Red Herring

girl summer. There's been hot vac summer. This summer, arguably, it's kind of turning

“into hot diarrhea summer. The one that no one wanted, but we here at Radio Lab are offering”

you something different, which we are calling cold war summer. Or I'm calling it that because

we just realized this will be our third story that involves the cold war in a month. This

one is really special. We're bubbling it up from the archives. It's a tale of espionage. It's a real who done it that involves submarines, periscopes, hydrophones, many a bunker. And I didn't see the answer coming. Enough out of me. Let's jump into this tale. It comes from the archives was reported by Annie McCueen and it is called "Red Haring" "Yeah, wait, wait, you're looking for it." You're listening to Radio Lab. Hello, I'm Lillu Miller. This is Radio Lab. And today, boom, boom.

“Hello. Hi. A story from producer Annie McCueen from her bathroom. I'm actually like”

straddling the bathtub here, so giving I did a yoga last night. I do think our thing is like

underwater mysteries from the 9th. Yes. Okay. So today I have a story. It's like a Tom Clancy International Underwater Spy Thriller with a little spicy science thrown in. All right. I am grabbing my popcorn. Take me away. Yeah. Okay. Let's begin with. Yeah. Okay. Thank you, Magnus. Magnus. How do you pronounce your last name? It depends on what you come from. So most Americans would say "Valberg" or "Valberg" or something like that. Yeah. What do you say? Well, that's also

the pens. In Sweden it's "Valberg." Oh, wow. But in Denmark it becomes a bit more like fail, bow, or something. Wow. Yeah. Okay. Anyway, Magnus is an associate professor. The University of Southern Denmark. Where he studies underwater sound. Yeah. So let's start off in 1981. Yes. Well, let's go back to that time. Yeah. So that's the defining year. How old are you? I was 13 years old. I was living in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden. Okay. And it was an extremely tense period.

Because in Stockholm. You know, we had the Baltic Sea right in front of us. There was only about 140 miles of water separating Sweden from the Soviet Union. And Magnus said to him and a lot of other Swedes, there was just this fear of what was on the

“other side of the water. I remember this still in the school. You know, you had a map. You could see”

all the details, the Western Europe. Small towns, all these roads, the colors of different countries. And then across the Baltic it was just white. There was just nothing. And that was Soviet Union. We didn't really know even what was there. Just this mysterious nothingness. Yeah. And not very far away. Now Magnus says it's important to know Sweden was this kind of island, politically, because Sweden was neutral. But because of a lot of this mystery, a fear of communism,

there was always the sense that one of their greatest threats was the Soviet Union.

We heard about it all the time. We were even practicing a little bit in school. And we were really living in the time when we were worrying about a nuclear war almost daily. So 1981, that a finding year, it's late October. Sort of when it gets really dark here, you know, and cold and damp. It's about four in the morning, pitch black. A fisherman leaves his home, gets in his boat and heads off to check his nets. Sweden has this

like super long coastline that's filled with these really complex inlets. Full of islands. There are rocks, like granite islands everywhere. And just as a sun is starting to come up, this fisherman makes his way into one of these rocky inlets. And all of a sudden out of the darkness, looming up out of the water, right in front of them. There is this big Russian stop standing there. It's huge. It's like this lung, almost bullet, dark bullet in the water, and it is like towering out of the sea. Just sitting there.

It's insane. What was it doing there? Exactly. What was it doing there? So the fisherman called the Navy and we all woke up to the news. Soviet submarine beached unsweetened shores.

So the military comes down if their helicopters circling overhead, many, many boats.

But at this time, Sweden people would also say we were incredible naive because we didn't have

any wars for the last war. It was like Napoleon wars. We didn't really were involved in anything. So Magnus said the military sent some guys out of the submarine.

“And we kind of knocked on the door of the submarine. They knocked on the side of the sub?”

Yeah, I don't know if they knocked, but they kind of asked, can we come in and have a look? Can they said, no, no, of course not. And then they said, oh, okay, sorry about that. But some, some, there were some clever physicists, they parked a small boat beside of the sub. And through some clever measurements, they could measure that they were nuclear weapons inside.

Oh, scary. You know, we have these defining moments for a nation.

In the states, you have like the Kennedy murder, the 9/11, and you know, and this is one of those for Swedes. And people started immediately to say, hey, this is war. Like we are in war. And, and eventually, because again, maybe we were too soft. What, what happened is that the commander of the Soviet sub told the Swedish military that

“all of their navigation instruments on board had malfunctioned all at once.”

Sort of, sorry, we navigated wrongly. You know, we lost our way. We ran ashore. Like we made a mistake.

Yeah. So the Swedish military sent a bunch of ships out to the sub, pulled it off the bottom.

And they, you know, returned it to international waters and it left. Okay. And for a 30-year-old Magnus. It was super weird because you could see that adults and the politicians, everyone were completely, how to say, like, taking their pants down, right? It was like, what? Like, no one could of course explain this. So the Navy, of course, they got a lot of money. So they became more vigilant. They had to now start to see if they could, you know, could they protect the Swedish coasts.

And, you know, it's not an easy thing to do. It's a huge coastline over a thousand miles.

“So how do you, like, patrol that? And, and obvious way to do that is with sound.”

Forget ships and so on are. Sounds propagate very well on the water. We're just going to listen for the subs. Yeah. Does that mean they, like, they hung hydrophones on buoys out in the water. Yeah. The all along the coast. Like, just, yeah. Well, not everywhere, of course. But it started to listen into this more carefully after this, all the politicians promised us that now we have bought all these gears. And now we are ready to tackle this problem. And, you know,

no problem. And, you know, then we went into sleep again. And then in October '82, we had the next wake-up call. This time in this big harbor. Very close to Stockholm. Right outside of a Swedish naval base. People started to see Paris coasts. One after another, after another, after another. Hmm. Hopping up out of the water. In the Swedish military, it was like, we have detected them and we have them. So this time, the Swedes send in a bunch of ships.

With nets. These big metal nets that they used to block the exits of the harbor, so there's no way a big cell can get out. And then they send in a bunch of helicopters that have hydrophones. And they dip those hydrophones into the water. And they start listening for submarines. And before long, one of those hydrophones would pick up the unmistakable sound of a Soviet sub. Hmm. And what does that sound like? I'm going to get to that. But what happened

is when the Swedes heard the sound, they would drop a bomb from the helicopter. They would hit the water, sink down to a predetermined depth. And then big explosion. And helicopters in the ships, they would just wait to see if the explosion would, like, would damage or scare one of these Soviet subs up to the surface. And so they waited and waited and nothing. Hmm. No Soviet sub emerged. Not even a piece of one. And this Swedish military kept this up for a month. Chasing down subs,

they hear dropping bombs. And by the end of the month, nothing comes of it. They don't capture a single submarine. What? I know. Isn't that great? Did they just, did they somehow get out of the barricade? They don't know. They don't know. I mean, I guess they could even be down there today. They could have hurt the sub, the sub fell, the sub, you know, filled with water. Like, they could be down at the bottom of the harbor. I guess these are just, this is just a huge harbor. And they just

things started to get more and more bizarre. So through the 1980s, every half a year, every year, we would have these submarine chases. All of a sudden, somewhere on the coast, the military would give an alarm. Oh, there is a sub. And then you would have these helicopters, bombs, nothing. Really? And then six months would pass. Once it was right outside the Royal Castle in Stockholm. So were people getting like annoyed, like, come on. Kind of a little bit, or are people still very

afraid? I think, you know, the cold war is still going on. Magnus said, there was just this fear. The fear is coming. The Russian day is coming. We just had to spend more money to find them. Were they still seeing pairs of scopes? Yeah, so that's the thing. What were they hearing and seeing?

“So they started to ask people, if anyone sees something, you should report it.”

Call this number, call this Swedish military. And they got tons of calls.

Many thousands of observations. But then the problem is, it's just like in a crime scene. If you

ask people to say what they saw, it's a long structure sticking up from the water. So is that a periscope or is it a boat? Could be a small whale? It could be a sub, but who knows? So what the Swedish military did is they came up with this ranking system for observations. On one end, you had ranked six. Six is, we cannot tell no one knows. It could be anything. Okay. And then you have like rank one is a definite sub. Definitely a sub. Okay. Now the thing is, for a rank one, definitely

a Soviet sub, pretty much every time in the report. It said, we heard the typical sound. The typical sound. We heard a typical sound. What is the typical sound? So the typical sound is basically when the Swedes were sure that they were encountering a Soviet sub, those hydrophones

on the water would always pick up this particular sound. It was called the typical sound because

it was believed to be the sound that, you know, just like a typical Soviet sub would make. And so anytime the Swedish military encountered that sound. It was automatically giving a one. It meant that encounter was 100% a sub. And then we, oh, sorry, go. And do we know what that sounds like? Well, not yet, because it's classified. Yeah. No one could listen to this sound and no one could knew what it was. But all the hydrophones were picking up this. They were picking up the typical sound.

“For years. Yeah. The Swedish military kept hearing the secret Soviet sub sound in their waters.”

So then the strange thing happens, right? In 1989, everything is changing. Thousands and thousands of West Germans come to make the point that the wall has suddenly become irrelevant. The iron curtain falls, the Berlin Wall falls. You know, everything opened up and all of a sudden, over one night

basically, the world changed for us. Changes were just sweeping across this continent. Something

unreal for me. All these places that have been almost impossible to go to were all open. It is if that white blank space on the map was starting to actually get some color and shapes and names. But while all of this is going on, something very weird is happening. Because the Swedish military is continuing to report hearing the sounds of Russian submarines invading their waters. 20, 30 incidents every year. And Magnus said by 1994. At that time,

“we had the Prime Minister Carl Belt. And he got so upset about this. He wrote a very”

angry letter to Boris Jelten saying, "Now you really have to stop. Now you have created your own country and the first thing you do is to try to occupy Sweden." Or stick up this. "Stop." But Boris Jelten's like, "I don't know what you're talking about." The Elts and said, "Well, we are of course not there. We don't see. You can see. Well, our subs are on land. What are you talking about? You're crazy." He denies everything.

So, as this whole mystery is unfolding, Magnus is watching from the sidelines. And by 1996, you know, at that time I was a university student. He's studying underwater biological sounds. Oh, and I got a job in the fishery department because my mentor, he was sort of the he was called Hawke and Vesterberg. He still is. He's still around. Yeah, let's hope so. That's Haken. Retired, Luciano Grafer and fisheries biologist. I started with telemetry

acoustic cracking in the 70s. And he was one of the few in Sweden who really was an authority on underwater biological sounds. And one day Magnus is standing in Haken's office. I was quite fresh on my job. When the phone on Haken's desk rings. He was not there, so I just took his phone and they... He just answered the phone on his desk. Yeah, yeah. But we had a very collegial relationship. Yeah. And on the other end of the line,

but then because he wasn't there, they started to talk to me and they said, "Well, they are forming this committee." This top secret government investigation. And they would like me and my boss to be a part of that. So, they say yes. There's a background check. Yeah, and cleared by the secret police. They were very secretive. And then he and Haken are on a train to Stockholm.

To this huge benevolent base. It's just like in a James Bond movie. You have a whole submarine base inside rocks. Wait, what? You can open the rocks and you're going there with your boss and you can have a...

“How do you open the rocks? Go to the side. Yeah, I don't know. Do you have some big rock indoors or something like that?”

Yeah, something like that. So, we went in there and you know... So, Magnus and Haken, who are not totally sure why they're there, are winding their way through this military base. Long tunnels. Two maybe captains were our liacens. Yeah, and eventually... You come into this meeting room with all these electronic gadgets. A lot of very calling equipment. You have a world map and they can follow the whole world from in there.

Kind of like mission control at NASA. You were super exciting.

Finally, they take their seats at a long table. And sitting there around the table,

are a bunch of other academic types like them. But they were also some very high rank military people. So, it was really like a wow moment for me. And we were sitting down there and then they said, "Well, ladies and gentlemen, you are the first civil people who were listening to this sound." The typical sound. This famous sound then. So now we will actually play the typical sound for you.

So it's been top secret for the last 15 years for 15 years. Yeah, no one has been there.

“No one outside the military was able or allowed to listen to it. Wow. So were you excited?”

Extremely, of course. This was like wow. Now, what Magnus said he expected to hear was something like... Bing... Bing... You know, what he'd heard in the movies. You know, these movies when they sit around the crowd. So I was thinking, it must be something like that, right?

But then, one of the Navy officers turns to a tape recorder and hits play. And this is what comes out. God, are they picking up voices? Are they like radio static?

Oh, so that's always what it sounds like. Yeah, this is a sound they've been recording

every year since that first set show up. It's intriguing. It sounds a bit like a few Donald Duck at a very long distance. What do you mean? Well, you know, Donald Duck is kind of his voice. If you imagine, you had like 10 Donald Duck's and they would be maybe like 100 meters away or so.

“I think it would be something like that. And it's also sounds a bit like an old shoe that kind of gets stuck in.”

He's kind of squeaky part to it. And then we were sitting there with all these generals and they were playing this sound. Did you look around the room at the table of scientists and military people? Well, everyone is sitting there and all these professors, they were kind of stiff upper lip. So they were just sitting there and listening kind of carefully.

But my boss, he's more like he's a very relaxed guy, you know. I think we looked at each other with very confused guys. But we were kind of keeping a stiff face also. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, cool. Got to play cool. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

So, after they played the sound, the naval officers turned to the scientists and say basically,

okay, now that you've heard the typical sound, we'd like each of you to try to figure out who or what is making it. To get to the bottom of what these typical sound was about. And even in that moment sitting at the table, Halkin and Magnus turned to each other. And they don't say anything. But they're both thinking... What, this is very strange. This is definitely not the sound.

After the break, Magnus and Halkin follow their intuition deep into a cloud of mystery. And they get to the bottom of it. Oh, they get right up close to the bottom.

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Radio Lab, Lulu, Annie, military crises trying to be averted by biologists. So after the meeting,

Magnus and Halkin are standing outside. Just standing there having a cigarette talking about the sound.

It sounds a bit like a popping sound when you fry bacon. And both of them find that this must be

“a biological sound. But what? And then I remember saying to Halkin air bubbles. This sounds like”

air bubbles. If you think of a scuba diver who gets a whole pinched in his, he's one of his pipes to go for a bit like an air bubble stream coming out of a hose. It sounds a bit like that. So their question is like, which animal releases air under the water? And we have kind of this hunch. Yeah, yeah. Now, incredibly, you can actually find this hunch in New York City. But it helps us have a car and a friend. So I called up producer Matt Kilti who's a friend

with a car. You have a bucket. And I also brought a large bucket. What a ridiculous bucket. Okay, so I only told Matt we were driving to the Hudson River. That was it. Okay, so we're taking the bridge. We drove through Brooklyn over the Manhattan Bridge. Okay, so now that we... Is there a cup? Is this the couple? Uh, it's my one cup holders. drove up Manhattan up to the river front. We can sneak and look

“for parking for a while. A long while. How many fireheads do you need on one block?”

It's a red light. Oh my god, that's a spot. We're on River side drive. Okay, let's go up here. There's no parking anytime. This is not going to work anymore. Well, how long are we going to be here? I don't know. We need to wander around a bit. I don't even know what we're doing. I'm looking for parking. What are you? Can you just... What are you looking for? What was a hunch? Yes. Okay, okay, so we got down to the rocky shoreline of the Hudson River. There's a piece of a ditch.

That might be a hole for it. Where we found it. Herring. Herring fish. I think that the evening, we were like, let's try herring. Oh my gosh, can we get down there? So for reasons that will become clear very soon. I tried to buy herring, but you can't buy fresh herring in New York City in December. And so I dragged Matt out to the Hudson River because I had read in an article that herring fish have been washing up dead on the shores of the Hudson. And nobody really knows why. Could be

pollution. It could be water temperature. But still unclear. Exactly why that happened. But you know what you're looking for. Like, what exactly does a herring look like? Oh, okay. Yeah, so I'm going to pick it up. That is the question. I picked up this dead when we found it. Yes, we'll just put my hands around it. Oh, and very slippery. Woo. Herring are big. I don't know maybe 10 inches. Big dead fish. Shiny. They are the silver of the oceans because they are all

these reflections from their scales. They just kind of look like it's like if a kid drew a fish,

“it would be this fish. Yeah. But the really important thing about herring, the whole reason why”

Magnus and Hocken had this hunch is because of what is going on inside of herring. Now, Lou, I know you've written a whole book about why fish should not be called fish. But have you for, like, wondered, how does a fish just float around in the water? Um, I don't think I have actually wondered that. Let me go ahead and tell you. So it turns out in most fish, they have this

thing called the swim bladder, the swim bladder, which is basically this tiny sack filled with gas

that regulates the fish's buoyancy. Similar to the buoyancy tank of a submarine. So if you're a fish and you want to, you know, go up or down in the water column, you do this by either pulling air into your swim bladder sack or pushing it out. And most fish do this through their bloodstream and their gills, which means it's quiet, silent, like basically invisible. But not the herring.

straight from the swim bladder to the anal opening. So when a herring needs to get air out of

“its swim bladder, it basically pushes it through this canal out of its butt into the water.”

And Magnus says when this happens, you will have this sort of small string of air bubbles, which yethunch might just sound like bubbles coming out of a hose underwater. Yeah. So he, his guess is like, the submarine sound is actually just bubbles that come out there, but so his guess is fish, farts. Yeah. Okay. Technically, these are not farts because they do not come from like digestive gases. Okay. But this makes me feel better. I feel like I can continue

to engage with this story. Oh, are you doing so far? I'm just very gross to help by them. Yeah, like I just, are you not? No. Well, how are you? Look, why are you? It's like even saying the word makes me like, I'm like, I don't want to be in this space even linguistically, let alone a

“raw air amount of meat. This is like, wow, that's, that's so interesting. I would never, how are you”

not? Because they're the funniest thing in the world because they're, they're a thing we all do. If we can't, that's upsetting. They make you feel better immediately. Like, even animals, like, find them funny kind of, I don't know, they're just, they're wonderful. They make, they connect us all. They connect us all. Okay. I, I, I, I, I just appreciate the meaning you draw while also being simultaneously relieved. These are not actual farts. Carry on. Okay. So, Hawkin and Magnus, they

now had their like fish fart theory. But now they needed to figure out, did the fish fart actually

sound like the submarines sound. And we approached that rather crew bleep. Basically, Magnus went

to a fish shop. They were dead. They were dead. They went to the lab. They dug up the hydrofoam. Okay. And then Magnus took this herring, submerged it under water. And I squeezed it. It's so weird to squeeze a fish though. It's very weird. But I squeezed it pretty hard. I don't think anything is coming out. You just kept squeezing it. We was like, kind of, oh, what is that? I made it too. It was like a really big blur of, you know, hearing poo and things coming out.

I'm so happy. Okay, toss them over. So then, you want to squeeze more? Hawkin, tried.

“Because you should get this feeling. It's a weird feeling. Maybe it'll be lucky.”

I got the magic touch. I got the fart fingers. He put the herring in the water. Squeeze the gentle, gently squeezing. Gently. And then, oh, bubbles. It was a tiny little bubble. Okay, that's good. You do a fart fingers. And then you would hear this kind of very airy, poppy sound, this kind of the perfect typical sound we thought. Turns out they thought wrong. Because when they look at the recording of the fish fart,

compared to the recording of the sub sound, they just, they don't really match. Absolutely not. This is just because they're very depressing. But I mean, this is a dead fish and an aquarium. So then they went out into a bay with this little tube, connected to a vacuum pump. Oh, no. Managed to get a wild herring in there, got it to fart. Yeah. That sound didn't match. No. But then, they had this thought. We need to get more realistic here.

We need to get out into the wild. Because herring aren't solo fish. They travel together in schools. These schools can be huge, like a square kilometer. Like sometimes we're talking billions of fish all traveling together. And so they thought, if we're right about this, the sound we're looking for isn't the sound of one fish farting. It's the sound of a lot of fish farting. Oh, like a lot a lot. Yes. And, you know, we were working for the fishery science in Sweden. So when you

a lot of fishermen and they would tell us, when herring goes into net, they get stressed and the net starts boiling, they say. Wow. So Magnus falls this clue onto a boat and out to a fishing trap. Beneath them in the shadow of the boat, he could see thousands of herring just swimming around there. I put the hide of one in the water and

victory. The typical sound. The whole box was just sinking out of these sounds. It was just incredible.

Their findings were harder for some members of the Navy than others to accept. I mean, there were people

that their who career was chasing submarines. But finally, in 1999, it became official.

The typical sound that had haunted the Swedish Navy for over a decade was not made by Soviet submarines. Instead, for over a decade, the Swedish Navy had been straining their ears to hear the sound of thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of herring all farting together. Okay. So that was the end of the typical sound. Man, I just can't believe you guys so quickly had all these ideas. But why did the military not

“think for 15 years? Are there no scientists in the military that would have any of your experience?”

Why was it? I think they didn't have the know-how and the other thing is this whole thing

of the military having this culture that you keep seeing secrets, which means that it's very hard to have an open and it's very top down. It's very hard to have an open discussion about like a scientific discussion going on around these topics. I mean, now I make it sound like they're very different from the rest of us. But in a way, there are just human beings and you can easily wind yourself up in some kind of explanation. If you have a few authorities telling you how things

are, you can easily start to collect evidence that that must be how it was. Magnus told me that the Swedish military actually used soar to investigate this sound. And what they saw on the screen in front of them was that sound coming from an object

“and then they would watch that object split apart. Divided into two? Oh. And then divided into four?”

And then it could go back into one again. Whoa. And now we can guess that what they were probably seeing was the school of hearing, splitting apart, splitting apart again. But at the time, this was a Soviet sub. So they must have thought this subs are like super high-tech. Exactly. They had people investigating how can the people that Russia can build a sub that can suddenly be decomposed into two and four and then back into one. You have like military scientists

sitting and trying to build a model of a Russian sub that can sort of disintegrate into four. I mean, that does make any sense. That is amazing.

I think this is something to look after all in our times. That you can always laugh at it and

say how wrong they were. But I wonder what people will think about us in 20 years. Oh, totally. I think about all the time. What is the fish part of today? Exactly. There's just one more little thing that I take away from this story because as I was doing research, I learned that hearing have just been fished forever. Yeah. Like really fished. All these Scandinavian countries they were built on hearing basically. It's been what people

have been eating and fishing for for thousands of years. Right. And not just that. Like cities have been founded on it. Cultures have been founded on it. Millions have been made and these fish have just been like running for their lives for millennia. Yeah. And it's like in this one moment or in this one decade or period of time, like herings just got back at humans in some way and like sort of give them a wild chase. You know? Yeah. And just for one, they had the power in the

upper hand. He played an important part of the country's foreign policy. Yeah. Yeah. It's almost like in the end, this story is just a very long-winded fart joke on us humans. Yeah, exactly. It is.

“That's what it is. When did see what you did there, Mekuin? This very long-winded fart joke”

was bravely reported by Annie Mekuin and beautifully produced by Matt Kilti, Annie Mekuin and Sarkari was sound design by Jeremy Bloom reporting in translation help from Magnus Ormstad, huge thanks to Ben Wilson who's done his own fascinating research into the hearing, too. And to Ola Tuneander, Hans Gordon, Andreas Timmelstad, class Helmerson and Mekbulz. Catch you on the flip, friends. May your sanity stay intact. And your wind, broken.

Hi, I'm Gabby. I'm from the Bay Area California and here are the staff credits.

Sarah Sandbach is our executive director. Our managing editor is Pat Walters.

“Dylan Keith is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Jeremy Bloom,”

W Harry Fortuna, David Gabel, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindu Nina Sambundan,

Matt Kilti, Mona Modgacker, Alex Nisan, Sarah Kari, Natalia Ramirez, Joanna Strogetz,

“Anisa Vizza, Arian Wac, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young, with help from Gabby Santas and Maya”

Applebee Milamad. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton,

Angelie Mercado, and Sophie Samay.

“Leadership support for radio lab science programming is provided by the Simon's Foundation”

and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundation support for radio lab was provided by the Alfred P. Sim Foundation.