[RADIOLAB INTRO]

LULU MILLER: Hello. I'm Lulu Miller. This is Radiolab. And today—boom boom!

ANNIE MCEWEN: Oh, hello.

LULU: Hi.

LULU: ...From her bathroom.

ANNIE: I'm actually, like, straddling the bathtub here, so...

LULU: [laughs] Perfect.

ANNIE: Good thing I did yoga last night.

LULU: I do think our thing is, like, underwater mysteries from the '90s.

ANNIE: [laughs] Yes. OK, so today I have a story. It's like a Tom Clancy international underwater spy thriller with a little spicy science thrown in.

LULU: All right. I am grabbing my popcorn. Take me away.

ANNIE: Yeah. OK, let's begin with...

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yeah, OK.

ANNIE: Thank you, Magnus.

ANNIE ... Magnus.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Not a problem. Yeah.

ANNIE: How do you pronounce your last name?

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: It depends on where you come from. So most Americans would say Val-berg or Wal-berg or something like that. Yeah.

ANNIE: What do you say?

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Well, that also depends. In Sweden, it's Val-bery.

ANNIE: Oh, wow.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: But in Denmark, it becomes a bit more like Vale-bough or something.

ANNIE: Wow.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yeah.

ANNIE: OK. Anyway, Magnus is an associate professor...

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: At the University of Southern Denmark.

ANNIE: ...Where he studies underwater sound.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yeah.

ANNIE: So let's start off in 1981.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yes.

ANNIE: Well, let's go back to that time.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yeah. So that's a defining year.

ANNIE: Just how old were you then?

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yeah, so I was 13 years old.

ANNIE: Thirteen.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: And I was living in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden.

ANNIE: OK.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: And it was an extremely tense period.

ANNIE: Because in Stockholm...

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: You know, we have the Baltic Sea right in front of us.

ANNIE: There was only about 140 miles of water separating Sweden from...

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: The Soviet Union.

ANNIE: And Magnus said to him and a lot of other Swedes, there was just this fear of what was on the other side of the water.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: I remember this still in the school. You know, you had a map. You could see all the details of the Western Europe.

ANNIE: Small towns, all these roads, the colors of different countries.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: And then across the Baltic, it was just white. There was just nothing. And that was Soviet Union. We didn't really know even what was there.

ANNIE: Just this mysterious nothingness.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yeah, and not very far away.

ANNIE: Now, Magnus says it's important to know...

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: That Sweden has this kind of island politically because Sweden was neutral.

ANNIE: But because of a lot of this mystery, a fear of communism, there was always the sense that one of their greatest threats was the Soviet Union.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: We heard about it all the time. We were even practicing a little bit in school. And we were really living in a time when we were worrying about a nuclear war almost daily.

ANNIE: So 1981, the defining year - it's late October.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Sort of when it gets really dark here, you know, and cold and damp.

ANNIE: It's about 4 in the morning, pitch black.

ANNIE: A fisherman leaves his home, gets in his boat and heads off to check his nets. Sweden has this, like, super-long coastline that's filled with these really complex inlets.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Full of islands. There are rocks - like, granite islands everywhere.

ANNIE: And just as the sun is starting to come up, this fisherman makes his way into one of these rocky inlets. And all of a sudden, out of the darkness, looming up out of the water right in front of them...

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: There is this big Russian sub standing there.

ANNIE: It's huge. It's like this long, almost bullet - dark bullet in the water, and it is, like, towering out of the sea, just sitting there.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: It's insane.

ANNIE: What was it doing there?

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Exactly. What was it doing there? So...

ANNIE: The fisherman called the navy.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: And we all woke up to the news.

[NEWS CLIP: (Speaking Swedish)]

ANNIE: Soviet submarine beached on Sweden's shores.

[NEWS CLIP: (Speaking Swedish)]

ANNIE: It's a huge story. Like, all the papers write about it.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: And everyone is like, what on Earth is going on?

ANNIE: So the military comes down with their helicopters circling overhead, many, many boats.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: But at this time, Sweden was - people would also say we were incredibly naive because we didn't have any wars for, you know - the last war was, like...

ANNIE: Oh, you're soft.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: It was like - yeah, it was, like, Napoleon Wars. We didn't really - weren't involved in anything.

ANNIE: So Magnus said the military sent some guys out to the submarine.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: And, you know, we kind of knocked on the door of the sub and said...

ANNIE: Wait. They knocked on the side of the sub.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yeah. I don't know if they knocked. But, you know, they kind of asked kindly, can we come in and have a look? And they said, no, no, of course not.

ANNIE: OK.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: You know, and then they said, oh, OK, sorry about that. But some - there were some clever physicists. They parked a small boat beside of the sub, and through some clever measurements, they could measure that there were nuclear, you know, weapons inside.

ANNIE: Oh, scary.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: You know, we have these defining moments for a nation. In the states, you have, like, the Kennedy murder, the 9/11.

ANNIE: Yeah.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: And, you know, and this is one of those for Swedes. And people started immediately to say, hey; this is war. Like, we are in war. And eventually because, again, maybe we were too soft...

ANNIE: What happened is that the commander of the Soviet sub told the Swedish military that all of their navigation instruments on board had malfunctioned all at once.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Sort of sorry, we navigated wrongly.

ANNIE: You know, we lost our way. We ran ashore. Like, we made a mistake.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yeah.

ANNIE: So the Swedish military sent a bunch of ships out to the sub, pulled it off the bottom. And they, you know, returned it to international waters, and it left.

LULU: OK.

ANNIE: And for a 13-year-old Magnus...

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: It was super weird because you could see that adults and the politicians, everyone were completely - how to say - like, taken with their pants down, right?

ANNIE: [laughs].

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: It was like, what? Like, no one could, of course, explain this. So the Navy, of course, they got a lot of money, so they became more vigilant. They had to now start to see if they could, you know - could they protect the Swedish coasts?

ANNIE: And, you know...

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: It's not an easy thing to do.

ANNIE: ...It's a huge coastline, over a thousand miles. So how do you, like, patrol that?

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: An obvious way to do that is with sound.

ANNIE: Forget ships and sonar.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Sounds propagate very well on the water.

ANNIE: We're just going to listen for the subs.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yeah.

ANNIE: Does that mean they, like - they hung hydrophones on buoys out in the water...

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yeah, yeah.

ANNIE: ...All along the coast? Like, just a whole bunch of them?

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yeah. Some - yeah, well, not everywhere, of course. But it started to listen into this more carefully after this - all the politicians promised us that now we have bought all these gears, and now we are ready to tackle this problem and, you know, no problem. And, you know, then we went into sleep again. And then in October '82, we had the next wake-up call.

ANNIE: This time in this big harbor...

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Very close to Stockholm.

ANNIE: ...Right outside of a Swedish naval base.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: People started to see periscopes.

ANNIE: One after another after another after another popping up out of the water. And the Swedish military was like...

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: We have detected them, and we have them.

ANNIE: So this time, the Swedes send in a bunch of ships.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: With nets.

ANNIE: These big metal nets that they use to block the exits of the harbor, so there's no way a big sailboat can get out. And then they send in a bunch of helicopters that have hydrophones, and they dip those hydrophones...

ANNIE: ...Into the water. And they start listening for submarines. And before long, one of those hydrophones would pick up the unmistakable sound of a Soviet sub.

LULU: And what does that sound like?

ANNIE: I'm going to get to that. But what happened is when the Swedes heard this sound, they would drop a bomb from the helicopter that would hit the water, sink down to a predetermined depth. And then (imitating explosion).

LULU: [laughs].

ANNIE: Big explosion.

LULU: OK.

ANNIE: And the helicopters and the ships, they would just wait to see if the explosion would, like - would damage or scare one of these Soviet subs up to the surface. And so they waited and waited - and nothing. No Soviet sub emerged, not even a piece of one. And the Swedish military kept this up for a month, chasing down subs they hear, dropping bombs. And by the end of the month, nothing comes of it. They don't capture a single submarine.

LULU: What?

ANNIE: I know. Isn't that crazy? [laughs].

LULU: Did they just - did they somehow get out of the barricade?

ANNIE: They don't know. They don't know. I mean, I guess, they could even be down there today. They could have hurt the sub. The sub fell. The sub, you know, filled with water. Like, they could be down at the bottom of the harbor. I guess these are just - this is just a huge harbor, and they just couldn't really find any evidence of any Soviet sub.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yeah, it just ended in nothing. And then it - things started to get more and more bizarre. So through the 1980s, every half a year, every year, we would have these submarine chases. All of a sudden somewhere on the coast, the military would give an alarm - oh, there is a sub. And then you would have these helicopters, bombs - nothing.

ANNIE: Really?

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: And then six months would pass. Once, it was right outside the Royal Castle in Stockholm.

ANNIE: So were people getting, like, annoyed? Like, come on, crying wolf a little bit.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yeah.

ANNIE: Or are people still very afraid?

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yeah. I think, you know, the Cold War is still going on.

ANNIE: Magnus said there was just this fear.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: The bear is coming. The - you know, the Russian bear is coming. We just have to spend more money to find him.

ANNIE: Were they still seeing periscopes?

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yeah. So that's the thing. What do they see...

ANNIE: ...The whole of the '80s? Or what were they hearing and seeing?

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: So they started to ask people, if anyone sees something, you should report it. Call this number. Call the Swedish military.

ANNIE: And they got tons of calls.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Many thousands of observations. But then, the problem is, it's just like in - on a crime scene. If you ask people to say what they saw, it's a long structure sticking up from the water. So is that a periscope, or is it a boat? Could be a small whale. It could be a sub. But who knows?

ANNIE: So what the Swedish military did is they came up with this ranking system for observations. On one end, you had rank six.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Six says, you - we cannot tell. No one knows [laughs].

ANNIE: Could be anything.

LULU: OK.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: And then you have, like, rank one is a definite sub.

ANNIE: Definitely a sub.

LULU: OK.

ANNIE: Now, the thing is, for a rank one, definitely a Soviet sub, pretty much every time in the report it said...

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: We heard a typical sound.

ANNIE: The typical sound?

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: We heard a typical sound.

LULU: What is a typical sound?

ANNIE: So when the - so the typical sound is basically when - like, when the Swedes were sure that they were encountering a Soviet sub, those hydrophones in the water would always pick up this particular sound. It was called the typical sound because it was believed to be the sound that, you know, just, like, a typical Soviet sub would make. And so anytime the Swedish military encountered that sound...

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: It was automatically given a one.

ANNIE: ...It meant that encounter was 100% a sub. And the...

LULU: And do we...

ANNIE: I'm sorry. Go.

LULU: And do we know what that sounds like?

ANNIE: Well, not yet because it's classified.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yeah. No one could listen to the sound, and no one could know what it was.

ANNIE: But all the hydrophones were picking up this sound.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: They were picking up the typical sound.

ANNIE: For years...

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yeah.

ANNIE: ...The Swedish military kept hearing this secret Soviet sub sound in their waters.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: So then the strange thing happens, right? In 1989, everything is changing.

[NEWS CLIP: Thousands and thousands of West Germans come to make the point that the wall has suddenly become irrelevant.]

ANNIE: The Iron Curtain falls, the Berlin Wall falls.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: You know, everything opened up. And all of a sudden, over one night, basically, the world changed for us.

[NEWS CLIP: Changes were just sweeping across this continent.]

[NEWS CLIP: It's something unreal for me.]

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: All these places that had been almost impossible to go to were all open.

ANNIE: It's as if that white blank space on the map was starting to actually get some color and shapes and names. But while all of this is going on, something very weird is happening. Because the Swedish military is continuing to report hearing the sounds of Russian submarines invading their waters.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Twenty, 30 incidents every year.

ANNIE: And Magnus said, by 1994...

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: At that time, we had the prime minister, Carl Bildt. And he got so upset about this, he wrote a very angry letter to Boris Yeltsin saying, now you really have to stop. Now you have created your own country, and the first thing you do is to try to occupy Sweden.

ANNIE: We're sick of this.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Stop.

ANNIE: But Boris Yeltsin's like, I don't know what you're talking about.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yeltsin said, well, we are, of course, not there. We don't - you can see; all of our subs are on land. What are you talking about? You're crazy.

ANNIE: He denies everything. So as this whole mystery is unfolding, Magnus is watching from the sidelines. And by 1996...

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: You know, by that time, I was a university student.

ANNIE: He's studying underwater biological sounds.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: And I got a job in the fishery department because my mentor - he was sort of - he was called Hakan Westerberg. He still is. He's still around.

HAKAN WESTERBERG: Yeah, let's hope so.

ANNIE: That's Hakan.

HAKAN WESTERBERG: Retired oceanographer and fisheries biologist. I started with telemetry, acoustic tracking in the '70s.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: And he was one of the few in Sweden who really was an authority on underwater biological sounds.

ANNIE: And one day, Magnus is standing in Hakan's office...

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: I was quite fresh on my job.

ANNIE: ...When the phone on Hakan's desk rings.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: He was not there, so - and I just took his phone. And they...

ANNIE: You just answered the phone on his desk?

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But we had a very collegial relationship.

HAKAN WESTERBERG: Yeah.

ANNIE: And on the other end of the line...

ANNIE: ...It's the Royal Swedish Navy calling.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: They said they wanted to talk to my boss, of course. But then because he wasn't there, they started to talk to me. And they said, well, they are forming this committee...

ANNIE: ...This top-secret government investigation.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: And they would like me and my boss to be part of that.

ANNIE: So they say yes. There's a background check.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yeah, I'm cleared by the secret police.

HAKAN WESTERBERG: They were very secretive.

ANNIE: And then he and Hakan are on a train to Stockholm...

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: ...To this huge naval base. It's just like in a James Bond movie. You have a whole submarine base inside the rocks.

ANNIE: Wait. What?

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: You can sort of open the rocks, and you go in there with your boats.

ANNIE: What?

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: And you can have huge...

ANNIE: How do you open the rock?

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: ...Boats inside. Yeah, I don't know. You have some big, you know...

ANNIE: Rock door?

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: ...Locks or something like that. Yeah. Yeah, something like that.

ANNIE: What?

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: So we went in there and, you know...

ANNIE: So Magnus and Hakan, who are not totally sure why they're there, are winding their way through this military base.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Long tunnels...

HAKAN WESTERBERG: Two Navy captains were our liaisons.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yeah.

ANNIE: And eventually...

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: You come into this meeting room with all these electronic, you know, gadgets...

HAKAN WESTERBERG: ...A lot of recording equipment.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: You have a world map, and they can follow the whole world from in there.

ANNIE: Kind of like mission control at NASA.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: It was super exciting.

ANNIE: Finally, they take their seats at a long table. And sitting there around the table are a bunch of other academic types like them.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: But there are also some very high-rank military people. So it was really, like, a wow moment for me. And we were sitting down there, and then they said, well, ladies and gentlemen, you are the first civil people who will listen to the sound.

HAKAN WESTERBERG: The typical sound. This famous sound.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: So now we will actually play the typical sound for you.

ANNIE: So it's been top secret for the last...

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yeah, 15 years.

ANNIE: For 15 years.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yeah. No one has been - no one outside the military was able or allowed to listen to it.

ANNIE: Wow. So were you excited?

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Extremely, of course. This was like, wow.

ANNIE: Now, what Magnus said he expected to hear was something like...

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Bing (ph), bing...

ANNIE: You know, what he'd heard in the movies.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: You know, these movies where they're sitting around a sub.

ANNIE: Oh, yeah.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: So I was thinking, it must be something like that, right?

ANNIE: But then one of the Navy officers turns to a tape recorder and hits play. And this is what comes out.

LULU: Huh. God, is it - are they picking up voices, or, like, radio static? So that's always what it sounds like?

ANNIE: Yeah. This is the sound they've been recording every year since that first sub showed up.

LULU: It's intriguing.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: It sounds a bit like a few Donald Ducks at a very long distance.

ANNIE: What? What do you mean?

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Well, you know, like, Donald Duck, this kind of - his voice. If you imagine you had, like, 10 Donald Ducks and they would be...

ANNIE: [laughs].

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: ...Maybe, like, 100 meters away or so, I think it would be something like that. And it also sounds a bit like an old shoe that kind of gets like (imitating squeaking).

ANNIE: Oh, yeah. OK.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: It has this kind of squeaky...

ANNIE: [laughs].

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: ...Part to it.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: And then we are sitting there with all these generals. And they are playing this sound.

ANNIE: Did you look around the room at the table of scientists...

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yeah.

ANNIE: ...And military people, and you guys...

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Well, everyone is sitting there. And, you know, all these professors, they were kind of stiff upper lip. So they were just sitting there and listening kind of carefully. But my boss, he's more like - he's a very relaxed guy, you know?

HAKAN WESTERBERG: I think we looked at each other with a very confused gaze.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: But we were kind of keeping a stiff face also.

ANNIE: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool, cool - got to play it cool. Yeah.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

ANNIE: So after they played the sound, the naval officers turned to the scientists and say basically, OK, now that you've heard the typical sound, we'd like each of you to try to figure out who or what is making it.

HAKAN WESTERBERG: To get to the bottom of what this typical sound was about.

ANNIE: And even in that moment sitting at the table, Hakan and Magnus turned to each other. And they don't say anything, but they're both thinking....

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: What - this is very strange. This is definitely not the sub.

LULU: Dun dun dun. After the break, Magnus and Hakan follow their intuition deep into a cloud of mystery. And they get to the bottom of it. Oh, they get right up close to the bottom of the mystery. RADIOLAB will be back in just a second. Stay with us.

LULU: RADIOLAB - Lulu - Annie - military crises trying to be averted by biologists.

ANNIE: So after the meeting, Magnus and Hakan are standing outside...

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Just standing there, having a cigarette.

ANNIE: ...Talking about the sound.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: It sounds a bit like a popping sounds.

HAKAN WESTERBERG: The sound when you fry bacon.

ANNIE: And both of them thought...

HAKAN WESTERBERG: ...That these must be a biological sound.

ANNIE: But what?

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: And then I remember saying to Hakan, air bubbles.

ANNIE: This sounds like air bubbles.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: If you think of a scuba diver who gets a hole pinched in his...

ANNIE: His pipes?

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: ...One of his pipes - God forbid...

ANNIE: [laughs].

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: ...Like an air bubble stream coming out of a hose. It sounds a bit like that.

ANNIE: So their question is, like, which animal releases air under the water?

HAKAN WESTERBERG: And we had kind of this hunch.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yeah, yeah.

ANNIE: Now, incredibly, you can actually find this hunch in New York City, but it helps to have a car...

MATT KILTY: Oh, my.

ANNIE: Hello.

ANNIE: ...And a friend. So I called up producer Matt Kielty, who's a friend with a car.

MATT: You have a bucket.

ANNIE: Yeah.

ANNIE: And I also brought a large bucket.

MATT: What a ridiculous bucket.

ANNIE: OK, so...

MATT: OK.

ANNIE: ...I only told Matt we were driving to the Hudson River. That was it.

MATT: OK, so we're taking the bridge.

ANNIE: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

ANNIE: We drove through Brooklyn, over the Manhattan Bridge...

MATT: OK, so now that we've...

ANNIE: Wait, is there a - is this the cup holder?

MATT: It's my one cup holder.

ANNIE: OK. Well, I need...

ANNIE: ...Drove up Manhattan, up to the riverfront...

MATT: We can sneak...

ANNIE: ...And look for parking...

ANNIE: No, there's a fire hydrant right there.

ANNIE: ...For a while.

MATT: I wonder if I could park...

ANNIE: A long while.

ANNIE: It's a red light.

MATT: How many fire hydrants do you need on one block?

ANNIE: Matt, it's a red light.

MATT: Oh, my God, that's a spot.

ANNIE: Get on Riverside.

MATT: We're on Riverside Drive.

ANNIE: OK, let's go up it.

MATT: We'll just park here.

ANNIE: It says no parking any time. This is not going to work.

MATT: Well, how long are we going to be here?

ANNIE: I don't know. We need to wander around a bit.

MATT: I don't even know what we're doing.

ANNIE: We need [laughs]...

MATT: I'm looking for parking.

LULU: OK. What are you [laughs] - can you just...

ANNIE: [laughs].

LULU: What are you looking for? What was the hunch?

ANNIE: Yes. OK, OK. So we got down to, like, the rocky shoreline of the Hudson River...

ANNIE: There is a piece of a dead fish.

MATT: That might be a whole fish.

ANNIE: ...Where we found it.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Herring.

HAKAN WESTERBERG: Herring.

ANNIE: A herring fish.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: I think that evening, we were like, let's try herring.

ANNIE: Oh, my gosh. Can we get down?

So for reasons that will become clear very soon, I tried to buy herring, but you can't buy fresh herring in New York City in December. And so I dragged Matt out to the Hudson River because I had read in an article that herring fish have been washing up dead on the shores of the Hudson and nobody really knows why. It could be pollution. It could be water temperature. But still unclear [laughs] exactly why that happened, but...

LULU: And you know what you're looking for? Like, what exactly does a herring look like?

ANNIE: Oh, OK. Yeah. So...

ANNIE: How am I going to pick it up? That is the question.

ANNIE: I picked up this dead one we found.

ANNIE: I guess I'll just put my hands around it. Oh.

ANNIE: And...

ANNIE: Very slippery.

ANNIE: Whoa.

ANNIE: ...Herring are...

ANNIE: Very big.

ANNIE: ...I don't know, maybe 10 inches...

ANNIE: A big dead fish.

ANNIE: ...Shiny.

ANNIE: Wow.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: They are the silver of the oceans 'cause there are all these reflections from their scales.

ANNIE: They just kind of look like - it's like if a kid drew a fish, it would be this fish.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yeah.

ANNIE: But the really important thing about a herring, the whole reason why Magnus and Hakan had this hunch, is because of what is going on inside of a herring.

Now, Lulu I know you've written a whole book about why fish should not be called fish. But have you ever wondered, how does a fish just float around in the water?

LULU: I don't think I have actually wondered that.

ANNIE: Let me go ahead and tell you. So it turns out in most fish, they have this thing called...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The swim bladder...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The swim bladder...]

ANNIE: ...The swim bladder, which is basically this tiny sac...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Filled with gas...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: That regulates the fish's buoyancy.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Similar to the buoyancy tank of a submarine.]

ANNIE: So if you're a fish and you want to go up or down in the water column, you do this by either pulling air into your swim bladder sac or pushing it out. And most fish do this through their bloodstream and their gills, which means it's quiet, silent, like, basically invisible. But not the herring - the herring is different.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yeah, the herring is special because they have a canal straight from the swim bladder to the anal opening.

ANNIE: So when a herring needs to get air out of its swim bladder, it basically pushes it through this canal, out its butt, into the water. And Magnus says when this happens...

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: You will have this sort of small string of air bubbles.

ANNIE: Which, he had a hunch, might just sound like bubbles coming out of a hose underwater.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yeah.

LULU: So he - his guess is, like, this submarine sound is actually just bubbles that come out their butt.

ANNIE: Uh-huh.

LULU: So his guess is fish farts.

ANNIE: Yeah.

LULU: OK.

ANNIE: Technically, these are not farts because they do not come from, like, digestive gases.

LULU: OK.

ANNIE: But...

LULU: This makes me feel better. I feel like I can continue to engage with this story without feeling so gross.

ANNIE: Oh, are you, like, anti-fart or something?

LULU: I'm just very grossed out by them, yeah.

ANNIE: What?

LULU: Like, I just - are you not?

ANNIE: No. Well - I mean, no.

LULU: How are you...

ANNIE: What? Why are you?

LULU: It's like, even saying the word makes me, like...

ANNIE: Fart.

LULU: I'm like, I don't want to be in this space even linguistically, let alone aromatically.

ANNIE: My God, this is like - wow, that's so interesting. I would never...

LULU: How are you not?

ANNIE: Because they're the funniest thing in the world, because they're a thing we all do - if we can't, that's upsetting. They make you feel better immediately.

LULU: [laughs].

ANNIE: Like, even animals, like, find them funny kind of. I don't know. They're just - they're wonderful. They connect us all.

LULU: They make you feel better immediately. They connect us all. OK. I [laughs] - your - I just appreciate the meaning you draw while also being simultaneously relieved these are not actual farts. Carry on.

ANNIE: OK. So Hakan and Magnus, they now had their, like, fish fart theory. But now they needed to figure out, did the fish fart actually sound like the submarine sound?

HAKAN WESTERBERG: And we approached that rather crudely.

ANNIE: Basically, Magnus went to a fish shop...

HAKAN WESTERBERG: Bought a couple of herrings.

ANNIE: That were dead...

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Went to the lab...

HAKAN WESTERBERG: ...Rigged up the hydrophone.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: OK.

ANNIE: You hold him.

ANNIE: And then Magnus took this herring, submerged it underwater.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: And I squeezed it.

ANNIE: It's so weird to squeeze a fish, though. It's very weird.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: But I squeezed it pretty hard.

ANNIE: I don't think anything's coming out.

ANNIE: And he just kept squeezing it.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: So it was like kind of (blows raspberry).

ANNIE: Oh.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Oh. What is - (screaming).

ANNIE: It's poo [laughs]. I made it poop.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: It was like a really big blur of, you know, herring poo and things coming out.

ANNIE: I'm sorry, fish.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: OK, toss him over.

ANNIE: Oh.

ANNIE: So then...

ANNIE: You want to squeeze one?

ANNIE: ...Hakan tried.

ANNIE: You should get this feeling. It's a weird feeling. Maybe this will be the lucky one.

HAKAN WESTERBERG: I got the magic touch.

ANNIE: Wait. Wait.

HAKAN WESTERBERG: I got them fart fingers [laughs].

ANNIE: He put the herring in the water.

HAKAN WESTERBERG: Squeezed it...

ANNIE: Gentle - gently squeezing.

HAKAN WESTERBERG: ...Gently.

ANNIE: Gentle. Come on, little butt (ph).

ANNIE: And then...

ANNIE: Oh.

HAKAN WESTERBERG: Oh.

ANNIE: ...Bubbles.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: (Unintelligible) Bubbles.

HAKAN WESTERBERG: It was a tiny little bubble.

ANNIE: OK. That's good. You do have fart fingers.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: And then you would hear this kind of very eerie poppy sound, this kind of the perfect typical sound, we thought.

ANNIE: Turns out, they thought wrong...

LULU: [laughs].

ANNIE: ...Because when they look at the recording of the fish fart compared to the recording of the sub sound, they just - they don't really match.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Absolutely not.

ANNIE: This has just become...

HAKAN WESTERBERG: OK.

ANNIE: ...Very depressing.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: But I mean, this is a dead fish in an aquarium.

ANNIE: So then they went out into a bay with this little tube...

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Connected to a vacuum pump.

LULU: Oh, no.

ANNIE: ...Managed to get a wild herring in there, got it to fart.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yeah.

ANNIE: That sound didn't match.

HAKAN WESTERBERG: No.

ANNIE: But then, they had this thought. We need to get more realistic here. We need to get out into the wild because herring aren't solo fish. They travel together in schools.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: These schools can be huge, like a square kilometer.

ANNIE: Like, sometimes we're talking billions of fish all traveling together. And so they thought, if we're right about this, the sound we're looking for isn't the sound of one fish farting. It's the sound of a lot of fish farting.

LULU: Ew.

ANNIE: Like, a lot, a lot.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yes. And, you know, we were working for the fishery science in Sweden, so we knew a lot of fishermen. And they would tell us when herring goes into nets, they get stressed, and the net starts boiling, they said.

LULU: Whoa.

ANNIE: So Magnus follows this clue onto a boat and out to a fishing trap.

ANNIE: Beneath him, in the shadow of the boat, he could see thousands of herring just swimming around down there.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: I put the hydrophone in the water. And...

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Victory.

HAKAN WESTERBERG: The typical sound.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Ja.

HAKAN WESTERBERG: [laughs].

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Ja. The whole box was just singing...

ANNIE: Wow.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: ...Of these sounds. It was just incredible. It was just this cacophony of herring.

ANNIE: Wow.

ANNIE: Their findings were harder for some members of the navy than others to accept.

HAKAN WESTERBERG: I mean, there were people that - their whole career was chasing submarines.

ANNIE: But finally, in 1999, it became official. The typical sound that had haunted the Swedish Navy for over a decade was not made by Soviet submarines. Instead, for over a decade, the Swedish Navy had been straining their ears to hear the sound of thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of herring, all farting...

LULU: Oh, my God.

ANNIE: ...Together.

LULU: OK.

HAKAN WESTERBERG: So that was the end of the typical sound.

ANNIE: Man, I just can't believe - like, you guys so quickly had all these ideas, but why did the military not think for 15 years - like, are there no scientists in the military that would have...

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yeah.

ANNIE: ...Any of your experience? Or, like, why was it...

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yeah, I think they didn't have to knowhow. And the other thing is this whole thing of the military having this culture that you keep things secret, which means that it's very hard to have, like, an open - and it's very top-down. So it's very hard to have an open discussion about - like, a scientific discussion going on around these topics. I mean, now I make it sound like they are very different from the rest of us, but in a way, they are just human beings. And you can easily wind yourself up in some kind of explanation. If you have a few authorities telling you how things are, you can easily start to collect evidence that that must be how it was.

ANNIE: Magnus told me that the Swedish military actually used sonar to investigate this sound. And what they saw on the screen in front of them was that sound coming from an object, and then they would watch that object split apart.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Divided into two...

ANNIE: Oh.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: ...And then divided into four.

ANNIE: What?

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: And then it would go back into one again.

ANNIE: Whoa.

ANNIE: And now we can guess that what they were probably seeing was a school of herring splitting apart, splitting apart again. But at the time, this was a Soviet sub.

ANNIE: So they must have thought these subs are, like, super-high-tech.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Exactly. They had people investigating. How can it be that Russia...

ANNIE: What?

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: ...Can build a sub that can sort of be decomposed into two and to four and then back into one?

ANNIE: No way.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: You have, like, military scientists sitting and trying to build a model of Russian sub that can sort of disintegrate into four. I mean, it doesn't make any sense.

ANNIE: That is amazing.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: I think this is something to look after in our times that - you can always...

ANNIE: Oh, yeah.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: ...Laugh at it and say how wrong they were, but I wonder what people will think about us in 20 years.

ANNIE: Oh, totally. I think about that all the time.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yeah. Yeah.

ANNIE: Like, what is the fish fart of today?

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Exactly.

ANNIE: There's just one more little thing that I take away from this story because as I was doing research, I learned that herring have just been fished forever.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yeah.

ANNIE: Like, really fished.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: All these Scandinavian countries - they were built on herring, basically [laughs]. It's kind of...

ANNIE: Right.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: It's been what people have been eating and fishing for thousands of years.

ANNIE: Right, and not just that. Like, cities have been founded on it. Cultures have been founded on it.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yeah.

ANNIE: Millions have been made, and these fish have just been, like, running for their lives for millennia.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yeah.

ANNIE: And it's like, in this one moment, or in this one decade or period of time, like, herrings just got back at humans in some way and, like...

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

ANNIE: ...Sort of gave them a wild chase, you know?

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yeah. Yeah. You could say that, yeah.

ANNIE: And just for once, they had the power and the upper hand.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: They played an important part of a country's foreign policy.

ANNIE: Totally, yeah.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

ANNIE: It's almost like in the end, this story is just a very long-winded fart joke on us humans.

MAGNUS WAHLBERG: Yeah, exactly. It is. That's what it is [laughs].

LULU: Winded - I see what you did there, McEwen. This very long-winded fart joke was bravely reported by Annie McEwen and beautifully produced by Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen and Sarah Qari with sound design by Jeremy Bloom. Reporting and translation help from Magnus Ormstadt. Huge thanks to Ben Wilson, who's done his own fascinating research into the herring toots, and to Ola Tunander, Hans Gordon, Andreas Timmelstad, Klaus Helmersen and Meg Bolz. Catch you on the flip, friends. May your sanity stay intact and your wind broken. Bye.

[LISTENER: Hi. This is Sam calling from London, England. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Suzie Lechtenberg is our executive producer. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachael Cusick, David Gebel, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Sarah Qari, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster, with help from Shima Oliaee, Sarah Sandbach and Jonny Moens. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly and Emily Krieger.]

 

-30-

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

 

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of programming is the audio record.