Q: Is there any interest in going after the Japanese aircraft carriers that also went down?

Ballard: Well, we did. We spent a tremendous amount of effort. In fact, when we had our little accident and we knew the vehicle was going to be down for several days, we immediately steamed over to the site where the Japanese carriers were. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the equivalent of Chuck Haberlein from Japan with us. Chuck brought with him the logbooks of the destroyer escorts of the Yorktown, so we had a tremendous database. Even though it was a tremendous database, and it did succeed in finding the Yorktown, it still came up with a 300-square-mile [500-square-kilometer] search area. We actually went over to the Japanese carrier site and conducted a larger search. The area that we conducted in the Japanese carrier site was 400 square miles [650 square kilometers]. So in this total expedition we searched 700 square miles [1,100 square kilometers]. That’s seven times Titanic, seven times Bismarck. The problem is, in search, if you look in the wrong drawer, you’re not going to find anything. And so we did a miraculous 100 and— well, we did total coverage, 200 percent coverage of the area. We found 2 targets in this area: 2 targets in an area of 300 square miles [500 square kilometers] that looked like, smelled like, tasted like, just like the same smudge that was the Yorktown, and we dove on them, and they were geologic formations. And all of a sudden, our search area exploded in all directions. When you go to your primary area and you search it with 200 percent coverage, and you check out every target that looks like an aircraft carrier, and it ain’t there, that’s it. Because now the Pacific Ocean covers one-third of the planet, and the search explodes in all directions. So we gave it quite a shot, but once we had our system back on line, we wanted to get back to the Yorktown.

Q: I have a quick question about the timing: How many days had you searched with the MR-1 before you got to the smudge?

Ballard: The total search time was four days, wasn’t it, at the Yorktown site? Four days at the Yorktown site and I believe four-plus days at the carrier site. I think we spent more time at the Japanese site than the Yorktown site, but we had a target. We were sort of confident that we had the Yorktown.

Q: Eight days combined before you hit the Yorktown?

Ballard: Well, by the time we had to then get Hawaii off—had to go back to Midway, because they’re a meter and we had to turn the meter off, because once we searched 600 square miles [1,000 square kilometers], 700 square miles [1,100 square kilometers], we wanted to send them home and bring on more forces, and we only had so many people we could have on the ship at any one time. So, we steamed back into Midway after two weeks. So the first leg was two weeks long, which completed the total sonar search of both areas, and the initial dives that led to the implosion, and then we ran back to Midway, because we had to go back to Midway to get everything we blew up. The Navy had been flying it in by way of Pearl Harbor, and there’s only two flights a week that come into Midway, and they only come in at night so they don’t ingest a lot of gooney birds, and so the night flight. We timed our arrival back when the ship came in and then we went in, grabbed all of our replacement stuff and steamed back out.

Q: And then the quick timing on the ATV: You said it takes six hours to get down there and then—

Ballard: And then you must stay down until you either run out of things to do, or you have a problem and you come home again and fix it.

Q: So how much time did you spend photographing?

Ballard: Total time ATV on Yorktown was, gosh, Commander, it must have been 20 hours? I think total time—you add up the lowerings. I mean we, if you want to know the truth, we got to know her very well. I mean, we finally said, “Well, what are we going to film now?” We filmed this one from five different angles, so. Chuck would have spent another month there [laughs], but we wanted to try to find the Hammann. Because once we knew where the Yorktown was, we had a good idea where the Hammann was. And so, we began searching for the Hammann. We began to pick up depth charges that we thought were off the Hammann, we were closing in on her and then we got blew out by the weather. Finally, Neptune closed the weather window on us and we got blown out and we could not get back into the water, and the expedition ended. Yes?

Q: Were you surprised by the great sterility of the marine life?

Ballard: I was, I was.

Q: Was it because of the great depth?

Ballard: A combination of the great depths. You couldn’t be further from a source of sediments on the planet. The Titanic, for example, sits right near the grand banks and is being swept by the Labrador current like a big broom, and it’s sweeping particles off into the water, and that’s why its sort of turbid. Even though we think of Titanic as clean water, it still had particles in it because it’s so close to the Grand Banks and a high productivity. You’re also, with the Titanic, in northern latitudes, just like you were with the Bismarck. You’re up in areas of high biological productivity. Those critters die and their bodies fall to the ocean floor, and they become problems for your camera. They become backscatter. Midway is at 30 degrees north latitude, so you’re still just above the Tropic of Cancer, you’re in pretty clean water. Why are coral reefs so pretty? Because they’re sterile. The warmer the water, the less they can hold nutrients, whereas when you get up in the high latitudes you get high nutrients, high backscatter. So we had very, very clean water. In fact, the rate of sedimentation around the Yorktown is around a centimeter per millennium. Let that sink in. A centimeter—less than a half inch—per thousand years. The Yorktown has been down 56 years, so, fine dusting. In fact the measurable component of deep-sea sediments around the Yorktown is meteoritic dust.

Q: How big was the help of the U.S. Navy in finding the Yorktown?

Ballard: Well, I wouldn’t have found it without them. I mean, how, where—was that a loaded question? The guy has a uniform on. Actually, this would not have happened were it not for the Navy’s cooperation. There was no way we were going to do this mission without the Navy’s support, and that means Navy in many different aspects of the Navy, not only the Navy that provided the ship and provided the vehicle system: the Naval Historical Center, without that historical database we wouldn’t have found the Yorktown; the Naval Oceanographic Command, the oceanographer of the Navy, if they hadn’t gone up there and done that pre-survey with their swath ship. The Navy went in there and did a bathymetric survey. I wouldn’t have known what I was up against. I had a bathymetric map before I went to sea of the Yorktown site, so I knew what I was up against. That’s why I took two systems: a system that could work in the mountains—i.e., ATV—and a system that would work out in the plains—i.e., the MR-1. So absolutely, in many, many ways they were key players.

Q: Do you or the Navy have any more plans for the Yorktown?

Ballard: No, the Yorktown is in our historical site. I mean Chuck’s group now has a tremendous database. It is protected by international law, unlike the Titanic, although we are not giving out its coordinates. The Naval Historical Center has the coordinates. If you want to find it, it’s somewhere out in the North Pacific. But no, it will be protected. It’s within the exclusive economic zone [EEZ] of the United States. I think what we’re going to see—fairly soon we’re gonna have another press conference in a month or so about a push to put historical ships protected on the EEZs. And if we can get the United Nations to add just three words to the Law of the Sea to not only protect cod and haddock, but to protect human history within our EEZ, we will automatically put yet another safety control on the Yorktown, because it is within our EEZ. Yes?

Q: Could you describe the orientation north-south, bow-stern of—

Ballard: She runs north-south. Zero-two-zero is her bearing of her flight deck. We did make a nice landing on her. We want to say the submarine forces now have their own aircraft carrier. It’s now property of the submarine forces, and ATV made a beautiful wheels-down landing. We used up very little of the flight deck, because the elevators were all crashed in, so we had to do a very short landing. But we did.

Q: I take it that the ship is still pretty much intact, in spite of water damage?

Ballard: Totally intact. She’s sitting up, she has a severe starboard list. She’s sort of down at the stern a little. We don’t really—we got a lot of data we’ve got to crunch, but we have pretty good aspect angle on her flight deck. You can see the elevators are all collapsed. You can understand why many of them may have been down when she sank. But she’s sitting there proudly, as you can see, upright, in remarkable condition, I think. Get Newport News Shipbuilding to go out and give her a cleaning [and] she’d be a great historical site, and I say that not totally joking. I’m convinced that one of the reasons I’m interested in these kinds of projects is the Yorktown and the Japanese carriers and all the airplanes and everything that went down there—and the Hammann—is a battlefield. And that battlefield will get wired one day, and you will visit that battlefield live, just as they had virtual travel in the New York Times this morning, as I was reading it on the plane. I don’t believe the Yorktown is going to be out of sight, out of mind now. We know where it is. It’s not far from Midway, it’s not hard to lay cables. We laid cables all the way across the oceans of the world. We’ve been doing it since the 1800s. So to wire up the battlefield of Midway, I don’t see that that’s a problem. And I’d go down there and just clean it up a little. Look at the shine on her stainless steel. There’s absolutely no animal encrustation on that ship. Just sweep the flight deck. And I’m not being silly about that, I truly believe in it. That’s why I don’t take things from ships of these historical ships, because I think they can be visited just like on our way to the Midway we stopped off in Pearl Harbor and went and visited the Arizona in Pearl Harbor—Battleship Row. She’s underwater, people visit her. The Yorktown’s underwater, and you can visit her in the future. So this was the first visit to the Yorktown, not the last.

Q: How many people died on the Yorktown, and how many were rescued?

Ballard: Chuck or Bill, do you know how many died on Yorktown and how many were rescued?

Haberlein: Forty or fifty on the ship.

Ballard: There wasn’t a high mortality on the Yorktown; forty or fifty died. The Hammann suffered heavy losses. [To someone else:] How many? Twenty-four hundred were rescued.

Q: Dr. Ballard, would you give us your take on a question that some people are bound to ask, which is why do this? Why go to the Yorktown and devote a certain amount of archaeological research? Is there an element of the Mount Everest type of thing—because it’s there? Is it to show you can do it?

Ballard: No, this is a long series of projects that I’ve done with National Geographic, beginning with our Titanic project, then our Bismarck project, Guadalcanal, when we went to a Iron Bottom Sound, the Lusitania. These are opportunities to visit historical sites and to relive history. You know the old saying, if you don’t study history, you’re doomed to repeat it. I see in this a tremendous opportunity to bring back to life the Battle of Midway. By breathing into it contemporary history, by going and finding it, by documenting it, by having your own struggle, it’s a parallel story. And Peter and Brian have done this successfully time and time again. Our specials on Titanic is still number one in the history of cable television. Our story with the Bismarck won two Emmys. Stories with the Lusitania won two Emmys. And we’re on cable television, and we’re winning. This is not- -you’re really, really busting down the doors when you can do that the way we do it with [National Geographic] EXPLORER. And EXPLORER has a long track record of bringing these kinds of stories to not only their members [of the National Geographic Society], but to the world, and I deeply enjoy being now associated with these great moments in human history. And I think it’s a wonderful opportunity to tell a great story and to learn those lessons, to interview Bill and his colleagues—very moving interviews. You walk away from those interviews, you walk away from seeing their catharsis, which can only happen by taking them there and showing them this ship and then asking him, on camera what does he think. And those are very, very moving interviews that Peter and Brian captured, and I think you walk away not glorifying war, but understanding the tragic losses that are associated with war. And so I think it’s very important for all of us and certainly for my children. I’d rather have them see Midway than repeat it.

Q: You mentioned getting an up close and personal look at the elevators. How close were your observations able to get, any other signs of the struggle to keep the ship afloat?

Ballard: Well, we were able, for example, to see where the torpedo hit her on her port side just forward a midship. We were able to go down and analyze that damage. Chuck could answer that a lot. I mean there’s a tremendous interest on the part of naval historians and naval architects and to the structural damage. I’m interested naturally in how these ships finally come to rest and what is their potential for other expeditions to find the Indianapolis, which was a great story as well. There are so many great, compelling stories out there. And certainly one—if this thing was just a shattered heap of nothingness, it would be very difficult to tell the compelling story that we are going to be able to tell. But to have her sitting upright, intact, gives us an opportunity. When you see the searchlight footage—I mean, we took those powerful lights and we put a special reflector on that made it a laser- beam white. It was just—I’m going to buy those lights. Because we had a searchlight that we could go right up to every entrance and scan in, and we looked and explored the entire interior of the ship. We could see—I mean, we had a beautiful three-chip zoom lens, and we could go right in up and see in great detail through the bowels of the ship. Amazing footage.

Q: You said a minute ago—you just commented in passing that you wouldn’t want to raise it. Is that because it’s so big, or so deep?

Ballard: Well, it would be silly. Why don’t you build a new one? It would be cheaper. No, it would be silly. As soon as you brought her up, Mother Nature would attack her. Sunlight would hit her. High oxygen contents would hit her. All sorts of things would start happening to that ship, and you would have a very, very degraded ship very quickly. Mother Nature is providing free storage, and she [the Yorktown] is in Davy Jones’s locker, and Davy Jones’s locker is a refrigerator. And it [the Yorktown] is in suspended animation, and it would be silly to try to bring her out. In the first place, you are not going to get her out of the bottom. She’s in the most cohesive mud you can imagine. She’s 45 to 50 feet [13 to 15 meters] into the bottom. Good luck. No, she’s fine, she’s safe.

Q: Just to clarify again: She’s pointing north?

Ballard: Yeah, there’s something about that that really gets you going, huh? All right, zero-two-zero.

Q: Also, what battle damage, other than the torpedoes, can you see?

Ballard: Well, we can see the damage in the flight deck. Why don’t you answer that?

Haberlein: Two big bomb holes, a vast in the ship’s elevator, which you see in the battle photos taken at the time, and we saw that bomb hole. There is evidence of fire. There’s a fire in the uptake, perhaps a chimney fire. That left evidence of itself. We had that and one torpedo. You could see the wakes on the torpedoes.

Ballard: Oh yeah, you could see exactly. They spotted them coming in, and they tried to, well, with machine guns they tried to shoot the torpedoes and were unsuccessful.

Q: Aside from that damage, it’s pretty much intact?

Ballard: Oh yeah, I mean, it’s buckled some. I mean, she took a couple. In the OAS sonar, which is probably the best camera shot we got, the sonar shot, you can see the lineations in the deck. You can see—we definitely are using that. I mean, that’s a gigantic photograph of the whole flight deck in one image. And that is a beautiful—you can see the island, you can see the elevators, you can see everything. You can see the whole deck. I mean, we made night landings. I mean, using, purely on instrumental landings, if you will, with ATV, we could come right in. We picked up her flight deck at a hundred yards [90 meters] on our sonar and could just come in right on it, make a nice landing.

Q: No aircraft or anything?

Ballard: No, they cleared the aircraft before she went. And recognize that she rolled, so she dumped whatever she had, and then she took off and glided. She did not go straight down. These ships sort of plane away, and so we searched for aircraft, but that’s a tough search.

Q: Did you see any human remains?

Ballard: No, there weren’t any. They pulled everyone off.

Q: Does it appear that the ship hit flat when it hit the bottom?

Ballard: Yes, it appeared to have hit perhaps a little down angle at the stern, but pretty much into the bottom. But when you look at the drag dynamics on the v shape of an aircraft carrier, it’s gonna want to do that. I mean, I have always found these ships right themselves. Remember Bismarck went in upside down also. But over her 16,000-foot [5,000-meter] fall, she righted herself. They always right themselves, if they get enough water to do that. It takes about 5000, 6000 feet [1,500, 1,800 meters] for a ship to right.

Q: Are you doing any more expeditions of the Black Sea, and what would that be?

Ballard: Well, we’re doing a fascinating mission in a few weeks with the NR1. We’re working off of New England, off of Hudson, off New York. We’re working with the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center to look for Paleo-Indian—evidences of Paleo-Indian occupation of our continental shelf during the Ice Age. We know that 18,000 years ago sea level was much lower than it is today. It was 500 feet [150 meters] lower, and a vast amount of real estate off New England and New York was land. And we’ve been tracking and plotting mastodon teeth that we’ve recovered to find where the mastodon and woolly mammoth kills took place, and we’re going to go out searching for evidence of the Paleo-Indians. That’s our next mission, and then after that our next big mission is back to the Mediterranean with NR1 to work off the Sinai. And hopefully, although we don’t know yet whether we can take NR1 into the black sea—if we can’t take her in, we’ll go in with probably the Jason system. We still haven’t figured out, and I’ll talk to the admiral later, but that’s—a U.S. nuclear submarine has never been in the Black Sea, so there’s some political issues that we have to deal with. But we’ll certainly want to get back in the Mediterranean. There is some wonderful stuff to do there.

Q: Is this the deepest wreckage ever found?

Ballard: Yes. We’re all done. It’s a wrap. Any one of you that want to come up and do more, I’d be more than glad to be available. Bill, you want to present that to—yeah, we can do that right now. Thank you very much.

Surgi: I represented the crew of CV-5, and I’m thankful for the Geographic and Partisan Pictures and Ann Daniels, in particular, for the interviews that I had with her and that she selected me to go. We had a little ceremony on board when we were leaving the site, and I’ll just read off a line from that: I, as representative of the crew of CV-5, thank you— meaning the crew of the Laney Chouest—and as a thank-you gift from the crew of the Yorktown all of you will receive, courtesy of the U.S. Navy ATV, a cup from the depths of the Yorktown CV-5 with its logo. And then I said they they would be available to the crew, so everybody on their crew had gotten one. But I was told by Dr. Ballard and Kathy that I should make up some souvenir cups. These were 8-ounce [230-gram] Styrofoam cups that stood almost 4 inches high. When they went down to the Yorktown, the depth pressure reduced them to this because of manufacturing, I guess, different people. A couple of them came back a little smaller than that, about the size of my thumb. I have one for THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC magazine, and I was given the name Bill Allen. Now these cups were signed before the Japanese left by the Japanese, by Dr. Ballard, by Harry Ferrier, who flew from the island of Midway, and myself. I have one for Newport News Shipbuilding, because we didn’t know who was going to be here. Then I was told the Secretary of the Navy would be here, so in his place, Admiral? Thank you for the experience of a lifetime.