Apparently, the undersea mission that found the wreck of the Titanic wasn’t looking for the Titanic at all:
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.
Only once he had used his new underwater robot craft to map the submarine wreck sites was he able to use it to crisscross the North Atlantic seabed to pinpoint the last resting place of the luxury liner. It meant he had only 12 days to find the Titanic.
“I couldn’t tell anybody,” he said. “There was a lot of pressure on me. It was a secret mission. I felt it was a fair exchange for getting a chance to look for the Titanic.
“We handed the data to the experts. They never told us what they concluded – our job was to collect the data. I can only talk about it now because it has been declassified.”
More details will be revealed when National Geographic Channel airs Titanic: The Final Secret on June 8.
H/T: The Moderate Voice
May 27th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
Our government is accomplished at playing the fool ya game.
Perhaps you recall the Glomar Explorer and their mission to research and recover undersea Manganese nodules. We later found that it was a cover for the attempt to recover a sunken Soviet sub. They almost got the sub, but it broke apart while they were bringing it up (of course that could be a lie, too).
I can’t wait to find out what the real story is behind the Bush Presidency. I mean, does anyone really believe we let an idiot march us toward fascism for eight years? It must be a cover story for something really big; like space aliens or maybe we secretly sold all of our national assets to Communist China… no wait, that last one is true.