26/10/2026
USS Trepang (SSN-674), which has been credited with photographs of flying ci**rs over the Arctic in 1971.
If you believe internet authors, a submarine on an extended patrol (vvodka) does nothing except search for the entrance to Shamballa, catch plesiosaurs in its periscope, and enter into a mental link with the Alpha Centauri civilization. The question of who is scrubbing the heads (gal’yun), tightening stuffing boxes (sal’niki), and chipping scale in the bilges (tryumy) usually doesn’t bother ufologists. And that makes sense: a guy with a rag and a monkey wrench (razvodnoy gayochny klyuch) doesn't really fit into the concept of cosmic contact.
Meanwhile, world ufology has been holding on for several decades to a concrete-reinforced fact: in March of nineteen seventy-one, the American nuclear submarine Trepang, hull number SSN-674, Sturgeon-class, was hanging out somewhere between Iceland and Jan Mayen Island. It was just cruising under the ice, minding its own business, when suddenly the OOD (vahthenny ofitser) looked through the periscope and was struck dumb. Instead of the familiar Arctic landscape, giant flying ci**rs, triangles, and other unidentified objects were hanging in the crosshairs of the optics. Call it an alien base, call it an intergalactic minority summit. Photographs included—blurry, grainy, with washed-out edges, everything just as it should be for a genuine top-secret state file.
For fifty years, humanity thrashed in ecstasy, analyzing those images pixel by pixel. And in twenty-four, journalists finally figured out how to call the guy who was the main man on that very Trepang back in seventy-one: retired Rear Admiral Dean Sackett, the boat's commanding officer at the time.
The admiral, to give him credit, answered briefly and with military boredom. He said, sure, we really were in the Arctic back then, boring through the ice and advancing science, but the crew didn't lay eyes on any flying ci**rs, saucers, or little green men. And the U.S. Navy, after rummaging through the archives, threw up its hands entirely: we can't confirm the status of the photos; where they came from—hell knows (pyos ih znaet).
You’d think we could disperse. The skipper said "it didn't happen"—meaning it didn't happen. On a submarine, the skipper isn't even the first after God; he's the guy God checks pressure gauge readings with before arranging a storm. If the skipper says there's a crocodile flying outside the hull, the OOD is obligated to take a bearing on the crocodile, determine the range, and log the amphibian with its speed and course. And if the skipper says there were no aliens, then even if they were holding square dances in the control room (tsentralny post) and drinking brudershaft with the chief of the boat, they didn't exist in nature.
But internet experts can't be derailed by such nonsense as eyewitness testimony. The reaction of the armchair staff (divanny shtab) was instantaneous and brilliant in its unclouded purity: "What does the boat's CO know? He simply didn't have the clearance (forma dopuska)!"
Right here, as a former active-duty sailor (matros srochnoy sluzhby) of a strategic missile submarine (raketny podvodny kreyser strategicheskogo naznacheniya), I take off my beskozyrka and start weeping into an oily rag.
Picture this oil painting. A tight control room (tsentralny post). The ship's commanding officer—a man entrusted by the government with a nuclear reactor, combat torpedoes, over a hundred living souls, and the right to start World War III upon a signal from headquarters. But they won't let him near the periscope! Standing there is some specially trained middle-grade warrant officer (michman) from the secret department, or better yet, a first-year muster (matros-pervodnik) with a Level 1 Martian clearance, elbowing the skipper aside and saying sternly:
"Step away, Comrade Captain 2nd Rank, don't breathe on the optics. There's an alien cigar diving into a polynyas out there, and your personal file is missing a clearance note from the reptilians. Go back to your cabin, drink some tea, while we log this interplanetary contact."
Anyone who has ever descended into the pressure hull (prochny korpus) knows perfectly well: on a submarine, you can't hide even an extra can of condensed milk (sgushyonka) from the skipper and the crew. Fifteen minutes later, the bilge mechanic (tryumny) in the tenth compartment (otsek) will know about it, and twenty minutes later the XO will already be screaming over the 1MC (gromkaya svyaz), trying to figure out which rat breached the emergency rations (neprikosnovenny zapas). And here—a giant alien spacecraft is hanging right ahead (po kursu), someone is clicking a camera shutter through the skipper's periscope, developing the film in a dark nook (temnaya vygorodka), printing photos, and the cap is walking around completely clueless! Figuring, probably, that they're getting the wall newspaper (стенгазета) ready for Navy Day.
Why, if a single lousy flying cigar had actually hovered over the Trepang back in seventy-one, the reaction of any normal submarine crew—ours or the American one—would have been identical to the letter. There wouldn't have been a shred of awe before a extraterrestrial intelligence.
First of all, the XO would have immediately sounded general quarters (avral) and made the sailors holy-stone and scrub the weather decks, because it looks bad in front of the aliens—the boat has streaking rust, the brass isn't shining, what if they've got a strict inspection going on back there on Sirius?
Second, the political officer (zampolit) would have immediately held a political briefing (politinformatsiya) on how bourgeois humanoids are trying to provoke us with their unfriendly hovering, but our Soviet (or American democratic) nuclear shield is tougher than their flying pipe.
And third, the engineroom chief (mekhanik) would have stared through the periscope for a long time, spat, and said that the cigar was made shoddily, the rivets were crooked, the aerodynamics were like a brick's, and if they drained the hydraulics (gidravlika), they could grease our air compressors for half a year.
In reality, everything is much more prosaic. I’ve seen those photos. Regular rubber target-aerostats that the fleet launches for gunnery practice and exercises, plus chunks of Arctic ice caught in a mirage. Up North, when the air is freezing and the water is steaming, over the horizon you'll see craziness even worse than that—one minute a hill hangs upside down, the next a tugboat stretches out in the height like a multi-story building. Especially if you're looking at this business after the third watch, when your eyes are gluing shut and the ventilation is roaring in your head.
Some staff photographer snapped a training inflatable sausage (navusnaya kolbasa), dropped the prints in a desk drawer, and forty years later his grandson found the envelope in the attic and took it to the editorial office of a tabloid. And the circus started. NSA secret archives, secret Anunnaki bases in the ice, admiral conspiracy!
Because to the ordinary man on the shore, it’s boring to know that submariners in the ice are engaged in routine, heavy, mind-numbingly monotonous work: listening to noises, counting miles, monitoring loop temperatures, and dreaming of a hot shower. The people demand a mystery. Preferably grand, with special effects and a mandatory global government covering everything up.
So old man Dean Sackett was wasting his breath apologizing to journalists. He should have dropped the unvarnished truth right away: yeah, ci**rs flew in. Moored right to the sail (rubka). The humanoids asked for alcohol to cure their hangovers and wanted to know how to get to the Gulf Stream, but we wouldn't tell them because they violated reporting protocol (forma doklada) and clambered up the brow (trap) without permission.
Believe me, the internet would have been ecstatic. They wouldn't even have nitpicked the security clearance.
