The Pink Sea Cucumbers

I'm calling because I think it's time people knew about this. I served in the Navy from 1971 to 1982, and I was part of something that most people have never heard of. Something that doesn't officially exist in any records you'll ever find. The unit was called the Pink Sea Cucumbers. I know how that sounds. I know it sounds like a joke. But that was the designation, PSC for short. It was a black ops unit, highly classified. We operated out of San Diego, but our missions took us all over the Pacific. Our specialty was underwater insertion and extraction for operations that couldn't go through normal channels. There were twelve of us. All volunteers, all with extensive diving experience and security clearances that went beyond top secret. The training lasted eight months. They put us through things I still can't talk about, psychological testing, pressure tolerance beyond anything standard Navy divers did, and extensive briefings on phenomena that the military had been tracking since the 1940s. What made us different from other special operations units was our primary method of transport. We didn't use submarines. We didn't use surface vessels. We used USOs.

USOs. Unidentified Submerged Objects. The Navy's been tracking them since World War II, objects moving underwater at speeds that defy physics, making impossible maneuvers, appearing on sonar[ and then vanishing. By the early seventies, we'd identified patterns. Regular routes. Predictable appearances in certain locations at certain times. Someone high up, I never knew exactly who, decided these objects could be useful. If they were traveling these routes anyway, and if we could find a way to hitch a ride, we could insert teams into locations without any conventional signature. No ships, no aircraft, no paper trail. Perfect deniability. The first few months were just observation. We'd go out in modified submersibles, small, two-man craft, and position ourselves along known USO routes. Just watching. Learning their patterns. They moved through the water like nothing I'd ever seen. No propulsion signature, no cavitation, just this smooth, impossible movement. They ranged in size from maybe thirty feet across to over two hundred feet. In March of 1972, we made first contact. Not communication, contact. We positioned ourselves in the path of a USO that had been tracked making regular runs between a deep ocean trench west of Hawaii and the coast of Japan. When it approached, we activated a specific frequency pulse, something the eggheads at the Naval Research Lab had developed based on years of acoustic data.

The USO slowed. Not stopped, slowed to a speed we could match. Maybe fifteen knots. It maintained that speed for six minutes, which gave us time to approach and attach magnetic grapples to its surface. The hull, if you want to call it that, was smooth. Almost organic-looking, but metallic. Temperature read at exactly ambient water temperature, which shouldn't have been possible given the speed it had been traveling at. We rode it for forty-seven nautical miles before it accelerated again and we had to release. But that was the proof of concept. We could do this. Over the next six months, we refined the technique. Developed better grapples, better timing, better positioning. By September, we were ready for actual operational deployment. Our first real mission was an extraction off the coast of the Philippines. There was an asset, I can't say who, that needed to be pulled out quietly. No State Department involvement, no official channels. We positioned ourselves in the Mindanao Trench, waited for the USO we'd been tracking on that route, and attached. The ride took four hours. The USO brought us to within two miles of the target coordinates. We released, made our way to shore in standard dive gear, completed the extraction, and returned to the designated pickup point. The USO came back exactly on schedule, they were reliable like that, once you understood their patterns. We attached, rode it back out to international waters, and transferred to a submarine that was waiting for us.