Inside the secret US military mission that located the Titanic

Authored by edition.cnn.com and submitted by jbird221
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(CNN) For years, the incredible discovery of the Titanic's wreckage at the bottom of the ocean in 1985 was thought to have been a purely scientific effort.

Speaking to CNN on Thursday about now-declassified events, Robert Ballard, who discovered the Titanic, said that the expedition was part of a secret US military mission to recover two sunken nuclear submarines on the bottom of the ocean.

"They did not want the world to know that, so I had to have a cover story," Ballard said.

The true story of what happened now serves as a museum exhibit at The National Geographic Museum in Washington, which is open through the end of the year.

Ballard was a commander in the US Navy and a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The Navy offered him the funding and opportunity to search for the Titanic, but only if he first explored the USS Thresher and the USS Scorpion, two American nuclear subs that sank in the 1960s.

"We knew where the subs were," Ballard said. "What they wanted me to do was go back and not have the Russians follow me, because we were interested in the nuclear weapons that were on the Scorpion and also what the nuclear reactors (were) doing to the environment."

The wreckage of the Titanic, which sank in 1912, was discovered near the bottom of the ocean in 1985.

The search for the Titanic served as a great cover story, and the press was "totally oblivious to what I was doing," he said.

When his team finished exploring the Scorpion and Thresher, they had just 12 days left in their trip to search for the Titanic.

The famed ship that sank on its maiden voyage was found on the ocean floor at a depth of more than 12,000 feet in the North Atlantic Ocean.

"When we found the Titanic, we naturally were very excited, because it was a tough job. We got it, scoring the winning goal at the buzzer," Ballard said.

The famous discovery set off major press attention, but the expedition's true purpose was kept under wraps. A New York Times story from the days after the discovery features a series of denials from officials about the project.

Navy spokesman Capt. Brent Baker said at the time that the project was simply to test if the oceanographic system worked, and a scientist denied a military involvement.

''There was nothing classified,'' Dr. Robert Spindel, the head of the Woods Hole Ocean Engineering Department, told the Times.

Not so, Ballard admitted, and that wasn't the only one.

"I cannot talk about my other Navy missions, no," he said. "They have yet to be declassified."

umru316 on February 29th, 2020 at 05:51 UTC »

IIRC it was Dr. Ballard of the University of Rhode Island who led the expedition. He was inactive Navy at the time. He had designed a robot, Argo, that the Navy needed for their search for the subs, so he made a deal that if the original search for subs was successful the Navy would fund his search for the Titanic.

In other expeditions he found other shipwrecks including the Bismarck and Yorktown. He also did a lot of geology and mapping of the Atlantic Ocean floor. He's an accomplished and respected archeologist and a bit of a famous figure where I'm from and he was a friend of family friends.

Edit: fixed Navy, no good reason for the error 3 times.

Edit 2: I learned all this 10+ years ago, we didn't know him, and both my parents and I have moved away from that area, so Dr. Ballard and his accomplishments haven't come up in conversation in years - not that he was a frequent topic of conversation anyway. That's why I said "IIRC." I could have fact checked it, but I didn't.

2a. In that spirit, according to u/doodlebugkisses he was actually st the Woods Hole Institute at the time he found the Titanic. I'll update with any other connections I find in replies

Kevin_Uxbridge on February 29th, 2020 at 05:36 UTC »

They weren't trying to 'recover' or even locate Thresher or Scorpion, just document their condition. Both had been (if memory serves) already found and photographed. But they did do this job quickly and well, so off to find Titanic.

GoodTestCase on February 29th, 2020 at 05:32 UTC »

I wouldnt say that they only looked with spare days left over. They just had a limit as to how long they could keep looking once they finished the Navy's project. I read Ballard's book about finding it and they were always going to look for it. It wasnt spare time.

Also, the article makes it seem like this is new news. His book, which mentions the US Navy angle and submarine mission, was published in '89.