Canadian Navy Investigating Possible Nuclear Bomb off BC Coast

— from The Guardian —

The Mark IV nuclear bomb that was released over the Pacific Ocean in 1950 after a US air force flight’s engines caught fire during a simulated drop. Photograph: Globalsecurity.org

The Canadian navy will be heading to the coast of British Columbia to investigate claims that a diver may have come across “the lost nuke” – a Mark IV bomb that went missing after an American B-36 bomber crashed in the region during the cold war.

Diver Sean Smyrichinsky was wrapping up a day of diving near Haida Gwaii, an archipelago 80km west of the coast of British Columbia, when he stumbled across what may be the remains of the world’s first known “broken arrow” – the code name for accidents involving American nuclear weapons.

“I was just looking for fish for the next day. I figured I would do a little reconnaissance dive looking around and on my dive I got pretty far from my boat,” he told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “And then I found something that I had never, ever seen before.”

The object was huge, he said, measuring around 12 feet long. “It resembled a bagel cut in half, and then around the circle of the bagel these bolts all molded into it, like half spheres. It was the strangest thing I had ever seen.”

He came out of the water, excitedly describing the bowl-shaped object and its bolts that were bigger than basketballs. “I started telling my crew: ‘My God, I found a UFO.’” He sketched a rough outline of what he had seen on a napkin.

Smyrichinsky started asking around, curious if anyone else had ever come across the mysterious object. “Nobody had ever seen it before or heard of it. Nobody ever dives there,” he told the Vancouver Sun. “Then some old-timer said: ‘Oh, you might have found that bomb.’”

READ MORE: The Guardian