Awesome or Off-Putting is a weekly delve into cryptozoology, ufology, aliens, medical marvels, scientific wonders, secret societies, government conspiracies, cults, ghosts, EVPs, ancient artifacts, strange facts, odd sightings or just the plain unexplainable.
It’s called the Quacker. Right off the bat you know we’ll either be selling you Aflac, or trying desperately to convert you to Richard Nixon‘s pro-oatmeal religion.
We’ll not be doing either of those, actually. Instead – we’ll be talking about weird, repeating underwater sounds Cold War Russian submariners used to hear every time they’d pass certain spots. Some say it was the sounds of super technology secreted under water. Some say it’s the groanings of an unknown monster. Yet others believe it could have been aliens scooting around a deep sea base.
We think it was probably dolphin farts. But let’s take a look, shall we?
Remember the Bloop? It was that weird sound recorded by one of many microphones in the Arctic or something. Nobody knows what it was – but many agree that it didn’t emanate from any known animal. The Quacker is just like that. It wasn’t actually recorded (that we’ve seen), but it was heard by lot’s of submarine crewmen that Russia used to send into the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. Please notice the similar location (but totally different sounds) of the Bloop.
First let’s get the name out of the way. It’s not named after a duck’s call. It’s actually a reference to a frog noise. The Russians, apparently, think that frogs go ‘Quack’ instead of ‘Ribbit.’ The quacks would pass the submerged subs – or at least they sounded like they were passing by. Nothing ever showed up on radar.
It should be noted that the noises were heard in the same under water sectors. When the submarines left the vicinity – the noises ceased.
So what was it? There are three guesses, all summed up on Wikipedia:
“There never was much consensus about the nature and origin of these sounds, and the only hard fact about them is that they existed. Official reports of the commission remains classified to the present day, even if it was known that it never reached a conclusion. Several hypotheses were proposed, but none reached full acceptance, as they all failed to account for at least some of the phenomenon properties. The three main theories about the origin of this phenomenon propose some secret new technology developed by the US or NATO, an unknown marine animal or extraterrestrial activity.”
And exactly how did the things emitting the sounds act? Peculiarly, to say the least. According to theFullWiki.org:
These objects exhibited behavior not unlike some living being or manned vessel, showing obvious interest in the passing submarine, circling around it, trying to actively avoid sonar pulses, and so on. The speed of some of these objects (estimated from Doppler shift of their sound frequency) was in the range of 200 km/h, much higher than any then-known man-made vessel. Contact was attempted on several occasions, but, apart from some obvious reactions to these attempts such as changing the pitch of the sounds or movement of the apparent sound source), nothing came of it.
The peak of quacker observations occurred at the end of the 1970s, when the areas where the sounds appeared started to multiply and spread over from the Barents Sea to other areas including the North Sea and the North Atlantic in general. The Soviet Academy of Sciences was invited to create a joint commission with the representatives of the Navy, as this phenomenon was identified as a potential national security risk. This commission worked for about a decade, but despite extensive investigations results remained inconclusive, and it was eventually disbanded. In the 1980s the phenomenon slowly faded, and now quackers may have disappeared completely.
With the sound stopped – we’ll probably never know what it was. Until we maybe develop invisible submarines. You know – like Wonder Woman‘s jet. The sailors aren’t invisible. You can see them walking around – you just can’t see the hull. That way when another weird sound happens, all anybody would have to do is look up. Plus they’d all be wearing only blue-spangled underpants and magic bracelets.
Solving these types of things seems all to easy, doesn’t it?
We should be a government.
anon says
The Bloop and Quacker are in the same Area? The bloop was in the Pacific , the Quacker was off the Arctic in the barent sea, geography in US’s schools is appalling.
gossip for grown ups? you mention dolphin farts and laughed at other languages onomatopoeia’s.