The idea of the possibility of the existence of underwater civilizations has long dominated the minds of science fiction writers. It's not hard to guess why. Since the bottom of the World Ocean remains practically unexplored, one can easily imagine that somewhere there are hidden underwater cities built by intelligent beings. However, while stories based on this possibility remain very popular in science fiction, many real-life cases that took place in the 20th century suggest that the seabed does indeed hold secrets like the ones he told us about in his novels Jules Verne.
In the early morning of October 28, 1902, the British cake ship "Fort Salisbury" was sailing through the Gulf of Guinea off the coast of West Africa into the southern waters of the Atlantic Ocean. The sea was calm, the sky clear, so it was easy for the watchman to notice two red lights emerging from the water a few hundred yards ahead on the starboard side of the ship. Taking the binoculars, the watchman noticed that the lights were emanating from a huge, dark object that appeared to be a seagoing vessel, although he had never seen such a thing before.
Aware that a collision was possible, he alerted the helmsman and called second mate AH Reimer, who climbed onto the deck to see the mysterious ship for himself.
The second officer only managed to observe the object for a few seconds before it plunged into the water. Yet this was enough for him to confirm the main details noticed by the watchman.
Recording his observations later in the logbook, Reimer described the phenomenon as “a little scary … we could not see all the details in the dark, but the object was 500-600 feet long with two lights, one at each end. Some kind of mechanism, or maybe fins, was making a lot of excitement. We noticed that its sides were covered with scales, and then it slowly disappeared from our field of vision."
Talking about the event later, Raymer suggested that they saw the ship's hull upside down, but later abandoned his idea. An experienced sailor could not make such a mistake, he believed, in any case, not a single vessel was lost at that time in the seas near West Africa.
Attempts to identify this object as a marine animal have also failed. Although all the witnesses from Fort Salisbury independently argued that the surface of the creature was more scaly than smooth, the chances that they saw the giant fish were negligible, since it must have been many times larger than the largest marine life known to science - the blue whale. In addition, as the Admiralty rightly noted, the fish has never equipped itself with illumination.
Apparently, this is a kind of machine, one of the types of submarines. The only problem with this theory was that in 1902 no country on Earth possessed the technology. capable of building a submarine of this size.
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In 1888, the first operational submarine was launched by the French Navy and operated with a single propeller driven by an electric motor and weighed only 30 tons.
Two years later, the Germans, who were consummate submarine designers
At that time, a 200-ton ship was designed, but it was not produced until 1905. The Royal Navy, which tried out its first submarine the same year the incident took place off the coast of New Guinea, was far behind Germany in terms of technical prowess.
No one for more than 90 years since then has come up with an explanation that seems truly reasonable. What can be said with certainty is that in 1902 people witnessed the first incident of a number of similar ones, which remained a mystery to us - the discovery of unidentified submarines in places that are logically inaccessible to them or acting in a way that is impossible to do. it is with human-made mechanisms.
On January 12, 1965, pilot Bruce Katie, flying over Kaipar Harbor north of Helensville, New Zealand, noticed a creature in the water below that looked like a whale stranded. On closer inspection, the pilot realized that it was a 100-foot-long metal structure that rested in the water at a depth of about 5 fathoms.
Although it was obvious that it was a submarine, Katy found something odd about the ship's outline and he reported it to the New Zealand Navy. He was told that the object, which he claims he saw, could not be a submarine in any way, since the tide was low in the harbor and in the deltas it was in any case too shallow for the submarine to go so far into Kaipara.
Katya's mystery soon became even more curious as more evidence emerged. On April 11 of the same year, two people checking a wrecked fishing boat near Wontaggi Beach, 80 miles from Melbourne, Australia, saw two strange submarines half a mile offshore, hundreds of yards apart. They watched them for fifteen minutes, and then the boats began to sink. They were later told by the Australian Maritime Intelligence Service that. "Given the particularities of the region and the shape of the coastline, these could hardly have been submarines."
But, in any case, this was not an optical illusion, since subsequently, within five days of the same month, three more appearances of strange submarines were reported in the seas north of Brisbane. The Australian Navy investigated all three cases and came to the same conclusion: the observed object could not be any of the ships known to the fleet, since no skipper would risk his ship in an area full of underwater rocks and other hazards.
Some incidents were even more difficult to explain. In 1963, a US Navy exercise tracked down and pursued a submarine stationed in Puerto Rico in the South Atlantic, about 500 miles southeast of the North American continent. Sonar operators on destroyers, accompanied by the aircraft carrier Vesp, accidentally spotted an underwater object propelled by a single propeller capable of over 170 knots, while the record for man-made nuclear submarines was about 45 knots.
Indeed, it was difficult to imagine how a ship with a propeller could move at a speed 4 times the speed of the fastest ship on earth. The mystery became even more intriguing when radars picked up a signal from a depth of more than 27,000 feet, which in turn was a record for conventional submarines.
Even the thought that the inhabitants of other planets can observe us frightens many. And the assumption that some creatures of a higher level of development secretly live on our own planet in our time, and just a few miles from the coastline, can cause real panic.