A fact that you will be incredibly surprised to learn. The wreckage of the Titanic was actually found by people who were on another secret mission and pretended to be looking for the wreckage of the Titanic. Yes, the Titanic was a scenario created to cover up the secret mission.

Isn't that amazing?

The expedition, led by Robert Ballard and Jean-Louis Michel, was actually on another mission, and the search for the Titanic was a cover story to disguise that mission. In this case, their goal was not initially to search for the Titanic. But they spent most of their time doing useless things and wandering around as if they were searching. And finally, they came across it by accident.

Ballard and Michel, a former US Navy officer, explained that in 2008 they were actually tasked with finding two US Navy submarines. Both submarines, the USS Thresher and the USS Scorpion, had sunk in the Atlantic Ocean. The US wanted to know the fate of the submarines, whether the Scorpion had been sunk by the Soviets, and whether the nuclear reactors powering the ships had affected the environment.

The team located both ships and determined that the Thresher probably sank after a power collapse. The final hours of Scorpion and her crew of 99 are uncertain. There are various theories about the ship's fate, ranging from being sunk by a Soviet torpedo attack to exploding. Ballard's team found evidence of flooding at the front of the ship. The aft end remained airtight until it sank and the pressure caused it to explode like parts of the Titanic.

Ballard had extra ambitions for this voyage. He had originally taken the job when he was trying to get funding to find the Titanic. But the navy told him that they were interested in the technology, that he should only look for submarines. However, Ballard managed to get permission from his superiors to actually search for the Titanic - between his two submarines - if he had the time. Of course, he was constantly reminded by his superiors that his main task was to search for submarines.

Surprisingly, the team found the Titanic, making their cover story almost watertightly true. If you tell people you're looking for the Titanic and then you find it, nobody asks, "Well, what were you really after, huh?" However, while the actual discovery of the Titanic was very good for the fictionalised story, the Navy was not very happy about it.

Explaining the true purpose of the mission to National Geographic in 2008, Ballard said, "The Navy never expected me to find the Titanic, and when it happened they were really nervous about the intense public interest. But people were so focused on the Titanic myth that they never connected the dots."

 

Source: IFL Science