SECRET MISSION TO FIND THE TITANIC

The Man Who Found the Titanic: A Tale of a Secret Expedition

Apr 15, 2012 4:45 AM EDT

A hundred years ago tonight, the Titanic sank, taking more than 1,500 souls with it. Robert Ballard, who discovered the wreck, tells Andrew Carter about the secret expedition to find it.

Robert Ballard's life's dream was to find the most famous shipwreck in the world, but if not for the Cold War and two missing submarines, the Titanic might never have been found.

Ballard, who also discovered the wreck of the Bismarck and the USS Yorktown,became interested in ocean exploration as a child while reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. “From a very early age, I wanted to be Captain Nemo and I wanted to explore the ocean floor,” he says. With his parents’ encouragement, he joined the Navy, worked at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, and became an oceanographer. After 53 years and more than 130 expeditions, the 69-year-old adventurer is “still at it and hoping for a new discovery.”

Ballard had long been fascinated by Titanic, and always dreamed of finding it. Back in the 1970s, he led a failed expedition to do just that. But it wasn't until 1985, while serving as a naval intelligence officer, that he was able to secure the technology and funding that helped him finally discover it 1.000 miles due east of Boston. Having helped the U.S. Navy develop unmanned submarines, Ballard thought the technology might be useful in finding the lost ship. The Navy had little interest in funding the search, but it was very interested in finding the USS Scorpion and the USS Thresher, two nuclear submarines that were lost in the 1960s on either side of where the Titanic went down. With the Cold War still in its final throes, the Navy had to keep the true nature of the submarine search a secret. They told Ballard that if he could find the subs, then afterward he could use their technology to search for the ship—but the world would think the expedition was about finding the Titanic from the beginning.

“I wanted to find the Titanic. The Navy just wanted our expedition to deflect from the true mission.”

 

Dr. Robert Ballard, seen speaking at a conference in San Diego, had long been fascinated by the "Titanic," and always dreamed of finding its wreck. In 1985, while serving as a naval intelligence officer, was Ballard able to secure the technology and funding to find the wreckage., Rich Schmitt, 

“The Navy didn’t want to disclose the location of those submarines, so we needed a cover story and Titanic was the cover story," says Ballard. "I wanted to find the Titanic. The Navy just wanted our expedition to deflect from the true mission.”

Of course, history would show that the expedition was successful on all fronts. Ballard was able to do reconnaissance on the missing submarines, and in the early-morning hours of Sept. 1, the image of a boiler in the sand 12,000 feet beneath the surface signaled the discovery of the Titanic.

“There were two reactions almost simultaneously,” says Ballard. “The first reaction was celebration, we all jumped up shouting because we were near the end of the expedition and we thought we were going to fail. But that was followed quickly by a realization of where we were, that we were on a gravesite. We started seeing where the bodies had landed, that this was a cemetery, and it changed our emotional wall. It went from pure joy to thoughtful reflection.”

Rumors have surfaced over the years that Ballard wanted to keep the location of the wreck a secret to protect it from salvagers. Not entirely true, he says. The expedition was a joint U.S.-French effort, which meant, “There was no hope of protecting it from the French; the French were aboard. Although initially they said they wouldn’t salvage it, they reversed their decision and they knew the location because they were aboard and could write it down. So there was no secret among them, and they’re the ones that actually founded the salvage operation.” Since then more than 5,500 artifacts have been taken from the wreck site.

Ballard, who has long been outspoken against the recovery of objects from theTitanic, is disturbed by the salvage operations, not only because they are disturbing a gravesite, but because human exploration is damaging the ship. “We went back in 2004 and did it all over again, and we can show you exactly where the submarines had landed, where they had crushed the deck, where they had knocked off the crow’s nest, where they pulled fixtures off the ship, and where they tried to break off the telemotor, all the debris, all the garbage that they left behind.”