Titanic
 | |
| Date | 15 April 1912 |
|---|---|
| Location | Atlantic Ocean |
| Description | The deadliest peacetime sinking of a superliner or cruise ship in history |
The RMS Titanic (Royal Mail Ship) was a British passenger liner, operated by the White Star Line, which sank in the North Atlantic Ocean after striking an iceberg during her maiden voyage from Southampton, UK, to New York City. Of the estimated 2,224 passengers and crew aboard, more than 1,500 died, making it the deadliest sinking of a single ship up to that time.
Olympic
Some accounts hold that it was not the Titanic that sunk, but the rebranded sister ship RMS Olympic [1] as part of an insurance scam.[2]
Rediscovery as cover story
For years, the discovery of the Titanic’s wreckage at the bottom of the ocean in 1985 was officially a purely scientific effort. In 2018, Robert Ballard, who discovered the Titanic, said that the expedition was part of a secret US military mission to recover two sunken nuclear submarines on the bottom of the ocean. "They did not want the world to know that, so I had to have a cover story", Ballard said. He was a commander in the US Navy and a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The Navy offered him the funding and opportunity to search for the Titanic, but only if he first explored the USS Thresher and the USS Scorpion, two American nuclear subs that sank in the 1960s, without the Soviets finding out. The search for the Titanic served as a great cover story, and the press was "totally oblivious to what I was doing," he said. Navy spokesman Capt. Brent Baker said at the time that the project was simply to test if the oceanographic system worked, and a scientist denied a military involvement.[3]
A Titanic victim on Wikispooks
| Title | Description |
|---|---|
| William Stead | Suspected UK deep politician who died aboard the Titanic |
