Almost immediately after the Titanic sank on April 15, 1912, there were attempts to recover the wreckage and the bodies of those who had gone down with the ship. However, the limited diving technology of the time prevented this from becoming a reality for more than seven decades.
On September 1, 1985 — just 40 years ago — the wreckage was found during a joint exploration by an American oceanographer, Robert Ballard, who was also a Navy officer, and a French oceanographer, Jean-Louis Michel, as The New York Times reported at the time.
But the dive initially had nothing to do with the Titanic at all — it was a secret mission to find the wrecks of two nuclear submarines, the USS Scorpion and the USS Thresher.
However, this information was not made public until 2008, when Ballard revealed the true nature of the mission to National Geographic.
“The Navy is finally discussing it,” Ballard told National Geographic in 2008. At the time, as now, the Titanic continued to be a source of fascination, sparking efforts to uncover its secrets, create detailed images of its wreckage, and visit what remains on the ocean floor.
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Ballard originally met with the US Navy in 1982 to secure funding for a new type of submersible technology that would allow him to find the Titanic. The Navy agreed to fund the project, but only if it would be used to investigate the sunken submarines. The USS Thresher sank in April 1963, and the USS Scorpion followed five years later, in May 1968. They remain the only nuclear submarines the Navy has ever lost, reported the United States Naval Institute.
The Navy agreed that Ballard could search for the Titanic if there was any time left in the mission after finding the subs — and after confirming whether the Soviet Union had played any part in sinking them.
“We saw no indication of some sort of external weapon that caused the ship to go down,” Ronald Thunman, then the deputy chief of naval operations for submarine warfare, told National Geographic.
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With 12 days left in the mission, Ballard found the Titanic using a hunch that the ship had split in two and left a trail of debris.
“That’s what saved our butts,” Ballard told National Geographic. “It turned out to be true.”
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Ballard said the Navy was nervous that people would catch on to why they were actually scouring the ocean floor.
“The Navy never expected me to find the Titanic, and so when that happened, they got really nervous because of the publicity,” Ballard said. “But people were so focused on the legend of the Titanic they never connected the dots.”
So, 23 years later, Ballard disclosed the truth about his mission. He also wrote about his experience finding the ship in his book “The Discovery of the Titanic.”
“It was one thing to have won — to have found the ship,” he wrote. “It was another thing to be there. That was the spooky part.”
Correction: July 18, 2023 — An earlier version of this story misstated when the USS Scorpion disappeared. It was lost in May 1968, not May 1965.
