Thunman agreed to fund the Titanic expedition on one condition - that Ballard use the money and the time to also locate two nuclear submarines that went missing in the Atlantic in the 1960s. On April 10, 1963, the USS Thresher sank during deep-diving tests more than 200 miles off the coast of Boston. All 129 crew and shipyard personnel died.
Five years later, 99 crewmen died when their submarine, the USS Scorpion, mysteriously disappeared near the Azores, a Portuguese archipelago some 1,000 miles west of the European continent.