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Capital One Bank Guy (0:00)
Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees. Just ask the Capital One Bank Guy. It's pretty much all he talks about in a good way. He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast too. Oh really? Thanks Capital One Bank Guy. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See capital1.com Bank Capital One NA Member FDIC.
Erin Menke (0:34)
Welcome to Erin Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild. Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. Humans are incredible engineers. We've rarely met an engineering problem we couldn't solve. But as I'm sure you've heard before, sometimes humanity gets so caught up in whether it can do something, it forgets to ask whether it should. Such was the case in the late 1960s when the US government became aware of a sunken Russian submarine and stopped at nothing to retrieve it from the bottom of the sea. The K129 nuclear submarine sunk sometime around March of 1968. For reasons that will never be known, all the CIA did know was that the Russians were conducting a massive search and rescue operation in The Pacific Ocean, 1500 miles north of Hawaii. Once the Russians gave up, an American sub moved in using special cameras the Russian vessels didn't have the American sub revealed. The K129 was intact at the bottom of the ocean and if recovered, could provide the CIA with Russian missile technology and codebooks filled with secrets. But of course, this would be no easy retrieval mission. The sub was 16,500ft down. It was one thing to have an American sub take pictures, but having divers searching the debris at that depth was out of the question. And the wreck of the sub was so big that it would take some incredible machinery to recover it. The deeply paranoid, ethically dubious CIA of this time was not willing to let the opportunity slide though. And so they embarked on a multi million dollar project to design a vessel capable of pulling K129 from the bottom of the sea, codename Project Azorian. They would need a cover story, and so the CIA reached out to none other than eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes to lend his name to the project. The CIA would call their ship the Hughes Glomar Explorer, and Hughes would tell the public that it was his ship being constructed to use in Deep sea mining operations. The CIA then hired a team of engineers, Swearing them all to secrecy and even keeping some in the dark as to the true nature of the vessel. The explorer was an engineering marvel. At 618ft in length, the ship had the largest moon pole Ever constructed, which is an opening at the bottom of the vessel that allows submersibles to be deployed, or, in this case, retrieved. Two doors would open at the bottom of the ship, Releasing Clementine, the name for a giant claw that was to be lowered to the bottom of the sea to retrieve K129. Clementine was attached to massive lengths of steel pipe that could be slowly doled out to lower the claw Farther and farther down. The whole apparatus was capable of lifting over £21 million. But halfway through the construction process, the engineers realized that they had made a mistake. To put it in simple terms, the ship wasn't big enough to support the claw and was likely to break in half. During the operation, the CIA had to spend even more money and make the ship even bigger. The problem with this, the ship was now too big to fit through the Panama canal. And so once it set sail from the east coast of America, it would have to travel all the way around South America to reach its target. The ship was finally completed, Costing the American taxpayer nearly $300 million. It began its long journey to the Pacific in 1973, nearly getting delayed in Chile By a revolution there, but ultimately making it to its target without issue. The process of actually lowering the claw, Clementine Took weeks. Once it finally reached the K129 at the bottom of the ocean, the claw successfully grasped the sub in its pincers, Lifting it from its longtime resting place. But as the sub was slowly lifted back up, over thousands of feet, Disaster struck. Parts of the claw failed, Snapping off and allowing a majority of the sub to fall back to the ocean floor. The steel just wasn't strong enough. The crewmen had to settle for lifting the remaining piece of the sub up into their ship and heading home. It's unknown what, exactly the CIA Learned, if anything, from the recovered piece of the sub. They actually intended on authorizing a second mission to return to the site and try to recover the rest. But before that could happen, American journalists finally caught wind of the project and leaked details to the public. The general consensus seemed to be that another recovery mission Wasn't worth the cost. And so most of K129 remains where it came to rest at the bottom of the ocean. And any secrets it might have held Are lost to time. Curiously, the Russians have never made attempts of their own to recover the sub, a sign that nothing of value is really on board, or just an admission of a pretty big truth. 16,000ft of water is a pretty safe way to hide a.