‘Foreign submarine’ may have been whale

At 6:56 a.m. Sunday, the captain of the Atago, who was standing on the port side of the deck, pointed to an area off the port beam.

“Isn’t that a periscope?” he asked at first, “Nay, Thar she blows! A hump white as a snowhill! ‘t is Moby Dick!”

Is this the same captain that was in change in the ramming incident?
How about they rename the boat the “Pequod”?

But I guess seeing things that aren’t there is a lot safer than not seeing things that ARE there. Apparently the Aegis system, which can target 100s of craft and help shoot down incoming ballistic missiles isn’t very good at figuring out the difference between a whale and a submarine is…though maybe the designers didn’t factor that in, as they assumed each Aegis ship captain wouold not be a total retard.

I guess you are all experienced sea dogs and know better than these guys. First of all, periscopes aren’t made to be spotted and discerned easily. Also, you can’t tell someone is retarded just because he thought he saw something in that environment – wavy and color-shifting and all that ( its not like spotting an albino 50 meters off the coast). And above all, this was the right thing to do – even if there was nothing – alerts like this reveal if the crew is prepared for fast mobilization and as previously said – its better to tie the legs even of an already baked chicken. There is no need to remind how slackness can lead to many casualties in deadly surprise attacks.

The issue is the MSDF’s (can we just say navy now?) creditability. If the Russians made such a claim, and then retracted, you can bet there was a US sub in their waters and some kind of back room diplomatic appeasement was reached. With the Nipponese, you never really know what they saw. They have no reliable track record since loosing the big game in 45.