Our friends over at SF Citizen picked up on our recent post about the Great Mothball Fleet at Suisun Bay to call attention to one resident of the fleet that's in search of a good home.
The vessel in question is the former Sea Shadow (IX-529), a ship built under a cloak of secrecy during the 1980s to test various radar-eluding, stealth technologies for use in maritime environments. This video gives a good sense of how the ship looks -- inside and out -- as accompanied by a propagandistic soundtrack of military marching bands:
Like it? Wanna take it home? The Navy is now willing to give ex-Sea Shadow away for FREE, but there's a catch, as SF Citizen explains:
Now the first time the Navy tried to give away this historic boat, in 2006, they had all sorts of rules. Then they tried again in 2009 with more flexible rules. But the problem is that you can’t just take the Shadow, you also have to take the Hughes Mining Barge (HMB-1), a floating drydock boat that was developed as part of Project Jennifer. (That was the semi-successful, top-secret effort mounted by the Central Intelligence Agency to salvage the remains of the Soviet submarine K-129 from the ocean floor.)
Frankly, we're not sure why the Navy hasn't simply tried posting an ad on Craigslist or Freecycle. But if you'd like to have a stealth ship of your very very own, SF Citizen has all the details.
LINK: The US Navy Wants to Give Away the Formerly Super Secret Sea Shadow Stealth Ship (SF Citizen)
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