On the morning of Memorial Day, May 27, 1968, dozens of family members of the crew of the USS Scorpion gathered at Pier 22 at the Norfolk Naval Station awaiting the 1pm arrival of the submarine returning from a routine three-month deployment to the Mediterranean. The families waited for hours in the wind and rain clutching umbrellas and comforting shivering children. But unbeknownst to them, the Scorpion had sunk five days earlier, killing all ninety-nine men onboard.
What veteran military reporter Ed Offley has found out decades later is that the Navy already knew the Scorpion’s fate on that morning but hid the facts from family members, the press, and the public. To this day, family members and the public remain in the dark about what one American admiral has called “one of the greatest unsolved sea mysteries of our era.”
Ed Offley is a Military Reporter for The News Herald in Panama City, Florida. He is a graduate of the University of Virginia (’69) and served in the U.S. Navy in Vietnam. His new book is Scorpion Downâ€â€Sunk by the Soviets, Buried by the Pentagon: The Untold Story of the USS Scorpion.
I’ve read the book and was quite impressed. However, I was not able to find any independent corroberation on the web.
I went to a bulletin board where ex-SOSUS personnel post and their opinions. The ratio is three posts thinking the book is BS versus for every post that thinks it’s plausible. People who were posting included a guy who was stationed with Vince Collier, seaman that was in the class where the SOSUS “Scorpion death” recording was played. The man posting said Vince was quite a talker, but never mentioned hearing the “death” recording.
Other ex-SOSUS personnel posting said that they remembered seeing US and Soviet subs mameuvering live as the paper tape was being produced from the sensors.
It’s a good book, but it would be nice if someone came forward to corroberate it.
Scorpion Down.. a week or so prior to the sinking of the Scorpion, i remember hearing about a russian bomber mysteriously crashing near an air craft carrier.
To me the timeing was too much to dis regard.. I assumed it was tit for tat..
Bingo.. the Scorpion was already sunk sooooooo it would seem that maybe we were retaliating for our sub… which we knew went down..
maybe we were in a heightened state of alert.
The russian badger t-16 went down on the 25 of may.