-The Titanic is the world's most famous shipwreck.

-The iceberg was enormous.

-As it swept past Titanic, the lights of the bridge lit it up.

Absolutely brilliant white.

-This is the story of those who've tried to find it.

-First, you got to recognize we're taking a voyage into history.

-He had a call name called "Cadillac Jack."

He loved to gamble.

The Titanic was a big one.

-He occasionally joked that he was the biggest ship owner in the world, but most of the ships were on the seabed.

-It's a story of incredible scientific innovation... -I said, "Well, I don't have the equipment to do this."

And he said, "Build it."

-Nothing like that had ever been done, to my knowledge, in oceanography.

-...a story of Cold War intrigue... -The primary purpose of the expedition to find the Titanic was not to find the Titanic.

It was 100% completely classified.

-...and it led to one of the greatest discoveries in history.

-You had to stay focused.

We were looking for something that might be kind of small, and you want to see it when it shows up.

-For every generation, Titanic is reborn.

When Bob Ballard found the wreck in 1985, this was another whole new chapter.

♪♪ -By the 1980s, the Titanic had been lost in the ocean for over 70 years.

Several attempts to find it by Texas oilman Jack Grimm had failed.

Meanwhile, at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, one of America's leading oceanographers was putting together a plan of his own.

His name: Dr.

Robert Ballard.

-Bob Ballard is a very energetic, enthusiastic person.

He basically commands a room when he walks in, and he entices you to get involved with his projects.

-The actual beginning of the quest to try to find Titanic goes much further back.

-You know, Bob had been looking to find the Titanic for a number of years, and, of course, there were, uh, the previous expeditions to go out and find it that had been unsuccessful.

-Since the 1970s, Ballard had been trying to design a device capable of exploring the deepest regions of the North Atlantic, where the Titanic was thought to be located.

-Bob was beginning to set up a laboratory at Woods Hole called the Deep Submergence Lab, and he offered me a job.

What he had in mind for me was to build Argo and to go look for the Titanic.

He told me that the very first time I met him that that's what he wanted to do.

-Stewart Harris' job was to build a submersible device, which Ballard called the Argo.

Previous attempts to find the Titanic had failed largely due to bad weather and technical malfunctions at extreme depths, but the hope was that Argo would withstand all these pressures.

-They had come up with a concept which they called Argo and Jason.

Argo was a kind of unique combination of sonar and video imaging.

The idea was that Argo would be a deep submersible platform that is towed from a ship... and that Jason would be a small, remotely operated vehicle that would be launched from Argo, actually, and be able to go down and do the up-close and personal kind of filming.

-Argo had three TV cameras.

These were designed to incorporate a live video signal so that you could see in real time at the surface on the research vessel what the vehicle was directly passing over.

-Building Argo would require millions of dollars.

Without a wealthy benefactor behind him, Bob Ballard decided to seek funding from a different source: the US Navy.

-Robert Ballard is most widely known as an oceanographer, an undersea explorer, but it's also an important detail of his character that Robert Ballard is a commander in the US Navy.

He strategizes and liaises with the US government, so he absolutely has a foot in a military camp and a foot in an academic camp.

He is both an oceanographer and a naval officer.

-Bob was able to get his projects funded by the Office of Naval Research.

They were very keen on helping Bob work on Argo-Jason because they saw it as a deep-ocean asset that would be useful to the Navy, as well.

-The Argo was of great interest to the US Navy.

They saw the military applications and the potential for searching for things such as lost submarines.

-Ballard is operating in a time when the military industrial academic complex is a core component of US foreign policy, that the Pentagon will pour money into technological developments in areas where it can see a dual-use technology, where developments of technologies that might be for civilian purposes will also have enormous military benefits.

So he approaches the Pentagon with a pitch to use this technology to find the Titanic.

Ultimately, the Navy is not interested in the search for the Titanic, but for the strategic reasons of needing to locate two lost submarines, the Navy decides that they will meet Ballard's proposal but that the search for the Titanic is a byproduct.

-The primary purpose of the expedition to find the Titanic was not to find the Titanic.

It was to go survey the wrecks of the two US Navy nuclear submarines.

Both the USS Thresher and USS Scorpion were attack submarines.

They were basically hunter-killers.

Their job was to hunt Russian submarines, you know, detect them, track them, make sure they didn't pose a threat to US ships.

-Ballard had approached the Navy to fulfill his dream of finding the Titanic.

Now he found himself in a Cold War game of cat-and-mouse in which the stakes couldn't be higher.

-For 20 years, the Soviet Union has been accumulating enormous military might.

They didn't stop when their forces exceeded all requirements of a legitimate defensive capability.

-1982 is a period of heightened tension between the United States and the Soviet Union, broadly referred to as the New Cold War.

Bomber fleets and intercontinental ballistic missiles grew in number on both sides.

Submarine forces were built up with the primary goal of hunting and destroying, if necessary, Soviet vessels.

-Submarines at the time helped maintain the doctrine of mutually assured destruction.

They had their ballistic submarines within range of our cities.

We had our submarines in range of their cities.

The USS Thresher disappeared in 1963.

They surmised quite quickly what happened to the Thresher.

Apparently, it was a faulty pipe that started leaking.

The Scorpion is still hotly debated about what really happened there.

-The Scorpion was deployed on a mission to observe Soviet naval forces.

During this time, it was lost.

And a mystery surrounds exactly what caused that.

-Then you have more extreme conspiracy theories that it was sunk by the Soviet Union because the Scorpion was getting near their fleet and posing a threat or it was done in retaliation.

-Alongside the tragedy of losing two cutting-edge military vessels and all hands on board, if the Soviets had developed technology that allowed them to trace these submarines, if they had been destroyed through military action, then it could mean that the covert nature, the secretive nature of US undersea activities was actually exposed.

So the entire balance of terror upon which the Cold War rested was at risk unless they could confirm that the Soviets were not able to locate and find these submarines.

-They basically bookend the Titanic.

They were close enough to be part of this operation where they could be surveyed while the claim was that there was a search for the Titanic.

Depends on what version of the story you want to believe.

Either Robert Ballard came up with this idea of the search for Titanic as the cover story... or it was the Navy that realized, "Hey, this is an opportunity.

We'll fund this expedition, and it will provide the cover we need to go look at these submarines."

-His primary responsibility is to find the submarines, and with any time remaining, having achieved that objective, and any resources remaining, he can then use that to find the Titanic.

So it is predominantly a military salvage mission that then, as a byproduct, can become the search for the Titanic.

-Oh, it was-- it was 100% completely classified and remained so for about 20 years.

That's when the world learned that the discovery of the Titanic had actually been a ruse to go look at these submarines.

♪♪ -By 1984, with funding from the US Navy, Robert Ballard had built his deep-water submersible, the Argo.

He must use it to examine the wrecks of two nuclear submarines located in the area where the Titanic sank.

To fulfill his ambition of finding the Titanic, as well, he realized the Argo alone may not be enough, so he enlisted the help of the French marine institute Ifremer.

Bernard Pillaud has never spoken about these events before.

-[ Speaking French ] -So the collaboration with Ifremer came about pretty naturally.

They had just developed their very sophisticated side-looking sonar system which they called SAR.

-Ifremer also had the wide-area search technology which Woods Hole didn't have at the time.

-[ Speaking French ] -If the French had found positive indication of where the wreck was, then we would come in with Argo and just do video and film survey of the wreckage.

-While the search for the Titanic would be a joint US/French operation, Ifremer were told nothing about Ballard's secret mission for the US Navy.

-The French team were kept in the dark about this whole project.

I think that any observers like the Soviets-- that, "Oh, the US and French are working together."

That means they must really be looking for the Titanic and not doing something, you know, covert.

-In order to narrow down the search area, the French team carefully examined every aspect of the tragic events that took place over 70 years earlier and led to the sinking of the Titanic.

♪♪ When the Titanic left Southampton Dock on its fateful voyage, no one believed it could sink, least of all the man at the helm, Captain Edward Smith, probably the most famous sailor in the world.

-Captain Smith is a selling point for the Titanic.

There are some first-class passengers who like him so much that they'll only travel on ships that he is in command of.

-Captain Smith, highest-paid sailor in the world, known as The Millionaires' Captain, nicknamed "EJ."

Known to have a quick smile, ready with a story.

-The other thing about Captain Smith is he liked speed.

He liked going fast.

The officers said it would make them fairly flush with pride as he conned his ships up New York with a foot to spare at the bow and a foot to spare at the stern.

-If you look at interviews he makes even 9, 10 years before the Titanic, he says that technology has taken us beyond the point of dramatic shipwrecks, and it does seem as if Smith has been rendered a little bit too complacent.

He is too confident both in his own capabilities, his own track record, and, of course, in the technology that he believes has rendered ships like the Titanic close to unsinkable.

♪♪ -About 6:30 after sunset, Titanic entered a very cold part of the North Atlantic, and from this moment on, they knew they might encounter ice.

-It was a Sunday night.

It was incredibly dark.

There was no moon in the sky.

-It is an exceptionally calm night, so there's no wind or breeze that is breaking waves around the base of the iceberg that helps them become easier to spot.

Everything has conspired to make this iceberg difficult to spot.

-There was so much ice in the area where Titanic sank that it created a very thin band of haze all around the horizon, and this reduced the contrast with the berg, and so, therefore, instead of the berg being seen a few seconds earlier, it was only seen about 50 seconds before the collision.

-The fact that Captain Smith hasn't slowed the ship down means that they are dealing with something that is going to take them longer to spot on a ship that is moving too fast to spot it in time.

When Frederick Fleet looks out and sees an iceberg dead ahead, he rings the bell.

-[ Bell ringing ] -He also calls down to the bridge to say the famous words, "Iceberg dead ahead, sir."

-He communicates with them using a telephone.

The quartermaster, the man steering the ship, Robert Hichens, he attempts to avert disaster.

-The iceberg was enormous.

They go hard to starboard to try to avoid it, and it looks for a second as if the Titanic is turning enough in order to avoid this iceberg, but at the last second, it grazed the ship.

The iceberg opens up a significant section of the Titanic to the North Atlantic water.

-Titanic was built to crash at the front and have four compartments gone, but this iceberg took five compartments.

-At least five watertight compartments are flooded, and as soon as this happens, it is mathematically certain that Titanic will founder, that the Titanic will sink.

-The night the Titanic sank, an event took place that would leave explorers searching for the wreck at a disadvantage for more than 70 years.

An error was made when the wireless operators sent out the wrong coordinates for Titanic's position, which were picked up by two nearby ships, the Californian and the Carpathia.

-Carpathia, in responding to Titanic's distress signal was going 10 miles to the wrong position, but completely randomly, Titanic's actual crash site happened to be between where the rescue ship was and on the way to the wrong distress position.

-The last messages coming from the wireless room play a vital role, yes, in getting the Carpathia to near the site of where the Titanic sinks, but when it comes to people hoping to find the Titanic, there is a much larger area for them to search until they actually encounter the wreck itself.

-If Robert Ballard and the French team were to be successful in finding the Titanic, they would need more than just technology.

Their search strategy would need to account for the many historical uncertainties surrounding Titanic's position.

-The search strategy was based upon the last reported sightings, the last telegraph message that had been sent.

It was also based on sightings of the Carpathia and the Californian, where they picked up the survivors and the timing of things and what they knew of the surface currents, as well as the subsea currents in that area.

♪♪ -For the purposes of mapping out a search area, there was another publicly available source containing important clues as to the Titanic's possible location.

-Well, men, first, you got to recognize the fact that we're taking a voyage into history, and that's just what it is.

And hopefully we can find the wreck and gain access... [ Man speaking indistinctly ] ...and gain access to the purser's office.

It's my film.

If I want to talk on and on and on, I think I will.

-Between 1980 and 1983, Texan oil tycoon Jack Grimm's three missions to find the Titanic had used advanced deep-water sonar and photographic technology.

-We had everything we needed.

All we needed was good weather and being able to cover all the bases.

-Jack Grimm's expeditions produced a tantalizing possible location for the Titanic.

-The search goes on while the exhausted crew maintains a desperate night vigil.

-And suddenly, there was a very loud, crisp reflector.

[ Sonar pinging ] Bang, bang, bang, bang.

It was a linear object, but only 600 feet long.

The Titanic was over 800 feet long.

And so it was written off as perhaps a pile of rocks, scattered debris and rocks, and that was the description of target number 9.

This crisp, 600-foot-long object is the bow section of the Titanic.

-William Ryan and Jack Grimm had a hunch that the Titanic might be located at target number 9, so they went in search of photographic evidence.

-About three hours into the tow, this object suddenly appears.

The camera hits something, and it tilts something.

And the reaction was, "What is this?

What happened?"

-Oh, there's something there!

Look!

-[ Woman shouts ] -And there it was, a few frames of videotape we would look at again and again.

Its immediate impression caught the eye and froze the mind.

-When Jack Grimm returned, he exclaimed he believed that that was the Titanic's propeller.

He was convinced it was the propeller.

I think the reaction of the public was interesting, but it was oh-hum.

-And your camera that you were pulling just went right over this.

It bumped over it.

-Yes, and we didn't know any of this until hours later.

So I went back in the summer of '83 to try to confirm that discovery, and we lost all of our camera systems in the storm there and was unable to confirm it.

-I stayed neutral because I didn't know where it was from.

I knew it was on the transect towards target number 9.

-Jack Grimm did not fund any more searches for the Titanic, so the only people in a position to solve the riddles he left behind were Robert Ballard's US/French team.

Had Jack Grimm found Titanic's propeller?

What was at target number 9.

Could it really be the Titanic?

♪♪ A year before Robert Ballard recruited the French in his quest to find the Titanic, he carried out a top-secret mission for the US Navy.

Using his submersible, the Argo, he covertly surveyed the wreck of a downed nuclear submarine, the USS Thresher.

Little did he know, but this mission, and his later survey of the USS Scorpion, would provide a vital clue in the search for the Titanic.

-The first thing Ballard did was to survey the Thresher, to make sure that there was no fissile material leaking from the reactors or the weapons.

♪♪ -We arrived on scene and launched Argo.

My role in the whole expedition was to keep Argo running and running well.

And so my focus totally was on keeping the cameras running, keeping the sonar running, keeping the lights running.

-It's just really eerie to see this thing sitting on the bottom of the ocean, knowing that it had brought all these men to their death.

-3-2-7... -During the investigation, they found that the problem was likely faulty piping, which short-circuited some of the electronics and shut down the reactor.

Without the reactor, there's no propulsion, and without propulsion, the sub began to sink.

It fell below crush depth and imploded.

-While surveying the debris from the implosion, Ballard noticed something that called into question the received wisdom about searching for a shipwreck at these kinds of depths.

-Because nobody had ever been able to see the effects of a violent decompression at such great depth of something the size of a US Navy attack submarine, the sight of what it does to a vessel was new.

It was brand-new to Ballard.

The shape of the wreckage, what was left, where the damage occurred, how the hull had decompressed and split up, the sections it had broken up into.

All of this was new.

-Both the Thresher and the Scorpion imploded, and that's kind of like if you have a bag of potato chips or a bag of crisps and you start squeezing it and you start applying the pressure.

Eventually it's going to burst, and you're gonna crush everything on the inside, and bits and pieces are gonna be ejected through the openings.

-And what Ballard's team is able to develop here is the technique in which they use the debris field that is created.

Rather than having to find the single wreck, which occupies a very small space on an enormous seabed, you can use that debris field and trace it and follow it in real time through these lenses and use that to locate where the primary wreck is.

-And what he noticed in these debris fields for the submarines, he applied that to the search for the Titanic.

-Ballard's theory was that if something as robust as a nuclear submarine had imploded at these depths, could the same have happened to the Titanic?

If so, it, too, may have produced a debris field which Argo could follow, and that might lead him to the wreck.

This would be even more likely if, prior to sinking, the Titanic had split in two and not sunk intact, as many eyewitnesses claimed back in 1912.

♪♪ -Titanic was such a big ship that, really, how people perceive the accident and the disaster was different depending on where you were in the ship.

-The lounge, or the reception room, closed at 11:00 every evening.

The smoking room is allowed to stay open until midnight, which means it's the only public room still open on board when the men in the smoking room feel a slight shudder at about 20 minutes to midnight That is the Titanic hitting the iceberg.

[ Metal creaking ] -Other passengers heard a sound like running over shingle on a beach.

Some described it as tearing a piece of calico or perhaps we might think of it as a piece of canvas.

-The calmness of the reaction belies the seriousness of the situation.

[ Rapid footsteps ] -At this point, Captain Smith obviously came running out onto the bridge immediately and said, "What's happened?"

And Murdoch said, "We've struck ice, and I've shut the watertight doors."

Captain Smith immediately called for the carpenter and Thomas Andrews, the designer, and they went forward to, what's called, sound the ship.

-Andrews' first moment of feeling genuine panic that something might be seriously wrong is when he gets to "G" deck and to the mailroom, and he sees the clerks dragging sacks of letters away from incoming, trickling in seawater.

He sees the water coming in, and he's able to do quick calculations.

-Thomas Andrews then returns to the bridge, having inspected the damage to Titanic, and Captain Smith can't really believe what Thomas Andrews tells him, the devastating news that neither of them would ever have expected in their wildest dreams.

He says the ship has about an hour and a half to live.

-Once Smith has received what is essentially the Titanic's death sentence, a surreal period of faux calm seems to settle over his actions on the ship.

-Passengers were asked to get out of bed, get dressed, dress warmly, put lifebelts on, and go up onto the freezing decks.

And they thought this was a real pain.

They wanted to be in their warm bedrooms.

They never believed that Titanic would sink.

-The first-class lounge is opened up by a well-meaning ship official so that the first-class passengers can be warm while the lifeboats are prepared, so they decamp in there.

The band arrives to entertain them.

Then other stewards open up the bar in the lounge.

They're serving brandy and hot cocoa.

-Initially, people probably think that it's something of a drill, perhaps.

Of course, as the ship sinks lower and lower down, it is crystal clear what is going to happen.

And it's at that point that the panic begins to set in.

-As Titanic's decks sink lower and lower because the water's flooding in in the bow, people start quickly to realize it's a very urgent situation, so having found the lifeboats very difficult to fill at the beginning, they're then having to overfill them and rush them at the end.

-At one point, one of the officers manning the lifeboats had threatened to shoot any man that tried to rush on board again ahead of women and children.

-There are reports, for example, of First Officer Murdoch shooting some people who were trying to storm the lifeboats, and then he turns the gun on himself and he gives a salute.

So it all becomes really like a living hell.

-Many men are becoming concerned about getting their wives and children into the boats, and you do see some genuinely remarkable moments of courage.

Isidor and Ida Straus-- they were the co-owners of Macy's department store in New York-- declined to get in a lifeboat.

Mrs.

Straus would not leave her husband.

She said they had lived together and, if needs be, they would die together.

Benjamin Guggenheim famously said he was going to dress in his best and go down as a gentleman.

That's one of the most enduring legends of the Titanic.

-Thomas Andrews is trying to be as helpful as he can because he knows there are not enough lifeboats and he knows they're not going to have time to launch them all before the Titanic sinks.

-The last sight that we have of him, we think, is from a steward on board, a waiter on board, called Cecil Fitzpatrick, and Cecil sees Smith and Andrews talking together near the bridge just before the Titanic starts to go into its real final plunge, when the two of them are swept overboard and never seen again.

Their bodies aren't recovered.

The Titanic split as it sank, we now know, between the second and third funnel, but it happened after the electricity had failed.

The lights had gone out.

There is no moon.

So essentially these people in the lifeboats are looking at a darkened skyscraper disappearing in the gloom in front of them.

-She splits in half, and then the lights go out, and then the cries happen.

And, tragically, everyone in the lifeboats thinks that there's no one left on the ship, that there was always enough lifeboats for everyone.

So they can't understand where these cries from 1,500 poor souls are coming from.

And the whole thing suddenly dawns on them that they've actually been immensely lucky to be able to get into a lifeboat and that they're actually witnessing one of the most terrible tragedies of modern time.

♪♪ -Armed with the theory that the Titanic may have created a debris field on its way to the ocean floor, Ballard and the French adapted their search strategy into what they called the two-stage approach.

The French would first use their sonar to try and find the wreck from their research ship, Le Suroit.

Ballard would then join them and use Argo to search for a debris field on board the US ship, the Knorr.

The other mission was top-secret.

It was to survey the wreck of a second nuclear submarine for the US Navy, who had paid for the technology Ballard wanted to use to find the Titanic.

-The US Navy, in a degree of tit-for-tat with Ballard, makes the deal that, ultimately, once he is able to locate the Scorpion, any remaining time and resources that were allocated to that mission can be diverted to his search for the Titanic.

-We did have a lot of rough weather, and I remember a few days where we weren't able to do anything but basically just try to stay in your bunk and not get rolled around the ship.

And unfortunately, the SAR vehicle went over the debris field and worked its way further and further away with every turn in mowing the lawn.

It was left up to the Argo system to go and try to fill in the rest of the box and find the wreck site.

We all knew that we were trying to get the work done -- at the Scorpion site done as fast as possible so we could go to look for Titanic.

Argo would not have been able to cover that much territory in the time available.

So, having Ifremer eliminate maybe 70% or so of the search area was huge.

-Building upon the experience he had in the search for the Thresher, Ballard is able to find the Scorpion with 12 days remaining, which he can then allocate to the search of the Titanic.

-With the clock ticking, the French and US teams join forces on board the Knorr.

If they're going to find the Titanic, it's now or never.

-What we ended up doing with the Argo system is not necessarily following the track of just mowing the lawn, but the line spaces were increased in order for us just to be able to look for debris and not for the shipwreck itself.

The line spacings were spaced further apart.

-Myself and the small team of people that we had that were in charge of Argo, or of supporting Argo, working 18 hours a day.

-All the watch teams were suffering after a day or so of boredom of watching mud go by for eight hours a day on TV.

Probably some of the worst produced television ever.

The, uh -- People would get excited if you saw a rock or a fish or something.

There'd be cheers, you know, just seeing something different.

So, it was, uh -- it was very, very boring work.

-We started giving ourselves nicknames.

The midnight watch crew was The Team of Quiet Excellence.

So, you know, drinking lots of coffee and telling jokes, but, you know, you had to stay focused.

We were looking for something that might be kind of small.

And you want to see it when it shows up.

That happened on the night of August 31st.

I came on shift at midnight, August 31st.

So it was going into the September 1st.

It was just another shift.

Not long after midnight was when we first saw the first hints of debris.

And literally it was, "That's not natural.

That's something that's manmade."

And then it's gone.

-When we started seeing debris or wreckage on the sea floor, we knew that there was something nearby that was big that these objects had come from.

-Basically, everybody really got perked up at that point because we knew, "Okay, we're in a debris field."

We're seeing debris.

I think it was probably around that time we said, "Somebody should go wake up Bob."

-During this debate, the chef came in to see if we wanted anything and he saw what was going on and he went and got Bob.

-When Bob showed up, we were just coming around for another track line.

It was not long after he got there that we went overtop of one of the boilers.

-When we first passed over the boiler, everyone was screaming, "Boiler, boiler!

It's a boiler!"

Everyone knew about the photograph, and Walter Lord's book about Titanic had a picture of the boilers before they were installed.

So everyone knew that that boiler was from Titanic.

-At that point, we knew.

We did it.

We found it.

And my comment was, "Bingo!"

[ Laughs ] -When Bob came in the control van, he was excited.

I think he shouted, "The sucker exists," or something like that.

He was very, very excited.

We had found Titanic, and everyone was very excited and there was champagne being served.

-The first image that we saw that really brought home what we were looking at was the bow.

The bow was the most recognizable part of the ship.

♪♪ -The atmosphere went from everyone being excited for the discovery to everyone being somber.

-We had found the Titanic.

It was an achievement.

It represents a -- a tragedy.

1,500 people or more lost their lives when that ship sank.

When you do see it, you have to realize that -- what it cost.

-Bob Ballard and the French team had achieved what eluded so many.

They had found the Titanic.

And while Ballard's name is the one most associated with the discovery, it was very much a team effort.

-Ifremer made a huge contribution to finding Titanic, being able to go and eliminate that much of the search area.

Argo would never have been able to cover that much ground in the amount of time there was.

-For the general public, the discovery was immense.

The French/US team had solved a mystery which had captivated the world for nearly three-quarters of a century.

-One of the most remarkable things that happened in the whole cruise was how the public reacted to this discovery, which totally blew my mind.

When we got back to Woods Hole, the main dock, it was jammed with people.

There were thousands of people on the dock when we arrived back home.

There was a big banner strung on the main building facing the dock -- "Congratulations," you know?

-Among those who watched the explorers' triumphant return was the US Navy.

After all, it was the Navy's funding of Argo that had made the discovery possible.

-The Navy was less than happy that they found the Titanic because it brought unwanted attention to the mission and a lot of scrutiny.

And some media at the time began to question, like, "Why was the Navy involved at all in something that involved a commercial passenger liner?"

-The Navy gets quite nervous about the sorts of questions that might be asked about this technology, about their connection, about exactly why it was that Ballard had developed and was using this technology in the first place.

-And of course the Navy went into a little bit of a panic there and just said, "This was an opportunity to test these new submersibles," and kind of left it at that.

But there was a bit of a worry that the success was gonna expose the whole secret operation.

-But ultimately, the fame and the excitement around the Titanic is enough that people just look past these questions.

And it's not until decades later that people really start to explore this connection between Ballard a naval commander, and the discovery of the Titanic.

-As more details emerged about the final resting place of the Titanic, there was one more mystery that remained unsolved.

Was Titanic located near the spot Jack Grimm's team had identified and labeled target number 9?

-How important do you think your findings were to the discovery now by this US/French team?

-I feel they confirmed what I had said all along, that we'd discovered it in the summer of '81.

-Did they -- Is the site where they found the ship very close to where you expected it to be found?

-Yes.

We don't have the exact fix on where they found the main body of the ship, but it almost has to be within a mile radius of where we found the propeller.

Therefore, our cameras just missed the wreck in the summer of '81 and was only able to get about 90% of the propeller.

-When they found the boilers and got all excited -- and up in the corner of the video frame was the date, the time, in little tiny numbers, and the pressure depth.

And it was exactly the pressure depth of target 9.

So, he gave me the Titanic on my birthday.

Fabulous.

Thank you, Bob.

And he is to be congratulated because he was the first to actually show that this was, in fact, the Titanic.

-Earlier expedition, they had actually passed right over the wreck of the Titanic and didn't realize it.

You know, they found out later when, of course, Ballard revealed the location.

And that's just because they were using equipment that was just not as advanced as Ballard was -- and Ballard's equipment, like the Argo, which was the key to finding the Titanic.

-The discovery of the wreck was one of incalculable significance to studying the history of the Titanic.

It answered many questions about the sinking itself, and it provided a massive platform for the development of underwater and submarine technologies.

-It brought the subject to the global population for a second time.

I mean, you could even argue that, even today, over 110 years later, we're still talking about the Titanic almost as much as they did at the time.

-Titanic's wreck site is a very somber place.

It's cold and dark, but it's a memorial to the 1,500 people who died.

-To me, the sort of hallowed ground is actually there at the surface because no one died on the sea floor.

Everyone died at the surface.

And with every expedition I've been out there, it always feels like a different part of the ocean there.

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