Well that's peculiar.
Three Dutch World War Two ships considered war graves have vanished from the bottom of the Java Sea, the Dutch defence ministry says. All three were were sunk by the Japanese during the Battle of the Java Sea in 1942, and their wrecks were discovered by divers in 2002. But a new expedition to mark next year's 75th anniversary of the battle has found the wrecks are missing.
Experts say salvaging the wrecks would have been a huge operation. The defence ministry is to investigate the mysterious disappearance. In a statement, it said that two of the ships had completely gone, with sonar images only showing imprints, while large parts of a third ship, a destroyer, were missing. "The desecration of a war grave is a serious offence," the ministry said, hinting at human involvement in the disappearance.
The seas around Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia are a graveyard for hundreds of ships and submarines sunk during the war. Illegal salvaging of the wrecks for steel, aluminium and brass has become commonplace. But the three missing wrecks were located 100km (60 miles) off the coast of Indonesia, at a depth of 70m. Salvage operators say it would not be easy to lift them.
"It is almost impossible to salvage this," Paul Koole of the salvage film Mammoet told the Algemeen Dagblad. "It is far too deep." Experts say the operation would have needed large cranes for long periods of time and would be unlikely to have gone unnoticed.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-37997640
That's got me thinking of John Wyndham.
ReplyDeleteYup.
ReplyDeleteAt first, we didn't understand. Peculiar, yes, but hardly worth loosing sleep about it.
ReplyDeleteWhen crewed ships started vanishing from the sea, it was already too late...
Weird. It seems to me more and more as a hollywood promo joke to the 39th anniversary of Close Encounters of the Third Kind which was on Wednesday...
ReplyDelete