On February 14, 1950, a US Air Force Convair B-36B crashed while on a training mission to simulate a nuclear attack on San Francisco. The plane was traveling from Fairbanks, Alaska, to Ft. Worth, Texas, but ran into trouble over the Pacific, west of Canada. The crew jettisoned the Mark IV atomic bomb, then bailed out, then the plane crashed over the open ocean. Twelve of the 17 crewmen were rescued. The Mark IV nuclear bomb they were carrying resembled the Mark III "Fat Man" bomb dropped on Nagasaki five years earlier, but it was not armed with the necessary plutonium for a nuclear explosion. Instead, it carried lead, uranium, and TNT.
Fast forward to last weekend. Sean Smyrichinsky was diving for sea cucumbers off the coast of Pitt Island, British Columbia, when he encountered a large object, at least 12 feet across, that reminded him of a UFO.
"I came out from the dive and I came up and I started telling my crew, 'My god, I found a UFO. I found the strangest thing I'd ever seen'," Smyrichinsky told the CBC, a CNN partner broadcaster.
After friends told him of a B-36 bomber that crashed in 1950 with a Mark IV nuclear weapon on board, he looked up photos of the bomb online.
"It was a piece that looked very much like what I saw," he told the broadcaster. "The plane that was carrying the bomb, it crashed 50 miles south of where I found that object."
Smyrichinsky reported the find to the Department of National Defence, who thinks it is the missing Mark IV bomb. A ship will search the area and divers will go down to take pictures of it.