Four Military Submarines Vanished in a Single Year. 58 Years Later, Scientists Have Cracked the Case.

By Darren Orf - 7/7/2026, 6:00 PM - 606 words

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Four Military Submarines Vanished in a Single Year.

58 Years Later, Scientists Have Cracked the Case.

In 1968, the U.S.—along with a large swath of the rest of the world—was in upheaval.

Both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated on U.S. soil, sparking mass civil unrest culminating in the events of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

The Tet Offensive saw a major escalation of the Vietnam War, and the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union continued unabated as the space race between the rival nations quickly approached its zenith.

But while the world dealt with unprecedented tensions above the waves, a strange series of events was also unfolding beneath them.

By the end of 1968, four nations—the U.S., France, Israel, and the Soviet Union—would all lose submarines under mysterious circumstances.

Although a small number in times of war (more than 50 U.S. submarines were lost during World War II), the number was an anomaly during a time of relative peace.

This undersea drama began in January, when two separate submarines—the Israeli INS Dakar and the French Minerve—both disappeared in the Mediterranean.

At 6:10pm local time on January 24, 1968, the Dakar transmitted its last known location north of Crete before going silent forever, just a few minutes after midnight the next day.

The mystery of the missing Dakar wouldn’t be solved until more than 30 years later, when a joint U.S.-Israeli operation located the submarine and determined that the Dakar had exceeded its crush depth, ultimately killing all 69 crewmembers on board.

Finding the diesel-electric submarine Minerve, on the other hand—which was lost at sea during a routine training exercise on January 27, 1968—would require 21st-century technology.

That 50-year-long wait came to an end in 2019, when underwater drones and advanced sonar found the wreckage at a depth of 7,000 feet some 28 miles south of Toulon, France.

The sinking of the Minerve (along with her sister ship, the Eurydice) forced the French Navy to rethink both its safety procedures and its search-and-rescure operations, according to the U.S.

Naval Institute.

These submarine tragedies weren’t isolated to the Mediterranean.

On May 21, the U.S.

Navy heard the very last from the nuclear-powered USS Scorpion after the submarine came up to periscope depth for communications around 250 miles south of the Azores (a Portuguese archipelago in the North Atlantic).

The U.S.

Navy located the wreckage later that October, and an investigation the following year determined that the Scorpion—one of only two U.S. nuclear submarines ever lost (the other being the USS Thresher)—had traveled below crush depth, similarly to the Dakar.

The wreckage, including the ship’s nuclear engine, remains on the seabed to this day.

But the most famous of these submarine wrecks is likely the Soviet ballistic missile submarine, K-129.

This vessel earns its place in history books not for its tragic demise—which occurred around late February 1968—but for the incredibly complex and covert CIA project to retrieve it, known as Project Azorian.

Under the direction of legendary aerospace engineer Howard Hughes, a crew set out on the Hughes Glomar Explorer, which was a purpose-built ship for retrieving the wreckage that was heavily disguised as a deep-sea mining vessel.

Six years after the USS Halibut discovered the wreckage, the Hughes Glomar Explorer retrieved it, dealing a heavy blow to Soviet secret submarine operations.

The deep ocean is an inhospitable environment, and traveling by submarine has always presented its fair share of risks.

But the tragedies of 1968 compelled navies around the world to improve their safety protocols, likely saving an untold number of seamen’s lives in the decades that followed.