RARE WHALE REDUX

Ten years ago, Nigel Wright and I wrote the following passage for our book The Rising of the Moon. Why are we resurrecting it now? Simply because, dear Fleur is (as you know) currently working as an intern at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter, and has been involved in curating the skeleton of the very beast this article is about. So, we are pleased to reprint it, together with pictures of the whale's vertebrae..

The Exmouth Herald for September 25th 1987 reported:

“Please could we have our whale teeth back

Callous looters hacked off the lower jaw of a rare whale washed up near Exmouth to steal its two front teeth. After the 20-ft long Cuvier`s beaked whale was found dead at Otter Cove on monday, Exeter's Royal Albert Museum and the British Museum in London sent experts to retrieve it for research. But during Tuesday night, the whale floated back out into Lyme Bay because nobody had secured it. In the meantime, Customs officers who had arrived to take charge of the carcase on Tuesday mornmg found that the teeth which are Government property were missing.

Mr. Kelvin Boot, from the Royal Albert Museum in Exeter, said: ''This whale is one of the rarest as far as beaching goes. There are no records of one being stranded in Britain this century. There was a sightng in the 1960's, but that is not like having the actual whale to investigate. It is a very significant find. Perhaps we should have chained it to make sure it didn't float away, but I am confident that it will turn up again on a beach along the coast. The Marines are on stand-by to tow it oft as soon as it is sighted.

We will then dissect the whale, taking samples of various organs to check for heavy metal pollution in the sea and to discover what it has bcen feeding on. So little is known about this particular beaked whale. I just hope we can get it back. We may never get the chance again.

Fortunately for the scientists the whale obliged on Thursday morning, when it was washed up at Budleigh Salterton. Mr. Keith Green, an Exmouth-based Customs and Excise officer, said:"We would like to hear from anyone who has any information on the whereabouts of its teeth - they are still the property of the crown. All whales, porpoises and dolphins stranded on the British coast are the property of the Receiver of Wrecks, a department of the Customs and Excise service.

Under its rules, the mammals' teeth have to be removed and sent to the British Museum to establish the age and sex of the whale.”

Here, we would like to note that whereas the newspaper`s conclusion that the lower jaw was hacked off by souvenir hunters is probably correct, this IS remarkably reminiscent of another scenario commonly reported in UFO related animal mutilations. The coincidence between the locations and the timing (as we shall see there were UFO reports in 1987 as well) is worth remarking upon.

As Nigel pointed out, they would have, made spectacularly uninteresting souvenirs and having come face to face as it were with another suppurating cetacean ten years later, he feels it unlikely that any but the most psychotic of curio hunters would have summoned up the intestinal fortitude to hack the jaw off the great beast. I have to agree with him, and would add that the task would have been a particularly onerous and time-consuming one, and would also add that Otter Cove is a particularly isolated spot that can only be reached by driving through the grounds of a local holiday camp. (14) (15)

If the mutilation was carried out at night (which it would have to have been in order to escape the prying eyes of gleeful holiday makers) it would seem almost impossible (having visited the location) that:

a. The operation (which would have needed a chainsaw to complete) could have been carried out without attracting attention.

b. That the perpetrators (whoever they were) could have taken the immense jaw up the treacherous cliff path without having incurred an unreasonable degree of danger.

or

c. Anyone would have bothered.

A refutation of the `callous souvenir hunter` scenario can be found in this folllowing account of the species:

“Cuvier's Beaked Whale. Order Cetacea : Family Ziphiidae :
Ziphius cavirostris
G. Cuvier

Cuvier's Beaked Whale (Ziphius cavirostris) Description. A moderately small beaked whale with upperparts ranging in color from dark brown to lead gray or blackish in color; underparts paler, but not whitish; occasionally head and upper back whitish; beak moderately prominent and the forehead rising rather sharply; lower jaw longer than upper; pectoral fin relatively small and the dorsal fin placed on posterior third of body; prominent keel extends from dorsal fin to tail; skull with length of rostrum less than twice its breadth at notch; lower jaw of males with one large tooth (about 7 cm in length and 4 cm in diameter) at the tip; in females the teeth are small and seldom break through the gums so that the animal appears to be toothless; two converging grooves on throat. Total length of adults, 5-7 m. Weight, 2.5-4.5 metric tons.

Distribution in Texas. Sparsely distributed throughout tropical and subtropical waters of the world. In the western North Atlantic, these whales are found from Massachusetts to Florida and the Gulf of Mexico.

Habits. Little is known of this whale beyond information revealed by stranded specimens. They are often observed in groups of 10-25. These whales are deep divers and may remain below water for 30 minutes or longer. They are known to eat squid, fish, crabs, and starfish.

The reproductive habits are almost unknown. There does not seem to be a distinct breeding season as calves are born year round. Calves are about 2.1 m long at birth. The length of gestation is unknown.” (16)

D.J.Coffey (1977) also notes that:

“...the male has a pair of teeth at the point of the lower jaw. In the female these do not erupt” (17)

As every report on this particular stranding has stated the animal was a female. This satisfactorily refutes any allegations that it would have been mutilated by souvenir hunters even if they had had the time, the opportunity or the motive, which is very questionable.

Another story in the Exmouth Herald a week later proclaimed:

“Hankies out for whale

Exmouth foiled out a carpet of polythene to bring ashore its most unusual visitor. a rare Cuvier's beaked whale on Friday morning. The 20ft. whale had been washed up dead on rocks at Otter Cove near Exmouth, and became a television celebrity overnight. But before experts from the Royal Albert Museum in Exeter could begin examining the five-ton female whale, thieves sawed off part of her lower law and two front teeth.

The whale was then washed away on the tide but found again in the estuary of the River Otter, at Budleigh Salutation. On Friday's high tide, Royal Marines from Limestone Camp secured lines around the whale and towed her out to sea as staff from the Exmouth Dock Company laid out a polythene carpet down Mamhead slipway on the pierheard.

As the whale was brought alongside by the Marines a line was thrown ashore to waiting dockers. A crowd of more than 100 watched the whale being pulled up the polythene carpet until the line broke. It was then a case of the one that got away as the whale drifted out to sea before the Marines nudged her back on to the slipway with inflatable boats. A new line was attached to the whale, which was pulled slowly up the sllpway and on to the road.

Several people reached for their handkerchiefs as the whale was lifted on to a waiting lorry - not to wipe away a tear, but to cover their noses. The carcass was then taken to a knacker's yard at Newton Abbot where staff from the museum began the task of stripping off the flesh. Mr. David Bolton. one of the museum team, said.' "We now know that the whale had a number of broken ribs and there was evidence of internal bleeding. This points to it having been hit by a ship or thrown across some rocks. "The whale had a punctured lung and a more detailed examination of the skeleton will provide some idea of her age.” (18)

The Ziphiidae, the family to which Cuvier`s beaked whale belongs is poorly known and full of so many zoological surprises that it has excited cryptozoologists as well as their brethren in the more mainstream branches of the narural sciences for many years.

Bernard Heuvelmans, the Belgian zoologist known universally as “The father of Cryptozoology” (19) waxed lyrical on the subject in 1968:

“No family of whales is so mysterious as the Ziphiidae, or 'Beaked Whales', which are really dolphins. Hyperoodon is the only one of its five genera which is at all common and the only one which has been known since the beginning of the last century. There seem to be several different species of Hyperoodon, or Bottlenose, reaching a length of about 30 feet, but the one most unlike the others is known almost entirely from skulls washed up in the Southern Hemisphere. Yet Hyperoodon has been caught only in the North Atlantic.

Cuvier's Whale (Ziphius) was first thought to be extinct when Georges Cuvier described in 1823 a partly petrified skull that had been washed up in the Mediterranean in 1804. Nearly half a century after the first stranding another was washed up in the same place. Later a whole specimen with an identical skeleton was found in New Zealand. Oddly enough in old specimens the skull is almost petrified, fossilised before its time, and in other respects it seems designed to fool the naturalist, for it is light above and dark below, thus breaking all the rules of animal coloration.

Mesoplodon is perhaps the most puzzling genus of all. It was first known from a carcase washed up at Elgin in Scotland and examined by Sowerby. It was brown and had a strangely curved lower jaw with only two teeth. In 1825 a similar beast, but with no teeth at all, was stranded alive at Le Havre. It lived for two days, and sightseers who had odd ideas about cetacean's diet-tried to feed it on bread soaked in water. Henri Ducrotay de Blainville studied it and christened it Aodon dalei on account of its absence of teeth, but subsequent scientists have said that it was just a Sowerby's Whale that had lost its teeth with age. It could well have been a female, for they are often found to be toothless. In 1850 Paul Gervais gave the species the name Mesoplodon bidens, which it has kept ever since. Meanwhile several different species of Mesoplodon have been reported, but their descriptions are based on so little evidence that it is hard to say whether there are ten or fifteen of them. One of the rarest is Gervais's Whale (Mesoplodon europaeus) of which only six specimens are known. The first was found floating in the English Channel in 1840; but the next three were washed up on the coast of New Jersey in 1889, 1933 and '935, and the last two, a mother and child, in Jamaica in 1953, which was rather unfortunate for a supposedly 'European' animal. Blainville's Whale (M densirostris) has an even more bizarre distribution. Only seven specimens have been found, but they could hardly have been farther apart: in the Seychelles, on Lord Howe Island, south of Africa, near Massachusetts, in Madeira and New Jersey. M stejnegeri is known only from two specimens from the Pacific coast of North America, and M. hectori from two specimens in New Zealand. The description of M bowdoini is also based on two New Zealand specimens, but as they were only skeletons we still know nothing about their external appearance. And I need hardly say that we know absolutely nothing about the habits of the various Mesoplodons, which are sometimes more than 15 feet long.

We hardly know more about the two species of Berardius, Arnoux's and Baird's Whales, which were first described in 1851 and 1883, and which may be over 40 feet long. The second has teeth which no mammalogist would have believed in had they been described by a layman, for they are embedded in cartilaginous sacs, and it seems that they can be erected at will. New species of Ziphiidae continue to be discovered. As recently as 1937 Oliver had to create a new genus, Tasmacetus, after three Beaked Whales of a hitherto unknown type were stranded in New Zealand. They were between 23 and 29 feet long; yet people still say that the sea cannot hold any large unknown animals.” (20)

In the thirty years since Heuvelmans wrote the above passage, the Ziphiidae have given up a few of their secrets and presented us with many more.

REFERENCES

14 [URL: www.nsrl.ttu.edu/tmot/ziphcavi.htm]
15 COFFEY, D.J. An Encyclopaedia of Sea Mammals (Hart davis/McGibbon, London, 1977)
16 The Exmouth Herald October 2nd 1987
17 I don`t know who first coined this appelation but I think it was French cryptozoologist Michel Raynal
18. HEUVELMANS B In the wake of the Sea Serpents (Hart-Davis, London, 1968 1st English ed.)
19. Chris Basford pers.comm.
20. As cited in Sightings, Dec 1997

Rising of the Moon is, by the way, available through Xiphos books

A WHALE OF A TALE

I get about 400 e-mails a day, which is why catching up on the backlog when I have been ill is always a daunting task.

I have been working on the backlog all day, and they included this one from a bloke called Mohamed Awad from the Gulf:

"Hi Jon, those are the pictures I found in the beaches of Oman. can you please till me what you think, whether its a crypto or just some whale.

Thanks!!"


Well, Mohamed, it is certainly a whale, but I have no idea as to
pecies. Richard (F) reckons that it is a baleen whale of some description rather than a toothed whale, but couldn't go any further.

However, it would not surprise me at all whether there is some set of arcane diagnostic signs of which we laymen are unaware, so over to you whaledudes and whalechicks amongst the bloggo readership.

In the meantime Mohamed - thanks for writing mate. Please get in touch with anything else of interest that turns up...

RICHARD FREEMAN: Return of the Grey Whale to the Atlantic

The only extant populations of Grey Whales (Eschrichtius robustus) are in the North Pacific, where there are two geographically separated groups. One population occurs along the east Pacific coast from Baja California to the Bering and Chukchi seas, the other occurs in the west Pacific from South Korea to the Okhotsk Sea.

However there was once a third population that lived in the Atlantic. It was found around the coast of Europe, Iceland and the eastern seaboard of the US and Canada. There are historical accounts of living grey whales from Iceland in the early 1600s, and possibly off New England in the early 1700s. It seems that the Atlantic grey whales were wiped out before the start of large-scale industrial whaling, suggesting that grey whales as a species are susceptible to coastal community-based whaling.

Sub-fossil remains, the most recent dated at around 1675 A.D., have been found on the eastern seaboard of North America from Florida to New Jersey, and on the coasts of the English Channel and the North and Baltic seas.

It was the Atlantic population that was described to science first. In 1861, Wilhelm Lilljeborg identified a sub-fossil, naming it Balaenoptera robusta. In the same decade, John Gray of the British Museum noted the differences between this species and the rorqual whales (Family Balaenopteridae), and so placed it in a new genus, Eschrichtius, after the zoologist Daniel Eschricht.

Sub fossil remains were collected from the coasts of England and Sweden. A sub fossil skeleton at Gräsö (Roslagen, Upsala, Sweden) was the type specimen of Lilljeborg's Balaenoptera robusta.

The grey whale was thought to be totally extinct until 1911 when the paleontologist Roy Chapman Andrews rediscovered a colony of the cost of Korea. On July 22nd 1916 a Dutch sailor who only identified himself as ‘PW’ saw an odd creature 400 miles to the north of Suriname in latitude 10deg 54’ N and a longitude of 56deg 27’W. It was estimated to be 70-80 feet long and had odd protuberances on the head. The animal did not have a dorsal fin. His sketch off the beast gave a whale like outline. Grey whales will often have collections of barnacles attached to the head. These might have been the protuberances ‘PW’ saw. The grey whale is also he only one of the great whales to lack a dorsal fin.

Dr Bernard Heuvelmans though that this may have indeed been a grey whale and that the species may have lingered longer in the Atlantic than most people think. In fact the date of the grey whale’s extinction in the Atlantic is not known.

At the 19th Annual Meeting of the Society for Conservation Biology, held in July 2005 in Brazil, Dr Andrew Ramsey and Dr Owen Nevin, of the University of Central Lancashire's School of Natural Resources, proposed the idea that the grey whales could be reintroduced in the Irish Sea. They proposed airlifting 50 surplus grey whales from the east Pacific coast population for release off the coast of northern England, the Cumbrian coastline, starting in 2015. According to these scientists it's ecologically, logistically and economically feasible and whale watching could regenerate struggling fishing communities around these coasts. A Lake District survey revealed that 90% of people would be in favour of re-introducing the grey whale to Britain, so it seems that this idea has already the backing of the local people. However, the idea caused division between conservationists. The Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society criticized this idea heavily, labeling it "neither feasible nor sensible". The group has serious doubts as to whether the Pacific grey whales could even survive in the Atlantic.

But the scientists have hit back. "Some people will say it is impossible but we are deadly serious about this," Nevin said on the university's Web site.

"It's ecologically, logistically and economically feasible and whale watching could regenerate struggling fishing communities around our coasts," he added. Ramsey said cargo aircraft can easily accommodate adult Gray whales and the journey from California to Britain would take less than 12 hours. "Providing the whales are kept moist at all times they are more than capable of surviving the long haul flight," he said.

The whales would present no threat to the fishing industry because they feed on worms and amphipods that live in sediment and do not eat fish.

I don't currently know if this scheme is still going ahead. I can find no more information on it. I hope it come to fruition because having grey whales off the cost of Cumbria is an exciting prospect.

GUEST BLOGGER OLL LEWIS: Whither the CFZ Archiving Project?

Oll has been jolly busy and the latest set of scanned news clippings and other stuff from the Archiving Project is ready for you to download HERE should you want to..

However Oll has a conundrum. What should he do next?

Vote for the next archive upload!

If you’ve been following the progress of the CFZ archive you’ll be aware that I’ve undertaken the humongous task of scanning uploading all of our stored news stories, letters, photos, slides and other documents dating from the olden days before nearly every news story was available online. If not then you really have missed out, check out the archive now for your chance to read newspaper articles on aquatic monsters from as far back as two centuries ago, read the news stories about the 1999 great white shark sightings off the Cornish coast, and see photographs from America allegedly depicting the carcass of a gigantic octopus. In the latest update you get the chance to read most of the stories published when it was revealed that the ‘surgeon’s photo’ of the Loch Ness monster was a hoax, one of the defining moments of cryptozoological history whether we like it of not.

With the set of articles on the surgeon’s photo I’ve finished scanning in the first of our box files and rather than just select another box file from the stack at random to scan next, Jon and I thought it’d be a good idea to let you guys choose what you want scanned in next. Simply post a comment after this blog with your chosen subject from the short list and the subject with the most votes gets scanned in next, so if you see a subject you like on the list and don’t vote you’ve only got yourself to blame if you have to wait a few months to see it.

The Candidates:
1) Dragons
2) Reptiles
3) Birds
4) BHM
5) Lake Monsters
6) Big Cats

Get voting.

Another bunch of goodies from the CFZ Archiving Project

Why is Oll wearing a hat indoors? Possibly because of his obsession with Indiana Jones, but possibly just for effect. Never mind. He has been jolly busy and the latest set of scanned news clippings and other stuff from the Archiving Project is ready for you to download should you want to..


http://www.cfz.org.uk//Archiving/Aquatic%203/


There's over thirty news items there with lots and lots more to follow. Have fun :)

GUEST BLOGGER OLL LEWIS: Love Hertz

Apart from the fact that his puns are terrible and he has an obsession with the more surreal side of Internet culture, Oll Lewis hasn't put a foot wrong since we started this bloggo-thing. He is also an old softy and insisted that we wait until Valentine's Day to post this story of unrequieted love..

While I was researching the article on the bloop I came across the sad tale of a very lonely whale. The whale’s calls have been picked up on the hydrophones of the NOAA since 1989 and have been tracked since 1992, they were identified as coming from a baleen whale (whales that possess baleen plates rather than teeth, and filter feed like the blue whale) in 2000.

The calls have been recorded at 51.75 Hertz, and last for 5-7 seconds each and come in groups of 2-6 calls. The creature has been nicknamed the 52 Hertz whale. The whale’s calls are unique, blue whales and fin whales communicate between 15-25 Hz, and it does not follow the known migration route of any extant baleen whale species. With that in mind it is not surprising that the whale’s calls have never been answered, and that every year only the mating call of this single whale is recorded at that frequency. What might be sad for this, by now, very lonely and frustrated whale is good for scientists who have had the chance to study the call of one individual whale in the wild and monitor how it changes year by year, the whale’s voice has become slightly deeper over the years it has been monitored.

A team of researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, whose members have included William Watkins, one of the pioneers of marine mammal acoustics, has been studding and researching the animal and its migratory pattern using the NOAA sound surveillance system since 1989. This team has formulated several theories as to why the animal might have such a distinctive call. The Woods Hole team’s current preferred theory is that the whale is a deformed hybrid between two different species of whale, but they do not speculate upon which species of whale could have got together to produce an animal with calls at a frequency so monumentally dissimilar to other baleen whales.

Another possibility is that the whale is the last surviving member of an unknown species, or one known only from the fossil record. Scientists are often, quite rightly, cautious about proclaiming that a creature is a new species based purely on what amounts to a trace sample. An animal needs a holotype to be classified as a species and that holotype, unless due to extenuating circumstances, needs to be the body of the organism. This is because scientists need to have a good idea what the animal actually looks like to classify it as a species and something to compare other possible members of the same species too. Because trace samples like recorded sounds, faeces and footprints are merely by-products of an animal’s existence and reveal very little about what an animal looks like, any scientist using them as definitive proof of a new species stands the risk of ridicule by their peers.

This is why no matter how many plaster casts of Bigfoot footprints, or blurry photographs of the Loch Ness monster turn up neither animal will be classed as a new animal, or even existing until a body is found. When I was at university several years ago, I had a conversation with one of my lecturers who was also fascinated by cryptozoology. He used the example of Nessie, saying that even if the monster popped out of the water on camera during a live BBC broadcast and posed for photos, unless there was a body that evidence, would for some scientists, still carry only the same weight as one of his kid’s crayon pictures of the monster.

Because of this even when analysing something as unique as the call of the 52 Hertz whale you can only go so far before you are no longer presenting facts but only suppositions and theories. It is not improbable that the whale is the last surviving remnant of an unrecorded species, many new species of animal are discovered every month, the problem with this is finding the evidence to back it up. In the case of the whale, this would probably be one of the rare circumstances where a good quality photograph could be submitted as a holotype should the creature turn out to be an unrecorded species, but the problem would be in obtaining the photo.

The Woods Hole scientists were able to track the migratory pattern of the whale over several years, but this was only after the sounds had been declassified and released to them. Finding a moving target that you knew was in a certain place, say for example, last Tuesday, is a nigh on impossible task, and would require huge amounts of manpower. It is likely we will never know exactly what the 52 Hertz whale looks like, but the sentimentalist in me hopes that someday his calls are answered, however unlikely that may be.

The 52 Hertz whale can be heard here:
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/vents/acoustics/whales/sounds/sounds_52blue.html

THE ARCHIVING PROJECT:The second trenche of aquatic cryptoclippings is online

The other day we told you about how Oll Lewis is hard at work on the long awaited CFZ Archiving Project. He is still hard at it, and the second trenche of downloads is now available. They include stories on Lake Van in Turkey, various sightings at Loch Ness, as well as odd aquatic stories from the west of Ireland, and from Tasmania.

Download them for free: HERE

THE CFZ ARCHIVING PROJECT IS GO

Nearly fifteen years ago, in one of the first issues of our journal Animals & Men I made a manifesto promise. I promised to make our archive of press cuttings and articles available online, for free, to anyone who wanted them. Well, it has taken fifteen years, but today - in a small way at least - we started.



Exhibit One:


This is a picture of a certain Welsh ecologist slaving over a red hot scanner, as he slowly works his way through the CFZ archives. The picture was taken earlier this afternoon, and we are happy to say that the first fifteen scanned clippings from our voluminous archives of lake, sea, and river monsters, and other aquatic anomalies, are now available HERE

The more mealy mouthed amongst you will note that these cuttings are presented in a somewhat willy-nilly fashion. You would be right, but unkind to point it out. At the moment Oll is just scanning them, naming the subsequent files, and then uploading them to basic folders. What we would really like, in a few months from now when there is a significant amount of data with which to deal, for a couple of volunteers who have basic htm coding skills to offer to arrange them into some coherent order on a dedicated blog page.

We are hoping to get some trainees from the government's New Deal scheme, and have a hell of a lot of scanning completed within the next three months. So if you want to be involved in an interesting and useful project, now is your time to volunteer.

We will, of course be keeping you all up to date with the progress of the project.

SHOOP DA BLOOP: Reds On The Seabeds?

Apart from the fact that his puns are terrible and he has an obsession with the more surreal side of Internet culture, Oll Lewis hasn't put a foot wrong since we started this bloggo-thing. Because of his interest in things aquatic he has been co-ordinating the lake and sea monster news for the CFZ for some years now, and as regular readers of this bloggo will already know he is letting this obsession spill over online..

When I asked on another website if there was any cryptozoological topic they would like to see looked at by me for this blog one of the suggestions was something called
The Bloop .

The bloop is not an animal, rather an anomalous sound. It was picked up by the American government’s autonomous hydrophonic array in 1997 and was heard intermittently throughout the summer of that year. The sound was heard by hydrophones over a distance of 5000 km and is of a very low frequency. The sound wave produced has, according to scientists working with the American governments NOAA listening stations, the sort of waveform you would expect from a biological source.

And therein lies the mystery… for a deep sea mammal, like a whale, to have produced the sound it would have had to have been much larger than a blue whale. Scientists at the time suggested that the sounds may have been made by giant squid. However, there are no known species of giant squid, or any other cephalopod, large enough to be able to produce such a sound either. Since 1997, when the squid theory was first proposed, it has also been proved that neither giant nor colossal squid are capable of producing low frequency sounds like this and it is thought, like most other squid, that their main method of communication with each other is via sight, using their chromatophores to change colour in complex moving patterns.

But before we can proclaim that this must be the cry of some Jörmungandr-like beast, we have to consider the other possibilities too and just why the bloop was only heard over one summer, over 10 years ago and has remained silent ever since. The most obvious question to start with is, can we be sure that the source of the sound was an animal? The answer to that question is no, the scientists just said it was the sort of waveform you would expect from a biological source and did not say it was definitely from a biological source. The scientists did rule out seismic activity but that is not the only non-biological source the sound could have had. Equipment failure was also ruled out because the bloop was heard over several hydrophones on a number of occasions.

A possible non-biological source of the bloop could be linked to the very thing the autonomous hydrophonic array was set up to monitor. It was set up not to listen out for whale song or undersea seismic activity but to listen for Enemy submarine craft and provide their approximate locations in case of any possible threat to America. In other words, a sort of marine precursor of the ‘Star Wars’ programme that Russia is vehemently opposed to today. It is certainly within the realms of possibility that a government, other than that of the United States, had decided that it would be wise to test out just how accurate the American’s new monitoring system was using equipment that could produce suspicious sounds and see if the Americans detected them, and if they did how long would it take them to zero in on the source of the sound and investigate it. Tests like this would expose weak points and flaws in the system should your country wish to evade detection on the array, or mask your submarine’s presence as something else. The fact that the sound was said to have been the same every time it was transmitted over the summer does tend to lend itself to having been an artificially created sound, and if it was being created by a man made object, then it need not have been created by something larger than a blue whale. There have also been several other distinctly different anomalous low frequency sounds picked up over sustained periods in other parts of the array, which is what one might expect if someone were testing the limits of the array.

However, this theory is just as speculative as the bloop being the call of a gigantic beast and essentially that’s the problem with any theory - to explain the source of the sound. Maybe someday the bloop will be heard again and we might start to get some answers.