The USS Trepang photographs: a case with no chain of custody
Photographs said to have been taken from a US submarine in the Arctic in 1971, showing objects above the ice. They circulate constantly. What is missing from them is the thing that would make them evidence.
Photo by Mad Skillz on Pexels
A set of black-and-white photographs surfaced publicly in 2015, published in a French magazine, said to have been taken in March 1971 through the periscope of the USS Trepang, a US Navy attack submarine, during an Arctic patrol near Jan Mayen. They show objects above the ice and the sea — one elongated and cigar-shaped, others less distinct.
They are among the most-reproduced images in this subject. They are also a good case study in what a photograph needs before it counts.
What is documented
The USS Trepang was a real submarine and Arctic patrols of that kind were routine. That is the extent of what is established.
The photographs themselves arrived without a named photographer, without a release document, without a file reference, and without an account of how they left the Navy. Nothing links them to the vessel other than the assertion accompanying them.
What was claimed
That they show unidentified craft observed from a submerged US submarine, and that their existence indicates a naval awareness of such objects going back decades.
What the images look like
The most-reproduced frame shows an elongated object above the horizon that resembles, quite closely, a non-rigid airship — a blimp. That resemblance is the sceptical case in one sentence, and it is a reasonable one: several frames are consistent with airships, which the US Navy operated in large numbers and photographed extensively.
Other frames are too indistinct to argue about in either direction.
What remains unexplained
How they entered circulation. Somebody had them and somebody released them, and the route from a submarine periscope in 1971 to a magazine in 2015 has never been described by anyone.
That is the only tractable question here, and it is a records question rather than a UAP one. It would be answered by a Freedom of Information Act request for Trepang deck logs and photographic records for the patrol in question.
Join the discussion
Still open on this one:
- 01
Has anyone filed a records request for the Trepang patrol logs?
It is the obvious step and we can find no evidence it has been done. Deck logs would at least establish where the boat was in March 1971.
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See also
Everything this piece touches
Sources
Open them and check for yourself. Where a record is public, it is linked.
Submarine deck logs and photographic records
US National Archives and Records Administration
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