March 28, 2012, Updated September 11, 2012

One of the potential buyers of a collection of 5,500 artifacts from the doomed Titanic would install them permanently in an Eilat museum, according to a recent news article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

The RMS Titanic, a British luxury passenger ship, sunk in the Atlantic Ocean on its way from Southampton to New York after colliding with an iceberg in April 1912. More than 1,500 passengers and crew drowned, and the wreckage wasn’t discovered until 1985. Foraged items are split among six touring exhibitions that have attracted 25 million viewers.

The collection, worth about $270 million, includes maps of the disaster area, photos of the wreck on the bottom of the ocean, and 1,000 hours of video footage from diving expeditions at the site since 1987. It’s all being offered for sale by the New York auction house Guernsey, which is accepting offers through April 2.

A Guernsey executive told Haaretz that the collection could well become “a basis for a full-fledged tourist industry. People from all over the world want to see the remains of the Titanic and for that purpose would fly anywhere in the world, even to Eilat.”

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