 30°46′17″N 85°56′53″W / 30.77149°N 85.94812°W / 30.77149; -85.94812

On August 20, 2010, employees in the dive shop at Vortex Spring, north of Ponce de Leon, Florida, United States, noticed that a pickup truck had remained in the shop's parking lot for the previous two days. It belonged to Ben McDaniel (born April 15, 1980), a Tennesseean who had been diving regularly at the spring while living in his parents' nearby beach house. He had last been seen by two of those employees on the evening of August 18, on a dive entering a cave 58 feet (18 m) below the water's surface. While he was initially believed to have drowned on that dive, and his parents still strongly believe his body is in an inaccessible reach of the extensive cave system, no trace of him has ever been found. Despite this, the state of Florida issued his family a death certificate in 2013.

McDaniel had been living at his parents' beach house on the Gulf Coast during what they called a "sabbatical" in the wake of a divorce, a business failure, and the death of his younger brother two years earlier. An avid diver since his teens, he had been a regular at the spring, where he had apparently been covertly exploring the cave despite lacking the required certification. Lengthy searches have only located some anomalously placed and filled decompression tanks; many of the divers who took part in those searches believe that if McDaniel is indeed dead, his body is not in the cave as he was too large to enter its narrower passages. The McDaniels devoted their family's extensive financial resources to the search, at one point guaranteeing the replacement cost of a remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV). A reward they offered was rescinded in 2012 after the death of another diver who may have been trying to collect it, vindicating the criticism of the divers who had warned of that possibility and resented the McDaniels' insinuation that those who had searched for their son at great personal risk had not been "brave" enough.