Transcription
99 men left Spain on a nuclear submarine heading home to Norfolk, Virginia. They sent one final radio message on May 21st, 1968. After that, nothing. No distress call, no debris, no oil slick, just silence.
The families were told to wait at the pier on May 27th. They stood in the rain for hours. The submarine never came. And here is the part that still bothers me. The Navy already knew something had gone wrong before those families drove to the pier. The exact cause of the sinking has never been officially determined. The USS Scorpion is still down there with its nuclear reactor, its nuclear weapons, and its 99 crew members, and nobody has ever officially explained it.
Most people who know the USS Scorpion know it vanished. What I want to know is what the Navy did in the five days before it told anyone and why the official cause of sinking has never been determined in over 50 years. Because the answers go places I genuinely did not expect. And at least one of them I went back and checked multiple times before I felt comfortable saying it out loud. But before we get to that, we need to understand what kind of submarine the USS Scorpion actually was. Because this was not just any vessel.
The USS Scorpion was a skipjack class nuclearpowered attack submarine. One of the most advanced submarines in the world when it was built. It was faster underwater than almost anything the Soviets had. Its nuclear power let it stay submerged for months. Commissioned in July 1960, the USS Scorpion spent eight years as one of the most capable submarines in the American fleet. By 1968, it was also showing its age.
Here is something that did not make it into most of the reporting at the time. The USS Scorpion was supposed to receive a full overhaul lasting around 24 months. It received 8 months of emergency repairs instead. The Cold War did not stop for maintenance schedules. At least one crew member transferred off the USS Scorpion before its final deployment, specifically because he was concerned about the submarine's condition. He later said he did not believe it was safe to sail.
Stay with me here because what happened on the day the USS Scorpion was supposed to come home is something I keep coming back to. And once you hear it, I think you'll understand why this story has never fully gone away.
In February 1968, the USS Scorpion left Norfolk for a 3month Mediterranean deployment. By mid-May, the USS Scorpion was heading home through the straight of Gibralar. Then came the detour. Admiral Arnold Sharda, commander of the Atlantic Submarine Force, diverted the USS Scorpion 1,200 miles southwest to monitor a group of Soviet warships near the Canary Islands. Standard Cold War work.
The last confirmed radio message from the USS Scorpion arrived on May 21st. Commander Francis Slatterie reported the submarine was closing in on the Soviet vessels. That was the last anyone ever heard from the USS Scorpion or any of its 99 crew members. On May 22nd, the USS Scorpion suffered a catastrophic event around 400 miles southwest of the Azors. The submarine went to the bottom of the ocean in two pieces. All 99 men died. Nobody on the surface knew it had happened.
The Navy told families the USS Scorpion was due at Pier 22 in Norfolk at 1:00 in the afternoon on May 27th. Wives, children, parents, girlfriends, several dozen people gathered in a howling nor easter, standing in the rain, watching the harbor. 1:00 came and went. The USS Scorpion did not appear. The families were eventually told to go home. No explanation was given. Most of them learned the USS Scorpion was missing from reporters calling their homes that evening or from the television news. The USS Scorpion had already been on the ocean floor for 5 days.
One of those 99 men had never met his two-month-old baby daughter. She was at the pier that day in a pink checkered dress. Embroidered across the front were five words, "My heart belongs to Daddy." The crew left behind 64 widows and 99 children. Most of the men were younger than 25.
Now, here is where this story gets genuinely strange because the Navy did find the USS Scorpion. And what it then did and chose not to say is what has kept this case open for more than 50 years. The Navy had a secret advantage. A vast network of underwater hydrophones called Sosus had recorded the sound of a pressure hole collapsing on May 22nd. Acoustic experts triangulated the signals and calculated a rough position. In October 1968, 5 months after the sinking, the Navy announced the wreck had been located on the seabed around 10,000 ft down.
Here is the part I went back and checked. A naval history investigation published in 2025 found evidence suggesting the wreck was actually located much earlier, possibly as early as June rather than October as officially stated. The precise coordinates were not released to the public until 1998, 30 years after the submarine went down.
In 1985, Robert Ballard, the same oceanographer who found the Titanic, visited the USS Scorpion wreck using the submersible Alvin. Here is something most people do not know. The Navy did not ask Ballard to look for the Titanic. The Navy secretly lent Ballard the submersible to survey its two lost nuclear submarines. In exchange, Ballard was allowed to use the remaining time to search for the Titanic. The Titanic search was the cover story. Those 1985 photographs are the last images of the USS Scorpion ever made public.
Here is the part nobody talks about. The Navy held its inquiry. It reviewed the wreck photographs. It interviewed 76 witnesses over 2 months. Then it issued its conclusion. I am going to read it to you exactly as written because I think the specific words matter. The report said the certain cause of the loss of the scorpion cannot be ascertained from evidence now available. That is the official position of the United States Navy. After five decades, after multiple inquiries and after photographs of the wreck, after the declassification of thousands of pages of documents, still it cannot be ascertained.
Three theories have been seriously proposed. None has ever been officially ruled out. The first is a torpedo malfunction. The Navy's own court of inquiry concluded the most probable cause was a fault with one of the USS Scorpion's torpedoes. A known battery defect that could cause a weapon to detonate inside its own tube. A subsequent naval panel in 1970 disavowed this theory. The case was not closed. It simply changed hands.
The second is a Soviet attack. One controversial theory argued by military journalist Ed Offley in his book Scorpion Down is that the USS Scorpion was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine and that both governments buried what happened to prevent the Cold War turning hot. The Navy officially rejects this. The acoustic evidence from May 22nd has never been fully declassified.
The third goes back to maintenance. A journalist obtained thousands of pages of records through the Freedom of Information Act and found the USS Scorpion had been selected for a classified program that deliberately cut its maintenance to keep submarines operational. Whether that contributed to what happened has never been established.
In 2012, more than 13,000 former submariners formally asked the Navy to reopen the case. The Navy said no. The USS Scorpion is still down there around 10,000 ft below the Atlantic, 400 miles from the Azors. The reactor is still there. The nuclear weapons are still there. The last public photographs of the wreck are now 40 years old. The wreck site is protected as a war grave. The Navy monitors it for radiation and publishes the results in an annual report, but has never released survey photographs or updated the public assessment of what remains. The court of inquiry has never been reconvened. The cause of sinking is still officially listed as undetermined.
64 women lost husbands. 99 children grew up without fathers. And as of today, no one in an official position has ever told them exactly what happened or why their government knew something had gone wrong 5 days before it told them to stand in the rain at Pier 22. The USS Scorpion isn't missing. The answers are.