When a Kraken Attacked the United States Navy: The Mysterious Story of the USS Stein

  The USS Stein, a Knox Class destroyer of the United States Navy, was on a special operations mission in the Pacific Ocean sometime in the summer of 1978.

Named after Marine Corps Corporal Tony Stein of Dayton, Ohio who posthumously received the Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery in combat during the Battle of Iwo Jima in February 1945, the USS Stein was first launched in December of 1970 and immediately assumed a prominent place among ships in the United States Pacific Fleet.

The Stein was unique among vessels at the time because it was equipped with the most state of the art sonar equipment in the world and it was deployed by the Navy to listen for the tell-tale sonar signatures of Soviet nuclear submarines at the height of the Cold War.

Somewhere on its mission between Mexico and El Salvador the USS Stein had a terrifying encounter.  Unexpectedly, the ship was felt to rock from side to side and almost instantaneously the ship’s highly advanced sonar equipment simply ceased to function.

Unable to any longer perform its assigned mission, and now suffering substantial damage to its surface just below the water line, the USS Stein with Commander Napier V. Smith, in command, was forced to limp back to Long Beach, California and go into drydock for repairs.

In drydock as repair crews began to work on the ship they noticed something oddly peculiar.  The rubber surface on the main sonar dome of the ship had been torn to shreds by giant claws.  Embedded deep in the claw marks were large curved, hooklike nails, unlike anything that anyone had ever seen before.

The USS Stein 

        These enormous talons have torn the special rubberized coating that covers the USS Stein’s sonar equipment to shreds and damaged over eight percent of the ship’s surface.

The large nails were removed for further study by a team of Navy biologists and as the scientists set to work they noticed that the claws were similar to those found within the suction cups of squid, but that they were five times larger than the claws found on any squid ever seen up that point in time in 1978.

What strange fate befell the USS Stein on that summer night in 1978?  What type of unknown creature of the deep attacked, and nearly destroyed the technologically advanced sonar equipment of a United States Naval Destroyer leaving behind claws that were unlike anything that had ever been seen before?

The USS Stein’s sonar equipment, along with the surface of the ship itself, was quickly repaired, but not before the claws were sent away for further analysis.

It was confirmed that the hooks embedded in the side of the USS Stein had indeed come from some type of colossal squid-like creature.  Given the size of the claws themselves, in addition to the damage sustained by the ship, it was theorized that whatever creature had caused the damage must have been over 150 feet long!

The largest known squid in existence is called, in fact, the Colossal Squid or Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni and the largest specimen that has ever been found is only 46 feet in length.  This means that whatever type of sea monster attacked the USS Stein was over 100 feet larger than any giant squid now known to haunt the depths of the ocean!

To this very day large tracts of the world’s oceans remain unexplored by man.  Countless new and unknown lifeforms remain yet to be discovered, and it is more than likely that creatures once only believed to have lived in fable and lore will one day be proven to be real.

Did the USS Stein fall victim to one such mythic beast known to history as the Kraken?

The Kraken is a gigantic sea monster of squid-like appearance, thought to be the creation of Scandinavian folklore, that appears regularly in the Nose Sagas of the Middle Ages.

Reports of encounters with giant Kraken beasts that wrapped their enormous tentacles around Viking Longships were common in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.  It was reported that the ships were often rocked back and forth by the giant squid, with sailors tossed overboard, but with the ship rarely being sunk.

In the high Middle Ages lore and superstition surrounding the Kraken became common among seafarers on the north Atlantic.  Right on up until the 19th century sailors often told of how passing Kraken left giant whirlpools in the ocean that put entire ships and their crews in peril.  Famed Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus even described the Kraken in his seminal work Systema Naturae in 1735, which was considered a landmark and well regarded biological textbook up until the twentieth century.

It is thought that historical reports of Kraken sightings may, in fact, have been encounters with a creature now known as the Colossal Squid.

To date, only around half a dozen specimens of a creature called the Colossal Squid have ever been found.

Such a large creature was thought to be simply the stuff of legend, much like the mythic Nordic Kraken itself, until 1925 when a dead specimen washed ashore in the United States and was studied and reported upon by marine biologist G.C. Robson in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History.

Even as specimens of a new species of Colossal Squid began to be catalogued and identified in the last half of the twentieth century much debate still raged within the scientific community regarding what the true nature of the recently discovered creature really was.  Marine biologists argued over whether the so-called “Colossal” squid was a new type of squid or rather just a larger form of the already well known giant squid.

But then in 2007 in the Arctic Ocean the largest known specimen of a colossal squid ever found was captured by a New Zealand fishing boat in the Ross Sea.  The squid was a female on the verge of death that had gotten trapped in the boat’s large fishing nets.

Colossal Squid Captured in 2007

Scientists attempted to keep the carcass of this colossal squid frozen but the specimen, unfortunately, thawed quickly once it was captured and brought up from the depths of the Arctic Ocean.  This female colossal squid measures only about 50 feet in length but it is thought that much shriveling of the body has occurred due to rapid thawing and to the death of the squid itself.

For example the eye alone on this specimen, which is currently on display at the Museum of New Zealand, measures 11 inches in diameter which makes it the largest eye on any known living creature in the world even in its decomposed condition.  Scientists estimate that without any decomposition the eye on this one female specimen of a colossal squid may have measured as large as thirty inches in diameter!

In light of recent discoveries, like the one made by the crew of a  New Zealand fishing boat in 2007, many members of the scientific community believe that it may be possible for full grown male colossal squids residing in the dark fathomless depths of the Pacific and Arctic Oceans to grow as large as 100 or even 200 feet long--more than large enough to be the sea monster that attacked and badly damaged the USS Stein back in 1978, but as yet no specimens of that size have ever been found.

After over twenty years of service in the United States Navy the USS Stein was decommissioned from active duty in March of 1992.  That year the Stein was towed into port in Washington State and remained part of the United States Naval Reserve Fleet until 1999 when the ship was sold to the Mexican Navy.

Today, the USS Stein still prowls the world’s oceans having been rechistened the Ignacio Allende in honor of a Spanish general who once sympathized with the movement for Mexican independence.  

And perhaps, somewhere deep beneath the waves, lurk several enormous undiscovered Colossal Squid large enough to sink the mightiest warships in all the world’s navies, or maybe, reports of mythic sea monsters like the Kraken were more true than we yet know...