16 December 1973
(The Robesonian, Lumberton,
North Carolina)
Source: NewspaperArchive.com
The whole article:
“UFO, of course, stands for Unidentified
Flying Object — but have you heard of the USO?
That’s an Unidentified Submerged [Object].
There are many reports, some well documented, of
strange, unclassifiable objects prowling not the sky above but the seas and
oceans. Consider some typical cases.
On Aug. 29, 1964 the U.S.
oceanographic ship Eltanin was taking pictures with an underwater camera at 13,500 feet below the
surface some 1,000 miles
west of Cape Horn.
One of the photographs captured what looked like a
curious piece of machinery on the ocean floor with projecting rods which could
have been antennae. It seems inconceivable that this was a plant since no sun
reaches those abysmal ocean depths. The only other natural explanation that
seems conceivable is that it was an unknown type of coral.
The notion of a machine, evidently not man-made, at
the bottom of the sea may sound bizarre. But what was it that the noted
oceanographer, Dr. Dmitric Rebikoff, saw and attempted to photograph in the Gulf Stream on July 5, 1965. It was ‘a [huge] pear-shaped
object,’ he said, and definitely no form of [aquatic] life with which he, with
all his marine experience, was familiar.
And what about this account, with 40 eyewitnesses to
vouch for it, of an unclassifiable something that intercepted the Argentine
cargo ship Naviero at midnight on July 30, 1967.
The object, spotted off the coast of Brazil, was
‘the shape of a Cuban cigar and glowed with a strange green, almost white
[phosphorescence].’ That’s how Capt. Juliana Ardanza, skipper of the vessel,
described the eerily shimmering USO.
‘It was an object which navigated and submerged, as
any submarine, but its strange luminosity made it unusual,’ he continued. ‘It
was not a mirage or illusion but a real thing.’
More recently, something unidentifiable invaded the
waters of Northern Europe.
On Nov. 23, 1972 the story hit the newswires that for
two weeks the Norwegian [Navy], aided and abetted by the British, had been
playing catch-me-if-you-can with what they thought was an unknown submarine.
The intruder was in the Sogne Fjord [Sognefjorden], north of Bergen.
There were reports of a ‘yellowish-green spotlight’ on
the fjord and sightings of a dark object on the surface for about seven minutes.
One night six red rocket flares were seen in the fjord. Observers said the
flares ‘appeared to come straight out of the sea.’ The Norwegian [Navy] dropped
anti-submarine bombs with no result.
Strangely enough, at times the Norwegian and British
military communications frequencies used for the sub hunt were jammed by some
unknown agency.
The extraordinary thing is that the massive
Norwegian-British anti-submarine operation, using every available sophisticated
technique, was unable even to establish whether there was indeed something down
there, though there was no doubt about it.
Norwegian radio carried a report that the country’s
Defence Command did not believe the intruder was a foreign submarine and
labelled it simply ‘an unidentified submerged object.’
And that’s the way the mystery still stands. The whole
flap ended when the thing, whatever it was, vanished from the fjord.
Well, it must have been a submarine, you may say,
probably nuclear-powered. Fair enough. But what, then, about this well documented
account which goes back to the pre-modern submarine era.
According to the log of the British steamship Fort Salisbury,
the second officer, Mr. A. H. Raymer, on Oct. 28, 1902, at 3:05 a.m., in Lat. 5
degrees 31. S. and Long. 4 degrees 42 W., saw, with the lookout, ‘a huge dark
object bearing lights in the sea ahead.
‘Two lights were seen. The steamship passed a slowly
sinking bulk of an estimated length of five or 600 feet. Mechanism of
some kind was making a commotion in the water ….’
We can add to the denizens of the world of the
unexplained, the USO.”
Wikipedia
article: “Norwegian Armed Forces”:
Wikipedia
article: “Royal Norwegian Navy”:
Wikipedia article: “Sognefjord [Sognefjorden]”:
Related posts:
Map of the Sognefjord, Norway
(wikimedia.org)
(wikimedia.org image)
View of the fjord [Sognefjorden, Norway]
near Vangsnes
