BELLINGHAM - Quick: What's metallic, with little fiberglass wings, weighs nearly two tons and has Russian Cyrillic lettering on the side?

The Navy would like to know too.

A Bellingham fishing trawler found something strange floating in the water about 14 miles off the Washington coast.

Fisherman Erik Eide of Bow told the Bellingham Herald it looked like a dead whale but when he moved in closer Sunday, Eide and three crewmen thought it was a little submarine or a bomb with stubby wings.

Then Eide remembered seeing a a program on the Discovery Channel about a sonar rig towed behind submarines so he decided to haul it aboard for salvage. That's when they saw the Russian lettering on the side.

They called the Coast Guard which sent a vessel with crewmen carrying weapons and Navy officers with digital cameras. They ordered the ship to take the mysterious item to Port Angeles where the Navy took possession.

Eide says they told him they also think it's a sonar rig. Eide says he's letting the Navy look at it but is not giving up salvage rights.

A Navy spokesman, Lieutenant Commander John Daniels, says it was checked by explosive experts and it is not a weapon.

Source

yeah i saw this on the news lat night, i live in wa. but i was half asleep and it looked like some kind of weird fish thing..guess not lol. like i aid i was half asleep!

Whatever it is; it's neat looking.

Cool picture.

It does indeed look quite cool, I wonder what it is?!!?!?!?

Its a nucular submanarine!

I would bet its some sort of old Russian towed sonar array. You would be amazed at the crazy crap different navies are losing all the time.

This sonar rig must have been floating around the oceans for years. Great story. I wonder if under Maritime law the skipper gets to re-claim his catch?

That was a guess on my part that it is a towed sonar array. For all I know its a Russian fishing lure. It looks like the Navy wants to keep it. I imagine if the fellow makes an issue of his finder's rights for it they will either turn it over or compensate him. There have been a couple of cases I know of lately where people have found some sort of discarded government property and had to start legal fights to keep it.

But a big Russian fishing lure! That is another matter...

I remember hearing about this I think that the fisherman wanted to keep it though. We can defiantly rule out any sort of weapon because the Navy said that it wasn't one.