All Aboard the New Marie Celeste!
Eh bah gum! The British media know how to stoke the bonfire of fear that we keep warm by in these days of ‘fuel poverty’…
Ta Ra! I give you ghostly hulks of Russian cruise ship – not just full of rats, but cannibal rats no less – that could creep up a flooded stream near you, woooo, by tomorrow night.
Shiver in your shoes, oh infantilised population, alien spaceships may have been debunked (despite numerous credible victims giving corroborative evidence!) 27 out of every 3 children being abducted by the age of five, (probably NSPCC figures…) and 4 disc jockeys still at large, the media have new nightmares for you.
The hulk of the Lyubov Orlova is out to get you….investigative journalists are scrabbling for the facts – all over the internet. The Irish coastguards are ‘on the look out’ for her (and may have a long wait, as this helpful update from the register of missing vessels shows….)
That red square is the last reported sighting of her, 24 days ago – and that is the North Sea not the Irish sea….
The ‘Irish’ connection may have come from a comment on the ‘where is orlova.com‘ site:
The truth is that this ship is now only disguised as a hulk.
In fact it is owned and operated by NSA and GCHQ as a spy ship and floating submarine base.
Seal Team 69 operates from it together with the new SQUAT operation which is tasked to eliminate threats to truth.
The current operation, BLOKS, involves the ship secretly drifting up on the Irish coast to exfiltrate a team of Leprechauns who have been operating there since 1923.
We can’t expect our investigative journalists to be able to separate obvious fiction from fact, now can we……
But all is not lost, and Twitter could help here. A few well placed comments such as the above suggesting that wide eyed innocent children may be aboard, along with a gang of dangerous paedophiles and we could start a stampede to board the Lyubov Orlova…Martin Brunt breathlessly reporting from the port side, MWT with an ITV crew on the starboard side – and the cannibal rats licking their lips.
That delicious thought will easily sustain me for the rest of the day.
Does anybody know how long it takes for one cannibal rat to consume an entire semi-human? Google has let me down for once.
- Moor Larkin
January 24, 2014 at 1:21 pm -
I imagine James Herbert might have been yer man, but unfortunately – he’s dead.
- Eyes Wide Shut
January 24, 2014 at 4:49 pm -
Moor, do you remember that New Averngers ep – “GNAWS”? The one with the giant rat down the sewers? (I think there was a giant tomato too).
I was traumatised.
- macheath
January 24, 2014 at 6:35 pm -
Never mind the rats, there was an X-Files episode in which the water system of a Russian freighter was found to have transported a mutated aquatic humanoid flukeworm that evolved in a ‘soup of radioactive sewage’ after Chernobyl…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Host_(The_X-Files)
(best not while you’re eating)- Eyes Wide Shut
January 24, 2014 at 8:21 pm -
OOO, body-shock!
I do remember that one but it didn’t scare me half as much as the leopard-man thingie that ate people’s livers (was it for bile?) and then went into a coma for fifty years or so only to re-merge on a 3 or 4 day rampage looking for livers. And rinse and repeat.
I think he ended up trapped under an escalator in a shopping mall.
This sort of thing can mess with your mind you know
- JuliaM
January 25, 2014 at 7:46 am -
Eugene Tooms!” And yes, it was for bile…
- JuliaM
- Eyes Wide Shut
- macheath
- Eyes Wide Shut
- The Filthy Engineer
January 24, 2014 at 1:22 pm -
In my experience as a marine engineer of 43 years, I very much doubt that she is still afloat. Ships leak. I spent most of my life onboard ship trying to stop water from getting in. Of course when it was in I’d spend hours of my time trying to pump it back to whence it came. As for the rats they’d have eaten themselves long ago. Rats do that.
- Ian B
January 26, 2014 at 8:06 am -
You’ve forgotten that these are mutant horror rats. They plug the leaks with their little furry bodies.
- Michael
January 26, 2014 at 7:46 pm -
I agree, once I saw the timeline involved it was evident that given the circumstances this ship was on the bottom within a week or so. One good Atlantic storm with no damage control and pumps and it is “game over”. Hello water ingress, free surface flooding, capsize and down she goes! There is another possibility though for the “Tin Hat Brigade”, look at the theories regarding the loss of the hulk of the Brazilian Battleship “Sao Paulo” they actually claim she was abducted by aliens in an Atlantic Storm!
- Ian B
- FrankH
January 24, 2014 at 2:19 pm -
I’m not scared of cannibal rats, it’s the man eating rats you need to worry about. Cannibal rats eat rats, don’t they?
- Mudplugger
January 24, 2014 at 3:23 pm -
I wouldn’t worry about the man eating rats – but I might crap myself about the man-eating rats. It’s all in the hyphen, apparently.
- SamBest
January 24, 2014 at 9:23 pm -
and shouldn’t we be encouraging these cannibal rats to arrive ? : after all I’ve seen some real monsters when I visit a pal on his Thames’ barge. they’d frighten the horses. Introducing cannibal rats would solve the problem but alas….by the time the Lyubov Orlova arrives the rats will have surely eaten each other !
then again, there may be one last rat standing !
- Mudplugger
- the moon is a balloon
January 24, 2014 at 3:22 pm -
The average rat consumes 10% or so of its own body weight per day and a rat in the wild has a mass of approx 500g. The average human has a mass of 70kg, and so gnawing away at 50g per day, one average rat will get though one average human in 1400 days. That’s four years to you. French rats dining as they do on discarded and foie gras-fed frenchmen will get by for a bit longer. I hope that this helps.
- Mudplugger
January 24, 2014 at 3:27 pm -
But if that frenchman is still wearing his motor-scooter leathers and helmet, and the morning croissant-delivering security-man hasn’t yet arrived, how does that affect the calculation ?
- Mudplugger
- Brian
January 24, 2014 at 3:39 pm -
I bet the government didn’t consider this happening when they scrapped those Nimrods in 2010 . A decision that has come back to bite them (with little yellow front teeth).
- Ed P
January 24, 2014 at 6:34 pm -
The red square shows her in the North Sea, but the “more details” panel states that on 10th December she was “mid Atlantic” and moving at 0.5 knots towards St. Johns. Curious – perhaps the rats were paddling?
- Jeff Wood
January 24, 2014 at 8:42 pm -
If this tub really existed – and the good Engineer above explains why it probably doesn’t – then one of the nearby navies would refuse to pass up the chance to put a fish into her side; both to remove a bit of clutter from the sea and also to test the current model of torpedo.
- Johnny Monroe
January 24, 2014 at 9:53 pm -
Torpedo? Is that a paedophile living in Glastonbury? We should be told!
- Johnny Monroe
- Gloria Smudd
January 24, 2014 at 11:01 pm -
- Eyes Wide Shut
January 24, 2014 at 11:37 pm -
- Gloria Smudd
January 25, 2014 at 12:55 am -
Her album is called ‘Music to suffer by’. Of course you will never be the same again. Listen to the track about cheese.
- Eyes Wide Shut
January 25, 2014 at 12:30 pm -
Is it “Limburger Lover?”
Can you imagine the butter scene in Last Tango …. but with cheese?
This site isn’t good for me. The other day it was “Kinky Boots” and now its “Limburger Lover”.
I’m very sensitive, you know.
- Eyes Wide Shut
- Gloria Smudd
- Eyes Wide Shut
- Steamboat Pete.
January 24, 2014 at 11:39 pm -
It appears that the Orlova was being towed from Newfoundland to the Caribbean for scrapping. For insurance purposes any ship to be towed in an ocean passage must be properly closed up for the conditions which it could be expected to encounter. So all sea valves must be closed tight. Any hatches and outer doors will be firmly closed and secured also. The weakest link is the propeller shaft seal, which is probably an oil-filled job. With the propeller stopped then eventually water will seep into the tunnel space. However, the tunnel spaces also will be closed off from the engine room by watertight doors, which will also be firmly closed. Even so, the shaft will pass through the aft bulkhead, again via a seal, but this one is less substantial than the main seal, so if the shaft tunnel filled up, eventually water would seep into the engine room. Then the engine room is isolated from sea water leakage into the adjacent cargo and accommodation spaces, by watertight bulkheads.
The Russians built good, robust ships. Someone from the insurance company will almost certainly have gone around to check all of this before permission for the tow was given. So the chance are that the ship is still afloat, albeit a little bit down by the stern.
The news item about messages from 2 lifeboats, which are thought (by whom? reporters or mariners?) to have fallen into the sea is a bit puzzling. Lifeboats don’t normally just fall into the sea, they live a life exposed to the elements, and are costly to replace.
There will certainly be rats onboard, it’s a ship, but whether they will propagate as is speculated is just that, speculation.
There may well have been a few cats onboard, so perhaps by now there are hundreds of giant rat-fed cats onboard, ruling slave kingdoms of rats.
But more to the point will be the question of the Russians robust approach to safety matters.
It is quite likely that the ship will have asbestos in it, quite possibly in large quantities, and if so thus will propose a possible insurmountable problem to any would-be treasure hunter who fancied salvaging the vessel. If he/she didn’t get eaten by rats, or cats, then the asbestos would get him/her. Scrapping a ship with asbestos built in is a very difficult problem indeed. I know, I’ve been involved in such a project (basically, not many ports in the western world will accept asbestos laden ships to be dismantled in their clean air).
So, all-in-all Anna, the best solution might be for some Navy or other to torpedo the thing.
Quietly, when the environmentalists aren’t watching.
If the environmentalists do object to sinking the ship, the kindest thing would be to give the ship to them as a goodwill gesture.- GildasTheMonk
January 25, 2014 at 9:58 am -
Brilliant – that is the kind of insight which makes the sight what it is. Now, along with Julia M and one or too other “Racconistas” I am a dedicated Fortean and loved the X files. I strongly suspect the hand of Eugene Victor Tooms in all of this, or possibly some form of government misinformation project designed to cover up what we all know is going on: alien raptors have joined forces with the Illuminati to take over the world disguised as “celebs” and LibDems. Only now their evil occult practices are being exposed – starting with “Savile”, who in fact used to eat small children whole, and did not die, but has fled the planet to his real home in a space hub behind the moon. I can’t wait for Nick Clegg to be exposed as a giant lizard. Oh, hand on, that last bit seems quiet realistic, come to think…
- Margaret Jervis
January 25, 2014 at 1:15 pm -
@gildas – as you’ve previously mentioned Richard Webster’s Secret of Bryn Estyn , you might be interested in the the re-published piece on Andrea Davison (Past Lives and Current Misgivings -8) which I think should read 2012 as the original date not 12.
I’ve posted another link on Ms Davison and a relevant excerpt from Richard’s book in the comment section.
- GildasTheMonk
January 25, 2014 at 2:43 pm -
Thank you, I shall take a look!
- GildasTheMonk
- Ian B
January 26, 2014 at 8:15 am -
Back in the day, before we had our internets, the Fortean Times was one of the few sources of information about the unusual, and it was one of the things I read to keep abreast of developments in moral panics, conspiracy theories etc; the worldview regarding things like Satanic Ritual Abuse, Bogus Social Workers, alien abductions, and “flaps” regarding flying saucers, mysterious predators, alien big cats and the like I’ve always considered invaluable in training me to understand the psychological dynamics in human populations.
Most people use a rule of thumb that the more reports of something there are, the more credible it is; thanks to the FT, the more reports of something there are, the more I think a “flap” is in progress. Which inevitably creates a quite different perception of something like the Paedocalypse.
- Margaret Jervis
- JimmyGiro
January 25, 2014 at 10:36 am -
“If the environmentalists do object to sinking the ship…”
It would seem that environmentalists only object to the scuttling of ships when it isn’t their own:
- GildasTheMonk
- therealguyfaux
January 26, 2014 at 12:35 pm -
If the Lyubov Orlova were theoretically to remain afloat indefinitely, never reaching land, like a Flying Dutchman– how many generations will it take for the rats to evolve into a comic foil for Lister, along with Rimmer and Kryten?
- Backwoodsman
January 26, 2014 at 1:49 pm -
Completely off topic and very late, but so glad your back !!!!!!!
She’s probably had her bunkers pumped out, (The ship obviously, not Anna), so the best thing , as suggested above, is to let Baroness Ashtons’ air force drop a bomb on her and turn her into an artificial reef. Otherwise she’ll have to be towed off to Dacca, because no European yard will scrap her because of the , scary word, asbestos. - Robert the Biker
January 26, 2014 at 5:54 pm -
I can picture this thing looming out of the fog, to the accompanyment of ghostly singing:
We are the rat rat ratties,
rat rat rat rat rat ratties
rat rat rat rat rat ratties
rat rat rat rat rat rat rat rat - Bill
January 26, 2014 at 7:43 pm -
If ever there was an appropriate place to send the 650 large rats in Westminster.
Find that ship!Oh and good to see you have the strength to carry on.
- Brian
January 28, 2014 at 2:44 pm -
Black rats on a boat and the Black Death returning – it’s deja vu all over again!
- Bill Sticker
January 28, 2014 at 8:13 pm -
Hmm. Cannibal rats? You mean the very wet kind of cannibal rat? The can only be found with sidescan sonar kind of cannibal rat?
Glug, glug, glug…….
{ 35 comments… read them below or add one }