Fisherman in Norway were stunned to discover a white whale wearing a harness daubed with the words "Equipment of St. Petersburg".
Norwegian marine experts believe it was no ordinary beluga whale, but a whale trained by the Russian navy as part of a programme to equip marine mammals in underwater military operations.
The apparently "tame" whale's strange behaviour around the boats, and the harness, reportedly led marine researchers to believe it had received military-grade training from the Russian navy, reports Norway's NRK .
Russia has in recent years made no no secret of its moves to bolsters its Arctic naval strength.
The fishermen described the whale, a suspected Russian recruit, as constantly seeking out their vessels.
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They reportedly said it had been trying to pull straps and ropes from their boats's sides whenever they entered the waters of a small fishing village of Inga, off the coast of Finnmark, in northern Norway.
“We were going to put out nets when we saw a whale swimming between the boats,” fisherman Joar Hesten told the Norwegian broadcaster.
“It came over to us, and as it approached, we saw that it had some sort of harness on it.”
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Norwegian marine experts say while Russian scientific researchers do keep whales in captivity, they are not known to place harnesses on dolphins.
Norwegian experts say the harness could have been designed to attach a camera or weapon.
Head of the University of Tromso's Insituture of Marine Rearch Martin Biuw told NRK he believed the Russian navy had harnessed the whales, adding that as far as he knew, the country's scientists were not studying the beluga.
While the tale may sound far-fetched, it would not be the first time Soviet Russia has recruited marine mammals to work on its military ops.
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Both the USA and Soviet Russia have in the past secretively recruited dolphins.
The Cold War foes were said to prize the marine mammals' intelligence and their sharp underwater vision, useful for hunting lost naval swimmers and detecting underwater mines.
The Soviet's military dolphin program was thought to have closed in the early 1990s, but reports in 2000 suggested the trained marine killers had been sold to Iran.
Russian President Vladimir Putin's elite dolphin squad has grown in recent years.
Military chiefs declared in 2014 they had "conscripted" Ukraine's fleet of combat-trained spy dolphins when Moscow annexed Crimea.
They had been trained at the Crimean State Oceanariu and kept by Ukraine when the Soviet Union collapsed, until Moscow decided it wanted its underwater '007's back and seized jurisdiction of the facility again.
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Moscow took control of 13 highly-trained military dolphins and sea lions it claimed were trained to hunt underwater mines, attack enemy divers with special knives and pistols attached to their heads, and plant bombs on boats.
The dolphins had also been trained for military and anti-sabotage rescue missions, and Western powers suspected they could be put to use patrolling the Black Sea amid the Ukrainian crisis.
State broadcaster TV Zvedzda revealed in 2017 Russian researchers were working on whether they could train white whales to "guard entrances to naval bases" in polar regions and even kill strangers entering their marine territory.
But the Russian Defence Ministry-owned broadcaster noted the researchers found white whales were bested by seals, which showed better guard instincts and oral command memory compared to belugas.
The researchers noted the white whales were "delicate," got ill after swimming too long in polar waters and were no match for the high levels of "professionalism" shown by seals.
The regions are becoming sites of increasingly important military significance as world superpowers eye Norway, the gateway to Europe, as the icy northern theatre of the future.
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The two polar powers were Cold War enemies, and Russian and Norway now allow trade and traffic across their land and marine borders.
However the Arctic powers' relationship is chilling as the question of who has access to natural resources under thawing ice caps surfaces, and Russia's unpredictable geopolitical behaviour, particularly toward Ukraine, sharpens the West's military focus on the Arctic Circle.
Putin has in recent years begun reopening former Soviet military bases along Russia's Arctic coastline, and his military has been firing missiles in the international waters off Norway in power displays.
Meanwhile, NATO has been openly staging "winter warfare" training, rehearsing fictional ice wars along with the Atlantic Alliances in military drills that image the defence of the Norwegian gateway to the West by an invading power.
