The UK’s Royal Navy was recently thrown into a state of high alert after picking up two mysterious sounds off the coast of Scotland, initially feared to be the work of Russian drone subs targeting the UK’s nuclear fleet, an official told The Sun.
The report revealed that UK Navy sensors scanning the region for signs of enemy presence detected the suspected blow-offs on two separate occasions.
With tensions running high, officials feared that Russian deep-sea surveillance drones had placed a listening device on the seabed near crucial submarine routes between the Isle of Raasay and Applecross in North West Scotland, prompting a full-scale investigation.
The peculiar sounds were picked up around 100 miles from the Royal Navy’s submarine base. Initially, analysts described the sounds as man-made, noting that they were unlike anything ever recorded on the range in its 55-year history.
This raised serious alarms within the UK Navy regarding a potential intelligence threat that could compromise national security and reveal sensitive military information.
The investigation, described as frantic, also reignited fears about Russia’s use of aquatic mammals for espionage, such as Hvaldimir, the now-famous beluga whale discovered in 2019 wearing a Russian camera harness.
Hvaldimir’s death off the coast of Norway last year fueled speculation about the Kremlin’s continued reliance on marine life for intelligence operations.
But after days of analysis and heightened alarm, officials revealed the true source of the noises: a gassy whale. The peculiar sounds that initially triggered fears of Russian espionage turned out to be nothing more than underwater flatulence from a marine mammal.
A Naval official told The Sun: “We have been analyzing the sounds and now believe it was a marine mammal. A whale.”
The discovery brought a moment of levity to an otherwise tense scenario, with some jokingly renaming the incident “The Hunt for Red Fart-ober.”
While the outcome was humorous, officials stressed the importance of vigilance. One source said, “We are taking it very seriously. We have to assume the worst.” However, the British Navy has not disclosed the exact timeframe during which this investigation was conducted.
The alert followed a warning from Defence Secretary John Healey, who stated that Russian ships damaging British underwater cables could face being boarded and seized by Marines.
The Fishy Mystery
The turmoil within the British Navy after detecting these unusual sounds is understandable, especially since they were picked up near the British submarine base.
The Navy was concerned that Russia’s elite underwater research unit, GUGI, might be attempting to record the acoustic signatures of the UK’s top-secret Astute-class attack submarines and Vanguard-class ballistic missile submarines.
These submarines are crucial to the UK’s defense, engineered to operate covertly and silently. Any compromise of their security would present significant risks.
Underwater drones are regarded as key assets that Russia may leverage against the UK. Russian experts have even issued regular ominous warnings about such tactics.
They went on to suggest that a strike by the nation’s Poseidon nuclear underwater drone could result in the UK being overwhelmed by a colossal 500-meter tidal wave of radioactive seawater.
Meanwhile, this wasn’t the first time marine life has caused such alarm. In the 1980s and 1990s, a similar situation sparked a tense deterioration in relations between Sweden and Russia.
In 1982, Swedish officials were startled by unexplained underwater sounds in the Stockholm archipelago. The Swedish military quickly launched an extensive operation, deploying submarines, boats, and helicopters to investigate the source of these mysterious signals.
However, the reality was far from what Sweden had feared. In 1996, Magnus Wahlberg, a professor from the University of Southern Denmark, led a team of bioacoustic researchers to investigate the origins of the strange sounds. During a 2012 TEDx Talk in Gothenburg, Wahlberg shared how they finally solved the mystery.
The team was granted access to a secure room beneath the Bergen military base in Stockholm, where, for the first time in Swedish history, civilians were allowed to listen to the classified “typical sounds.” Wahlberg anticipated hearing mechanical noises, such as pings or the hum of rotating propellers.
Instead, they heard a sound that resembled the crackling of bacon frying, popping and hissing noises like small air bubbles bursting in the water. It was nothing like what they expected from a submarine.
After the session, the team pondered why small bubbles would always appear on the surface following the noise. Could it be the work of an animal?
Intrigued, they went to a local store, bought Baltic herring (a shoaling fish species of the open sea), and lowered the fish into the water. What followed was an unexpected “beautiful concert,” the sound of herring passing gas.
The collective wind of herring, swimming in massive shoals that spanned kilometers in length and mere centimeters in height, created enough noise to be detected on military radar.
The Swedish navy had protocols for identifying the sounds of whales, seals, and walruses, but they had never suspected that herring could generate such loud emissions.
- Contact the author at ashishmichel(at)gmail.com
- Follow EurAsian Times on Google News
