The Glomar Explorer
Fake news can sometimes be used to cover real events, a made up story shielding the truth from prying eyes. Whether such fake news is nefarious is determined by the perspective of the recipient and the activities inspired by the information itself. An example of this is the story of the Glomar Explorer, which was built by the Sun Shipbuilding and Drydock Company at the request of Howard Hughes, who intended to use the ship, or so he said, for his Global Marine Development Incorporated.
Hughes informed the media that the ship was being built for the purpose of mining manganese nodules from the floor of the world’s oceans. The news was greeted with interest by other companies and countries who began to explore similar ideas. The manganese nodules could be sources of in addition to manganese, copper, nickel, cobalt, and iron, with traces of several other minerals. Since the project was under the direction of Howard Hughes it naturally drew attention, and several consortiums of international corporations and government organizations performed studies of similar operations.
In truth, the Glomar Explorer had nothing to do with the extraction of manganese or any other type of mining or ocean minerals extraction. The Hughes Glomar Explorer was built for an entirely different purpose and the story of manganese extraction was fake news to hide its true purpose. Glomar Explorer was built to recover a sunken Soviet submarine, the K-129, which had sunk in the Pacific in 1968. The manganese extraction news reports were to distract the Soviets from its true purpose. Beyond the use of his name, to which Hughes had agreed, he had no other relationship to the project.
The ship was built under the direction of the CIA, the NSA, and the United States Navy, and operated by civilian contractors under the employ of the CIA. The cover story held up through its construction and only deployment, when it recovered portions of the sunken submarine including human remains. While the Glomar Explorer was stationed over the sunken submarine, Soviet naval vessels operated in the vicinity, and it was later learned that the Soviets were aware of the true nature of the vessel, but they did nothing to interfere with the operation.
How much of the submarine was actually raised remains a subject of debate. The Glomar Explorer was never used for any other mission as it was incapable of performing any mining or operation other than the heavy lifting for which it had been designed. It was converted to a deep sea drilling platform and sold in the late 1990s but its operation was largely unprofitable and by 2015 it was delivered for scrapping.