37 Pings......

USS Thresher’s Crew May Have Survived Many Hours After Its Disappearance According To New Docs (Updated)

Knocking was heard from stricken sub USS Thresher | World | The Times

A different kind of......'Deep State?'

Maybe.
Maybe Not.
Normally I do not consider The Drive to be a very legitimate source.....and, of course, The Times often...ah...'times' is NOT much better.....
HOWEVER (comma!)
New docs have recently surfaced (pun nearly unintended) and some people (like me) who have interest in these things are poking around and peeling onions.....

Background:
The USN has lost 2 nucular submarines...as far as we "know"....during the last 6 decades.
The first of these was a relatively brand spanking new Permit class(*) boat - USS Thresher SSN-593 which was lost in April,1963.
(*) Typically, a "class" of warships (production run) is named after the lead ship.
Example: a "Nimitz" carrier, - or sometimes by the hull number of the lead boat - as in 688-class.
This class of boats WAS referred to as the "Thresher" class, and they were the first of a new series of revolutionarily quiet, fast, and capable boats that would make the USN a peerless submarine player for decades.

Following the loss of Thresher, the entire class was re-named, for obvious reasons.

The loss of this lead boat was seismic in its effect on the USN, and the aftershocks are still reverberating throughout the 'silent service' in the form of safety and engineering practices...today.

SO.....
BEFORE very recently, I would have said Thresher was lost on 10 April, but buried deep in a data dump are some key words and tricky phrases that might throw this in doubt - ish.
The boat DID do down, and all of the sailors (and a couple of contractors) perished in the sinking........AND YET.....
Not everything, apparently, is 'out there' with this incident.

I knew people on Seawolf (SSN-575 - the old one) back in the day and this boat has MANY MANY secrets......including, it appears, at least ONE more than I suspected.

So.
Big deal?
Not a Big deal?

...opinions vary....BUT.....As my president would say (when he's told to).....
"Here's the thing..."

The OTHER boat we lost was a Skipjack (USS Scorpion - SSN-589) and MANY MANY MANY rumors and theories, and at least one bald-faced lie surround the loss of Scorpion - including some dug up by........USS Seawolf....and others.

If they lie about the little stuff......


Interesting, perhaps to some of the older folk.
Not as modern-day important or interesting as a Kardashian selfie (NO secrets THERE!)

HOWEVER (comma!)
...submitted for your approval.

 

I haven't dug that deeply into the data, but I'm dismissing the "knocking on the hull" (for now) as a misinterpretation of the documentation that was declassified, or just a gross misunderstanding of what kinds of unusual things were heard by Seawolf...and others.

I've always been amused at the practice of conducting post-availability (shipyard) deep-dives in....very deep water, but they are easier to sanitize.

 

Fun Fact:
USS George Washington - SSBN-598 the first SSBN, was built by picking an attack submarine that was fairly well along in her construction process when Special Projects figured that they had enough data to try out the SLBM thing.
They cut the not-yet-a-boat in half and inserted a missile compartment, effectively changing a future SSN into a future SSBN.

The name of the would-be SSN............USS Scorpion (SSN-589).

Fun times over at EB.....

 

Concur.
Thresher is sleeping at depths that are well beyond any practical notion of her collapse depth.

We're still missing a piece of the puzzle.
Perhaps several pieces.
I'm highly skeptical of a 3500 ton boat staying essentially neutrally buoyant for that amount of time, and even if she did Seawolf would have heard Thresher's hull collapse without having to use her sonar.

Several other possibilities exist, chief among these being people hearing what they wanted to hear.
Underwater acoustics were still (some say ARE still) widely misunderstood in 1963, and vacuum tubes were still widely used even in a state of the art SSN. Some grease-coated seaman could have been whamming away on a plugged sanitary pipe 3 CZs away, and there might have been a misunderstanding between "OFF" and "STBY" in Seawolf's own sonars or one of the other baker's dozen ships might have been active.

Like I said....piece or pieces still missing.