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Titanic Conspiracy

There WAS a conspiracy....

Titanic search a cover for submarine mission
By Vikki Miller
Last Updated: 10:25AM BST 24/05/2008

A mission to discover the wreck of the Titanic was actually a cover story for examining the remains of two Cold War nuclear submarines, the man who located the liner has revealed.

Dr Bob Ballard, an oceanographer, has admitted that he had to locate and inspect the remains of the vessels, which sank during the 1960s, in a top secret mission for the US navy before he was allowed to look for the Titanic.

He said: "I couldn't tell anybody. 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."

He added: "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."

When USS Thresher and USS Scorpion sank, more than 200 men lost their lives and suspicions were raised that at least one of them, Scorpion, had been sunk by the USSR.

In 1982, Dr Ballard approached the US Navy for funding to search for the Titanic with a robotic submarine craft he had developed.

He was told that the military were not prepared to spend large sums of money on locating the liner, but they did want to know what had happened to the submarines. Officials were anxious to find out how the nuclear reactors had fared after being under water for so long.

The oceanographer was given funding to embark on two expeditions, one to find the wreck of Thresher in 1984 off the eastern coast of the US, and another to find Scorpion in the eastern Atlantic.

It was only once these missions were complete that Dr Ballard located the wreck of the Titanic in 1985, which sank in 1912 after it hit an iceberg with the loss of 1,500 lives.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019671 ... earch.html
 
I dunno, is every governmental secret necessarily a "Conspiracy"? Searching for sunken nuclear submarines to study their condition would seem to be within any navy's lawful pursuits. And I wouldn't expect any of them to publish day-to-day news accounts of what they found.
 
This isn't news. The backstory of the Titanic discovery has been known about for decades - Ballard even mentions it in his heavily ghostwritten autobiography! Indeed, he talks about it in an interview for Omni magazine in 1986!

Not as interesting as this story I have been researching though.....:
http://www.paullee.com/titanic/titanicfound.html
 
I've just put a little notice about my ebook on the Announcements forum.
 
So many Titanic threads! This isn't conspiratorial, just interesting:

Titanic survivor's letters sold

Letters written by a Cornish sailor who survived the sinking of the Titanic and its sister ship, the Britannic, have been auctioned for £17,500.

Archie Jewell, from Bude, was a lookout on the Titanic when the ship struck an iceberg in the Atlantic in 1912.

He escaped in a lifeboat and went on to serve on the Britannic, which sank in 1916.

Two letters he wrote to his sister about his shipwreck experiences were auctioned at Sotherbys in London.

Mr Jewell was the watchman on the Titanic who first noticed "ice and growlers" nearby.

He was relieved from his shift 90 minutes before the ship struck an iceberg.

In his letter to his sister he wrote: "I shall never forget the sight of that lovely big ship going down and the awful cries of the people in the water.

"You could hear them dying out one by one, it was enough to make anyone jump overboard and be out of the way."

Jewell escaped in lifeboat number seven, the first to be lowered from the deck of the Titanic.

He was the first survivor to give evidence at the inquiry into the disaster, in which 1,503 passengers and crew died.

He wrote to his sister again after his next ship, the Britannic, sank off a Greek island in 1916 during World War I.

The vessel, which was larger than the Titanic, had been sailing to pick up wounded troops and went down in just 57 minutes, with the loss of 30 lives.

Mr Jewell was one of three people to survive both the sinking of the Titanic and Britannic.

But he was killed in 1917 after his final ship, the SS Donegal, was torpedoed. ( :( Sounds like a bit of a Jonah... :shock: )

His letters were sold to an unknown bidder at Sotherbys auction house.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cornwall/7788559.stm
 
I can add some more to my posting a little while back. I have been in contact with the commander of the Royal Navy Hydrographic vessel; he is now retired and living in America. It seems that they DID come across a wreck which they surmised to be the Titanic. since they had no cameras they could not ascertain it definitely. However, it was the only wreck in the area and could only have been the Titanic.

Now, the above is fact. I am still not sure when it happened, but it must have been sometime in 1979. I have learned, and am trying to confirm the story that the RN co-ordinates were given to the US Navy, and used when Dr.Ballard looked for the wreck with his French comrades in 1985. However, Ballard is alledged to have sent the French looking in the wrong direction, so that he could gain the credit for the discovery. Hopefully, the French side of this 1985 expedition can give some more details. They have been quiet for nearly 25 years and I am trying to crowbar my way into their files :)
 
good post...

I think there wss a book launched last week also...

'101 Things You Thought You Knew About the Titanic...But Didn't '
 
Just thought I'd mention that a Titanic page has been updated drastically http://www.paullee.com/titanic/titanicfound.html
- the UK Hydrographic Office refuse to release the sonar trace that would prove that the UK found the Titanic in 1979 because it would affect relations with the UK and "another state."
WTH?
 
Resurecting this thread.

Caught a documentary on Friday about the Titanic.

Apparently in addition to the well known issue of the ship hitting an iceburg, there had been a fire in one of the coal bunkers that had been raging since she left Southampton.

This apparently caused one of the bulkheads that were supposed to seal the seperate sections of the ship to heat up till it was red hot and warp.

In additon as the only way of putting the fire out was to take the burning coal and send it into the furnace when a couple more coal bunkers caught fire the Titanic apparently was in grave danger of running out of fuel in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean which is why she was travelling at top speed into an Ice Field, gambling on the fact that she would not hit an Iceberg.

Unfortunately she did, and initially it appeared that the bulkheads were working and she would be able to survive until Carpathia reached her and would be able to transfer the remaining passengers and crew. Unfortunately it then appears that the fire weakened bulkhead ruptured causing her so sink a lot faster than expected causing the loss of life.


About the most damning thing in the whole incident is that the directors etc on the ship knew about the assorted fires and ordered the ships crew to keep quiet and when the investigation happened in the UK they conspired to keep a lot of the fireman out of the witness box to place the blame solely on excessive speed and bad luck.
 
George_millett said:
About the most damning thing in the whole incident is that the directors etc on the ship knew about the assorted fires and ordered the ships crew to keep quiet and when the investigation happened in the UK they conspired to keep a lot of the fireman out of the witness box to place the blame solely on excessive speed and bad luck.
Click to expand...
Did many firemen survive?
 
Just going off my memory from the documentary, of the inital crew that left Southampton, some rediculosly low number like 8 fireman stayed on past Belfast. So the people who got off would still be around for all the inquiries and would have been able to testify that the ship was on fire and damaged in a fairly critical place.

Wikipedia has a list of the crew showing who live and who died and It looks like at least 68 members of the Engineering crew survived. Of those 67 were fireman, trimmers or Stokers so would have known how bad the situation was.
 
George_millett said:
Just going off my memory from the documentary, of the inital crew that left Southampton, some rediculosly low number like 8 fireman stayed on past Belfast. So the people who got off would still be around for all the inquiries and would have been able to testify that the ship was on fire and damaged in a fairly critical place.

Wikipedia has a list of the crew showing who live and who died and It looks like at least 68 members of the Engineering crew survived. Of those 67 were fireman, trimmers or Stokers so would have known how bad the situation was.
Click to expand...
Thank you. Useful link. I am pretty sure the fire in the boiler room has been known about for many years. I feel sure I have read about it in Titanic books o_O Also, you'd think fires would be fairly common? I will try to watch the documentary anyway. If firemen were kept deliberately out of the witness box, that is pretty shameful.
 
Since I made the first post I had a read back of the whole thread and yeah it appears that the prescence of the fire has been known for a while but due to the London inquiry declaring it an irrelevance and actively trying to get back to what they decided was the main issue, which was the excessive speed in an ice field it apparently hasn't had that much publicity outside of dedicated followers of the Titanic. This was certainly the first time I had heard that portions of her were on fire before they reached Belfast and remained that way.
 
Bet the passengers were not told about the fire, nothing
on earth would get me on one that was.
 
George_millett said:
This was certainly the first time I had heard that portions of her were on fire before they reached Belfast and remained that way.
Click to expand...
You mean Queenstown, not Belfast. (Belfast is where she was built.) Queenstown was the last stop before the Transatlantic crossing.
 
Fires in a ship's coal bunkers were not uncommon and in most cases resolved without major problems. Probably why the captain and the directors were not unduly concerned.
 
Spontaneous coal fires were a bit of a feature of coal fired ships. One such fire on the HMS Vanguard lead to the redesign of all Royal Navy ships after the fire heated a bulk head that it shared with the powder magazine and ignited it, killing all but a handful of men.

My Grandfather served on the ship during Jutland and transfered off in early 1917, which was a rather lucky escape.

And just because he's a handsome chap here he is:

Grandad%20Goldsack.jpg
 
From that list

22. The iceberg was spotted at 11.40pm on April 14, 1912, by lookout Frederick Fleet, who proclaimed: “Iceberg! Right ahead!” Fleet survived the disaster and was a lookout on the RMS Oceanic during the Twenties, before serving in the Second World War. Pranksters placed a pair of binoculars on his grave in 2012 with a note saying: “Sorry they’re 100 years too late”.
Click to expand...

I know I shouldn't laugh but I did.
 
Draining The Titanic ... a documentary that has recreated the wreckage as it would appear if on dry land ..

 
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