USS Trepang UFO photographs

Case dossier

The voyage is the firmest part of the story. USS Trepang, a Sturgeon-class nuclear attack submarine commissioned in August 1970, was commanded by Dean R. Sackett Jr. Its 1971 command history says it operated beneath Arctic ice from 22 February to 22 March. The purposes were extensive testing that supplied data for new and improved weapons systems and experiments by ice scientist Walter Wittmann on the ice cap. Trepang then visited Faslane from 25 to 27 March and returned to New London on 6 April. The record does not mention an unusual aerial contact, photography of unknown craft, target balloons or a combat engagement.

The photograph claim entered the public record forty-four years later. According to a documented reconstruction of the magazine’s account, Top Secret received an envelope on 15 April 2015 containing nine A4 prints and an unsigned letter. The letter supplied the date, location, submarine, commander, alleged observer John Klika and an Arctic Submarine Laboratory leak narrative. The July 2015 issue then published the images. Because the sender was anonymous, the prints lacked a demonstrated custody chain and the dramatic account came from the same letter that attributed them, this publication documents circulation—not a 1971 event.

Checks of the named people weaken the attribution. The Black Vault’s published research says Sackett and Klika confirmed their presence aboard during the Arctic deployment but each denied seeing anything unusual. In a fresh 2024 interview, Sackett again said there were no sightings and the story was inaccurate. A Navy public-affairs officer separately told PolitiFact that the service was unable to verify the images as official Navy photographs. These statements do not identify every object in every print, but they directly contradict the anonymous witness story and any claim of Navy authentication.

The circulating ‘Trepang photographs’ should not be treated as one continuous sequence. The magazine itself described different markings and two apparent object groups, while later online collections changed order and context. Some frames resemble elongated balloons, test targets or effects around the sea surface, but no released Navy record ties a particular frame to a particular test. One dramatic smoke image contains repeated cloud regions consistent with copy-and-paste editing. That finding impeaches that frame and the integrity of the supplied set; it does not prove that every other image was made by the same method.

A separate viral image must be excluded entirely. AP traced a picture of a disc rising beside an explosion and a warship to a real 17 March 1982 shock test of the cruiser USS Arkansas. The original archive photograph shows the ship and explosive plume but no disc; the altered version appeared in the 2008 fictional short film The Orion Conspiracy. It is neither a Trepang photograph nor evidence from 1971. Its later association illustrates how visually similar naval imagery can be folded into an already weakly sourced dossier.

The most defensible conclusion is narrower than either ‘alien craft’ or ‘all solved as target balloons.’ Trepang’s Arctic deployment and weapons-related testing are documented. The image attribution, witness story, claimed security markings and laboratory leak are not independently documented. Some visual content may depict conventional tests or targets, and at least one supplied frame shows manipulation, but original negatives, metadata and a frame-by-frame custody chain are absent. Preserving the case is useful because it demonstrates how a true voyage can lend credibility to an unverified photo story; it does not justify treating the photographs as Navy-confirmed evidence.