A Diver Was Once Jolted Out of Water by a Beluga Whale That Mimicked Humans’ Speech

“Who told me to get out?” The perplexed diver yelled after jumping out of the water. Standing there, his fellows from the Navy Marine Mammal Program (NMMP) looked at each other, all of them thinking the same thing. Something was going on inside the water. It wasn’t some time after that that scientists decoded the source of this “get out” message. As unlikely as it sounds, the message didn’t come from another human. The culprit, rather, was a male beluga whale named NOC, who was residing in this netted underwater enclosure as a captive of the US Navy Program. Recently, scientists documented the episode in the journal Current Biology.

NOC’s message, shared by numerous media outlets, sounds like a human operator speaking through a broken radio. One YouTube user said it sounds like the Muppet Show's "Swedish Chef." Another described it with the gibberish sequence “mhhmhmhmhmmmmmhmmbeyoyoyo.” The whale was pulled out from the waters at the Northern Coast in Manitoba, according to Smithsonian Magazine. At this time, in 1984, the US Navy was testing weaponry to check whether it worked in extreme conditions and frigid waters.

Apart from these weapons, they needed marine creatures with built-in sonar, capable of locating and retrieving sunken experimental torpedoes. As part of this project, they started recruiting whales from the sea and training them to work for the navy. Each time a beluga approached their boat, the hunter would jump on the whale’s back and slip a lasso around its neck. The other would then slide a floating stretcher under the whale and carry it ashore. Hauling it in a leak-proof crate, the whale was taken to the netted underwater laboratory at the Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center, where the training would be conducted. 

"We were amazed — the voiceprint really reminded us of humanlike sounds and unlike normal whale sounds," researcher Sam Ridgway, neurobiologist, research veterinarian, and president of the National Marine Mammal Foundation, told Live Science. "We never heard anything like this before." Years later, in 2012, scientists from the National Marine Mammal Foundation finally documented the episode. But as it turned out, the innocent whale was just trying to bridge the linguistic gap between humans and animals.

According to BBC News, beluga whales are nicknamed the “canaries of the sea” due to their frequent high-pitched calls. This particular voice note consisted of clipped vocal bursts averaging about three times per second, with pauses resembling human speech. After the puzzled diver told others about what he had heard in the water, researchers fitted NOC with a pressure transducer, slipping it within his nostrils, where sounds were produced. Their data revealed that NOC was using a highly complex mechanism to say what he was saying.

Researchers noticed that NOC was rapidly shifting pressure in his nasal cavity to make the sequence of sounds. In the next step, he was amplifying the low-frequency parts of the vocals in the over-inflated part called the vestibular sac in his blowhole, which is typically used to stop water from entering the lungs. "Such obvious effort suggests motivation for contact," Ridgway reflected. Adding to the BBC, he said, "The sounds we heard were clearly an example of vocal learning by the white whale."

Researchers concluded that the “out”-like voice note was, in a way, NOC’s attempt to facilitate communication with humans. They even started training him to copy and mimic more and more words from the human language. After copying and learning for four years, NOC suddenly stopped making human-like sounds. And in 2007, The Guardian reported news of his death.

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