Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The CIA's most famous ship headed for the scrapyard

pri.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 44 posts

Re: The CIA's most famous ship headed for the scrapyard

#21

Post by runjake »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #4
aembleton wrote: post #3

I found this video of the burial of the soviet sailors incredibly respectful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFWMo7aHDRo&noredirect=1

I wonder how much of it was done as a hedge against the time when this would eventually come out. "Sure, we tried to steal your sunken sub. But look, we played nice."

There was a book that covered this -- maybe one of the James Bamford books, and it was related by the sources as an act of respect and marine tradition and nothing indicating it had to do with the eventual declassification of the event.

This sort of mutual respect and tradition between enemy aircrews is not uncommon.

Re: The CIA's most famous ship headed for the scrapyard

#22

Post by dimlyaware »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #4
aembleton wrote: post #3

I found this video of the burial of the soviet sailors incredibly respectful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFWMo7aHDRo&noredirect=1

I wonder how much of it was done as a hedge against the time when this would eventually come out. "Sure, we tried to steal your sunken sub. But look, we played nice."

My grandfather was an engineer on this project - it was done as a hedge against it coming out.

Re: The CIA's most famous ship headed for the scrapyard

#23

Post by ChuckMcM »

It would be incredibly cool if someone bought this ship and used it to actually mine manganese nodules. Or alternatively create a vacuum for methane clathrates. Park it next to Shell's new LNG ship, vacuum up a few billion cu ft of natural gas.

For reference, the composition of Manganese Nodules: http://crustal.usgs.gov/geochemical_reference_standards/mang...

Re: The CIA's most famous ship headed for the scrapyard

#24

Post by autobahn »

mirimir wrote: post #20
MichaelGG wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being openminded isn't much of a start though. How do you narrow down which seemingly-normal things are really facades for something? How do you privilege the hypothesis[1]? If you were, in this case, claiming it was because the CI was looking for Russian ships - what evidence do you have? Given enough conspiracy theories, at least one will be right. But that one right one shouldn't be accorded any point if there was…

In the 60s, there were many "conspiracy theories" about capabilities of US spy satellites. Now we know: http://www.space.com/13287-secret-spy-satellite-designer-rev... And CIA experiments with LSD. Virtually nobody took those stories seriously at the time.

the point is, the validity of particular conspiracy theories lends no particular credence to others.

Re: The CIA's most famous ship headed for the scrapyard

#25

Post by thaumaturgy »

autobahn wrote: post #24
mirimir wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the 60s, there were many "conspiracy theories" about capabilities of US spy satellites. Now we know: http://www.space.com/13287-secret-spy-satellite-designer-rev... And CIA experiments with LSD. Virtually nobody took those stories seriously at the time.

the point is, the validity of particular conspiracy theories lends no particular credence to others.

You're exactly right. Otherwise, this logic would lend support to, for instance, the notion that the moon landings were faked, merely because other conspiracies have turned out to be true. And nobody that's sane really thinks the moon landings were faked, so we find that other conspiracies being true doesn't really help with evaluating any given conspiracy.

Or maybe more succintly: we need more Edward Snowden and less Alex Jones.

Re: The CIA's most famous ship headed for the scrapyard

#26

Post by InclinedPlane »

cryoshon wrote: post #13
vcarl wrote: post #6

> From about 1970-74, the CIA managed to convince the world that billionaire inventor Howard Hughes had decided to invest millions to mine “manganese nodules,” balls of heavy metals that lie on the ocean floor. Via fake press releases, events, technical specs and front companies, the CIA convinced the world that Hughes was leading a new ocean-mining rush. This sounds exactly like James Cameron's astroid mining. I won…

The most difficult task of discovering these charades is openmindedness. Imagine, after all of the press releases and discussion around manganese nodule harvesting, saying Howard Hughes wasn't interested in mining manganese nodules at all, but sunken Russian ships. You'd be labeled as crazy. First off, people would be asking where the heck you got the idea that something along the lines of manganese nodules could act…

This conflicts with reality. In the real-world where historically the cover story crashed and burned very rapidly. There was only a period of about a year after the partial recovery of K-129 before the press knew of the deception, and only strenuous efforts kept the story from being published. Even then the story was delayed only a month. In 1975 the truth of Project Azorian was public, and there wasn't widespread disbelief as you would have imagined. Nor were there men in black doing awful things to keep the story secret, just administration officials asking politely.

Re: The CIA's most famous ship headed for the scrapyard

#29

Post by mirimir »

autobahn wrote: post #24
mirimir wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the 60s, there were many "conspiracy theories" about capabilities of US spy satellites. Now we know: http://www.space.com/13287-secret-spy-satellite-designer-rev... And CIA experiments with LSD. Virtually nobody took those stories seriously at the time.

the point is, the validity of particular conspiracy theories lends no particular credence to others.

That's true.

But on the other hand, maybe the category "conspiracy theory" isn't so useful? I'm reminded here of Kuhn.

I do agree that untestable hypotheses are bullshit. But most "conspiracy theories" aren't untestable, as nontrivial as the requisite tests might be.

Post reply on HN