In the 1970s-1980s, Soviet nuclear-powered ships at great depths faced an inexplicable phenomenon that caused, if not fear, then at least complete bewilderment. The acoustics caught strange sounds that came from clearly moving objects. Most of the signals resembled the lingering croaking of frogs. The naval witches called the unknown objects "Quakers". It was this word that soon entered official documents.
Brothers submariners
This natural anomaly is well known to the only twin brothers in Russia, the commanders of strategic missile submarines Rear Admiral Oleg Chefonov and Captain 1st Rank Igor Chefonov. They live in the metropolitan area of Northern Izmailovo. The brothers recently celebrated their 80th birthday. They were born in the Far East. They were five years old when in 1942, in the battles near Maloyaroslavets, their father, the chief of artillery of the regiment Gerasim Chefonov, died. It was then that the twins made an oath to each other: to be always together.
In 1945, the Chefonovs moved to Kronstadt, where Olga Zaidulina, the sister of the boys' mother, lived. Then, after the war, having endured the hardships and hardships of the wartime, people tried to support each other in every possible way. Olga's husband, Izmail Zai-dulin, commanded a submarine and enjoyed great prestige among naval sailors. His name gained fame in the pre-war years, when a submarine under his command first conquered the Arctic, opening the Northern Sea Route to the Russian submarine fleet. The officer bravely fought the enemy from the first days of the war, commanding submarines and torpedo boats in the Black Sea and Baltic. Captain 1st Rank Zaidu-lin, heading the 12th patrol boat battalion of the Baltic Fleet's water area guard fighter detachment, died on August 26, 1944. His sons, Dzhemal and Rustem Zaidulins, and by blood,and in spirit turned out to be close to the Chefonov twins. All four boys entered the Nakhimov School, and later, after graduating from the Lenin Komsomol Higher Naval School of Diving, eventually became the head of strategic missile submarine cruisers. In particular, the Chefo-novy brothers have more than a hundred thousand nautical miles passed under water, thousands of dives and surfacing. They served in the 182nd Submarine Brigade of the Pacific Fleet. They served in the 182nd Submarine Brigade of the Pacific Fleet. They served in the 182nd Submarine Brigade of the Pacific Fleet.
“My brother and I almost simultaneously took command of the submarines,” says Igor Gerasimovich. - It was the height of the Cold War. The international situation is tense to the limit. Both ours and NATO submarines were on constant combat alert …
Dangerous encounters
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There were inexplicable oddities in underwater trips.
“It was in the late 1970s,” recalls Oleg Gerasimovich. - At that time I already commanded a nuclear missile boat. They returned to the base, walked on the surface. Fog, zero visibility. A radar station is working. Suddenly, an object appears on her screen and quickly goes to the intersection of our course. The speed is high, the mark is clear. At first I gave the command to increase the stroke in order to get past, but the target repeated our maneuver. Then he ordered to stop the boat to let the unknown person through. In response to this, the "ghost" went to rapprochement. Having decided that the stranger simply did not see the boat, the crew began to give light and sound signals, but the object did not react, but continued to approach at high speed. The team was expecting an imminent blow. The tension was terrible. Everyone on the bridge gazes there with pain in their eyes,where the unknown target should appear. Distance - 5 cables, 4,3,2,1. The speaker almost shouts: “Half a cable-out! The target has entered the dead zone! " Everything is at the limit. A minute passes, the second, the third. The target was supposed to appear from the other side, but it never came. Impact too … Everything that happened was recorded in the logbook. The rear admiral reported on a meeting with an NGO (unidentified floating object), there is such a term.
- Somehow I had a chance to survive a meeting with a "Quaker". We tried to decipher his signals on our own, but quickly reached a dead end, - says Oleg Gerasimovich.
When Admiral Chefonov discussed this episode with other commanders, he realized that many of his colleagues were afraid of unknown objects. One of the commanders said that during combat service in the North Pacific Ocean, at a depth of one hundred meters, after an hour of "croaking", the nuclear-powered ship collided with something soft and viscous. The sound was like a slap of raw meat on a cutting board, but the "piece of meat" was so huge that it made the submarine, with a displacement of over 13 thousand tons underwater, shudder and shake. On another nuclear-powered ship in the Sea of Japan, after a specific "croaking", acoustics found two underwater targets, which easily caught up and overtook the cruiser, which was sailing at a speed of 10 knots (one knot - 1.852 km per hour). We measured the speed of the "ghosts": more than 50 knots! The commander then joked sadly: “Acoustics found an underwater plane!“Those conversations about unusual meetings in the depths of the ocean depths took place mostly during officers' feasts. The bosses did not notice what was happening or simply tried not to notice. New and incomprehensible always arouses mistrust and fear. And despite the fact that during all the time there was not a single apparent clash with NGOs, the tension experienced by the commander and crew members was depressing. Some hydroacoustics were afraid to take over the watch, so as not to go crazy with mysterious sounds.which was tested by the commander and crew members. Some hydroacoustics were afraid to take over the watch, so as not to go crazy with mysterious sounds.which was tested by the commander and crew members. Some hydroacoustics were afraid to take over the watch, so as not to go crazy with mysterious sounds.
Do not spare your efforts and means
But the moment came when the problem of the "Quakers" seriously worried the command of the Navy. “The problem is extremely complex and new for us, and therefore we will not spare our efforts and resources to solve it. We will give both people and ships. The result is important! " - said then the commander-in-chief of the Navy, Admiral of the USSR Fleet Sergei Gorshkov. Of course, the commander-in-chief was least of all interested in stories about living beings unknown to science. Ichthyology was not among the priority interests of the Navy. The commander-in-chief was concerned about something else: are not the latest anti-submarine developments of the US Navy behind the "Quakers"? For example, it was noticed: shortly after the appearance of the "Quakers" in the area where our submarines were located, American anti-submarine ships appeared there.
At the suggestion of Admiral Gorshkov, by the decision of the Minister of Defense of the USSR Marshal Andrei Grechko, a special group of several officers was created under the intelligence department of the Navy to systematize and analyze all inexplicable phenomena occurring in the World Ocean and could pose a threat to our ships.
“There were three main versions: either it was an underwater NGO, or an underwater creature unknown to science, or the know-how of the Americans,” noted Oleg Chefonov.
Thus began an unparalleled hunt for ghosts from the abyss. The officers continually traveled through the fleets, collecting bit by bit all the facts in any way related to their problem. An instruction was issued instructing submarine commanders to report all incomprehensible phenomena without fail. Operations departments of the headquarters of all fleets collected information on acoustic phenomena, marking the areas of their appearance on maps.
According to the reports of the submarine commanders, the impression was created of awareness of the actions of unknown sources of sound. They seemed to be trying hard to establish contact. Judging by the continuously changing bearing, the objects circled around the submarines and, changing the tone and frequency of the signals, seemed to have invited the submariners to “talk”, actively responding to sonar “sendings” from the boats. Accompanying the submarines, they followed for a while next to them, and then disappeared as imperceptibly as they appeared. At the same time, the impression was created that they were removed at a speed two to three times higher than the speed of any submarine vessel. For all the years there has not been a single known clash with the "Quakers", moreover, the impression was created that they were actively demonstrating their friendliness.
The version that "Quakers" are secret developments of the Americans was the first to disappear. It turned out that the Americans faced the "Quakers" during the Second World War. Having more sophisticated hydroacoustic equipment in the Atlantic than the Germans, they began to hear inexplicable sounds in the ocean. At first there was a real panic among the Americans: our then allies thought that the Germans had some new weapon. After the war, the passions gradually subsided. The Americans returned to this problem after they deployed the global hydroacoustic system SOSUS - a complex of coastal hydroacoustic stations and underwater hydrophones connected by hundreds of kilometers of underwater cable routes. This system covered the North Atlantic and part of the Pacific Ocean and made it possible to track Soviet submarines. It was then that the Americans decidedthat the "Quakers" is a top-secret USSR development for detecting foreign submarines. It is possible that if then the USSR and the United States joined forces to study this incomprehensible phenomenon, the problem would have been “split”. But, recall, there was a cold war …
Mystery not revealed
By the late 1980s, the Soviet secret research program Quaker was shut down. Perestroika began, the leadership of the Navy changed, and with it the priorities. The study of the problems of NGOs and "Quakers" was postponed, as was initially thought, until later, but it turned out, forever. The special group was disbanded. All materials on the topic disappeared in the naval archives under the heading "Top secret". By the way, some former members of the group still believe that the "Quakers" are nothing more than marine animals unknown to science with a high level of intelligence, like dolphins. This version is adhered, first of all, by the workers of the St. Petersburg branch of the Institute of the Seas of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who were involved in research in their time. There is nothing impossible in this, because there are plenty of testimonies about the unknown inhabitants of the ocean depths!This is exactly what the message dated May 10 of this year is about: “On the coast of one of the islands of Indonesia, the carcass of an unknown sea animal was thrown away. Fishermen find it difficult to determine the type of sea giant, at first they generally took it for a small boat. At first glance, the animal resembles a squid or sperm whale. Its body length is 15 meters, and, according to preliminary estimates, it can reach 35 tons. " Perhaps these sea giants are somehow embarrassed by submarines, and they circle around them for a long time, trying to understand what it is that has come to visit them. In general, one can only guess what happens behind the steel sides of the submarines. Fishermen find it difficult to determine the type of sea giant, at first they generally took it for a small boat. At first glance, the animal resembles a squid or sperm whale. Its body length is 15 meters, and its weight, according to preliminary estimates, can reach 35 tons. " Perhaps these sea giants are somehow embarrassed by submarines, and they circle around them for a long time, trying to understand what it is that has come to visit them. In general, one can only guess what happens behind the steel sides of the submarines. Fishermen find it difficult to determine the type of sea giant, at first they generally took it for a small boat. At first glance, the animal resembles a squid or sperm whale. Its body length is 15 meters, and, according to preliminary estimates, it can reach 35 tons. " Perhaps these sea giants are somehow embarrassed by submarines, and they circle around them for a long time, trying to understand what it is that has come to visit them. In general, one can only guess what happens behind the steel sides of the submarines.what is it that came to visit them. In general, one can only guess what happens behind the steel sides of the submarines.what is it that came to visit them. In general, one can only guess what happens behind the steel sides of the submarines.
Recently, a truly sensational statement was made by one of the leading experts in the field of acoustics of the World Ocean, the head of the International Acoustic Monitoring Project, Professor Christopher Fox, who has devoted his whole life to studying the mysterious acoustic signals coming from the abyss at his center in Newport, Oregon. In an interview, Fox pointedly said: “The depths of the oceans are so unexplored that even aliens can be hiding there. The mysterious underwater inhabitants are not yet visible, but it is already well heard. Such recognition is worth a lot in the mouth of a serious and famous scientist.
… After the end of the sea voyages, the Chefonov twins worked in the central office of the Navy. And in retirement they settled with their families in the east of Moscow. Their houses are in the neighboring streets …