Something Horrifying Happened to this Submarine

Ambient Songs:
By CoAg
https://www.youtube.com/@co.agmusic1823

Intro Theme by Swift Junai:
https://www.instagram.com/swiftjunai/?hl=en
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6hf5nMJ8s6LJJfFR4OQ3lg
https://open.spotify.com/artist/1PoG2b18MHocWZA8zQgWjO

Writers and researchers: Jay Adams
https://instagram.com/jayadamsdigital?igshid=MzMyNGUyNmU2YQ==

Jordan Gottschick https://www.youtube.com/@DerpsWithWolves/playlists

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello everyone, and welcome back to Scary Interesting in this video,
working over three horrific once in a lifetime events. These
are the kinds of things you almost wouldn't believe happened
if they hadn't been documented, and one of them is
pure nightmare fuel, just extremely disturbing. Y'll see what I mean,
and as always, viewer discretion is advised. At just twenty

(00:29):
eight years old, Kirstie's potential as a scientist an oceanographer
was just about limitless. Her resume was already decorated and lengthy,
having earned a degree in geology at the University of
London and a Master of Science at Southampton University before
getting to work in places like Greenland and Australia. But
in the summer of two thousand and two, an opportunity
presented itself that she couldn't pass up. The British Antarctic

(00:51):
survey Or BAS had offered her a thirty month contract
to live and work in ant Darctica while studying the
effects of ice movement on plant and animal life there.
As you might imagine for a scientist in her field,
this was the trip of a lifetime, so she immediately
accepted and got ready to head to one of the
most unforgiving places on Earth. She would then travel to
Rothera Research Station, which sits on the edge of Adelaide

(01:13):
Island in Antarctica, and like most places on the continent,
it's surrounded by snow, sea and jagged mountains as you
might imagine as well, life there is unlike anywhere else,
as was the work, which again was exactly what she
was there for. On July twenty seconds, two thousand and three,
she and Acauliague Richard were scheduled to snorkel near the
shoreline checking on the progress of underwater monitoring equipment. It

(01:36):
was part of a routine survey and essentially she'd be
checking to see how much the ice had moved since
the last survey. The waters that day were calm and glassy,
and the weather was clear and cold. As Kirsty put
on her bright orange dry suit and preparation for the dive.
It was just after three ten PM when Kirsty and
Richard entered the water to begin checking on their ice
tracking equipment, and although they were working as a team,

(01:56):
they each had their own responsibilities, so almost immediately they
split apart and began their work. About fifty feet or
fifteen meters away from one another. As Richard began to
locate his ice tracking equipment, all of a sudden he
heard a muted underwater shriek. He then whipped around toward
where the sound came from in just enough time to
see Kirsty disappear into the dark water, as if something
was pulling at her feet. He then darted toward Kirsty

(02:20):
as fast as he could, before realizing there were suddenly
no trace for it. All. All he could do was
stare down into the blackness blow wondering what just happened.
Then just as quickly, he surfaced and started swimming toward
the two person shore team that was assisting them. He
would then learn that as they watched from land, they
said they briefly saw it what look like a struggle
in the water between Kirsty and a leopard seal before

(02:42):
she was pulled beneath the surface. At three twenty five pm,
he made a call went out and a rescue team
mobilized fast. A boat was then launched, but when it
reached the area where Kirsty was last seen, she was
still missing. The water around them was also just as
empty and still as it was when the diet began,
almost eerily so after what happened moments earlier, but either way,
Kirsty's teammates continued to scour the surrounding ocean for any

(03:04):
sign of her, but the silence remained for another ten
minutes until something finally broke the water a little less
than a mile away. When one of the team members
spotted it, the site was beyond horrific. It was, in
fact a leopard seal, and it had Kirsty's body face
down in the water and her head firmly in its mouth.
The boat then raced towards the seal as one of
the rescuers started hitting the water with a shovel, hoping

(03:27):
to scare the seal away from her. As they closed in,
the seal got spooked by the nearing boat and released Kirsty,
but it actually stayed nearby, circling the boat as rescuers
worked to get her on board. Emergency first aid was
then given, but despite their best efforts, Kirsty was still unresponsive.
The boat then raced back to shore and Kirsty was
transported to roy There's medical station, where the base doctor

(03:47):
took over and tried everything to bring her back for
more than an hour. He tried to resustate her, but
nothing worked. At that point, it became clear there was
nothing more that could be done, and she was pronounced dead.
The news of her passing hit or twenty one colleagues hard,
both because of how sudden and violent the event was
and how much Kirsty was adored by those she worked
with back in the United Kingdom. Her family was then

(04:09):
notified the next morning of what happened, and Kirsty's death
was a first not just for the British Antarctic Survey,
but in the recorded history of human interaction with leopard seals.
No human being before had ever been killed by one,
and it was the first death in the survey's long history.
And it was later determined that she had been held
underwater by the seal for six excruciating minutes and dragged

(04:29):
to a depth of around two hundred thirty feet or
seventy meters. The official report also later documented forty five
separate injuries, most of which were around her head and neck,
because the seals grip on Kirsty's body had been relentless,
and for even more context, leopard seals aren't like the
ones you imagine balancing beach balls in the zoo. These
animals are apex predators. They're fast strung and fitted with

(04:52):
jaws that can crush bone. In Antarctica, they sit near
the top of the food chain, just below orcus, which
are their only documented predator. Most of the time, they
hunt penguins or smaller seals, and they do so with
brutal efficiency. When a leopard seal targets a penguin, it
grabs it by the feet, thrashes it around, and actually
smashes it against the surface of the water until it passes.

(05:14):
And even in freezing conditions, the leopard seal is surprisingly
agile for its size. An adult seal can grow to
more than eleven feet or three point four meters long,
and some have even been documented at an astounding thirteen
hundred pounds. This is roughly the size of a walrus,
and according to the rescue team that saw the seal
that attack Kirsty, it was unusually large, maybe about fifteen

(05:35):
feet or four point five meters long. It's also believed
that it was a female because they are known to
be about fifty percent larger than their male counterparts. Leopard
seals also have sharpened size or teeth, and inch long
canones designed for tearing flesh, even though their preferred method
of killing is by bashing the prey against the water.
Their heads are also shaped in almost a reptilian fashion,
with long jaws and piercing eyes, and they don't scare easily.

(05:58):
In fact, they've been known to approach humans out of curiosity,
but despite this, attacks on people are extremely rare. Leopard
seals don't usually go after humans unless provoked or unless
they mistake them for prey. In the official report released
in the weeks following Kirsty's death, an expert on leopard
seals suggests that Kirsty may have looked like a furst
seal from the leopard seal's perspective as she moved through
the water in her snorkel gear. Some experts speculated that

(06:21):
the animal may have acted at of confusion or defense.
The report also emphasized that no leopard seals had been
spotted in the air before the dive, which is something
that divers are trained to look out for. The standard
procedure was to cancel any underwater activity if a leopard
seal was seen nearby, and for thirty years that policy
had kept everyone safe this time, though obviously it wasn't enough.

(06:42):
The animal had remained hidden beneath the surface, unseen until
the moment it struck. It hadn't given anyone a chance
to react, and it didn't circle or approach the way
curious seals sometimes due. It attacked fast and then dragged
Kirsty into the deep, then strangely stayed in the air
after letting her go. And so this was a one
in a million kind of events. Kirsty had followed the

(07:02):
rules and done everything right, and still none of it mattered.
In response, the research community began reevaluating safety protocols, not
just at re THERAP but across other programs operating in
the Antarctic. Obviously, no one wanted to lose another scientists,
but in the end it was determined that no amount
of caution or procedure could have changed the outcome that day.
In two thousand and three, born in nineteen eighty five

(07:27):
in Penzance, England, Jacob was the youngest of four kids.
His older sister, Grace, was three years older than him,
but some accounts make them sound more like twins in
some ways and opposites in others. Jacob wanted to do
what he wanted to do well. Grace was the star
student of nearly every class she was in. Jacob, meanwhile,
was diagnosed with dyslexia at the age of ten and
took to skipping classes so he could hitchhike down to

(07:49):
the beach with his friends to go surfing. He'd actually
learned to swimmerround the same time he could walk, and
seemed to be even more comfortable in the ocean than
he was on land, and eventually Jacob dropped at a school,
but not with the intention of doing nothing. He had
dreams of his own in mind. He wanted to be
a photographer, a real artist people would know the name
of as he began working on that career path. In
the summer of two thousand and one, Grace was working

(08:10):
at a children's camp in France when she began developing
persistent headaches. She would the n end up coming home
in August, and by the next month she was officially
diagnosed with a brain tumor. The family was sure she'd
make a recovery since it had been caught so soon
after symptoms presented, but six months later Grace's cancer was back,
and this time she needed surgery in Belgium to try
to remove the second stronger tumor. Tragically, on the eighteenth

(08:33):
of December two thousand and two, Grace passed away at
only twenty years old. Before she passed away, she asked
for her ashes to be kept until another member of
the family also passed, so that she wouldn't be alone
when she was spread into the seat of all the
things in Jacob's life, this seemed to be the defining moment.
He'd lost his sister and his best friend, and in
the words of his family, he'd seen how she'd done

(08:54):
nothing to deserve her fate. But rather than being angry
about it, Grace's life led a fire under Jacob. He
decided that he was going to give us all to
everything he did from then on, doing all the things
he had dreamed of and living a life that was
worthy of two people. And unlike most people who make
grand statements when they're caught up in the moment, he
actually did exactly that. He would then go on to

(09:14):
win awards for his photography, including National Geographics Adventure Photographer Award.
His work was featured on billboards in the West End
of London and printed on surf magazines and known as
far away as Australia. To add to that, he also
took every other hobby he had just as seriously. He
trained in the water every chance he could get, practiced
holding his breath for minutes at a time, and climbed
mountains as well as caves and traveled the world to

(09:35):
do it. And to say Jacob was a skilled swimmer
would be an incredible understatement. He was the type of
person who actually taught skilled swimmers how to do things safely.
Part of a YouTube channel he ran under the name
Whirlpool Hitman, including instructions on how to safely interact with
natural whirlpools and swim in rough waters others. Meanwhile, so
he still took a somewhat lighthearted or side interest in YouTube.

(09:57):
He had cat videos, memes and the occasional piece clickbait,
but his most popular video sits at over forty million views.
So while it was clear he was a consummate professional,
his channel also seemed to be a bit of an
outlet to be silly or to be a little edgy,
and one day that took him to Hail Harbor, just
to the northeast of Penzance on the other side of
the peninsula. Hail was one of the first industrial ports

(10:18):
in all the UK and hosted steam powered metal founderies
from the seventeen hundreds onward. One such foundry, actually just
called foundry, was established in seventeen seventy nine and built
a harbor of their own to keep up with the
local competition. The result was Carnesou Pool, which is a
calm artificial harbor inside the natural bay about five hundred
and ninety by two hundred and thirty meters. Its water

(10:40):
depth also fluctuates between under half a meter and about
three meters deep with the tide twice daily. There was
also a bridge that spanned over the entrance to the harbor,
with a small set of canal gates underneath them, but
tidal water actually flowed in and out through a pair
of stone brick tunnels underneath the earthwork dyke, and because
of this construction for just a few days of the
year in spring, the change in tide heights with the

(11:01):
season turned those pipes into something else entirely. A whirlpool,
a couple of times larger than a person would form
at the mouth as the tide came in faster than
it could fit through the pipes, and on the twenty
eighth of May twenty thirteen, Jacob couldn't miss the opportunity.
That day was the strongest tide of the entire year.
Stopping by the house of a local friend of his,
seven year old David, Jacob asked him to help with

(11:22):
some filming and made his way down to the harbor.
Once there, he set to work inspect in the whirlpool.
He then put on a neopren diving suit to give
himself extra buoyancy, and then spent a good twenty minutes
acclimatizing to the whirlpool. He kept his distance, then gradually
figured out the boundaries the strength, and spent enough time
with it that the whirlpool began to weaken with the
tide as he waited for David to arrive. In the meantime,

(11:44):
as well, Jacob got some of his filming done wearing
a rubber horse mask in true twenty thirteen fashion, during
which he also captured a few interior views of the
whirlpool with a GoPro attached to a pole. When David
arrived shortly after, Jacob explained the whirlpool to him and
his confidence in managing it. And again, it wasn't like
he was just some carefree surfer duty He'd been through
dozens of whirlpools before and could teach others how to

(12:05):
do so and how to prepare for them. He just
needed someone else to hold the camera while he was
in there to get some shots that would otherwise be difficult.
After those were shot, the last thing they needed doing
was just some underwater video by hand to show the
vortex with a human scale to it, and Jacob cheerfully
took the camera before diving under the water to do that. Now.
Neoprene foam wetsuits contained thousands of little air bubbles trapped

(12:26):
inside them, which helped insulate the diver, but just like
the human body, they also compress as you go deeper.
Just from traveling a few meters blow the surface as
much as a quarter of the suit's poyanc he is
lost closer to ten meters and the full half of
it is gone. We don't know exactly what went wrong,
but all he would have needed to do was accidentally
go a couple of meters deeper than he'd meant to
to find himself suddenly overwhelmed. If the whirlpool managed to

(12:49):
grab him just a little bit deeper. Then it would
only get harder as what buoyance he remained vanished. Jacob
was quite capable of holding his breath for minutes at
a time, but considering the rough nature of the five
meters p he was sucked into, there would have been
ample opportunity for him to hit his head, chest or
jaw and suddenly inhale water, and per a geological survey
of the pool, the maximum possible flow rate was a

(13:10):
terrifying fifteen point five cubic meters of water per second,
or of a fifteen thousand liters. That's enough to fill
a two point five million leter Olympic swimming pool in
under three minutes. If he had become momentarily stuck in
the pipe, disoriented, or simply caught off guard, we'll never know.
Whatever the case, Jacob didn't resurface when he was supposed to,
and as David began looking for him, a fisherman in

(13:31):
the pool came over to assist. Jacob then did resurface,
face down and unconscious, as the two men called nine
to ninety nine. A lifeboat crew then arrived shortly after,
and Jacob was airlifted the hospital, but was pronounced dead
upon his arrival. The coroner's inquest later confirmed that he
had drowned. Originally, Grace's ashes were to be scattered with
their grandmothers on Gwynver Beach, which is an off the

(13:53):
beaten path place about thirteen columbers from Penzance, where the
cross on the local church is made from two surfboards. Tragically,
the ceremony had been scheduled for the twenty ninth of May,
the day after Jacob would pass away, so in the
end they would go together. On February ninth, two thousand
and one, within the control room of the nuclear submarine

(14:15):
the USS Greenville, Captain Scott had an important mission that day.
The US Navy had developed what it called the Distinguished
Visitor Embarkation or DVE program. This was a public relations
campaign that invited civilians, journalists, and even members of Congress
to essentially go for a joy ride on a nuclear submarine,
and in simpler terms, it was a chance for the
Navy to show off its capabilities and justify the need

(14:36):
for these marine vessels. By two thousand and one, this
was now routine for Scott, who had led several DVIE
missions before and compared to an average day of training missions,
these special rights were much more loose and casual. Typically,
these DV emissions included maneuvers crewmen could do in their sleep,
but were meant to impress the untrained. So Scott viewed
the DV events as a chance to meet with business

(14:57):
and political elites, and for the February ninth mission he
be entertaining sixteen distinguished visitors. Early that morning, the Greenville
loaded up with its crew of one hundred and six
plus its sixteen guests, and the ship departed Pearl Harbor
at seven fifty seven am and conditions that were pretty
close to perfect as the trip got underway. Spirits were
high inside the Greenville, and after nearly two and a
half hours of traveling along the surface, it reached its

(15:19):
dive site south of Oahu, slightly litted and scheduled. The
sub then slipped underneath the waves at around ten seventeen
am and descended to a depth of one hundred and
fifty feet or forty six meters. During this time, guests
were allowed to sit at control stations under Scott's supervision,
and he always got a kick out of seeing how
impressed visitors were with the inner workings of the submarine.
Shortly afterwards, the visitors were split into two groups. One

(15:41):
group would go to lunch and the other would remain
behind in the control room. After an hour, they were
scheduled to switch places, with lunch services expected to end
at around twelve thirty. This was when the real show
was set to begin, but lunch ran long because Scott
was apparently caught up in conversation with the distinguished visitors.
In fact, he apparently had to be reminded several times
after twelve thirty that they might return to port late

(16:02):
if he didn't get the maneuvers underway soon. This meant
that it wasn't until one ten that afternoon that Scott
returned to the control room and everyone prepared for what
would be an exciting demonstration of what the Greenville could
really do. As the captain ready the crew in the ship,
fire control technician Patrick watched sonar contacts from his position.
He was responsible for keeping an eye on any other

(16:22):
civilian or military vessels that might be in the vicinity
and if the Greenville was getting too close to any
During this time, Patrick identified three surface vessels in the
era and assigned them contacts S twelve, S thirteen, and
S fourteen, but none of them were any closer than
seven nautical miles or thirteen kilometers away, so he would
end up giving the go ahead from his perspective for
the maneuvers to begin. At around one fifteen PM, the

(16:45):
Greenville finally commenced with a series of high speed turns, twists,
and ups and downs, and of course, all of this
would lead up to what would be a grand finale,
a maneuver known as emergency Deep. This is when the
Greenville would descend to a depth of four hundred feet
or one hundred and twenty meters and then as within
seconds by blowing the ballast tanks and sending the submarine
skyrocketing toward the surface. The almost seven thousand ton ship

(17:07):
would then quite literally leap out of the water like
a whale, and once complete, the crew would guide the
ship back to port and Pearl Harbor to end the day.
As you might imagine, though, this maneuver requires preparation, not
the least of which included ensuring there are no surface
vessels that could be effected by such a rapid and
violent ascent. As Scott looked through the periscope. Patrick checked
on his sonar contact, but he couldn't quite get a

(17:29):
read on where the S fourteen was heading, so that
particular vessel took his attention for an extra moment. Once
he felt confident the S fourteen was a safe distance away,
he noticed that the S thirteen appeared to be heading
right for the Greenville's location. But just as he was
doing this, he heard Scott announce that he had made
no visual contact with any nearby surface vessels, so figuring

(17:49):
that Scott would have seen the S thirteen through the periscope,
Patrick just assumed his sonar contacts were wrong and gave
the okay from his station for the maneuver to proceed.
Scott then ordered the ship to descend to its argat
depth of four hundred feet, and once there he invited
two of the visitors to the controls for the ballast
tank blow. At one forty three PM, the captain gave
the order to blow the tanks, which sent the ship

(18:10):
screaming through the water column toward the surface and directly
into complete disaster. What Scott and Patrick had both overlooked
and misjudged was the location of S thirteen, which was
a Japanese fishing trawler named the ahem Marou. The one
hundred and ninety one foot or fifty eight metership carried
a total of thirty five people, including thirteen high school
students who were planning on future careers as fishermen. As

(18:33):
it turned out, the ahem Marou wasn't eight nautical miles
from the Greenville like Patrick believed, despite a cinar screen
saying otherwise. The trawler was instead on a collision course
with the rapidly ascending submarine, and just as the nose
of the Greenville breached the surface, it did so right
next to the fishing trawler. A moment later, the submarine
leveled off, sending its reinforced rudder directly into the fishing troller,

(18:54):
slicing it nearly in half. Scott then watched in a
horror through the periscope as the boat row skyward before
literally sinking into the ocean within minutes. Those aboard the
ship who could get off were left scrambling for life,
rafts or any floating wreckage. Shortly after the impact, the
Greenville radiate to Pearl Harbor for help, and the US
Coast Guard sprang into action. At first Scott started to

(19:15):
prevaire his crew to take on any survivors the Greenville
could rescue, but the seas proved to be too rough
to open the main deck hatches, and not only that,
but the massive submarine was making the waves of the
crash site worse through the amount of water the ship
was displacing, so he had to make the difficult decision
to move the Greenville away from the survivors, fearing the
sub could capsize the life rafts. Some time later, the

(19:35):
Coast Guard would be able to rescue twenty six of
the thirty five, but the other nine were lost to sea,
including four seventeen year old high school students and two teachers,
making the collision the deadliest between a nuclear submarine and
a civilian vessel in US history. Following the disaster, the
US Navy convened a Court of Inquiry to investigate what
led up to the collision and how this could have happened,
and their findings were damning for Scott. In particular. The

(19:59):
first sign of trouble cropped up before the Greenville ever
left Pearl Harbor, as the ship's analog video signal display
unit was determined to be broken. This system displays sonar information,
but rather than delay or outright cancel the trip, Scott
determined that this was not a mission critical piece of equipment.
Had the system been operable, it's more than likely Scott
would have seen the sonar contact of the approaching Ahi

(20:20):
Maru before given the orders to blow the ballast tanks
and initiating the rapid as end of the submarine. And second,
despite DVEE emissions being relatively more laid back than standard
training missions, it did have a schedule to abide buy
and even though the Greenville departed on time, the schedule
slowly start to slip away from the commander as he
divided his attention in too many places. By the time

(20:40):
maneuvers began at one fifteen PM, the Greenville was already
forty six minutes behind schedule. This threatened to shorten the
most important part of the whole program, and, not wanting
to sacrifice any of the maneuvers for the sake of
making up time, Scott apparently rushed through protocol and cut
corners like For example, at the conclusion of the high
speed maneuvers, standard procedure called for the ship to maintain
a step ready course for three minutes to ensure the

(21:01):
sonar contact was re established and accurate. This apparently only
occurred for ninety seconds before Scott ordered the submarine up
to the periscope debt to perform his visual contact duties,
which also inadvertently didn't give Patrick enough time to confirm
the sonar data he was receiving, and then beyond that,
Scott was supposed to perform a three hundred and sixty
degree look around the ship with the periscope for at

(21:22):
least three additional minutes before ordering the sub to emergency debt,
but apparently instead Scott only checked errors where there were
known to be surface vessels before the maneuver started, and
by that point the information was outdated. In twenty twenty one,
as the twentieth anniversary of the disaster neared, Scott wrote
an eight page open letter to the ahem Muru families,
apologizing again and taking full and sole responsibility for what happened.

(21:45):
The US Navy continues to operate its DV program, and
no further instance have occurred since two thousand and one,