Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, a production of IHeart Radio and grim and mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

Humans are incredible engineers.

We've rarely met an engineering problem we couldn't solve.

But, as I'm sure you've heard before, sometimes humanity gets so caught up in whether it can do something, it forgets to ask whether it should.

Such was the case in the late 1960s, when the U.S. government became aware of a sunken Russian submarine and stopped at nothing

to retrieve it from the bottom of the sea. The K-129 nuclear submarine sunk sometime around

March of 1968, for reasons that will never be known. All the CIA did know was that the Russians

were conducting a massive search and rescue operation

in the Pacific Ocean, 1,500 miles north of Hawaii.

Once the Russians gave up, an American sub moved in using special cameras the Russian

vessels didn't have.

The American sub revealed the K-129 was intact at the bottom of the ocean, and, if recovered,

could provide the CIA with Russian

missile technology and codebooks filled with secrets. But of course, this would be no easy

retrieval mission. The sub was 16,500 feet down. It was one thing to have an American sub take

pictures, but having divers searching the debris at that depth was out of the

question, and the wreck of the sub was so big, it would take some incredible machinery to

recover it. The deeply paranoid, ethically dubious CIA of this time was not willing to let

the opportunity slide, though. And so they embarked on a multi-million dollar project to design a vessel

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