Metatube
  • anteayer
Transcripción
00:00Submariners. What's the weirdest way someone entertained themselves during a long deployment?
00:02I spent five years on nuclear submarines, and the isolation breeds some truly bizarre hobbies.
00:06But nothing tops what our sonar technician did during a 90-day silent deployment.
00:09This guy, we'll call him Cooper, somehow smuggled aboard over 200 colored origami papers.
00:12About two weeks in, he started folding tiny paper cranes.
00:14Not unusual at first. Lots of submariners pick up crafts to pass time during watch.
00:17But Cooper had a system. Every time he detected a foreign vessel on sonar,
00:19he'd fold one crane in a specific color based on the ship type.
00:22Red for warships, blue for merchant vessels, yellow for fishing boats.
00:24By day 40, he had this elaborate string of color-coded cranes hanging in the sonar shack.
00:27Cooper began reading them like some bizarre tactical record,
00:30making predictions about patrol patterns based on his crane sequences.
00:32The weird part? He started getting eerily accurate.
00:34He'd study his paper birds and say things like,
00:35we'll encounter a Russian Akula class in approximately six hours, and somehow be right.
00:38Our captain initially thought it was coincidence,
00:40until Cooper correctly predicted an unscheduled Chinese destroyer movement
00:42that even command hadn't anticipated.
00:44The officers started calling him the Crane Whisperer.
00:45When we returned to port, naval intelligence actually debriefed him.
00:47They were convinced he'd developed some revolutionary pattern recognition system.
00:50In reality, Cooper later admitted he was just making educated guesses based on standard patrol routes.
00:53His paper crane collection was eventually confiscated as potentially classified material,
00:56which might be the only origami in history considered a national security concern.