Episode Details

Art Bell interviews a former U.S. Navy submarine communications officer, identified only as "Officer X," who reveals a harrowing incident from his time aboard the USS Ulysses S. Grant during the Libya crisis of the 1980s. When a series of equipment failures cut all communications for six hours at DEFCON 3, the crew found themselves unable to confirm whether nuclear war had begun.

Officer X describes how the navigation officer, convinced the worst had happened, began rallying crew members toward launching nuclear weapons. The captain posted armed guards at the small arms locker as tensions escalated. Only the calm intervention of the executive officer and a risky decision to deploy an antenna near the surface restored contact with the outside world. The fault turned out to be a shorted trailing wire combined with a Scottish transmitter station going offline.

The interview ends abruptly when Officer X receives a phone call during a break and announces he must leave immediately. Art suspects he was contacted and told to stop talking. The episode also previews a controversial upcoming interview with a self-proclaimed satanic witch named Harlot.