this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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I am curious as to what the repeated knocking on ~30 minute intervals that was picked up on sonar ends up being if not from the sub.
I believe that in a previous case like this it was found to be biological -- some sort of animal noise maybe.
I was messing around with this like sub warfare simulator game a while back and I blew up a whale with a torpedo because it showed up on my sonobuoy network as an unidentified contact 😅
What game is that? Sounds cool
Similar things have happened in other underwater rescue situations and it almost always turns out to be equipment involved in the search. The sonar bouys dropped by the planes are extremely sensitive pieces of equipment.
If I had to guess, every 30 minutes or so a boat running a grid search pattern would get close enough to one of the bouys that it was able to pick up sounds from the boat. As the grid pattern took the boat further away from the bouy it wasn't able to continue to pick up the noise, and the "knocking" stopped after about 4 hours and wasn't heard again until a few days later. Then the search pattern changed, and boats started getting close to the bouys again.
It was a fish knocking on the window and saying, 'here, billy, billy, billy, billionaire'.
It was intermittent because an orca kept swimming past and saying, 'don't do that, it's bad for them, but if you like the sound of that you're better off knocking on the bottom of the big ones up top'.