The Royal Canadian Navy will send a ship and dive technicians to B.C.’s north coast in the coming weeks to determine whether an object discovered by a Comox Valley man is a bomb that went missing during the Cold War.

The owner of UB Diving in Courtenay says he finished harvesting sea cucumbers near Haida Gwaii when he saw something unusual.

“I saw a really large circular object that was flat on the top that had a hole cut out of it and I thought that’s pretty strange,” Sean Smyrichinsky told CTV News.

Smyrichinsky is an experienced diver and says he realized right away that it wasn’t a natural object. 

“I really had no idea what it was or where it came from and because it was round and bowl-shaped I thought UFO,” Smyrichinsky said.

Without a camera to capture the odd find, the diver had to wait to learn more. 

Two weeks after the discovery a friend told him about an American bomber that crashed in 1950 while doing a secret exercise off of B.C.’s coast.

The aircraft experienced multiple engine failures and the crew was forced to release a bomb they were carrying before they bailed out.

“According to the records, according to the way it was designed, it was to be destroyed and so it blew up and the crew that testified on this, they saw the flash and heard the bang when it went off,” retired Col. Jon Ambler with the Comox Air Force Museum said.

Whether or not that actually occurred has been the subject of continued debate.

It’s now believed Smyrichinsky may have found a Mark IV “Fat Man” bomb that went missing during the Cold War.

“When I saw a schematic of the bomb one of the pieces on the schematic looks very much like what I saw and then when we realized we were diving only about 50 miles from where the plane crashed,” Smyrichinsky said.  “That really got my mind racing.”

In the next few weeks the diver will travel back to the area with the Royal Canadian Navy.

Dive technicians will use a SeaBotix inspections ROV to identify the object.

“To think that something like that has been sitting on the bottom of the ocean for the better part of 65 years without being found, it’s kind of neat that now that we have a possibility of locating it and determining that that is actually where the object went,” Lt.-Cmdr. with the Canadian Armed Forces, Michele Tessier, said.

Many people’s questions and speculations will be answered once the object is properly identified. Until then, a cloud of mystery will continue to shroud the underwater phenomenon.