His search for the Titanic concealed a top-secret military operation. How the iconic discovery unfolded

The Titanic before it departed on its fateful voyage. It sank on the night of April 14-15, 1912. Albert Harlingue/Roger Viollet/Getty Images via CNN Newsource

Forty years ago, in the early hours of September 1, grainy black-and-white images of a metal cylinder appeared on the video feeds in the command centre of Knorr, a research vessel searching the Atlantic seafloor for the world’s most famous shipwreck: the Titanic.

Members of the four-person watch team, suspecting the object might be a sunken ship’s boiler, were unable to tear themselves away from what was unfolding on the screen, so they dispatched the team’s cook to rouse Bob Ballard, the expedition’s chief scientist who had been searching for the wreck since the 1970s. He was awake, reading in his cabin bunk.

The cook “didn’t even finish his sentence. I jumped out. I literally put my flight suit over my pajamas, which I didn’t take off for several days after that,” recalled Ballard, senior scientist emeritus in applied ocean physics and engineering at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

CNN spoke to Ballard, and a member of his team, Dana Yoerger, a Woods Hole senior scientist in marine robotics, ahead of the 40th anniversary of the Titanic’s discovery. They recounted the unusual chain of events that led to that stunning sighting — and how the adventure didn’t stop there.

“As I came in, we had a picture of the boiler on the wall, and we looked,” Ballard said. “We realized it was definitely (from the) Titanic, and all bedlam grew loose.”

Even before Ballard and his team found the wreckage 73 years after the iconic vessel set sail in 1912, the Titanic was a source of ceaseless fascination. The “unsinkable” ship went down on its maiden voyage in a gilded age with American’s wealthiest on board, a tale of human folly, class prejudice and technological failure.

Its discovery in 1985 only intensified the Titanic’s pull on the public imagination; it unleashed a 1997 blockbuster movie that remains one of the highest grossing in film history, several documentaries and museum exhibits, and for those with deep pockets, high-stakes trips to see its final resting place about 13,000 feet (3,900 metres) below the ocean’s surface, one of which, in 2023, resulted in fresh tragedy.

For ocean explorers such as Ballard and his colleagues, finding the Titanic was like climbing Mount Everest for the first time. The prototype technology that made it possible has since transformed deep-sea exploration and science, vastly expanding scientists’ knowledge of the ocean. But even with the right tools, it took an inspired shift in strategy to uncover the iconic shipwreck.

The search concealed a top-secret mission

The 1985 search for the Titanic was not Ballard’s first attempt at locating the wreckage. A 1977 expedition failed when a 3,000-foot drilling pipe to which sonar and cameras were attached snapped in two, according to Ballard’s 2021 memoir, “Into the Deep.” The experience, along with the need for live imagery, convinced Ballard that remotely operated underwater vehicles that could stream video back to the exploration vessel were a better way forward, but he struggled to find funding for his vision.

Ultimately, the US Navy supported the development of Ballard’s technology, a deep-sea imaging system nicknamed the Argo. The Navy was interested in using it to determine why two nuclear submarines, the USS Thresher and the USS Scorpion, had sunk in the Atlantic in the 1960s, as well as for broader Cold War intelligence-gathering purposes.

Ballard convinced Navy officials to build in some time to search for the Titanic during the expedition to survey the submarines, a ploy that ultimately acted as a cover story for the Navy’s secret mission.

“What people didn’t know at the time, at least a lot of the people, was that the Titanic (search) was cover for a top-secret military operation I was doing as a naval intelligence officer,” Ballard said. “We didn’t want the Soviets to know where the submarine was.”

Despite years of planning, Ballard wasn’t optimistic that he would find the Titanic for two reasons: The time allotted for the search was short and a French team, led by engineer Jean-Louis Michel of the French oceanographic institution IFREMER with whom Ballard had been cooperating, was using a new, sophisticated ship-mounted sonar system to locate the ship’s final resting place.

“The agreement was that the French would find it,” Ballard said, “(and) once they found it, I’d have plenty of time, a week would be sufficient, to film it.”

The French team, while close, missed the wreckage, and Ballard’s “camera on a string,” as he described it, spotted the wreck — aided by a significantly narrowed search area following the French sonar scanning.

Ballard had what he called a “light-bulb moment” while mapping the debris of the Scorpion sub that was pivotal to the mission success. Its debris field was a mile-long trail, not in a small circular area as expected. Heavier objects sank straight to the seafloor, but lighter debris went down at a slower rate, and ocean currents carried them farther away.

He realized that the Titanic, which fell to a similar depth as the Scorpion sub, would have a similar, if not larger, debris field and that looking for this stream of detritus would be easier than finding the hull and other heavy parts of the vessel.

“It was the technology and the knowledge of how to use it,” Yoerger said. But also “the big thing that led to our success was Ballard’s strategy. He wasn’t trying to find the ship, he was trying to find the debris field, which is a much bigger target, and one that’s particularly well-suited to finding with your eyeballs.”

The discovery added a new word to the dictionary

The Argo took black-and-white video of the Titanic in 1985, while an older system called ANGUS, with its 35-mm camera system, captured blue-hued still images revealing the wreck’s existence. The team returned a year later with more advanced, color cameras to record every inch of the wreckage, including the ship’s swimming pool, grand staircase and bow, generating iconic images still familiar today.

Ballard also became the first person to visit the wreck that year via Alvin, a crewed submersible that he had previously piloted, which took more than two hours to reach the seafloor. Once there, he spotted poignant artifacts, including a child’s doll, uncorked champagne bottles and silverware. He saw no human remains.

Trails of rust covered the Titanic, created by bacteria that feasted on the metal, creating long, reddish spikes — a phenomenon Ballard named “rusticles,” a word that subsequently entered the Oxford English Dictionary.

Ballard recalled that some areas, covered in a protective pink paint when the ship was built, looked pristine. To preserve the “very hallowed ground,” Ballard said he advocated using a similar approach — protective paint perhaps applied by underwater robots — to prevent the wreckage from eroding further.

Rewriting science textbooks

The Titanic’s final resting place was far from Ballard’s only discovery in a long, distinguished career as a scientist and explorer. Expeditions to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge provided key evidence for plate tectonics, while a voyage to the seafloor along the Galápagos Rift revealed the existence of hydrothermal vents and the fantastic life forms that live on them — showing that life could thrive without sunlight and precipitating new theories about its origins.

Ballard went on to discover several other storied wrecks: the Nazi warship Bismark, the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown and PT-109, a Navy vessel commanded by President John F. Kennedy in his mid-20s during World War II.

But his golden touch faltered in 2019 when an expedition to locate Amelia Earhart’s downed plane turned up empty. The explorer said he thought it would be possible to find the aircraft with the help of new technologies. “It’s still on our checkbox,” he said.

While human-operated submersibles still have a role to play, he said that the future of ocean exploration is remote and robotic, and he ultimately envisions that uncrewed ships will ply the world’s oceans. To date, about 27% of the seafloor has been mapped.

“We’re now getting to where we can launch multiple AUVs, autonomous (underwater) vehicles, sort of a pack of dogs that you can send out. … We can put all those assets in the water at the same time,” said Ballard, whose Zoom handle is Captain Nemo after the fictional character in Jules Verne’s “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.”

“I mean, it’s all about bottom time. The real calculation you make is how long you are underwater.”

Yoerger has turned his focus away from the ocean floor and is developing an underwater robot that can explore the twilight zone — the midwater ocean 200 to 1,000 metres (about 650 to 3,300 feet) below the ocean surface, just beyond the reach of sunlight, which plays a key role in regulating the globe’s climate by mitigating the rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

At 83, Ballard is still actively exploring the ocean. In July, he returned from a 21-day expedition aboard the Nautilus operated by his nonprofit, the Ocean Exploration Trust, to Guadalcanal, in the Solomon Islands in the Pacific. There, he began mapping vessels and planes lost during five major World War II naval battles between August and December 1942.

“I love it when kids tell me to stop discovering things, so there’s something left for them to find,” Ballard said.

But he said he’s confident plenty of unknowns remain about the ocean for the next generation of explorers.

By Katie Hunt, CNN