A diver looking for sea cucumbers found an 11,000-pound nuclear weapon

A man found an unexpected object when he went diving.

(Image credit: iStockphoto)

last updated 8 November 2016

A Canadian commercial diver named Sean Smyrichinsky was searching for sea cucumbers near British Columbia when he found a mysterious, large object he initially guessed might be a UFO.

Smyrichinsky described his find as "bigger than a king-size bed" with a hole in the middle "like a bagel." When he surfaced and sketched a picture of the object for a few friends and local fishermen, one finally piped up: "Oh, you might have found that bomb."

The bomb in question was an 11,000-pound nuclear weapon, a Mark IV "Fat Man" nuke similar to the bombs the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. The weapon was carried by an American bomber that in February of 1950 crashed en route from Alaska to Texas when the engines iced over. Though the bomb was ostensibly not armed, the crew cautiously dropped it into the ocean before the plane crashed into a mountain.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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