‘I thought I saw a UFO-shaped object underwater but it was a lost nuclear bomb’

Diver Sean Smyrichinsky was searching for fish off the coast of British Columbia when he spotted a strange UFO-shaped object underwater – sparking a Canadian military investigation into a potentially lost US nuclear bomb from 1950

A diver exploring waters off the coast of British Columbia was wrapping up his day when he spotted what he believed to be a UFO in the Pacific Ocean—but the reality of the object proved far more alarming than he could have anticipated.

With global tensions mounting, scrutiny has intensified over the numerous nuclear weapons “lost” by the US military throughout the decades.

The US has a total of six unaccounted-for nuclear warheads—armaments capable of obliterating entire cities.

In 2016, the Canadian navy initiated an investigation following Sean Smyrichinsky’s account of witnessing one of the world’s earliest “broken arrow” incidents. Broken arrow is the US military’s designation for accidents involving nuclear weapons.

Sean told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation: “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. And then I found something that I had never, ever seen before.”, reports the Mirror US.

He discovered a massive 12-foot-long UFO-shaped object resting at the bottom of Haida Gwaii, an archipelago situated 80km west of British Columbia’s coastline.

He said: “It resembled a bagel cut in half, and then around the circle of the bagel these bolts all moulded into it, like half spheres. It was the strangest thing I had ever seen.”

Describing the bolts as larger than basketballs, he surfaced from the water desperate to share his findings.

He said: “I started telling my crew: ‘My God, I found a UFO.'”

Sketching an outline of what he observed on a napkin, he told the Vancouver Sun: “Nobody had ever seen it before or heard of it. Nobody ever dives there. Then some old-timer said: ‘Oh, you might have found that bomb.'”.

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The bomb in question was a “lost nuke” – a Mark IV bomb which vanished after an American B-36 bomber crashed in the region during the cold war.

The Mark IV was a 10-foot, blimp-shaped nuclear bomb weighing approximately five tonnes and which went missing over the Pacific during a US air force B-36 training flight on 13 February 1950.

According to the Royal Aviation Museum of Western Canada, the intercontinental bomber had departed from an air base in Alaska for a mission that included a simulated drop on San Francisco when three of the plane’s six engines ignited.

The crew was forced to abandon the bomber but US air force reports stated they ejected the bomb into the Pacific. The US military claimed the lost bomb was a dummy capsule packed with lead rather than the plutonium core required for an atomic explosion.

The army also made this claim in 1958 when a fully-armed B-47 carrying a Mark 15 hydrogen bomb near Tybee Island dropped its nuclear bomb following a mid-air collision.

The weapon was never recovered, and initially the army claimed it was a dummy.

However, decades later, in 1994, documents released from a 1966 Congressional testimony revealed the Tybee Mark 15 was actually a fully intact nuclear weapon.

Nonetheless, with Sean’s plane the bomber disappeared for several hours.

Days afterwards, 12 of the 17 men aboard were discovered alive – with the aircraft having plummeted into the Canadian mountains.

Sean started investigating the story online. He told CBC: “And sure enough, there was a story about this lost bomb.”

He spotted an image of his bomb. He said: “A big circle with these balls, I had no idea that particular bomb contained all these enormous balls, bigger than basketballs.”

These spheres housed the explosives. Sean learnt the bomber had gone down roughly 50 miles south of where he’d been diving.

He said: “I’m right in the right area and it looks like it could be a piece of that thing. What else could it possibly be? I was thinking UFO, but probably not a UFO, right?”.

Sean submitted an email to Canada’s department of national defence, who informed him they were examining the matter with “keen interest”. Then in 2016, the Canadian Armed Forces announced a vessel would be dispatched in the coming weeks to examine the object.

The Canadian government reiterated the claim the bomb was a dummy. It said: “Nonetheless we do want to be sure and we do want to investigate it further. A team specialising in unexploded ordnance will determine what risk, if any, the object poses and whether it should be retrieved from its resting place or left as is.”