WHY ARE SHIPS AT SEA GOING IN CIRCLES?
Now here's one that has my high octane speculation and suspicion meter in the red zone. It was spotted and shared by E.K., and it raises all sorts of questions, for it seems that ships at sea have been sailing in circles, and no one, apparently, knows why. Here's the story:
A maritime mystery: What has been causing ships to sail in circles?
As the article notes, ships sailing in circles - often unbeknownst to their crews (we'll get back to that) - has been a growing phenomenon, particularly in Chinese waters, and as the article avers, one immediate suspicion is electronic warfare and the deliberate interference and manipulation of GPS data:
Ships appearing to sail in circles have become an increasingly common and mysterious phenomenon near a number of ports on the coast of China, especially near oil terminals and government facilities - but nothing had been seen where the Willowy was.
Researchers monitoring these bizarre circles near the Chinese coast believe they are probably the result of systematic GPS manipulation designed to undermine a tracking system which all commercial ships are required to use under international law.
...
The circles spotted near the Chinese coast have been attributed to GPS interference, something which coincided with US sanctions on Iran, according to Phil Diacon, the chief executive of marine intelligence firm Dryad Global.
This immediately made me think of the USS Fitrzgerald and USS John McCain incidents, where two American warships, one in Japanese waters (the Fitzgerald) and the other in the busy waters around Singapore (the McCain), suffered collisions with civilian vessels, in spite of the latest in electronic detection and warfare equipment. I said then, and maintain still (and in spite of friendly efforts from ex-US Navy personnel to dissuade me), that these were not accidents, but perhaps the result of electronic warfare of some sort. I've even gone so far as to entertain the possibility that some sort of mind-manipulation technology may have been used not only on the crews of the American warships, but perhaps also on the crews of the civilian vessels with which they collided.
The problem with that explanation here is that the latest episodes occur far from waters in which China would be interested:
But according to a global analysis of this data by environmental groups SkyTruth and Global Fishing Watch, a number of circling incidents have also occurred quite a distance away from Chinese ports, with some impossibly appearing miles inland near San Francisco.
SkyTruth found the real locations of these ships often thousands of miles away from the circular sailing tracks. The ships were again were often actually near oil terminals or in locations where GPS disruption had been reported before.
In this case, a Liberian flagged vessel began to show some unusual behavior:
At approximately 1am on Sunday morning, the Liberian-flagged crude oil tanker, operated by Singaporean business Executive Ship, suddenly swung starboard and began actually sailing in circles.
The ship was unable to steer and the crew reported that four other vessels in its vicinity were caught in a similar spiral, slowly converging on each other for an unknown reason.
...
There are suggestions that GPS jamming has been used by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps to dupe commercial vessels into entering Iranian waters, and Chinese electronic warfare capabilities have been proposed as a potential cause for some ships appearing thousands of miles away from where they really were.
The crew aboard the Willowy were aware of these issues but none of these risks could be feasible west of Cape Town - a long way from the Strait of Hormuz or the contested South China Sea.
So what's the explanation here? The article offers the South Atlantic magnetic anomaly and the weakening magnetic field of the Earth as a possible hypothesis:
But the European Space Agency has detected something else there.
Nobody knows why, but the Earth's magnetic field - which has lost almost 10% of its strength over the last two centuries - is growing particularly weak in a large region stretching from Africa to South America, impacting satellites and spacecraft.
Known as the South Atlantic Anomaly, the field strength in this area has rapidly shrunk over the past 50 years just as the area itself has grown and moved westward. And over the past five years a second centre of minimum intensity has developed southwest of Africa, very near to where the Willowy was sailing.
One speculation regarding this weakening is that it is a sign that the Earth is heading for a pole reversal - in which the north and south magnetic poles flip.
This flip won't happen immediately but instead would occur over the course of a couple of centuries during which there would be multiple north and south magnetic poles all around the globe.
The impact would be enormous for seafaring vessels whose navigation was based on magnetic compasses - causing them not only to sail in circles, but perhaps not even realise it.
Fortunately, as the crew and the company's onshore marine superintendents knew, it has been decades since magnetic compasses governed maritime navigation.
Modern ships like the Willowy use something called a gyrocompass instead, which finds true north as determined by gravity and the axis of the Earth's rotation rather than magnetic north.
Now, this is where it gets very interesting, especially if you've been following some discussions in physics for the past few decades where it has been suggested that there is a link - mysterious and unknown - between gravity and magnetism. And it's also where the article begins to raise more questions than it answers, for we're informed that the Willowy's gyrocompass mysteriously malfunctioned, cause unknown:
The crew, alongside the company's shore-based marine superintendents, investigated and identified that the ship's primary gyrocompass was indeed malfunctioning.
The ship resumed its course safely when it switched to using the secondary gyrocompass, along with an old-fashioned magnetic compass for good measure, Executive Ship confirmed to Sky News.
Asked what caused the failure, the company described it as "an incidental breakdown" and added "repair will be done at the next port where the cause will be identified by shore technicians".
But wait a minute, what about those four other ships involved in the incident? Indeed, the article itself asks this question in the very next paragraph:
But what about the other ships in the Willowy's vicinity, circling and seeming as if they would converge?
A spokesperson for Executive Ship explained to Sky News: "The initial presumptive cause of circling for the Willowy was considered to be strong currents which also led the crew to perceive that other ships were circling too."
With so many mysteries on the oceans, it must be easy to panic at sea.
And with that rather lack-luster ending and non-explanation, the whole article ends.
As the reader might have guessed, this has my high octane speculations and suspicions running in all sorts of directions, all of them in "the red zone." For example:
What if the appearance of the South Atlantic anomaly is not entirely natural? What if it is either deliberately engineered, or, is a consequence - an unknown effect - of so many new technologies being introduced around fifty years ago, such as extremely low frequency radio broadcasting using deeply embedded antennae in the Earth, which might interfere with the planetary dynamo and hence with the magnetic field? What if such technologies and there effects were deliberately investigated in the past 50 years, such that utilizing that technology one could literally induce a pole shift, or the creation of several local north or south magnetic poles?
But as the article notes, magnetic compasses and so on should not even be a concern, since ships use gyrocompasses. So the implication is that something might be causing gyrocompasses to malfunction simultaneously and in the same area. If that is the case (and the article does not explicitly say so, I'm merely speculating that it might be), then the question is what is making that happen? Given that the article spends much time indicating that many incidents might be written off to electronic warfare and interference of some sort, I wonder if it is being suggested that interference along the lines of my speculations in the previous paragraph isn't being suggested. But how and why?
My suspicion is that somehow the gyrocompasses are being intereferred with. There might be a variety of methods to do this: introduction of subtle precessional "wobbles" in the compass, which could "move" rotational "north" to a different position. Since gyrocompasses are based on the mass and rotation of the Earth and the compass in relation to them, this would seem to imply an ability to alter local or regional conditions; think of the "masscons" beneath the Moon's surface, anomalous concentrations of mass, which would increase the local gravitational acceleration on the lunar surface. Similar things might be being engineered - deliberately, or as an unintended consequence of other systems engineering.
In any case, I don't know about you, but I have the suspicion, the intuition, that regardless of whether or not we're looking at deliberate intentional (or unintentional) interference, the bottom line is we're looking at interference of major navigation systems.
And that makes this story one to watch.
See you on the flip side...
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Oh its much better than circles…ships that are amphibious…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE-7UpcZKqQ
these ships are tracked on AIS crossing overland, even crossing continents. The various alphabet agencies of each of the major powers have been able to spoof AIS/GPS for years now. The USS Fitzgerlad could easily be a case in point as the 20 storey super tanker involved only broadcast its position using a class B (SOLAS) AIS transceiver, this class is mainly small fishing vessels and private yachts. But they should have been pinging on a class A (SOLAS) AIS transceiver. And like the proverbial RTA insurance claim report had to swerve “several times before hitting the tree”. All very fishy for a supertanker! 🙂
Doc, your comment on the gradualness of pole reversals brought to mind evidence brought out by electric universe guys that indicates some past sudden changes. Wooly mammoths frozen solid buried with bellies and mouths full of fresh clover. These and other signs indicate huge and almost instantaneous climate shifts that they associate with polar shifts both rotational and electro mag. Some with and some without interplanetary incident.
Once upon a time (sort of), a compass sought out magnetic north where the pilot of the ship plotted a course in conjunction with stars at night (clear skies obliging) and the sunrise/high noon/sunset yielding something of a position. Regular observations of skies during daylight and starlight and lunar positions required elaborate calculations to prepare written tables to navigate mid ocean from those few that could do so. Finding an accurate means of determining longitude was something of an obsession during the 1700’s to include sizable prize rewards for a method that worked. Accurate time pieces became a sought-after instrument of choice. Since the 1800’s attaining accurate longitude became less of a mystery.
The gyrocompass, a sophisticated instrument and mini solar system in its own right, was able to break away from magnetic compass limitations. Been onboard modern ships for some time now. Most since the early 1900’s. Still, settings need to be made correctly or calibrated before setting sail. A reliable power unit for the spinning rotor needs to be free from disruption. The main unit is usually placed at the ships center of gravity and readings taken from there by way of repeaters – one at steering on the bridge. Just how vulnerable to manipulation commercial tankers and such are to outside sources seems a safety issue that needs attention.
The specific electronics and mechanics, although not entirely secret, of units and working parts is not something that’s easily acquired for common discussion without need to know for purposes of use. On board electronics can be affected by frequency sources not ordinarily breached. That might include directed pulsed beam weaponry to unpredictable solar and cosmic pulsed bursts. They can be significant even if short in duration but enough to disrupt or alter original settings that offsets subsequent readings, either by observation or by sensing electronics that ordinarily receive amplified pulses from the base unit. Shuffle the “right angles” abruptly of the rotor axis, the pivot axes in relation to the spinning earth rotation, and the readings might be temporarily shifted enough to be in error. Multiple applications or dual use might be part of the designs yet not intended for disruption. Like that Party purposed Hua(Whah)wei(way) Trojan Horse stuff. The entire tanker superstructure might be used against vulnerable equipment on board.
Take a toy gyroscope after initiating its main rotor spin and hit it and one can feel a slight shift or try shifting it abruptly by hand and one can feel significant resistance to rotation change and movement. Overcome that resisting force produced by the spinning rotor and subsequent readings can be read differently. Those that are more sophisticated might have their electronics pulsed if the energy of impact is sufficient. A heavily pulsed wave that affects the base unit and the attached electronics aboard ship could alter navigational readings, too, even sabotaged component parts made elsewhere might be at fault.
From this side of the monitor there’s quite a few variables to account for, for any reasonable hypothesis for any unexpected circular navigation not picked up by other navigational tools on ship. Surface warships and submarines rely on working gyrocompasses and all attached electronics, too.
Then again, a deliberate station-keeping-course-correction might seem like circular navigation. Mission objectives are, no doubt, classified or prohibited from prying snoops when military is involved, heh, heh. Tanker delays might have markets behind their seemingly circular navigation. The motives of company, captain, and crews deserve scrutiny.
Intriguing phenomenon. Steaming in a circle might imply a default setting if contact is lost with GPS or other positioning system.
A gyrocompass uses angular momentum to determine a perpendicular line to the planet’s spin axis. The device is electric, and so susceptible to magnetic fields. After all, electricity and magnetism are essentially the same thing – one induces the other and neither can exist without the other.
One thing that argues in favor of the natural theory is that pole reversal happens roughly every 12,000-13,000 years, and we are about 12,000 years past the last one. In fact, both magnetic poles are heading for Indonesia right now, the the MAMA is directly opposite.
In any event, it wouldn’t hurt for the able seamen on those ships to pull out the sextant, a clock and a star chart and practice good old stellar navigation again. Lord knows they probably have plenty of free time out there.
“If this continues it’s back to the future astrolabes, sextants, sunstones, and star charts, chronometers.”
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesian_navigation
I bet they didn’t go round in circles ‘accidentally’.
maybe the oil tankers, if they must wander aimlessly, should gather in the Bermuda Trianlge so as not to go around in circles.
If this continues it’s back to the future astrolabes, sextants, sunstones, and star charts, chronometers.
The US Navy just started requiring junior officers to become proficient on sextants. No connection to GPS jamming or spoofing, of course…
Gotta go with all of the above. The most plausible is likely the biggest influence on this idea. Energy prices destabilized more than a few folk on earth into medical and now racist martial law. One more idea from the old Brendon O Connell area: killswitches and backdoors into every chip on the planet. Plausible that the same entity behind this set of oddities are the same entities behind boeing s/w issues, missing flights, fukushima, blowed up spacecraft, power outages, iranian centrifuges, and just boit any other fubar involving chips.
That was just about any other issue involving chips.
Process of elimination: Shut down all the HAARPs and CERNs first…not likely to happen though…
I first read about this in https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/11/15/131940/ghost-ships-crop-circles-and-soft-gold-a-gps-mystery-in-shanghai/https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/11/15/131940/ghost-ships-crop-circles-and-soft-gold-a-gps-mystery-in-shanghai/ that article leaves me with the impression that the issue originated as a means to purposefully obscure location and identity features inherent in AIS. Perhaps this capability has expanded such that the technique impacts the electronic display system and the part of the system that tells the ship its location, but, the ship location is consistent with its natural force vector. like a fake video loop displaying information that misleads people and systems that rely on the navigation display and AIS. It is not clear that there is an actual take over of the ship direction heading from the reporting. This display presentation trick could still cause a collision if ships are not signaling their accurate location or receiving accurate traffic location. guessing.
I agree with Goshawks, it’s often been reported on ZH that when oil gluts occur, and right now we are in an extreme glut, tankers tend to get parked or just sail in holding patterns. The article does note that this is happening around oil terminals in particular.
As the magnetic poles shift, weaken, develops holes so might the veil between worlds and our waters become mingled causing great disruption. Perhaps one disruption is in sea trade. Temporarily these ships partially sail into the waters of another world with a slightly different gravity and magnetic field. Some go all the way through and never return and must adapt to their new world, culture, and beings. Soon perhaps other worlders and times experiencing polar shifts of their own may begin to appear in our own world by accident causing great disruptions of all kinds in beliefs and the world stage according to how we act towards one and another. Perhaps with the weakening and fluctuating fields the laws of physics entangled with the old will morph and alter with to a new perception and an age of magic wonders and abilities will appear? Until our shield and barrier grows strong and stable enough to cut us off in a plus or minus centuries. Every shift is different and some are quick and others take hundreds or a thousand years to occur. Perhaps the spirituality we experience in the coming new age is beyond imagining to everything we now know and experience but is hinted at in some of our myths and fairy tales.
Perhaps this is when and how the rapture might work. Those who resonate with Jesus’s room in God’s infinite mansion of infinite rooms disappear to there during this time. Those who are too material and tied to the dogmas of modern physics get burned by cosmic radiation/Hell. And perhaps others of us wonder into other Heavens and rooms in God’s infinite mansion of infinite rooms.
My first thought is magnetic north.
Second thought, not navigating by stars/analog;
but by electronic/algorithms.[now to 2nd paragraph].
“Particularly in Chinese waters”?
Electromagnetic warfare?
Russians developed their own GPS; but not China?
Mind-warfare?
In line w/all the latest technological breakthroughs in nano/biological/mind sciences; including the Gates of Hell vaccines, both biological[mosquitos/viruses] and conventional[syringes].
If so, what were the methods/vectors of deliveries. How many psyche ops were involved/tested.
But according to SkyTruth …
White Rabbit
Assuming mind experiments had many possible vectors; than locations would vary in regards to vectors.
On the mechanical perspective; it would seem, sabotage of equipment[from manufacture to onboard installation?
Now other ships in vicinity, point to targeted in theatre manipulation[from satellites, on-ground/sea, and/or below surface.
Unknown CERN-type facility in said location?
{South Atlantic Anomaly]
Ah! The infallible Gyrocompass.
The 50 years of a new man-made electromagnetic sea of Earth is a likely player.
Perhaps, a few know how to navigate those seas, and subsequently manipulate them w/relative precision?
Systems are certainly becoming overloaded.
Surprisingly the solutions are more technology overloads.
Chaos is a given agent in all kinds of know/unknown crisis. An agent that’s been rather busy in the employ of the few who have keys to navigating these turbulent seas. Seas, that like the weather; can and are being manipulated for power and/or profit.
Even at the expense of all of humanity, and/or nature herself?
I am not clear on how this could be happening because there are multiple redundancies it seems in this situation.
There’s magnetic compass, there’s Gyro compass, and then there’s GPS. With all three of these available, why is there not cross checking going on?
As far as ships sailing in circles, this could be partially ‘credited’ to the large-scale fluctuations in oil prices in recent times – notably for those ships “especially near oil terminals.” This has to do with the futures industry around oil prices (and even oil storage capacity). In some cases, it is more profitable to someone to keep an oil tanker steaming in circles than to deliver its cargo (or to pick a cargo up). And the captains have been ordered to make something up, rather than reveal that their owners are trying to ‘game’ the market…
On the South Atlantic anomaly, if artificial, that could be ‘weather warfare’ written large. The areas directly under the magnetic poles have a more-intense radiation environment than elsewhere (hence the auroras). If you could learn to ‘park’ a magnetic pole over an antagonist’s territory or capital, that might prove to be an advantage.
(Or, since some UFOs have been theorized to travel along magnetic field lines or gradients, screwing-up Earth’s magnetic field could be seen as a defensive maneuver – ‘cloaking Earth’, as it were…)
Gos my first thought too was “follow the money”, some sort of maritime insurance scam. Of course does not exclude a “hi tech” or even a more “Fortean” range of explanations.
This idea also has a strategic weaponry component. Does one need to have nuclear weapons for a first strike capability? Not necessarily. Any missiles using GPS and similar steering mechanisms can be “hijacked” and “reprogrammed” simply by changing the configuration of magnetic signature of the region so that it points back to the capital from which the missiles are launched. If you have the technology to do this, even missiles are no longer an effective deterrent. I suspect it’s cheaper technology and has far more flexible capabilities.
Yes OrigensChild.
There are many incidents of UFOs shutting down missile sites, deactivating nukes, and much more.