Original subtitles

- [Rudy] The following program

contains footage of military operations.

Viewer discretion is advised.

Tonight, on The Proof Is Out There: Military Mysteries.

This Korean War hero was officially declared dead

in a plane crash.

So how did he show up on film

standing next to the burning wreckage?

- I'd say that's pretty good evidence

that he survived the crash.

- [Rudy] Is this recording proof

the real first woman in space died on re-entry?

(tense music)

- [Rudy] What happened to the ships in this photo,

and did it nearly change the course of World War II?

- The big question is,

did the Germans anticipate what was going on?

That's a mystery.

- [Rudy] And, is this proof

the government is training dolphins to kill?

- The dolphin would be swimming,

would see an enemy frogmen,

and bam, would slam this giant needle into their body.

(dramatic music)

- [Rudy] In the modern history of war, there are films-

- Shazam.

- [Rudy] Photos, recordings,

and documents that raise questions.

- So everything about this story is one big mystery.

- This particular footage has caused a lot of controversy.

- [Rudy] What's really happening?

- [Expert] There's so little information.

- Nothing like this has been attempted before.

- [Rudy] That's where we come in.

Our mission: investigate the battlefield's strangest images,

sounds, and more.

- [Expert] This photo blows my mind.

- [Amy] You can imagine how terrifying it would be.

- [Rudy] We'll analyze each with military experts

and try to come up with answers.

- I'm Ronnie Adkins, former US Army Intelligence Analyst.

- I'm Rudy Reyes, Recon Marine war veteran.

The proof starts now.

(dramatic music)

Welcome, everyone.

We're ready to rock and roll on this week's first mission.

And this one's important to both of us.

It's a mystery of the missing.

- It is important to both of us, Rudy, and here's why.

An American hero vanished in the Korean War,

but the big question became,

what happened to Major Sam Logan?

It's 2010, and filmmakers working on a project

about the Korean War come across a long lost film.

It shows a man in a white undershirt

standing near what appears to be the smoldering wreckage

of a US aircraft.

Take a closer look.

If this man is who some people think he is,

he's supposed to be dead.

- Most Americans had no idea

that there was photographic evidence of a American hero.

- [Ronnie] Mark Sauter, former Green Beret and journalist,

is one of many who believe the man is the missing hero,

Major Sam Logan.

- Logan was a fine man.

He had served honorably in World War II,

and like many US aviators,

he had been called back to a war zone during the Korean War.

(foreboding music)

- [Ronnie] This story begins September 9th, 1950

in the skies of the Korean War.

Logan is piloting a B-29 Super Fortress named Little Mike

along with 10 other crew members.

(bombs whistling)

- They were performing a bombing operation

outside of Pyongyang, the capitol of North Korea,

when they were hit by anti-aircraft fire.

- [Ronnie] Logan's B-29 bursts into flames and goes down.

- During the war,

the Pentagon maintained Sam Logan

in the category of killed in action,

and stated that there were no confirmed survivors

from his aircraft.

- Logan was declared dead,

but if he is the man in the film as many believe,

what happened to him next?

Rudy, what can you tell us about the bomber

Logan was flying during the Korean War?

- This is the B-29.

It was one of the most advanced aircraft of its time.

It featured a pressurized cabin,

four gun turrets that could be fired by remote control.

Its first mission was in 1942,

but throughout World War II,

we lost a few of these bad bears to the Soviets.

And those Soviets, they broke 'em down,

they built 'em up, reversed engineered the tech,

and built a bomber of their own, the Tupolev 4.

Now, look at the Tupolev 4, look at the B-29.

A virtual carbon copy.

- Yeah, but a plane can't tell you

how it's best flown or even used.

For that you're gonna need air crews and pilots

like Logan himself, who would've

had a lot of valuable intelligence in his brain

that the Russians would've wanted,

and it actually might just be a clue

into the mystery of what happened to him.

(intense music)

One theory is that

the North Koreans secretly transferred Logan

and other American prisoners to the Soviets.

As evidence, believers point to a photo

published in a Soviet newspaper months after the crash.

- It was sent around the world by the Soviet News Agency,

and it clearly shows Sam Logan in his t-shirt

in communist captivity.

There is no doubt this man was captured by the communists.

- [Ronnie] The photo was apparently taken

at the same time as the film discovered decades later.

If you compare both to a known photo of Logan on the right,

there is a striking resemblance.

At about the same time,

troops occupying the North Korean capitol Pyongyang

discovered these words scratched into the wall of a prison.

Sam Logan, captain,

US Air Force shot down 9 September, 1950.

- This is something that was common

that POWs would write on walls

hoping that somebody would see this in the future.

- [Ronnie] So if the evidence points to Logan's survival,

why did the Air Force think he died?

The Pentagon said it was because Logan wasn't seen

in any POW camps

and wasn't part of any prisoner exchanges

when the fighting stopped.

But remember, B-29 pilots were prized.

Did the North Koreans hand him over to the USSR

to help train Tupolev 4 pilots?

Michael Logan was just two when his father went missing,

and he agrees with the theory.

- Russia, the communists didn't have big bombers.

And they really, really wanted pilots from big bombers

so they could, you know, learn from 'em.

- US servicemen that were kept

where the enemy can gain intelligence

and knowledge from, the know-how.

And somebody like Major Logan would be

hugely useful to our enemy.

It would've been a significant value for the Soviet Union

to take somebody like Major Logan.

- [Ronnie] On a trip to Russia in 1991,

Mark Sauter says he met a former Soviet intelligence officer

who admitted it happened.

- They found a former Soviet psychological operations

and intelligence officer

who said he personally had processed Americans

being sent to the Soviet Union.

I met with him in Moscow while he was still alive,

and he told me, "Yes, POWs were sent to the Soviet Union."

They also found many people,

often from the former East Block

or Warsaw Pact countries in Poland

who said they had been in the Soviet prison system

and had seen American POWs from the Korean War.

There seems to be little doubt now

that the Soviets got US POWs.

I believe one of the ones they got was Sam Logan.

- [Ronnie] Given that Logan is standing

under the watchful eye of an enemy soldier,

it's reasonable to assume he's a prisoner here.

Sauter thinks the enemy subjected some prisoners

to brainwashing.

Assad, who's former CIA, agrees.

If that's the case, what happened to the prisoners

after they provided the information the Russians wanted?

- Sadly, there were some servicemen

when they were given the option

after they had been, you know, reprogrammed,

they did not want to return to the United States.

- American captives realized that no one was coming for them.

And they had a choice, they could refuse to cooperate

and they would be tortured and probably sent to a camp

to be worked to death,

or they could agree to tell what they knew

and allowed to survive.

None of those men were ever returned.

- [Ronnie] Did Major Logan live out his last days

in the USSR?

His son says it never would've gotten that far.

- He didn't give them anything.

He wouldn't have lasted long

because they would've tortured him,

and in a very short amount of time, they would've,

you know, killed him

because he wasn't gonna give 'em anything.

(tense music)

- Major Sam Logan is perhaps the best evidence

of an American fighting man

who is now known to have been captured

by the communists in Korea and has never been returned.

- [Ronnie] The Russians denied they took American prisoners,

and Major Logan's family may never know for sure.

They're left only with a 70-year-old film

they believe shows him being captured

and memories of a loving husband and father.

- When mother saw the video, she was just brokenhearted

that she had never seen that before.

And the fact she saw her husband as a POW

was really heartbreaking for her.

Well, I blame the government for not being diligent

about finding any of the missing-in-action.

They say they are and they're trying to find their remains,

and there's a lot that the United States could do

to find out information if they really wanted to.

(tense music)

- And it's amazing,

all those years later, the film is discovered randomly,

by get this,

a person working on a documentary on the Korean War.

- That's right, man.

The thing that sticks out to me the most is as of right now,

there's still a lot of uncertainty

about Major Logan's fate.

His family doesn't have many answers at all.

I hope they get some soon.

- During the Cold War,

the Soviet Space Program was run by their military.

That's unlike our own NASA, which is actually civilian-run.

- Now while NASA's rocket launches

and their mistakes are public knowledge,

that wasn't how the Soviets operated.

This next mystery is about a voice from space,

and did it belong to the first woman in space

who died during re-entry?

It's May 17th, 1961.

Italian brothers and amateur space watchers,

Achille and Giovanni Judica-Cordiglia

are manning their homemade radio system when they hear this.

(cosmonaut speaking indistinctly)

- [Rudy] A panic stricken voice speaking in Russian.

- [Rudy] The brothers believe

it's the heart-rending last words of a Russian cosmonaut.

(cosmonaut speaking indistinctly)

- [Rudy] And that's strange, because officially,

the Soviets didn't launch a woman into space

until two months later

when Valentina Tereshkova made history

as the first woman to make that journey.

- She was picked because she had the right pedigree.

She was a parachutist,

which was really important

because the Soviet cosmonauts at the time

didn't land with their spacecraft.

They actually ejected at 10,000 feet

and had to land by parachutes.

(foreboding music)

- [Rudy] But the recording raises the question,

was Tereshkova the first woman in space

or just the first woman to survive?

(rocket whooshing)

- Can two amateur radio operators actually record sounds

from space?

- All right, with their system,

they claim to have picked up a transmission

from the first Sputnik satellite and Sputnik 2.

Well, get this,

they said they heard the heartbeat of Laika,

the dog that was up there in that spacecraft.

- Yeah, I'm sure something was recorded,

but what evidence do we have that it actually came from space

or even for the theory of the lost cosmonaut?

(dramatic music)

- [Rudy] First, is the recording even genuine

or did the brothers fake it?

One of them, Giovanni, is still alive and he says no.

(Giovanni speaking Italian)

- [Rudy] And Joe Pappalardo of "Popular Mechanics"

agrees it's possible.

- The radio signals bounce around.

As they reflect off of things, they fragment.

So the idea that someone on the ground

can intercept a space message is not implausible.

- [Rudy] Not only was the tech there to hear it,

the Soviets were known to be secretive

about other space disasters.

- The Russians didn't always play by the book.

So the idea that the Russians would launch a mission

and that would've gone poorly

and we didn't know about it, is very possible.

- In 1960, there was a horrible accident

that claimed more than a hundred lives.

(tense music)

That happened on a launch stand.

That killed senior officials as well.

They still were able to cover it up,

but history unearthed it decades later

after the fall of the Soviet Union.

- [Rudy] Years later in 1967,

cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov died during reentry

in a capsule widely known to be defective.

- Things really just fell apart at the end of the flight.

His parachute didn't deploy properly,

so he hit the ground at full speed.

- One of the fatalities that they had to admit

was Komarov whose reentry went poorly.

And that is kind of all you need to know

about the dynamic around the Russian space program

at that time.

This is a society built on mistrust.

- [Rudy] So there was a precedent for deadly mishaps

in the Soviet space program,

but did that happen in the case of the lost cosmonaut?

(cosmonaut speaking indistinctly)

- [Rudy] After listening to the specific words

the woman is saying, Pappalardo has doubts.

- I don't think that's very plausible.

I think if it's hot enough to complain about during re-entry,

you're surrounded by a sheath of hot plasma

that's ionized gases.

And if you're seeing that, you're not radioing out,

there's no radio communication

that can get through that shroud of plasma during re-entry.

So I don't think she could have communicated.

- [Rudy] We dug deeper,

and our experts can find no mention of this alleged incident

in the millions of previously classified documents

released by the Soviet Space Agency, Roscosmos,

and it's not mentioned

in any US intelligence documents either.

- Every one of the cosmonauts in the program

are accounted for, and their stories go back a long time.

It'd be impossible to make a cosmonaut disappear

from their official record.

They did lie, they did cover things up.

They are not upfront,

about things that go wrong in particular.

However, in the long term,

it's harder to keep those secrets,

especially in something like a space program.

- [Rudy] 60 years later,

Giovanni is still haunted by whoever that voice belonged to.

(Giovanni speaking Italian)

(cosmonaut speaking indistinctly)

(Giovanni speaking Italian)

(dramatic music)

- It's important to note

that after the fall of the Soviet Union,

Western sources claim at least 11 fatal accidents

occurred in the Russian space program from 1961 to 1967,

and that they were all covered up.

- Well, you know, it's definitely the Soviet M.O.,

however, in my gut,

I feel the legend of the lost cosmonaut

is just that, a legend.

- Four months before D-Day,

Allied ships were training for the invasion

when they were attacked.

The question is,

how did the attack that nearly canceled D-day happen?

You're looking at photos

of destroyed American landing ships.

They were supposed to be used for the D-day landing

but instead, they're lying in ruins

on Allied soil months before the top secret invasion.

What happened here?

(tape rewinding)

It was April 28th, 1944 in the English Channel,

30,000 Allied troops carrying heavy packs and rifles

are on ships called LSTs, or landing ship tanks.

This is a test run for D-Day, people.

Everyone from the top flags to the swabbies is involved.

It's called Operation Tiger.

The idea is for Allied troops to make practice landings

in Slapton Sands, England,

because the shore there resembles

the D-Day target of Normandy.

- They're going to launch

what will ultimately be the largest amphibious landing

in human history.

They're gonna be attempting

what is the most difficult military offensives to try

in an event that you cannot lose.

And so, the best thing you can do

is attempt to work out all the kinks

through as realistic as possible training scenarios.

- [Ronnie] The stakes are high,

but then, some uninvited guests arrive.

A wolf pack of dreaded German Schnellboot,

E-boats, as the Allies called them.

They have diesel engines and moved faster than the LSTs,

and each is armed with three cannons and torpedoes.

- These were small, very fast motor torpedo boats

that relied on high speed

to launch torpedo attacks against Allied shipping.

- [Ronnie] The E-boats fire their torpedoes,

the LSTs go down,

and when it's all over, 700 men are dead.

- Numbers of Allied soldiers

had not had proper training with their life vests.

They ended up drowning

because they put their life vests the wrong way.

You also had large amounts of Allied troops

who were burned by exploding fuel,

which was stored in all the tanks and trucks and Jeeps

that were on these LSTs

that was ignited by the torpedo attacks.

- [Ronnie] Supreme Allied Commander General Eisenhower

processes the loss.

- Well, the big question is,

did the Germans anticipate what was going on?

Did they just happen to stumble on it?

That's the mystery.

- So Rudy, we've gotta go to the map here for some context.

At this point in the war,

Nazis know that the invasion to liberate Europe is coming,

but they don't know it's gonna happen at Normandy.

They think it's gonna happen at Calais.

And that's largely because the Allies have been

sending all kinds of bogus radio traffic,

building fake landing craft

as a part of Operation Fortitude South

since Calais is the closest distance from Great Britain.

- [Rudy] Got it.

- Now, what do you think Ike's biggest fear is here?

- That the info's been compromised.

- Exactly.

Ike's worried that, not only did a spy tip the Nazis off

about the training operation in the channel,

but also about the entire D-day plan as a whole.

(tense music)

Allied forces are worried about spies

and it's not just paranoia.

We know that as early as 1940,

the Nazis were sending spies into Britain

by boat and even parachute

to gather intel and perpetrate sabotage.

But we also know that by the spring of 1944,

most of the Germans spies sent to Britain have been caught.

In fact, more than a dozen have been flipped

and are now acting as double agents,

feeding the Nazis disinformation.

- It doesn't ever appear that the German intelligence

put together what exactly was going on and why.

- [Ronnie] Military analyst Tim McMillan says

that raises the second possibility,

that the E-boats came across Operation Tiger

purely by chance.

- They got lucky.

- They thought they were just merchant ships.

This is what the German patrol boats were doing.

They were trying to be a nuisance,

sink any sort of shipping.

By the time they carried out the attack,

they realized it probably wasn't merchant shipping

but looked more like landing ships.

- [Ronnie] In other words,

these E-boats were just doing what they were assigned to do,

patrol the channel and create chaos.

- The German Navy had transitioned in,

away from the large scale battle for the Atlantic

to these smaller 9, 7, 10 vessel groups

that were essentially out

hunting for targets of opportunity,

which could have been merchant vessels or in this case,

it would appear that they stumbled

upon a relatively sizable military target.

- [Ronnie] And Allied mistakes contributed to some bad luck.

For one thing, the British Navy had good intelligence

E-boats were already in the area,

but the information did not reach the flotilla

because incredibly,

the American ships were not on the same radio frequency.

Another thing, because it was night,

the flotilla traveled in a straight line

to prevent the ships from losing one another.

Bad idea.

- Normally, ships would be zigzagging.

But when you're zigzagging at night,

that can be a problem because you can't necessarily see

where other ships are going,

increasing the risk of collisions.

So at night, if you think you're going to be safe,

you're most likely gonna be sailing in a column.

That of course means that you're more vulnerable.

- [Ronnie] But there is a third theory.

Historian Anand Toprani argues,

the Germans probably had some raw unspecific intelligence

from intercepted radio traffic

that the Allies were doing something in the area,

they just didn't grasp its significance.

- If they're able to capture and decrypt communications,

they might understand that an operation is taking place.

And according to a post-mortem by the US Navy,

that is what the Germans did.

They were able to capture Allied communications

and form a rough idea

there was some sort of exercise taking place,

and basically scrambled nine E-boats

to launch a hit and run attack against this training operation.

- [Ronnie] The Allies considered calling off D-Day,

but went forward once they were confident

the plan hadn't been compromised.

For their part, the Germans may have decided

Operation Tiger was just another decoy.

How wrong they were.

(tense music)

The moral of the story is,

good intelligence only works when you believe it.

- The Germans probably knew

a military exercise was happening,

they just didn't know how important it was.

- I'm Rudy Reyes.

- And I'm Ronnie Adkins.

- From the air, the structure in our next mystery

looks like a flying saucer.

It's called the Runit Dome,

and it's located in the Marshall Islands.

The question is,

what is the Runit Dome hiding and how dangerous is it?

In a way, the story of the dome

starts with this piece of footage.

It's May 1958, on the Enewetak Atoll in the South Pacific,

the US test a nuclear bomb underwater.

1/10 of a second after detonation,

a massive dome of ocean water rises into the air.

At the 20-second mark, it's nearly a mile high.

- Oh my gosh, look at that. Shazam.

That is,

the massive amount of water that has suddenly

become airborne is absolutely incredible.

- [Rudy] This footage was classified until 1999.

Military historian and author Martin K.A. Morgan says

it's an abandoned US navy ship there in the blast zone.

The brass at the Pentagon claimed,

these underwater nuclear tests

help them understand the effects of nukes on navy ships.

- And looked at this wall of water

that's tumbling toward the ship.

Look at the way it just sweeps over that ship

like it's not even there.

I mean, that is an unstoppable force.

And no matter how modern your navy is,

your navy can't survive that.

- [Rudy] The Enewetak Atoll, part of the Marshall Islands,

is about 3,000 miles west of Hawaii.

Our brave GIs captured these islands

from Japan in World War II.

And in the early Cold War,

the area became ground zero

for nearly 67 nuclear tests conducted over a 12-year period.

Many of the local Marshallese had to be relocated.

The US assured the island nation

that it would clean up the fallout.

And that brings us back to the dome.

In 1977, the dome was erected

to contain the lethal radioactive waste

produced by those massive blasts.

- They had to do something

with all of the now radioactive material and soil

that was everywhere in this region.

And so the US government built effectively a tomb

called the Runit Dome.

- [Rudy] But is the dome really keeping the area safe

or is it a ticking time bomb?

So what it's hiding is simple, nuclear waste.

And Rudy, not just a little nuclear waste.

- That's right, this thing is huge.

It has the equivalent of 35 Olympic swimming pools

of cemented radioactive material.

Now we've got some uncemented radioactive crater debris

and porous soil all around.

Now, to protect it from the ocean,

we've got a sea wall as well.

But the question is, is it safe?

(dramatic music)

First, we need to ask, why so much waste?

Historian Alex Wellerstein says it's because a rivalry

between the US Navy and Air Force led to more than 60 tests.

- It was the United States Navy trying to show

that it still had a role in the nuclear age,

and that the atomic bomb didn't make it obsolete

because the Army Air Forces were sort of trying to take

all of the credit for what the future would look like

in terms of national security.

- [Rudy] And historian and author Amy Teitel says

the tests only stopped when the US and Soviet Union

agreed to a moratorium.

- The moratorium called for an end to atmospheric testing,

but it wasn't an immediate thing,

which gave both countries this last ditch effort

to put in as many tests as they could possibly get.

- [Rudy] The Marshallese had no idea

there'd be so many tests

or that they'd result in 100,000 cubic yards of waste.

And there was another big secret being kept from them.

In the 1960s, after nuke tests ended,

the Navy conducted a dozen biological weapons tests there.

- The people there were not really kept informed

of what was gonna happen,

and they were sort of, in the end,

treated a bit like guinea pigs.

- [Rudy] See, the Runit Dome was designed

to literally bury that part of the Atoll's past.

It's 377 feet in diameter with an apex of 24 feet

and concrete walls 18 inches thick at sea level.

But now, there are new concerns

that the dome isn't necessarily going to keep a lid

on things forever.

- The water level in the area of Enewetak

has been rising by about seven millimeters per year.

That doesn't sound like much,

but in aggregate over time, that's a lot.

And what that means is that seawater is in contact

with what the dome is sealing.

- There are places that water can get into.

The fear now is that radioactive material

will slowly start leeching out.

- [Rudy] We're left with a situation that's,

well, fubar is the best term.

And the challenge is to find a way

to prevent a widespread radioactive disaster

without making matters worse.

- And at this stage, the only answer is to go there

and pour more concrete on top of it.

Everything we do at this point

is going to leave a destructive footprint.

What we're left with now

is a situation that cannot be changed.

(tense music)

- Whether or not the tomb is strong enough

to prevent an environmental disaster is still a mystery.

- And it's nuts to think about all the nuke tests

that happened around the world before the ban.

Here's a time lapse of every atmospheric nuclear detonation

around the world.

- [Ronnie] There have been 528,

and those are just the ones that are above ground.

- Let's hope we don't get to 529.

- This one's pretty special, Ronnie.

- This one's pretty special, Ronnie.

It's rare film

of an Allied World War II battleship exploding.

The footage was so sensitive,

it was kept hidden from the public.

- A lot of good men died that day.

The mystery though is how did the ship explode?

November 1941, in the Mediterranean Sea,

sailing from Alexandria along Egypt's northern coast,

the Royal Navy First Squadron

including the HMS Barhum and two other British battleships

is on the hunt for Axis convoys.

But historian Martin K.A. Morgan says

that you can see in this declassified footage today,

they are the ones being hunted.

- The ship's capsizing.

The ship is already obviously in distress.

And then this massive explosion engulfs it.

(explosion booming)

- [Ronnie] Take another look.

As seen in this once secret footage,

the Barhum is already rolling over to her port side

from a Nazi torpedo

when a massive explosion rocks the ship.

Arthur Ken Sewell says

862 crew members perished in the blast.

- But when that ship detonates, that's when this really,

you know, turned from a tragedy to a catastrophe.

(explosion booming)

- [Ronnie] But strangely, nobody sees this footage.

The British government keeps it secret

and embargoes the news for months.

And during that news blackout,

this secret metastasizes into a mystery.

Ship sink but they usually don't spontaneously combust.

So the only reason this was caught on film

is because a camera crew happened to be on board

a neighboring ship, HMS Valiant.

- I keep going back to the last few seconds.

The ship sinks so quickly

and then detonates only after it capsizes.

And what could have caused this massive secondary explosion?

- I know, and how'd the Nazis get a shot off on this ship

in the first place?

(tense music)

First, some context.

This is the first half of World War II,

and Nazi U-boats have been sinking

an average of eight merchant ships a month.

But it was very rare for them

to take out well-defended warships.

- Battleships just didn't sail out

into the open Mediterranean Sea by themselves.

They were under escort from smaller ships.

And if a submarine appeared in the vicinity,

the smaller ships attacked

and then hopefully destroyed that submarine

so that the submarine could not present a threat

to the big prize, the battleship.

- [Ronnie] On this day, the German submarine U-331

was able to slip through the convoys defenses,

approaching the Barhum at an angle

that exploited weaknesses in Allied sonar technology.

- 1941, anti-submarine sonar was not very sophisticated.

They had a hydrophone that would point back and forth

and like a search light.

U-boats would like to get ahead of its target

and approach it head on,

so if it did get hit with the sonar,

there's not a lot to reflect back.

- [Ronnie] The hydrophone, which is basically a fancy way

of saying underwater microphone,

could easily misidentify objects

if they approached from an odd angle.

On the day the Barhum went down in a faithful moment,

an Allied hydrophone detected the Nazi sub

about a thousand yards away.

But faulty data leads to the misidentification of U-331.

The Brits don't think it's a sub,

that allows the German predator to continue its approach,

threading through the front cluster of destroyers.

The U-331 hits the Barhum with three torpedoes,

so that's what causes the ship to capsize.

(explosion booming)

But why did it explode?

Well, Navy Captain David Marquet says

it has to do with the way ordnance was stored.

And what happens when a ship rolls over?

- You've got all these big shells

and you're storing 'em in this room.

So they design the mounts and the brackets

needed to be able to hold 45 degrees.

- [Ronnie] But as you can see in this freeze frame,

at this point, we're way past 45 degrees.

- By the time the ship is listed 90 degrees on its side,

all those big artillery shells that the ship carries

in the magazines are falling out of their brackets.

And you have this massive, catastrophic explosion.

- [Ronnie] This was a major event

impacting thousands of lives.

So why did the British government

immediately classify the footage

and wait weeks before informing the cruise families?

- The loss of a Queen Elizabeth-class battleship

of the Royal Navy would be corrosive to morale.

But that's not the main reason.

The main reason that this was kept quiet

was primarily out of a concern for operational security.

- [Ronnie] Turns out, the U-boat that sank the Barhum fled

before even confirming the ship had sunk.

And the British wanted to keep the Nazis in the dark

for as long as possible.

- That was the British strike force

in the eastern Mediterranean.

If the Royal Navy is out of action,

there's nothing that'll stop the Germans in North Africa.

The whole British position might have been undermined.

(tense music)

- All right, so we've solved this one.

The Barhum was struck

because Nazi submarines were able to exploit a flaw

in British sonar.

- And we know the source of that secondary explosion.

The German U-boat torpedo capsized the ship.

The shells got loose.

Boom! They detonate.

- Everybody's heard of Navy Seals,

but in this week's secret weapon segment,

we wanna talk about Navy dolphins.

- Militaries around the world are using them.

But the big question,

are we turning flipper into a deadly weapon?

February 2022, the Crimean Peninsula.

It's the eve of Russia's full scale invasion of the Ukraine

when a mapping satellite picks up a strange object

that has just appeared in the waters of Sevastopol Harbor.

Let's take a closer look.

It appears to be some kind of submerged, bug-like

air or watercraft with two identical wings or chambers

on either side of a metal frame.

Military historian Mike Guardia

says that the incredibly strange weapon isn't a weapon at all.

It's actually a pen that houses the weapon.

- It's not a boat and it's not a submarine.

Believe it or not, that is a navy dolphin.

- [Rudy] Did he say dolphins?

Apparently, it's not as strange as it sounds.

According to journalist and author Mark Sauter,

the United States military has relied on trained dolphins

for decades.

- Back around 1960,

the US Navy began to experiment with marine mammals

such as dolphins, sea lions, and whales,

to see if they could accomplish difficult missions

under the water.

And it turned out they could.

- [Rudy] Most commonly,

they've been used to pinpoint the exact location of mines.

- Dolphins have great low light vision, incredible sonar.

They're fast, they're agile,

they're able to move at depths underwater.

So at the end of the day,

the natural solution that the dolphins have

is better than any technology we've come up with.

- [Rudy] But many believe the world's major powers

are also training dolphins to kill.

That's the rumor about those Russian dolphins in Crimea.

And the militant Islamic group Hamas

released this video claiming one of their members

in their frogmen unit had been attacked

by a heavily armed dolphin in the service of Israel.

(soldier speaking Arabic)

- [Rudy] As you can see in the video,

they claim the dolphin was wearing this harness,

which would appear to fit on the dolphin's nose,

and has what looks like a spear gun attached to it.

Is this for real?

- Hang on, killer dolphins?

Rudy, are you tracking anything on this?

- My unit works with the underwater sea mammals.

They protect our harbors.

They pick up rank and they can retire just like you and me

after 20 years.

- Well, I don't have a lot of experience here,

but we did ask our experts to take a deep dive into it.

(tense music)

- [Rudy] First, we dug into the history

and it turns out there are allegations of dolphins

being used as assassins going back more than 60 years.

Mark Sauter says some of the most compelling public accounts

are from the Vietnam War.

- Now, the reports were, that the dolphins had been trained

to wear a giant hypodermic needle on their nose

attached to compressed gas.

And the allegations were,

that the dolphin would be swimming,

would see an enemy frogmen, and bam!

Would slam this giant needle into their body.

The gas would rush through into their body cavity,

blow up their insides, and as a benefit,

float them to the top

so that the human guards could recover them.

- [Rudy] Is it really possible to train dolphins to kill?

On the one hand, they have

an insanely sophisticated echolocation system.

They use that clicking sound

not only to map large areas of the ocean,

but to identify objects with mind-blowing specificity.

For instance, when a dolphin echo locates on a person,

they don't just see muscle and bone.

They can see scar tissue,

metal pins or rods, and artificial body parts.

But could they be trained to kill specific kinds of people

and not others?

Preston Stewart is skeptical.

- It's one thing for a dolphin

to identify a mine under the surface, or a shipwreck,

but to identify an individual human being in the water

and to take action to kill that one person,

that's asking a lot.

- [Rudy] The US Navy officially denies any involvement

in such training.

But that's not the whole story.

Former trainers for the Navy have come forward

to say it's all true.

They were teaching dolphins to kill.

One trainer even said they were mounting weapons

to their snouts.

They believe the program failed

because the dolphins refused to cooperate.

- If skeptics say,

"Well, the Navy would never train them to do that,"

or, "The CIA would never train them to do that,"

I would suggest that's naive.

I think they did.

- [Rudy] Sauter says it's our buddies at Langley

who have taken the lead with training killer dolphins.

In fact, we now know through declassified documents

that the CIA wanted to arm dolphins with explosives

to sink enemy ships.

The top secret program, project OXYGAS,

started training two dolphins in 1964

to carry out combat missions.

- The Navy is doing the relatively open

and unclassified work,

but there's a shadow program being managed by the CIA.

And the CIA program is highly classified,

and involves dolphins doing things

that the government does not want the public to know.

(tense music)

- We've got the declassified CIA case file

for Project OXYGAS here.

Take a look.

This is the actual artist rendering

of the dolphins carrying bombs.

What could go wrong?

- Now, the CIA shut the program down in 1970

because the dolphins were just too unpredictable.

That probably explains why we don't have dolphins

with lasers on their heads.

But we don't know what we don't know.

Possibly, there's still some kind of program like this

alive and flipping.

I'm Rudy Reyes.

- And I'm Ronnie Adkins.

Until next time, keep your powder dry.

- And your head on a swivel. Good night.

(dramatic music)