Did you know that the first discovery of the Titanic’s wreckage was actually made during an unorganized mission to explore the Titanic? Even more interestingly, this mission was orchestrated by people pretending to be looking for the wreckage of the Titanic, even though they weren’t looking for the Titanic wreckage. In other words, people who were searching for the Titanic accidentally found the Titanic.
The people on the mission did very different things in the area before they accidentally stumbled upon the Titanic wreckage. The team that discovered the wreck, led by Robert Ballard and Jean-Louis Michel, actually had another mission and was using the Titanic as a cover-up story.
Ballard and Michel, a former US Navy officer, announced in 2008 that they were actually tasked with finding two US Navy submarines. USS Thresher and USS Scorpion sank in the Atlantic. In addition to wanting to know the fate of the submarines and whether the Scorpion had been sunk by the Soviets, the United States also wanted to know if the nuclear reactors powering the ships were affecting the environment.
The team located both submarines and determined that Thresher probably sank after a power outage. The final hours of Scorpion and its 99-man crew were less clear, with theories ranging from being sunk by a Soviet torpedo attack to an explosion. Ballard’s team found evidence that flooding had occurred on the front of the ship, while the aft remained watertight until it sank too much, causing the ship to explode like parts of the Titanic.
Ballard also had extra goals on this journey. He had first gotten the job while seeking funding to search for the Titanic, but the navy told him that even though they were interested in the technology, he had only set out to search for submarines. However, despite being reminded by his superiors that his primary duty was to search for submarines, he was able to obtain permission from resource providers to actually search for the Titanic if he had enough time between the two submarines.
The team surprisingly found the Titanic, making their alibi pretty solid. When you tell people you’re looking for the Titanic and then you find it, no one asks “what were you really after”. But the Navy was not so happy.
“The Navy never expected me to find the Titanic, and when we did find it, they were matured by the public attention drawn to the area,” Ballard told National Geographic in 2008, revealing the true nature of the mission.
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