Fellow conspiracy realist. It is the end of the calendar year and we're we're going to take a break to get with our families, our loved entities. And while we're doing that, we wanted to share some of our favorite classic episodes. This one is another episode about the high seas. You guys, the Curse submarine.
All the mighty Curse and how it fell.
Yes, more than five hundred feet long, carrying missiles the size of small aeroplanes.
It's a big boy.
And here's the thing, even if you're a big boy nuclear sub you're still very small in comparison to the system that we call the ocean.
So it was destroyed in.
One of the most catastrophic submarine disasters in history. The entire crew was lost, and even now, decades later, as we learned back in twenty twenty, you'll find plenty of people who believe this accident was not an accident after all. One quick note before we dive in today, we had a few grimlins in the proverbial machine during this recording. As a result, you may notice a little bit of
strangeness with the microphones in this episode, especially my own. However, we managed to keep those audio shenanigans to a minimum. We hope you enjoy the show.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, welcome back to the show.
My name is Matt, my name is Nola.
They call me Ben. We are joined as always with our super producer Paul Mission Control decades. Most importantly, you are you. You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know. We're diving deep today in what will come to be the first terrible pun of this episode, into a story that some people may remember right as one of those many ephemeral headlines that
circulated in two thousand. In two thousand and one, but this was brought to our attention by one of our fellow listeners, a fellow conspiracy realists, who, for the sake of comic book Nerdery, we will refer.
To as naymar Hey, guys, So, I just got out of the Navy working on submarines, and as such, I've got a couple submarine conspiracies that you may or may not know about.
So the first one is the Curse, which that made it international news. And two thousand, I think it was two thousand, the Russian submarine that was spying on United States and and and NATO submarines and warships doing doing a bunch of a bunch of exercises and it blew up. So the official story is that a torpedo blew up. But I know people who have been who are on the boat one of the submarines, and they were listening to the Curse, and I know one of them has
told me it definitely got shot by another boat. One said it definitely did not, and and some of the others have have refused to talk about it. So who knows what's going on there? That one's definitely worth looking into.
Nay more, this is a fantastic question, and you've actually you've given us a lot to chew on here such that we talked off air, and this may be the first of multiple submarine related conspiracies, because let's talk about submarines. The weirdest thing about a submarine is that they are inherently conspiratorial. They are these mysterious, at times nuclear powered craft that are as we record sneaking through the ocean depths across the planet. You know, a submarine is explicitly
designed to deceive, to occlude its presence. The location and the capabilities of a submarine are often the stuff its owners don't want you to know, and so it's no surprise that submarines are themselves the subject of numerous conspiracies. So today we're diving into the mystery of one submarine in particular, as you requested, Naymor, what happened to the curse? Here are the facts.
So work on the kur Gan in nineteen ninety and the sub officially launched in nineteen eighty four, and it was massive.
It was a massive deal.
But it was also physically massive, at five hundred and eight feet nineteen thousand, four hundred tons. It was capable of launching missiles the size of a small aircraft that would absolutely decimate any targets that were unfortunate enough to be in its path, and that.
Could be up to four hundred miles away.
NATO actually called it an Oscar two class, which is a nuclear powered cruise missile submarine owned and operated by the Russian Navy and until two thousand and seven, conversion of the US Navy's Ohio class subs from ballistic missiles to these types of more long range cruise missiles. The Oscar two class submarines were the largest of their type in the world.
In this particular Oscar two class submarine, the Cursk was a big deal, and others in this class were explicitly designed to defeat the biggest threats that were seeing in the US Navy's command, the US Aircraft Carrier Group, So the machines that are out there floating that function as a full military command base and airport.
Yeah, it's important to remember that until about two thousand and seven, the Oscar two class was the largest type a submarine of its type in the entire world. The only reason that changed is because some Ohio class subs that originally launched ballistic missiles were converted to also launch cruise missiles. The Kursk had the power in theory to sink an aircraft carrier with a single torpedo that was specifically something called a Type sixty five. These torpedoes carried
a nine hundred and ninety pound warhead. This is serious stuff, and you know, to be very clear when we say aircraft carrier in this sense. We mean exactly what Matt is talking about here, the the ship that is the the carrier where you see the jets launching and stuff. Aircraft carriers don't ride solo. They roll deep that you'll we have to remember that an aircraft carrier is one part of what is it called an aircraft carrier battle group,
and that includes other ships. It changes depending on the mission, but you know, it includes things like guided missile cruisers, destroyers, frigates like this. This is not the only thing on the album. An aircraft carrier battle group is kind of like a Posse track, But the aircraft carrier is the you know, is the tupac?
Uh?
Really quickly, what is a frigate?
Yeah? Yeah, frigate is is an old term. I love so many maritime terms. There's also like brigotine. A frigate is meant to protect other warships and some and I think they specialized. Again, I'm not a member of the Navy, but I think they specialized in anti submarine warfare.
Pretty often every time I hear I just want to say, frigin frigate. You know, it's just it's got the ring to it. But please let us right the ship and move forward in the episode there we.
Go, There we Go. So, aside from being powerful in offensive terms, the Curse was also very It was a source of pride for the Russian military because its structure was purportedly incredibly robust and sturdy in a way that would worry the members of NATO.
Yes, the whole design of this craft made it very, very, at least on paper, difficult to sink, to breach the hull, to cause major damage to this thing. It had a double hole design, So just think about this way on the outer the exoskeleon. Essentially the outer hole was stainless steel. It had all kinds of different metals in their nickel, chromium, and it had extremely good resistance to things like corrosion and natural processes that would weaken the whole system. And
something's really interesting. These metals actually have a bit of a weak magneticism to them. And something really interesting about these metals nickel and chromium, you know, combined there with steel, Both of these metals were very difficult to detect with this thing that the United States military was using a
magnetic anominally detector. And because those metals have those weak signals as it's traveling through the sea, through the ocean, it's not as easily detected because of that weak signature of those metals contain you know. Then you get into the inner hole and you're looking at two inch thick steel's It's really cool because the structure of that outer and inner hole essentially made this thing so strong that you could just plow through ice out in the Arctic
somewhere if you needed to, just to break through. And the way this structure I mean already we're kind of describing here is just how strong this thing is.
Right.
It was compared a lot to the Titanic, at least in some of the writing that I saw about the ship or the boat, excuse me, the submarine, because it was built with these compartments, separate separated compartments that if one were to be breached and a flood was to occur in one of those, you could turn, you could shut that thing down, lock it off, and then be
safe in another compartment. Even if the submarine were to sink all the way down to the ocean floor, the crew would theoretically be able to survive in one of the other compartments if they did. You know, seal themselves in essentially and had enough oxygen. But that comparison to the Titanic about being unsinkable and that structure is very interesting.
Yeah. I don't know if it's our own kind of personal selection bias or something, but it seems like historically, whenever we run into these so called indestructible or impregnable structures, something goes terribly awry. It's like putting a target on your invention's back. This boat was able to do something amazing and possibly something that would terrify some of our land lubbers in the audience. The Cursk was able to remain submerge for up to one hundred and twenty days.
That means if you were on the crew of the Curse, it was theoretically possible that you would sink under the surface of the briny blue and you would not see the sun or see the sky until almost half a year had passed.
I just have to say I have no military experience, but the concept of doing that for one hundred and twenty days straight, psychologically, I would not want to be in there, trapped with what one hundred maybe one hundred plus human beings inside that thing. No thank you.
I can't even imagine just the logistics of that. And just like the sanitary conditions, you know what I mean. I'm sure you know there's there's things to help keep things from becoming from deteriorating into a state of you know, disgustingness, I guess for lack of a better word, but it seems like it'd be pretty stinky down there with all those men's you know, bodies.
Yeah, that's what's That's one of the first things I thought of too, Because we have we have amazing technology for you know, recycling air, we have an amazing water reclamation technology as a species, but for some reason, our entire speed just hasn't figured out a way to get around the funk, you know, just that locker room stank with an a that occurs whenever you have a bunch of a bunch of people in a small claustrophobic situation.
And you know, we're not we want to be completely fair, Like the curse was large enough and to a degree opulent enough that senior officers did have their own staterooms. It's not like everybody was three people to a bunk or something. But still, life on a submarine is very, very challenging, and the Curse itself actually only completed a single mission during its time, which sounds unusual for such
a juggernaut of the waves. During five years of service, it completed one six month deployment to the Mediterranean Sea. This was in nineteen ninety nine, and they were going to monitor US naval response to the Kosovo crisis that
was occurring. Now you might ask yourself, why spend so much time, blood and treasure on the creation of a craft like this and not really take it out, you know, not really give it a spin around the global block It turns out there were I don't know if it's fair to say Russia was broke, but they had some serious money issues going on, right.
Yeah, it's crazy.
So they spent all this money, you know, top dollar to make this impregnable, you know, b myth of a seafaring war machine, and they didn't factor in a little detail, you know, the the go go juice, the stuff that makes it go, literally, the fuel. They didn't have it had built it into the budget. There was an absolute funding crisis that was so serious that many members of the Northern Fleet.
Had gone unpaid for quite a while. In the mid nineties.
Imagine that. Okay, so now let's paint the situation with a little bit of a sharper brush to your point, Noel, You're trapped on a submarine. You might be underwater for four months. Everything stinks of funk and sweat. And the other one hundred something people with you are non consensual volunteers, right. They signed up for the Navy with the expectation that they would be paid for it, and all of a sudden, you're not getting the checks. And that doesn't mean you
can get off the boat. You're still stuck. It's terrible, and you know, I don't want to be glib about it, because the story of the curse takes a very violent turn almost twenty years ago today.
Yes, so on August tenth, in the year two thousand, well, something strange happened. There was an unexpected disaster, at least according to the official story. Right, there's an unofficial disaster that occurs during an exercise out at sea. It was called Summer X, And the way the story goes, there was a tremendous explosion inside of the submarine itself that
ended up just tearing the thing into several pieces. Specifically the front end, the nose of it was completely ripped off of the submarine itself, and there were other pretty large parts of this submarine that were completely separated and blown apart and shoved into one another. And again, this is a submarine. You have to remember, it is operating
underneath the surface of the water. So unless you are specifically tracking this thing with some kind of sophisticated, high powered or some other technology, you don't know where it is. If you're on the surface, let's say, even if you're in a frigate or another ship or something that's monitoring
the situation, you don't know exactly where they are. But there were crews on surrounding ships or nearby ships, and the only way that they knew something had gone wrong was that they felt the impact or essentially the boom the implosion that occurred below, and you could feel it essentially being on another craft.
This disaster occurred in an area known as the Barrence Scene. The Barren See is a part of the Arctic Ocean. It's off the northern coast of Norway and Russia, and this geography is important because that second, much larger explosion created an impact that could be felt as far away
as Alaska. Later research by seismologists would conclude that this was the force was equivalent to that of an earthquake, measuring four point two on the Richter scale, which means that which of course would lead you to rightly assume that munitions were part of the explosion, you know what I mean, not just a fire or something.
Yes, and it follows that there were no survivors. All one hundred and eighteen members of the crew of the Kursk perished in the disaster. And you know, this was something that Vladimir Putin, who was recently elected at the time. It's hard to imagine a time when Vladimir Putin wasn't the head of this part of the world, but there certainly was, and he had recently been elected and staked a lot of his reputation on pushing for this project.
So this was a big blow to him personally. And it wasn't a good look either that he happened to be on vacation at the time, and this did not
play well with relatives of the crew members. I watched a documentary about this, and there there were a lot of I guess hearings where relatives of the crew members were just shrieking in Russian and just at the top of their lungs, cursing Putin and this regime and saying, how could you let these men live in a tiny box for you know, however long we know it was.
It was quite a long time with no pay.
We know that happened too, and then just you know, let them die like dogs, basically, you know, so a lot of emotion. They were absolutely aghast and enraged at the way this disaster was handled. They argued that the official statements were absolute disinformation, absolute bs. Was there a cover up? We'll talk about that after a quick word from our sponsor.
Let's walk through the immediate after math of this disaster. And you know, it's tempting to say that, of course, anyone will react with intense grief and emotion when they lose a loved one, but it's crucial for us to emphasize that the claims of the relatives of these crew members were not just made up out of whole cloth. They didn't just wake up for no reason and decide
to accuse the government of deceiving them. Later research found that there were intense problems with the investigation the Russian Navy, according to official sources, initially did not realize an accident had occurred. More than six hours passed before an initial search even began. And to your point about those compartments, Matt, does that mean, like you can look out layouts of
these nine compartments in the curse. Does that mean that some of the one hundred and eighteen people aboard were able to escape whatever that initial blast was and move to a safer compartment. Would six hours have saved them?
You know?
Eleven hours later the Navy declared an emergency. Finally, later research showed that all crew members had died by that point. Normally, there's a you know, cash of safety gear on these types of subs rescue buoys which automatically deploy like an escape pod in a spaceship or something, but that did not occur. The booy of the Curse had been disabled. It took the Navy sixteen hours to find the wreckage and to start to kind of like figure out what
had happened. Rumors were circulating the sub may have collided with a mine, which we know exists. We know there's like, you know, still potentially isn't there one in Savannah Bend, and we talk about that in Savannah, Georgia.
There's a mine somewhere out there in the harbor.
It's a nuclear nuclear way.
Oh even worse. But still we have heard tell of still active minds out there, you know, from war and this was a again a rumor, but that it had been an undeployed mine that it collided with inadvertently.
Yeah, from way back in World War Two. There are you know, there are all kinds of rumors that were circulating around at the time. It is it makes total sense, right, how on earth could this have happened? We were doing some kind of official exercise. Nothing could have should have
gone wrong. Maybe there was a friendly fire situation, an accidental you know, deployment of a torpedo that ended up hitting a friendly target in this way, right if you're if you're imagining yourself as as the Russian military or some of the the commanders there. And the thing is, there's all kinds of other stuff that people have said
over the years about what may have happened. But now almost twenty years, almost twenty years to the day later, the question still remains what actually happened inside that submarine and to that submarine on that day, August tenth, two thousand.
Here's where it gets crazy. The official explanation, even at first was suspicious. There were problems that cropped up with it immediately. The primary issue was the high amount of secrecy involved. The Russian government refused all international offers of assistance, which can you know, if you're suspicious, it can function as tacit confirmation that they had perhaps some secret technology on there or something that they were not comfortable with
other nations discovering. These things went back and forth. So we're going to jump around in time just a little bit right now. The official explanation is that the authorities say the crew of the Curse was preparing to load a dummy torpedo, a practice torpedo, right, because these are naval exercises. That doesn't mean it's actual war, so they don't want to shoot genuine torpedoes. And this torpedo that they were loading, which was a sixty five seventy six
kit torpedo, had two problems. First, it contained a liquid called high test peroxide. This is not the kind of stuff that you put in your hair when you're a teenager or something. Second problem, they claimed there was a manufacturing defect, and that there was a faulty weld in the casing of the sub of the torpedo. And so when they were loading this on, this high test peroxide or HTP leaked from this faulty weld, and it caused
the ed who's fuel to explode. That fuel is kerosene, right, and kerosene is a friend of explosions.
And remember, by the way, this is a sixty five type weapon. That's the aircraft carrier killer that we were talking about, A very large weapon or a very large piece of ammunition, I don't what you call it around
if you will. So, so when the explosion occurred, mixed with the things we're talking about there, the kerosene and the HTP, it blew off the inner and outer doors to the torpedo, so the things that are really helping in a lot of ways to keep the water out, which is you know, generally a good thing when you're inside a metal container inside the ocean. Then it started
a fire. It destroyed the bulkhead, the separator essentially between the first and second compartments, like the ones we were talking about there where the control room, by the way, was in one of those So when that bulkhead was destroyed between the first and second compartments and that fire's going, you actually had probably at least in all likelihood most if not all of the crew within the control room that people running the boat, running the sub they probably
all perished or at least were badly injured and perish soon after. That really really messed up. And then we have that second explosion that was noticed by a lot of the crew that was on the surface, and that really is an issue when you don't have access to controls of a ship that you were on or a boat.
Yeah, yeah, no kidding. And this we know that that initial blast occurs, right, the theory is, or the official explanation is the way that you just outlined it, bat and the idea is that two minutes, in fifteen seconds Ballpark, that initial blast, the submarine, the Kursk, had reached the floor of the sea, and the intensity of this initial fire eventually triggered the detonation of multiple torpedo warheads on board.
It is impossible in the English language to accurately describe how terrible that is because remember earlier in the episode, just for an example, we pointed out that these warheads could weigh nine hundred and ninety pounds. This is calamitous. That second explosion was the equivalent of over two tons of T and T. But as we said, there were people who had a lot of problems with this explanation.
No, no doubt, the torpedo manufacturer themselves completely contested this version of events. In addition to that, the official story seemed to contradict Russia's own claims about the hull of the craft. Seemed completely inconceivable that that double hull design, with those nine water tight compartments, which are obviously meant to fill up in the event of a breach to keep it from completely being compromised, that it would have taken just the absolute most violent explosion to pierce those
very very fortified watertight compartments. So let's go into some of the possibilities. We start off with maybe the most plausible, like using kind of process of elimination and just a common sense. At the time, senior officers in the Russian Navy claimed that the Curse had collided with a British or American sub that was running spying maneuvers out in the Barns Sea.
Yeah, so this is interesting neymar because what we see here is that both quote unquote sides of the militaries involved are accusing the other ones of spy. So our US position is the curse was said. They were doing exercises, but the real goal was, or at least one of the goals was to spy on the US right and detect our maritime presence. That makes total sense. I'm not saying that's untrue. It probably is because military exercises or war games or whatever you want to call them, are
often they often have multiple ulterior motives. Right, Let's show an antagonistic force that we can like China a few years back. Let's show the US that we can also shoot satellites out of the sky. Let's call that. Let's call that a test for the environment or whatever.
They said.
That was hilarious. Maybe I'm being a jerk. I don't know.
I don't think so. Just speaking of in part of another bit of submarine research that we were doing together, we heard, and I'm going to quote this, it's from PBS's No. They discussed how way back when, in the nineteen sixties and seventies, the United States militaries, specifically the Navy, working with several others. They miked the entire ocean, or almost the entire ocean. And this is something that we're probably gonna do an entire episode on if we haven't
done it already, which maybe we have. I don't think we have. But there were microphones everywhere.
As an audio nerd, the logistics of that alone is blowing my mind. I mean, micing up a drum kit is a pain in the butt, you know. Can you imagine micing the entire ocean? Any audio files or studio rats out there know what we're talking about.
Well, it's I guess less sophisticated than you may imagine. It's more about visual readouts. But it just knowing that the US military was listening to everything to identify exactly where Russia was operating or at the time, the Soviet Union. It's everybody's doing it, that's all.
And again no shade here at all, because we have to remember, you know, everybody is trying to do this. The US had satellites taking photographs before they could figure out a like a viable way to send those photographs back to Earth. They literally were Paul beat me here. They were literally dropping Filman from the sky. And then sending some porschemuck out to try to catch it. So like, yeah, everybody is everybody is spying on each other in some way.
And the reason we're bringing up this dichotomy is because the Russian claims are not that they were spying on us or British craft. The Russian claims or that they were participating in these naval exercises and they were being shadowed by those those dastardly the ne'er do wells over at NATO. So they're saying that the West was spying
on us. It seems like everybody was spying on each other, if you want to be completely fair, everybody was spying on each other because that's the right thing to do. But then if that's the case, why wasn't there a quicker response to the disaster on the curse if it were indeed an accident. Sorry, no one could see this on the zoom, but I just got so pleased with myself and like leaned back from the mic and looked at you guys.
We were also all nodding pretty heavily.
Yeah, but I love the one upsmanship or brinksmanship.
Mate. Now, we went into that one the other day. But I think this is more one upmanships like you to spy on me, bro, let me spy on you. Oh you can just spy on me. I'm gonna double hard spy on you, bro.
You know that's the way we spy on the whole world.
Yeah, I'm gonna mic the ocean.
So the thing about this is that everything we just said is true. None of this is None of this is conspiracy theory.
De ocean problem and a MIC's space.
Sorry, no, no, what else can we mic?
Yes?
Oh?
Then we made smartphones. Now we have mics everywhere.
Right right.
I always think of that thing in Batman where they turn every smartphone in the world into a listening device that is not beyond the realm of possibility.
These days, it's it's pretty pretty terrifying.
But total total aside. I think it's just a fun experiment, and I would love to hear you guys take on it, and I'd love to hear from our fellow conspiracy realist about this. So it's no secret, you know, like the I'm not going to put any of us on the spot specifically, but I know between the three of us we have a lot of like proxies and privacy things
on our phones and on our devices. I wanted to do an experiment where I removed those you know what are ostensibly protections to see how the ad, how the ad magic algorithms work. And I've been I've been trying to build an AD profile as like a deranged billionaire. So I'll be carrying my phone around, maybe open Facebook and an OS or something, and just be like megayacht price, price, megayacht diamonds wholesale.
Yes, Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton, yes, whole You know.
So, if anybody wants to do an experiment with that and join us, we'd love to hear your results. So far, I have not been getting targeted ads for a megayacht, So maybe I'm just not doing it right. Maybe you know what, the system probably already knows that I can't actually buy it.
I think megayachts are the kind of things that don't really need to be advertised for. They just kind of make them to order.
You know that is true? There's not there's there's probably not some uh, some guide a department in Ikea going, how am I going to move all these meggie yachts? People just keep wasting money on couches. But anyway, yes, the spying stuff is real null. To your point, this does seem like a plausible explanation, does it not. For someone to say, for members of the Russian Navy to say the Curse cats collided with someone that was spying
on them. It has a propagandistic effect too, because the implication here is that the other side is somehow incompetent or.
Culpa bule, you know what I mean. Like it's like, look, it was their fault. They shouldn't have been there in the first place, and they killed all our beloved comrades. It's a good way to spin it to maybe redirect some of that anger we're talking about about whom you know, wives who'd lost their husbands, et cetera. You know, mothers who'd lost their sons. Let's let's point this, you know, shotgun blast of grief and anxiety toward the enemy or at least an other.
And secrecy is well, actually it's it's all kind of secrecy. From this point on, there are a lot of even more conspiratorial thoughts going into what actually occurred here to the curse and we're going to talk about those after a quick word from our sponsor, anybody down to talk secret torpedoes always.
That's one of my main things, you know what I mean. It's like number one on my LinkedIn is talk to me about secret torpedoes. I'm kidding. I haven't been on LinkedIn forever. I don't know what it says. It's true, though,
there are secrets so more conspiratorial ideas. One of the one of the ones you will see frequently is that the Russian government was being very secretive about the wreckage of the Curse because they were carrying, like we had kind of speculation earlier, they were carrying top secret technology, specifically a classified ultra high speed torpedo known as the
Squall or in Russian shkval. NATO at the time was very concerned about this, and so for some time you would see speculation that maybe they were taking this off the drawing board and into action too soon, and something had gone wrong with this new technology. I mean, you know what kind of logically makes sense, right, new technology is super treacherous. How many people died in a space program, right? How many people have died in experiments with new munitions,
with new aircraft? You know what I mean. It's it's unfortunately, it's a cost of doing the business that is war.
But here's the problem.
There's a lot of speculation by you know, military experts and historians that these this technology never really existed.
So that puts a little bit of a wrench into this theory.
But but how would they know it's hyper classified.
This hyper classified mega torpedoes. It's true, I don't know, that's a I know, I know you're joking their Matt, But it's a good point you make. I mean, there really is no way of knowing if that level of secrecy that we know the Russians are capable.
Of was was was a thing.
Uh So let's talk let's let'slet's pivot away a little bit to the American side of things. You'll see some of these claims that the US submarine uh, the well, a pair of submarines, actually the USS Memphis and the Toledo uh sank the Cursk with their torpedoes or you know what's the official line of the Russian government is that they collided with them while they were out on those spying expeditions or whatever you call it kind of exercises.
And this theory goes like this, the Toledo accidentally collided with the Cursk, and so the Memphis then open fire when fearing retaliation, and the resulting fire ignited the torpedoes.
So kind of like at a party somewhere where things get out of hand, somebody bumps into someone and someone's like, hey, why'd you bump into me? And then someone else preemptively tries to end a fight by starting one. It sounds strange, but it also I don't know about you all, but it feels like it has the ring of plausibility to me, because accidents do happen and people are already at such an enormously tense point here.
Isn't that a weird escalation? Though, Ben, I guess that's to your point. The tension is a big part of it because they shouldn't have been there in the first place, right, So it was almost like they were discovered and then it's right, or these are these international waters? No, right, this is definitely they're They're not supposed to be there. So if the curse discovers this American spy craft, it would be it would be on the table for them to open fire.
Anyway. I'm just want to make sure I'm understanding.
You know, that's a really good question. From the way the uh, from the way the situation is occurring. I imagine, and listeners please correct us here, but I imagine this is either an international lane of traffic or or an international waters area, or maybe there are conflicting claims about the sovereignty over the sea here. Because you know, as we know, you think land borders are messy, ocean borders are hilarious. They're they're a pile of dangerous spaghetti that people get killed over.
Yeah.
Man, you can't build an ocean wall, right, I mean not yet. I guess you could maybe, but it'd be pretty expensive and pretty messy.
We you know, we were really focused on the microphones for a while. We haven't upgraded to the wall yet, but we'll get there. So it feels realistic, but it also feels maybe a little bit too convenient. The problem is that, of course, these lines of speculation thrive because of the secrecy immediately following the disaster and the years following that. But let's get really conspiratorial here. We can
start connecting odd dots. According to the stories, one of the US submarines in the area had its emergency booy deployed. Like we said earlier, an emergency buoy is an automatic thing that happens as a means of assisting search and rescue efforts. It only deploys generally in an emergency. The Russian Kurse buoy, as I think you had said earlier, Matt was disabled, and the US buoy that Lloyd was
apparently recovered by Russian forces. One of the subs, the Memphis, went to port to get repairs in Norway, so there was some kind of damage to it. The implication is, and you'll see people claiming that there is photographic evidence of the USS Memphis and that these photos show the hatch covering this emergency buoy is missing. So you start to see kind of the threads connecting here. But that's only part of the story. There's other speculation about the USS Toledo.
Yeah, so supposedly after this event went down, the Toledo itself needs to get some repairs, so it heads on over to a facility within the US and once it gets in there, absolutely no one is allowed to see it. The personnel that generally would be doing those repairs and inspecting and making sure everything's okay, taking reports on that they just don't get to look at it and then
check this out. There's supposedly video evidence from the Curse that shows several large gashes on the hole or you know, a lot of damage on the hole that's fairly long, and it seems to show that the metal is bent inward as though there was an explosive force on the outside pushing that metal in. Now, what we do need to take into account here is the concept of implosion.
When you've got a pressurized container, right that then when there's a ton of in this case ocean water pressure on the outside and exterior of that, let's say just a can, a big aluminum can, if there's an if there's sufficient pressure on the outside, then an implosion can occur where there would be essentially a crushing of that container and the explosion and would cause it to look a very certain way. In a lot of times, if that pressure is large enough, you would just see fragments
of metal as like that's what is left over. That is not what happened with the Curs for sure, at least a full implosion, because it wasn't at full depth there when it occurred where or you know, fifteen thousand I think feet would be around the time when you get like full crushing.
Depth, right, And the curse was at three hundred and fifty four feet under the surface or one hundred and eight meters.
Right, which is nothing compared to you know, crushing death or deeper depths, so, you know, implosion. I don't know. All I'm saying is it just still feels a little fishy, but it doesn't necessarily prove anything.
Oh fishy, yes, yeah, yeah, I mean it's true. But there's there's another there's an even weirder series of rumors about stuff that happened on land after this, right.
Yes, and this is even fishier almost to me. It's this. The story goes that.
Almost immediately after this incident, a quite sizable loan or debt to the United States on Russia's behalf was forgiven and Russia was allowed to take out an additional loan. That doesn't happen. You know, we don't to what end, what's the reasoning there? Very unusual. Also, in the days after the incident, it turns out that George Tenant went to Moscow.
If you know that name doesn't ring a bell.
He was the first acting CIA director in history to go to the Russian capitol, which is a big deal. And that last part is definitely true, but it's also important to this there's no causation here. These events are not necessarily connect did but it sure does make you think, doesn't it Fellas Yeah, this.
Is kind of the juicy stuff, right, because George Tenant did travel to Moscow just eight days later on August eighteenth. It was officially an invitation from Russian officials to discuss ways to counter international terrorism, but the Nbass refused to give any further details about this, and Uncle Sam stonewall
at the media pretty hard core. So now we as we said this happened almost twenty years ago to the day, we have the benefit of retrospect, We have a lot of other intervening research, and some of this later research has has has drawn conclusions or gathered evidence that's just disappointing enough to maybe sound like the truth. So what if the Cursk wasn't using these secret high tech what do you call it, Matt, hyper classified? It's been in
your favorite phrase, Yeah, these hyper classified squall torpedoes. But what if instead, as a very cash strapped navy, they were relying on cheap, old fashioned technology, because you know, that's another line item that you don't have to add to the budget. There's a former Royal Naval Engineering College lecturer named Maurice Stradling, and he's also a torpedo designer, which sounds like a really interesting hobby. It's probably a job, but it's a cool idea as a hobby. So he
started comparing and contrasting stuff. He looked at the data from the Kursk disaster and it reminded him of this pretty obscure story about a similar explosion aboard a British sub in nineteen fifty five. I had never heard of this. I think most people in the US, aside from professional explosion investigators like Rachel Lance, have probably not heard of this.
That's so amazing that you mentioned that, Ben, That's what I was scratching my I had a thought and then it went away, and it was Rachel Lance man for people that maybe don't listen to the other show that Ben and I do, ridiculous history. We interviewed Rachel Lance about the sinking of the SS of the Hunley. Excuse me, it's not the SS, which was like a World War One no I'm sorry. A Civil war submarine that was made out of like it's like a flintstone sub where you have to crank it with your feet.
And she is the.
Foremost expert on underwater explosions, which we joked was a very very specific the specialization, and she agreed, but yeah, I would love to hear her take on this.
Well, just to jump back to that, Yeah, that's amazing. I'm sorry that I missed that, guys.
But the.
Other disaster that we're talking about here where there was an explosion due to some kind of malfunctioning torpedo. Let's jump to a boat called the Sight on the SIDN. There was some kind of experimental torpedo on board and there was an explosion. Here's the deal, though, this torpedo contained the substance that's thought to have been within the curse, that HTP or high test peroxide, and the thought was the crew of the Sight On we're loading this torpedo
and that's when the explosion occurred. When this blast happened, thirteen men died.
So this is fascinating and this is something we know again in retrospect, some of the official findings of this tragedy with the British sub didn't match the actual findings carried out by that secret Board of Inquiry into the disaster once this report was late later became public, the found that a stainless steel pipe carrying this high test peroxide to the engine of the sub had burst, and
something the public didn't know at the time. The original investigation found incompetence on the part of the submarine crew again of this UK boat, this Sidon. They found that the torpedo had accidentally been started or ignited, you know, before it was fired out of the sub, which is kind of like a really really terrible comparison. Imagine torpedoes at this time in the fifties a little bit similar to firecrackers, like you gotta get ignite them and shoot them.
But you're in a sub remember, you can't run away, so the timing is very, very important. So the idea here is that there had been maybe a little bit of a cover up or at the least public you know, public reputation management on the part of the UK government. And importantly, to Stradling's point, the torpedoes on the Cursk also had HTP, leading Stradling to believe that this proves a similar disaster led to the destruction of this Russian submarine.
So he is finding in favor of an accident, you know, not a planned act of belligerence, and the explosion of this practice torpedo in the Curse, he says, set off this chain reaction with the live warheads, and this caused the explosion that later sent the Curse to its watery grave.
And this is the exact story that if you go to the Moscow Time Times, the Independent News out of Russia, this is the exact story that they have that was published in August of twenty nineteen of what the true fate of the Curse was.
Independent Come on, maybe it is okay, Well, what do you think happened to the Curse?
Maybe a freak chemical accident, this enemy forces attack scenario.
I don't know, what do you guys think.
I do think the plausible thing is perhaps that oops followed by boom boom.
That's me, but I don't know.
Well, there's a great point brought up by some former CIA analysts and people familiar with the intelligence community. One guy in particular stood out to me, a guy named Jeffrey Edmonds, and he says, you know, something's kind of tragic. He says, there's simply a tendency for acts evidence to happen in Russia. And again we're not being anti Russian here,
this is what this guy say. He's saying that Russia appears to have this process whereby they often combine a willingness to take risk with outdated infrastructure that just can't support that risk taking culture, and that this creates an
environment where accidents are more likely. This is a longstanding observation slash accusation of the Russian military, which is, you know, to put a fine point on it, and to be brutally descriptive, the military of Russia has been repeatedly accused of throwing bodies at a problem until they consider that
problem solved, you know what I mean. That's why one of the most popular and even plausible theory conspiracy theories in the world of space exploration isn't whether people went to the Moon, it's how many cosmonauts might have died before Jurigergarren got into space and came back.
Not to mention how many dogs died.
And.
How guilty is any other country and including and especially the United States. Of course, even with the inflated budgets, and you know the amount of importance that's placed on it culturally and publicly.
No, no question about it.
So let us know what you think happened there on August tenth, two thousand, which it's crazy to realize that it's almost two decades gone now, but we want to hear from you. You can find us on Facebook, you can find us on Instagram, you can find us on Twitter. We always love to recommend for the Facebook friendly folks in the audience our community page. Here's where it gets crazy.
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Living towards the finish line. But I think it helped when you moved your hand again.
Yeah, you're the conductor, Matt, you are the conductor.
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