Cold Open

It’s May 22nd, 1968, deep in the Atlantic Ocean, 400 miles southwest of the Azores.

Francis Slattery, captain of the USS Scorpion, a nuclear-powered submarine, looks across the busy control center.

Captain Slattery is 36 years old and a rising star in the United States Navy. He’s trained for years to lead submarines like this into battle - but he’s not taking the Scorpion to war today. He’s taking his ship home.

The Scorpion glides through the waters a few hundred feet below the surface, heading west toward America at a speed of 18 knots. The submarine hums with a quiet and efficient activity that pleases Slattery. He’s been captain of the submarine for less than a year but knows every inch of his command. He can picture the ship’s cooks busy in the galley. The engineers who are hard at work in the engine room. And he knows that three decks below the control center, a routine battery charge is underway.

Captain Slattery decides it’s time to come up to periscope depth. He gives the order… the submarine pitches upwards… and the words “Set Condition Baker throughout the ship” echo along the Scorpion’s compartments.

In response to Captain Slattery’s order, the crewmen seal the Scorpion’s watertight doors. This is standard procedure - periscope depth is potentially hazardous for a submarine as it’s not always possible to detect obstacles near the surface. So Condition Baker is the order given to prepare the ship for any eventuality.

But neither Captain Slattery nor anyone else on board is prepared for what happens next.

The Scorpion shudders as an enormous explosion shakes the boat. In the confined space of the submarine’s reinforced hull, the blast is concentrated into a deadly shockwave. Captain Slattery doesn’t even get the chance to look around, to react to the suddenly blaring alarms... before a fireball engulfs the control center and with a lurch, the USS Scorpion begins to sink.

The crippled USS Scorpion tumbles slowly into the depths of the ocean. The pressure on the hull increases until finally, the submarine implodes. Any of the 99 sailors on board who survived the initial explosion are killed instantly. The loss of the Scorpion will be a heartbreaking tragedy for the crewmen’s families. But the sinking will also become an enduring mystery. How and why the Scorpion was lost will puzzle investigators and the public long after the submarine vanished in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on May 22nd, 1968.

Introduction

From Noiser and Airship, I’m Lindsay Graham and this is History Daily.

History is made every day. On this podcast—every day—we tell the true stories of the people and events that shaped our world.

Today is May 22nd, 1968: The Disappearance of the USS Scorpion.

Act One

It’s April 12th, 1968, off the coast of Crete in the Mediterranean Sea, six weeks before the disappearance of the USS Scorpion.

The nuclear-powered submarine lurks in the darkness, hundreds of feet underwater. On board, the Scorpion’s captain, Francis Slattery, feels a bead of sweat trickle down his neck. He and the crew are bathed in the red glow of the submarine’s combat lighting. There’s almost complete silence. Sound travels far underwater, and no one wants the ship to be detected, because the Scorpion is being hunted by another submarine.

Thankfully for all, it’s not an enemy out there, but an ally. These are NATO war games, and the Scorpion is playing the part of a Soviet sub. A few moments later, the other NATO submarine passes them by without noticing and Captain Slattery’s relief is mixed with a sense of disappointment. He’s proud of his men, but he was expecting more from the captain of the other sub. If it ever comes to a real fight, he’ll have to do better than this.

During the Cold War, submarines have become the spies of the sea. The latest are powered by nuclear reactors, allowing them to run so quietly and stay underwater for so long that they’re virtually undetectable.

One of these newer submarines is the USS Scorpion. But even though she has a modern power source, the ship is in a state of disrepair. In recent years, most of the United States Atlantic submarine fleet has been retrofitted with new safety features. But not the Scorpion. The eight-year-old submarine is one of only four in the Navy that hasn’t yet had an overhaul, and, on this deployment, she’s been plagued by mechanical issues. The crew has nicknamed her the “USS Scrap Iron”, and one sailor has complained to his parents in a letter that they have “repaired, replaced or jury-rigged every piece of the equipment on board".  So, it’s understandable that Captain Slattery and his men are looking forward to returning to America.

When the war games are over, the Scorpion is ready to go home. But that’s when Captain Slattery receives one last mission from the top brass at Navy Intelligence. US spy satellites have spotted Soviet ships testing suspicious weather balloons near the Canary Islands, off the coast of West Africa. Since the Scorpion is going to be passing by anyway, Slattery and his crew are ordered to investigate.

So, in mid-May 1968, the USS Scorpion leaves the Mediterranean behind. Slattery sets course for the Canary Islands and the Russian surface ships with their weather balloons. The American sub slinks silently under the targets, taking photographs and scientific readings. Then, with their mission complete, the Scorpion and her crew are finally allowed to head for home.

***

It’s May 27th, 1968, at the US Naval Base in Norfolk, Virginia, almost two weeks after the USS Scorpion left the Mediterranean.

22-year-old Barbara Folli huddles beneath an umbrella as rain pours down on the dockside. Despite the harsh weather, Barbara’s wearing her favorite dress - she wants to look her best today because this afternoon her sailor husband Vernon is arriving home after a three-month-long deployment on the USS Scorpion.

Barbara has dropped off their one-year-old daughter with a babysitter and braved the storm to wait at the dock alongside the families of other Scorpion sailors. Her husband’s submarine is due back at Pier 22 at 1 PM. But that hour passes with no sign of the Scorpion.

Barbara and the other wives, parents, and children linger anxiously at the base all afternoon. But Vernon and the rest of the Scorpion crew never arrive. The family presses Navy officials for answers, but they are assured that there’s just been a routine delay. The Scorpion will arrive tomorrow perhaps. Gradually, the families drift away, back to their empty-seeming homes. But as Barbara drives to pick up her daughter, she has a bad feeling in her gut. She’s sure that Navy officials haven’t told her the whole truth.

And she’s right. Soon it’s confirmed that the Scorpion hasn’t been heard from in more than five days. The submarine isn’t delayed - it’s missing. A huge search and rescue operation is launched by the United States. But no one has any idea what has happened to the Scorpion - or even where the submarine could be. They’ll have to scour the Atlantic Ocean from Virginia to Spain.

As they do and days pass, hopes of finding the submarine intact on the surface somewhere fade. And finally, on June 5th, 1968, the rescue operation is called off, and the Navy announces that the Scorpion is officially lost in sea.

But the hunt for the missing submarine won’t end there. The Navy will continue to scour the ocean for the lost Scorpion, in hopes of tracking down the wreck - and finding out what went wrong.

Act Two

It’s early June 1968, at the Pentagon in Washington DC, a few days after the search began for the USS Scorpion.

Dr. John P. Craven hunches over a cluttered table filled with ocean charts, cups of coffee, and papers covered in calculations. John is a 45-year-old Navy scientist who specializes in deep water searches. But he doesn’t use ships or sonar to find things - he uses math.

Two years ago, John was asked to find a missing hydrogen bomb that was on board a US Air Force plane when it crashed in the Mediterranean. John helped locate that bomb using statistics and probability. So, when the USS Scorpion went missing, it wasn’t long before Navy chiefs turned to John again to crunch the numbers and help them find their lost submarine. What John needed though first, was raw data. And for that, he turned to America’s military and scientific listening posts - John thought that their underwater microphones might have picked up the sound of the Scorpion’s demise. His hopes proved correct - on May 22nd, three hydrophones in different parts of the Atlantic each recorded a small blip of noise, followed by a series of much louder rumblings.

John quickly concluded that the first blip was an explosion on board the Scorpion, and the later rumblings were the sound of the submarine imploding.

Now, using all three data sets, John is roughly triangulating where those sounds came from. That should roughly give him the last position of the Scorpion. Through complicated math, he’s able to narrow down the search area to remote part of the Ocean south-west of the Azores.

The Navy dubs this area “Point Oscar” and sends out a survey ship to photograph the ocean floor, looking for the wreckage of the Scorpion. This ship, the Mizar, is led by another Navy scientist: Chester “Buck” Buchanan. Buck starts growing a beard on day one and tells his shipmates he won’t shave until he finds the missing submarine.

But as Buck searches the ocean floor, back on dry land, John Craven continues to analyze the acoustic data and thinks he’s spotted something. According to his calculations, it seems like the Scorpion was actually headed east at the time of the disaster, back in the direction of Europe. John asks several experienced Navy captains why a submarine might make such a strange U-turn. And each captain gives him the same answer - torpedo trouble.

The torpedoes on the Scorpion contained a failsafe designed to stop them targeting their own ship. A turn of 180 degrees would cause the warhead not to detonate. So, if a torpedo were to accidentally activate while still on board a submarine, turning the entire ship around rapidly could in theory prevent a catastrophic explosion.

John becomes convinced that a faulty torpedo was behind the loss of the Scorpion. But when he presents his theory to superiors in the Navy, they don’t believe him.

The acoustic data is open to interpretation. And weapons experts claim it’s impossible for a torpedo to explode inside a sub the way John suggests. They think John is putting too much faith in math and doesn’t have the seagoing experience they do.

For his part though, John suspects the Navy may be covering something up. After all, if a torpedo could explode on the Scorpion, then a torpedo could explode on any Navy submarine. And that not only means hundreds of American submariners may be in danger, it also means that the entire US fleet may need emergency retrofitting, leaving the country open to attack.

While John tussles with his superiors, in the Atlantic, the search for the Scorpion goes on for weeks - and then months. Buck’s beard grows longer and longer. But the Navy’s patience grows shorter and shorter. And eventually, they reach the point where it wants to call off the expensive search. Buck and John are forced to beg for more time - and the team is given one last chance.

It’s a chance that Buck takes. On October 29th, 1968, John Craven gets a top-secret message from the search ship Mizar. In it Buck Buchanan says he’s finally shaved off his beard. John knows immediately what that means - they’ve found the Scorpion.

The missing sub lies in pieces on the seabed some two miles down. John and his team have been proved right about the location of the Scorpion. But when the sub’s wreckage is inspected more closely, new evidence will emerge that undermines John’s theory about the faulty torpedo. And these fresh clues will bring investigators closer to uncovering how the Scorpion and its crew ended up on the bottom of the ocean.

Act Three

It’s the summer of 1986, deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean, eighteen years after the sinking of the USS Scorpion.

Oceanographer Bob Ballard pilots the state-of-the-art submersible Alvin through the inky darkness. No sunlight reaches these depths. The only illumination in this strange deep-sea world comes from Alvin’s high wattage headlights. Bob and his team have traveled to the bottom of the ocean on a mission for the American military: to document the wreck of the USS Scorpion.

As the submersible approaches the Scorpion, its propellers churn up a flurry of sediment from the seabed, showering the wreckage in an eerie snow. Bob maneuvers over the wreck and takes countless photographs of the shattered submarine below. Many will remain confidential military secrets for decades. But one crucial detail is made public: the Scorpion’s torpedo room is found intact and undamaged. It’s clear that a warhead did not explode on board and cause the accident. So, it must be then something else.

In the years that follow Bob Ballard’s expedition, several new theories emerge about the demise of the Scorpion. Some point to a malfunctioning trash compactor. Others to explosive hydrogen gas released by the submarine’s batteries. But the most controversial explanation is that the American submarine was deliberately targeted and destroyed by the Soviet Union.

To those who back the theory, the motive for such an attack was revenge. Just two months before the loss of the Scorpion, the Russian submarine K-129 also sank under mysterious circumstances in the Pacific Ocean. If the Russians believed the US sank their submarine, they could have sunk an American ship in response. But many skeptics suggest this is little more than a conspiracy theory and insist that there is no compelling evidence for such dramatic events.

The truth about the last moments of the Scorpion may never be known for certain. But lessons have been learnt from the tragedy as the US Navy has not lost another submarine since. But that has been little comfort to the families of the sailors of the USS Scorpion - the 99 men who lost their lives serving their country when their nuclear-powered submarine mysteriously sank on May 22nd, 1968.

Outro

Next on History Daily. May 23rd, 1980. Critics are left underwhelmed by the release of a new psychological horror movie: Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.

From Noiser and Airship, this is History Daily, hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham.

Audio editing by Muhammad Shahzaib.

Sound design by Gabriel Gould.

Music by Thrumm.

This episode is written and researched by Jack O’Brien.

Edited by Dorian Merina.

Managing producer Emily Burke.

Executive Producers are William Simpson for Airship, and Pascal Hughes for Noiser.