Hundreds of dark shapes are sitting on the bottoms of Cook County’s rivers, canals and lakes, and a whole lot of them look like cars. Sonar maps made for the county have tagged roughly 270 underwater "anomalies" in local waterways, many of which investigators say resemble submerged vehicles. This week, the Cook County Sheriff’s Missing Persons Project started testing that theory in the Sanitary and Ship Canal and yanked out four cars, from a recently stolen SUV to decades-old classics. Detectives say any one of them could help crack a long-cold missing persons case, but every pull is slow, expensive and done in water where divers can barely see their own hands.
How the county mapped the riverbeds
The sonar targets did not appear by accident. The U.S. Geological Survey spent years running bathymetric and water quality surveys on Cook County’s surface waters, producing detailed maps that sheriff’s investigators are now using like a treasure chart for evidence. The publicly released data covers dozens of lakes, rivers and navigable canals and gives detectives an acoustic list of odd returns on the bottom that deserve a closer look. Paired with local knowledge of spots where dumped cars and junk tend to accumulate, those maps help search teams decide which underwater blips are most likely to pay off and should be raised first.
Sheriff’s crews pulled four vehicles this week
According to NBC 5 Chicago, sheriff’s investigators brought in marine contractors to the Sanitary and Ship Canal and recovered four vehicles in one operation. The haul included a stolen 2018 Hyundai Elantra, a 2023 Dodge Durango reported stolen in August 2025, a 1971 Porsche that vanished from Chicago in 1976 and a 1974 Pontiac Firebird that disappeared from Stickney in 1984.
Commander Jason Moran, who leads the sheriff’s Missing Persons Project, told NBC 5 Chicago that crews work carefully to bring the cars up in one piece. "I do not want to lose any evidence that is going to come out of the car," he said, explaining why the team avoids ripping open roofs or windows underwater unless absolutely necessary.
The challenges do not end there. The sheriff’s office says divers in some stretches of canal have only about one foot of visibility to work with, which turns even simple tasks into blindfolded surgery. On top of that, recovery efforts typically cost between $15,000 and $20,000 per day. Those price tags, combined with safety concerns and weather, will dictate how many of the 270 anomalies crews can realistically check this season.
This is part of a wider pattern in the region
The Sanitary and Ship Canal is not an outlier. Similar searches have unearthed clusters of sunken vehicles throughout the Chicago area. Private dive teams and police-led projects have located dozens of cars in the wider river system in 2025, reporting those finds to authorities, according to CBS News Chicago. Some of those vehicles have contained human remains or lined up with old theft and missing person reports, reminders that what looks like scrap metal on sonar can be a key piece in someone’s long unanswered story.
For investigators, the new sonar inventory is not just a scientific data set, it is a to-do list for cold-case work that would have been almost impossible a generation ago.
What investigators are looking for next
Once a vehicle comes up, the real detective work starts. Investigators say each car will be processed for forensic evidence, from VIN numbers and registration records to any biological material or personal items that might have survived underwater. Those details are then cross-checked against theft logs and missing person databases to see what, and who, the cars might be tied to.
The Missing Persons Project has been leaning on a mix of old-school shoe-leather investigation and newer data tools in recent years, local reporting shows. The hope now is that pairing sonar mapping with targeted recoveries will finally produce identifications or fresh leads for families who have been waiting decades for clarity.
No one is pretending this will be quick. Officials say budgets, weather and the hard limits of diving in murky, busy waterways will keep the pace cautious. Still, families and cold-case detectives describe the effort as a careful step forward. The acoustic maps give them specific, tangible spots to search in places that were previously close to unsearchable. Turning a mysterious sonar blip into hard evidence, and eventually into an answer, will take time, but for the people still looking, simply having somewhere concrete to look is already a significant shift.
