Object off Alaska coast may be WWII Sub

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Underwater sonar images of a black shape against a background of grainy monochrome are safely stored on two computer hard drives at Bruce Abele's home in Newton, Mass.

Blurred by odd shadows and striations, the silhouettes are the biggest clues in more than 60 years to the fate of his father's World War II submarine, the USS Grunion, which sank nearly 5,000 miles west of Massachusetts, near the obscure islands at the tip of Alaska's Aleutian chain. For decades, relatives of the Grunion's 70 lost crewmen had no information beyond fragmented U.S. Navy records, and a few rumors, about where and why the sub went down.

They knew the Grunion had sunk two Japanese submarine chasers and heavily damaged a third in July 1942 near Kiska, one of two Aleutian islands occupied by the Japanese. They knew her last official radio message to the sub base at Dutch Harbor, on July 30, 1942, described heavy enemy activity at Kiska Harbor. They knew she still had 10 of her 24 torpedoes during that communication.

They knew Dutch Harbor responded with an order to return to the base, but they don't know if Grunion ever received it. Until a few years ago, the clues were too sparse to justify a search, said Abele, whose father, Mannert Abele, was the Grunion's commander. "We really didn't do anything about it because there was nothing, no information," Abele said. "What were we going to do?" Abele and his two brothers all married and had children. Bruce, the oldest, started working in computers in the late 1950s and later invested in Boston-area real estate.

Brad, the middle son, owned a management recruiting business and John helped found the multibillion dollar medical equipment company Boston Scientific Corp. Four years ago, a man who had heard about the Grunion's disappearance e-mailed Bruce the links to several Grunion Web sites. One site held an entirely new clue, a note from a Japanese model ship builder who said he thought he knew what had happened to the Grunion.

John Abele contacted the man, Yutaka Iwasaki, who translated and sent him a report written in the 1960s by a Japanese military officer who served in the Aleutians. A maritime magazine had recently reprinted the report.

by www.thesupernaturalworld.co.uk