The UK’s Royal Navy reportedly mistook a farting whale for the ‘Red October’
British ships spent several days tracking down a suspected Russian stealth submarine before concluding the suspicious sonar signature may have actually belonged to a farting whale, a Royal Navy source has told the Sun.
Two mystery sounds were picked up off the northwestern coast of Scotland, between Applecross and the Isle of Raasay, according to the UK tabloid. Convinced they were man-made, the Royal Navy went on a deep-sea hunt.
“We have been analyzing the sounds and now believe it was a marine mammal. A whale,” an anonymous naval official told the Sun, adding that the whale may have been passing gas at the time.
“We are taking it very seriously,” another Royal Navy source said. “We have to assume the worst.”
The first signal was detected traveling north towards the open sea. The second was heard “days later” moving south, before turning around and leaving again.
The admiralty had assumed that the Russian military’s Main Directorate of Deep-Sea Research (GUGI) may have been trying to deploy sensors in order to obtain the acoustic signatures of Royal Navy submarines, such as the Vanguard-class missile carriers and Astute-class attack boats.
The actual location of the UK submarine fleet is supposed to be a closely guarded secret. According to the New York Post, the suspicious sounds of flatulence were detected “about 100 miles” (160km) from where the submarines are based.
The US outlet lampooned the incident as “the Hunt for Red Fart-ober,” a pun on the title of the 1990 film about a stealthy Soviet sub.
Ballistic missile submarines are considered a key component of a country’s nuclear deterrent, ensuring that its atomic arsenal cannot be eliminated by a surprise first strike. Earlier this month, the French navy cracked down on the use of a fitness-tracking app at its nuclear submarine base, fearing that the online posts from Strava could reveal the boats’ patrol schedules.
Tensions between NATO and Russia, exacerbated by the Ukraine conflict, have caused Western navies to sometimes jump at shadows. A beluga whale spotted off the northern coast of Norway in 2019 was described as a “Russian spy” and tracked by the Norwegian navy for years. The whale, nicknamed ‘Hvaldimir’, was found dead last August, supposedly of natural causes.
