Mysterious signals. High-speed underwater craft. The Soviet Navy’s most classified encounters with the unknown beneath the waves.
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union wasn’t just in a race for space and nuclear supremacy—it was hunting something stranger in the depths. Soviet submariners and naval intelligence units frequently encountered bizarre phenomena in the oceans: sonar contacts moving at impossible speeds, unidentified submerged objects (USOs), and the eerie acoustic anomalies nicknamed “Quackers.” From the Arctic to the Black Sea, strange swimmers, vanishing craft, and unexplained events tested even the most hardened officers.
In this episode of Hangar 51 Files, we open the vault on declassified KGB archives, Soviet naval records, and firsthand testimony from submariners who came face-to-face with the unknown. We track sightings from the depths of Lake Baikal to the icy waters beneath the polar ice caps, dissect the possible origins of the Quackers phenomenon, and ask whether these were secret NATO technologies, misidentified marine life, or something truly otherworldly.
Dive deep with us as we separate propaganda from possibility—and explore what the Soviets might have uncovered about the unidentified forces lurking beneath the red waters of the Cold War.
