The USS Scorpion Buried at Sea | HistoryNet

The USS Scorpion Buried at Sea | HistoryNet:
"The crisis exploded without warning across the sprawling U.S. Navy community in Norfolk, Virginia:
A nuclear submarine and its crew had vanished in the Atlantic.
On May 27, 1968, USS Scorpion (SSN 598) failed to return as scheduled to its home port at the destroyer-submarine pier complex at the southern end of the waterfront.
Within hours the sub’s failure to arrive escalated into a major military crisis that spread to the Pentagon E-Ring and White House.
From Atlantic Fleet headquarters to dozens of homes and apartments across Hampton Roads, a day of anticipation and celebration had suddenly turned into an open-ended vigil of fear and uncertainty.
Scorpion and its 99-man crew had left Norfolk on February 15 for a three-month Mediterranean deployment.
The crew participated in several naval exercises with the U.S. Sixth Fleet and NATO, conducted ongoing reconnaissance of Soviet naval units in the Med, and paused to enjoy liberty at ports in Italy and Sicily before reentering the Atlantic for the homeward voyage on May 17. Scorpion’s skipper, Commander Francis A. Slattery, had radioed Atlantic Submarine Force headquarters early on May 22 that the sub would arrive in Norfolk at 1 p.m. the following Monday, Memorial Day.
Officials had released the arrival date 72 hours earlier and, despite a spring nor’easter that had swept the navy base with high winds and heavy rain, family members and Submarine Squadron 6 officials anticipated seeing the low silhouette of the Skipjack-class submarine coming into view on time.
The 1 p.m. arrival time came and went with no sign of Scorpion. 
Unknown to the families of the crew, the submarine’s failure to break radio silence by late morning had already sparked concern that by early afternoon was swelling into near panic throughout the Atlantic Submarine Force headquarters staff.
At 3:15 p.m. the navy made it official, transmitting a flash message over the Fleet Broadcast System to naval bases from Brunswick, Maine, to Jacksonville, Florida, and out to Bermuda, the Azores, and the Mediterranean.
Its terse technical phrases meant only one thing: Scorpion was missing...:"