The Fox News link below details the very bizarre case of a missing cargo ship which “vanished” in the Atlantic Ocean after it sailed westward through the English Channel. I also watched a BBC story about this event last night on the American PBS network.The cargo ship, ostensibly sailing from Finland to Algeria with a load of timber, simply disappeared from the earth and no one can find it. However, a telling piece of the puzzle is that Russia is extremely interested in locating this apparently-routine cargo ship as quickly as possible. Russia has ordered all its available naval ships to hunt for the missing ship, and the Russians intend to use “all means necessary” to find the ship and “use force” if necessary. This seems to be a disproportionate response to a shipload of wood. This is especially the case since it was a Maltese cargo ship bringing Finnish timber to Algeria. Where is Russia’s interest in this ship? The Maltese ship had (apparently) an exclusively-Russian crew, so this ship was apparently transporting something besides wood which was very, very important to Russia’s interests. This story sounds like the plot of a novel about international intrigue.

The possibility that this ship was carrying “secret cargo” is cited in the link below as well as the possibility of some kind of piracy. The “secret cargo” (or “secret mission”) option sounds plausible to me, but the piracy explanation so far does not. Piracy is unheard of in Northern European waters and acts of piracy don’t make ships “disappear.” Pirated ships off Somalia are quite visible in the locations to which they are moved to await ransom. The lack of any distress call about its sinking and the lack of any timber floating anywhere argue the ship was not lost at sea. I recall a report years ago of a timber-carrying ship in the Pacific Ocean and timber (which floats) washed ashore for a long time.

Even more bizarre is a report that there was a report of piracy involving the vessel on July 24 near Sweden. However, if that report is valid, how come there was no naval response from any European nation or the media till three weeks later? If the report of pirates disguised as “armed policemen” boarding the ship is true, they were either pirates disguised as police or they special forces military personnel from an unnamed nation disguised as police and falsely-reported as “pirates” by the Russian crew. The three-week delay between the report of this event and any official or media response is very suspicious. Either the report is false or many nations cooperated in arranging this delay to allow the ship to be sailed to a secret location where it was quickly hidden, chopped up or physically-altered so it doesn’t look like the ship which originally left Finland. Don’t laugh at this last possibility. It has been done before in international geopolitics. The book, Operation Uranium Ship by Dennis Eisenberg, Eli Landau and Menahem Portugali, describes the “true story” of an Israeli special operations force which hijacked a ship with uranium cargo sailing from France and quickly hid it in an obscure Greek island and altered its name, superstructure and physical appearance so the world’s navies wouldn’t notice it as it sailed to Israel. Something similar may have happened with this cargo ship, but we don’t know what nation pulled off such a possible heist. With a three-week head start, the ship could be almost anywhere now.

There are other possibilities which are worth mentioning (keep in mind I don’t know which explanation is true–I’m merely pointing out possible other explanations). Previous blogs have detailed the development of “invisibility” technology by modern nations which can make people and objects “invisible” to the naked eye by bending light waves around the object. This is much like the “cloaking” technology used by the Klingon warbirds in Star Trek movies. One previous blog cited a British report that a British tank was rendered invisible to a media observer. Has this technology been adapted for use on a ship? The facts that this ship had an all-Russian crew and Russia’s eagerness to find it argues that this ship had some kind of secret Russian mission. If this ship was testing a new “invisibility” technology, then the Russian “search” effort in the Atlantic would be a pre-planned ruse. If the “invisibility” option is true, the search effort ought to include infra-red and magnetic sensors, not just an effort to “eyeball” the missing ship. If the ship was physically altered during the mysterious three-week “black out” about it, it could be sitting in a port right now under a new name, a new flag and with an entirely different appearance!

The destination of the ship, Algeria, is also interesting as that nation has traditionally bought much weaponry from Russia. Was Algeria in on this mission or was the ship’s actual destination never truly reported? Another possibility is that it was not a nation, but a wealthy NGO (non-government operation) which seized the ship. So many Sovereign Wealth Funds exist now which have more assets than many nations. One of them could have planned and financed the operation, perhaps in behalf of a particular nation which wanted “plausible deniability.”  This explanation would be like the “Blofeld” plots of some James Bond movies.

This bizarre event comes on the heels of other bizarre international incidents which are briefly reported and then media coverage quickly disappears.  Such stories have included the astronomical sum of phony(?) US Treasury Bonds which were being smuggled into Switzerland from Italy by two Orientals (who were then mysteriously “let go” by authorities), the bombing of the “secret”‘ Syrian nuclear reactor for which no one took credit, the bombing of a convoy in Sudan of weapons ostensibly headed for Hamas for which no one took credit, and the case of another mystery ship which reportedly was carrying Chinese nuclear material from China on an Iranian (?) ship which was intended to head through the Suez Canal where it could have been exploded off the coast of Israel as a terrorist bomb. The ship was discovered when Somali pirates “accidentally” hijacked the shop and began dying of radiation poisoning after examining the ships contents. The USA, NATO nations, Russia and China all suddenly developed an intense interest to deploy naval vessels to that region soon after that event. [These previous mysterious events are all discussed in previous blogs in the Archives of this website.

Matthew 24:6 records Jesus Christ’s prophecy that “wars and rumors of wars” will mark the international geopolitics of the latter days at the end of this age. Paul warned in II Timothy 3:1 that “perilous times” would come in the latter days. The above mysterious events indicate that there are secret agendas being acted out in the world which the general public is not allowed to understand. What we can deduce is that important (and ruthless) rivalries are being acted out where the public doesn’t usually see evidence of these struggles. Only the governments and participants in these strange cases of behind-the-scenes international intrigue know what is going on…and they aren’t telling us the real story.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,539245,00.html?test=latestnews