The incident was said to occur around June 1947; two American ships were navigating their way between the Malay Peninsula and the island of Sumatra when they began to receive strange distress messages from a Dutch merchant ship called the S.S. Ourang Medan. The radio operator of the distressed ship reported the death of the captain, the officers, and possibly the entire crew. After saying that, the operator continued to send incomprehensible messages before finally stating "I die."
The first American ship to board the Ourang Medan was the Silver Star. The crew located and boarded a seemingly undamaged Ourang Medan in a rescue attempt. Instead of finding bullet ridden bodies and/or anything that would make sense, they found the entire ship covered with corpses of the crew down to the ship's dog. They found all of the bodies in a fixed, terrified posture, with almost no injuries, All of the bodies were found with their eyes still opened, faces affixed to the sun, mouths stretched opened and a few with arms outstretched.
The May 1952 report by the Proceedings of the Merchant Marine Council said "their frozen faces were upturned to the sun, the mouths were gaping open and the eyes staring..." As the crew of the Silver Star continued their investigation, they found the radio operator, dead, hands still on the Morse Code sending keys, with opened eyes and mouth.
The (living) crew quickly decided to tow the ship back to port to continue their investigations and possibly bring in some experts or such to the ship to find out what happened. But before they got started, smoke from below the decks began to pierce the floor beneath them, and the Silver Star's crew quickly evacuated. As soon as they cut the tow lines between the Ourang Medan, the ship exploded with massive force, and sunk.
To this day, there have been much controversy surrounding the story. Some people claimed that the Ourang Medan was nothing but a story. After much research, no records were found proving the ship's existence in any part of the world. People have stated that the lack of information puts great suspicion onto the story's credibility.
Some people have theorized that the the death of the crew was due to some developmental nerve agents that were outlawed under the Geneva Convention, and so mysterious governmental henchmen quickly erased the Ourang Medan from the shipping registers, and other places to keep it quiet. In fact, some people have tried contacting one of the two ships's owner at the area, The Silver Star and the "City of Baltimore" to get records and log books; they were met with silence.
Unfortunately, there is no way to prove the story's validity correct or wrong. There is absolutely no record of the ship's existence before/after the ship sank.What happened that faithful day is certainly a mystery, perhaps we will truly find out what happened, if it did happen, to the S.S. Ourang Medan.