🌊 “It Wasn’t a Submarine”: Cold War Diver Shatters Silence on Deep-Sea Encounter Norway Tried to Forget 🚫

The year was 1973, and Norway was balancing on a razor’s edge between NATO loyalty and the quiet fear of a Soviet incursion.

Bergen, the coastal city known for its fishing industry and postcard-perfect scenery, also held secrets the public would never glimpse.

It was here that a Norwegian Navy Special Forces diver received orders that would pull him from routine training and drop him into one of the strangest assignments of his career.

The orders were urgent: board a helicopter, head west to a classified point along the fjord, and prepare for a deep-water dive.

From above, he could already see the scale of the operation—multiple naval vessels clustered together in waters where no permanent installations existed.

Something unusual was underway.

When the helicopter touched down on a ship’s deck, the diver and his partner were given gear that far exceeded their standard kit: a helium-oxygen mix for extended deep diving,

advanced underwater cameras, and a brief but chilling instruction—“Document whatever you see.

Don’t speculate.

Don’t discuss.”

Lowered into the frigid water, they descended past 200 feet… then 300… finally settling onto the silted floor of the fjord.

It was there that they saw them—two deep, continuous grooves carved into the seabed.

Each was more than 30 feet wide, with a gap of 30 to 50 feet between them, running perfectly parallel like the treads of an impossibly massive machine.

The divers swam along the grooves, documenting every detail.

Unlike towed platforms, which leave messy drag marks, these tracks were pristine—steady, deliberate, as if a colossal vehicle had rolled across the fjord’s uneven floor without

hesitation.

The tracks continued for over two kilometers before ending as abruptly as they began.

No turning arc.

No scattered debris.

Just empty seabed, as if whatever made them had been lifted vertically into the water column and spirited away.

Back on the surface, the divers were debriefed.

There were no explanations—only a return to routine duties.

And from that day forward, the mission was never spoken of again.

For decades, the diver told no one, until in 2016 he finally shared the account with his son, who then passed it to the Mutual UFO Network.

At first glance, the story might feel like the stuff of maritime legend.

But when cross-referenced with other reports from the era, it fits into a disturbing pattern.

Between 1970 and the mid-1980s, Norway experienced a surge in sightings of unidentified submarine objects—or USOs.

Navy ships made sonar contact with unknown craft.

Civilian witnesses reported glowing orbs and submarine-like towers.

In November 1972, NATO and the Norwegian Navy mobilized 30 ships to intercept what they assumed was a Soviet submarine.

Yet the “intruder” moved at speeds no submarine could match—200 km/h underwater—and even shrugged off anti-submarine missiles fired in shallow waters.

And these weren’t just isolated Norwegian events.

The Cold War saw similar patterns in Sweden, culminating in the infamous 1981 incident when a Soviet submarine, U137, ran aground deep in Swedish territory.

While the Soviets claimed it was a navigational error, Swedish officials—and much of the world—were unconvinced.

The years following the collapse of the Soviet Union saw a sharp decline in such encounters, suggesting many “mystery craft” might have been advanced Russian technology, tested in

the shadows of NATO borders.

Still, there are details in the diver’s account that resist easy explanation.

No submarine—Soviet or otherwise—leaves tank-tread-like impressions kilometers long and dozens of feet wide on the ocean floor.

The clean termination of the tracks suggests vertical extraction—something no known undersea vehicle was capable of in 1973, or even today.

Skeptics argue the entire account rests on an anonymous letter.

There’s no precise location, no photographic evidence made public, and no official confirmation from the Norwegian Navy.

The diver could have been mistaken.

The tracks could have been the result of an industrial operation, or natural geological features misinterpreted under low-visibility conditions.

But believers point to the classified nature of naval operations during the Cold War.

If this was an encounter with a foreign craft—human or otherwise—the lack of public disclosure would be exactly what you’d expect.

Adding to the intrigue, Norwegian defense archives confirm that from 1969 to 1983 there were around 200 reports of unidentified objects in territorial waters.

These ranged from periscope sightings to sonar contacts in fjords far too shallow for traditional submarines.

Most of the files from the era of the diver’s mission remain classified.

Whether the tracks were carved by a Soviet engineering marvel or something not of this Earth, the truth is locked beneath layers of secrecy and seawater.

The diver himself offered no theory—only the memory of massive, perfect grooves in the deep, ending in nothingness.

For him, the mystery was in the absence: not just of the craft, but of any trace that it had ever existed.

Today, as technology pushes deeper into the unexplored 95% of Earth’s oceans, cases like this still haunt the fringes of naval history.

The Cold War may be over, but the waters of Norway—dark, deep, and still fiercely guarded—may yet hold their secrets.

And somewhere in those depths, perhaps, lie the answers to what two divers saw one cold day in 1973… and why no one was supposed to know.