Late last month, the secret was revealed – when Bob Ballard discovered the Titanic in 1985, he was actually on a secret mission to find two sunken US submarines, the USS Thresher and USS Scorpion, both of which had sunk in the Atlantic in the 1960s. Only after his team located and surveyed the two missing subs was he allowed to search for the Titanic, leaving only a twelve day window to located the sunken passenger liner.
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Titanic search was cover for secret Cold War subs mission
The man who located the wreck of the Titanic has revealed that the discovery was a cover story to camouflage the real mission of inspecting the wrecks of two Cold War nuclear submarines.
When Bob Ballard led a team that pinpointed the wreckage of the liner in 1985 he had already completed his main task of finding out what happened to USS Thresher and USS Scorpion.
Both of the United States Navy vessels sank during the 1960s, killing more than 200 men and giving rise to fears that at least one of them, Scorpion, had been sunk by the USSR.
Dr Ballard, an oceanographer, has admitted that he located and inspected the wrecks for the US Navy in top secret missions before he was allowed to search for the Titanic.
Dr Ballard said what he had seen during the inspection of the wrecks gave him the idea of finding a trail of debris that would lead to the main sections of the Titanic. Thresher, had imploded deep beneath the surface and had broken up into thousands of pieces and Scorpion was almost as completely destroyed. “It was as though it had been put through a shredding machine. There was a long debris trail.” Dr Ballard developed a robotic submarine craft in the early 1980s and approached the US Navy in 1982 for funding to search for the Titanic, which sank in 1912 with the loss of 1,500 lives after hitting an iceberg.
He was told that the military were not willing to spend a fortune on locating the liner, but they did want to know what had happened to their submarines.The military were anxious to know how the nuclear reactors had been affected by being submerged for so long.
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I’ll never forget the sinking of USS Thresher. Although I was a very young boy, when I saw a photo of a missing Thresher sailor in my hometown newspaper, I recognized him as my swimming instructor at the YMCA I had attended just a few months before.
I remember the media coverage at the time and the interest “Popular Science” showed the event through its’ magazine. Or maybe it was “Popular Mechanics” ?? It’s been so long ago now but I’ve never forgotten the first person I knew who was lost in the service of his country.
I think we all owe alot to sailors and others like him to live the kinds of life they died to defend.
It’s a shame for a man of Bob Ballard’s salt to allow himself to be pushed in to giving us “explanations” even kids would scoff at! Do we also know of any pictures of the “found” subs? Would love to go into more details with more people. Please do publish my address! RODRIGUES, from quasisouthernmost Brazil
I don’t mean this to sound flip, but they’re pictures of the Scorpion and Thresher wreckages all over the Internet. Pictures can also be found in the 1998 book “Blind Man’s Bluff”.
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On March 18, 2012, Brad Cole did sound kind of flip for in my comment I obviously meant POST-SINKING photos of the US subs Thresher and Scorpion. I keep inviting any CLEAR help — and keep asking for my address to be published… Thanks already. RODRIGUES