The Observer has a truly strange story about a Navy-trained pod of dolphins that may be missing in the Golf of Mexico. The dolphins are trained to attack divers in wetsuits and may be armed with toxic dart guns. I swear I am not making this up:
Leo Sheridan, 72, a respected accident investigator who has worked for government and industry, said he had received intelligence from sources close to the US government's marine fisheries service confirming dolphins had escaped.
'My concern is that they have learnt to shoot at divers in wetsuits who have simulated terrorists in exercises. If divers or windsurfers are mistaken for a spy or suicide bomber and if equipped with special harnesses carrying toxic darts, they could fire,' he said. 'The darts are designed to put the target to sleep so they can be interrogated later, but what happens if the victim is not found for hours?'
(more below)
Please note that this is not the group of dolphins from an oceanarium nearby:
The mystery surfaced when a separate group of dolphins was washed from a commercial oceanarium on the Mississippi coast during Katrina. Eight were found with the navy's help, but the dolphins were not returned until US navy scientists had examined them.
Sheridan is convinced the scientists were keen to ensure the dolphins were not the navy's, understood to be kept in training ponds in a sound in Louisiana, close to Lake Pontchartrain, whose waters devastated New Orleans.
This has to be one of the stranges things I've ever seen. As I said sending the link to a friend who's not a reader of this site, "Flipper, we hardly knew ye..."
Update: Olberman seemed to have some fun with this. He didn't take it all that seriously. Maybe the Observer was taken in...