Did a Glowing Sea Creature Help Push the U.S. Into the Vietnam War?

On a gray summer day in 1966, Todd Newberry was watching seabirds squabble above the kelp forests of California’s Monterey Bay, when a sailor struck up a conversation that changed his understanding of the Vietnam War. The stranger turned out to be a Navy sonar engineer assigned to the destroyer USS Turner Joy. Just two years prior, Turner Joy, along with USS Maddox, had reportedly been attacked by Vietnamese boats in a mysterious battle known as Gulf of Tonkin incident. This encounter was pivotal in plunging the United States into the decade-long war that killed 58,000 Americans along with 2.5 million Vietnamese and Southeast Asians. But even today, it’s still not clear whether the Turner Joy and Maddox had actually been under fire.

“He was not supposed to be talking about this stuff, I’m sure,” says Newberry, a professor emeritus of marine biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz’s sonar displays during the supposed attack. The objects were the size of torpedoes, but they didn’t move like any torpedo the engineer had ever seen before. They seemed to have a will of their own—to come at the ship, then drift right under.