[mtdewcmu]

Let's see if I can state this properly. The atoms of the ship will pass right through the event horizon like nothing. To see the ship, though, photons have to travel from the ship to your eyes. As the ship goes deeper into the black hole's gravity, the photons will "appear to" be getting slowed down by the black hole's gravity well, each photon more than the last. So, an outside observer would have to wait longer and longer to get the next photon. In fact, he'd have to wait an infinitely long time to get all of them. It's like an optical illusion, except that a real physicist would say it's not an optical illusion; it's time dilation, etc.