My Uncle Had "Brain Bubbles"

My mother called me a few days ago. She was crying, and reminded me that it was her brother Brian’s birthday. I was surprised to hear that name; she hadn’t talked about him in so long that I’d completely forgotten what happened. When I told this story to my buddy, he mentioned that Reddit loves creepy government stuff – so here’s the tale of my family’s dark mystery. I’ll tell you  what  I know first, and then I’ll tell you  how  I know.

My uncle Brian was a “scrubber” for a private company contracted with the US government. His job (or the job of his entire team, rather) was to retrieve or destroy secret, top-secret, and alleged “above-top-secret” data from sunken military vessels. This included anything from documents, storage drives, cargo, weaponry, dog tags/identification cards, and corpses. He would also scrub identifying marks on ships, strip indicators of country of origin, and salvage valuable parts of the craft. His duties were not limited to these, but these are the most interesting and relevant.

Brian performed deep sea dives between 1969-71, then again from 1980-81. We don’t know much about his life between those two periods, but we do know that he was stationed at a “training facility” somewhere in the arctic circle, probably Greenland or Canada. During that time, he only visited his home in Arizona for 6 weeks per year, and was forbidden from doing all kinds of weird things. He was not allowed to purchase office supplies or typewriters, could not spend money at all except with a checkbook issued to him by his employer, could not go into a bank for any reason, could not handle cash, could not go to large gatherings or drink alcohol, etc. They wouldn’t even let him smoke cigarettes. He was forbidden to write anything down and therefore would never handle a pencil, couldn’t talk about his job, and refused to even touch a phone, with one exception.

Brian had to call a phone number every six hours, regardless of the time of day. He would wake up in the middle of the night to make the call, which always pissed off his wife. Whenever he made that call, he always spoke casually, as if talking to an old friend, and had conversations that never amounted to more than idle chit-chat. I only heard these calls once in my life, and only in retrospect did I realize that they were heavily coded. What he was actually saying, we will never know. Even when someone called for Brian, he wouldn’t take the phone; he would only touch it or speak if  he  dialed the number. I have never seen such a paranoid person in my life, but in my young age, I found his behavior harmless and amusing.

My uncle mysteriously disappeared in 1999, when I was twelve years old. I had only met him twice, and by that time he was retired. I was too young to remember him the first time we’d met, but the second occasion I actually tried to block out – and pretty much have, until this conversation with my mom.

When we visited him for a week in Phoenix, he was glum the entire time. The man was singularly unfriendly, and appeared scarcely aware of anything but his own private thoughts. He was more pensive and withdrawn than anyone I’d ever known, as if he’d retreated entirely from this planet and left a functioning body behind. He looked over his shoulder all the time, even on the couch, and always watched the rear-view mirror when my mom drove us out to dinner. I remember him constantly doing weird things, like inspecting the light switches in his own home, unscrewing the little plates and poking around, then putting them back on. He looked up in the air each time he walked outside, as if he expected a brick to fall on his head, or maybe a helicopter to snap a photo of him. He only ever spoke in short and stilted sentences, cautious not to divulge anything that could get him into trouble. Brian seemed like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders, and a flood of confessions just behind the dam of his teeth. I found myself wondering about him each night as I tried to fall asleep.

One night during that visit, Brian snapped. I don’t know what caused it, but he had a massive freak-out and started acting like he was on hard drugs. In the middle of a normal conversation on the couch, he started shrieking about how he was “sick of all the games” and didn’t “wanna be a gerbil anymore.” To my mother’s horror, he lunged at me and tried to strangle me. He kept screaming to my mom that he was going to “twist the head off, show you all the circuits!” and went on and on about how there were cameras in my eyes and microphones in my ears. He bit me, and when he saw that I bled, he snapped out of the episode and burst into tears.

My mom tried to call 911 from the house phone, but it wouldn’t connect. She frantically dialed the number on his barren fridge, and a woman answered. My mom told her that Brian was acting crazy, and said she needed police and an ambulance. The woman told my mom that she’d phone Brian’s doctor immediately, and that everyone should just sit tight. (I refused to go to the hospital anyway; I’m a lifelong emetophobe and hospitals make me nauseous.)

In less than an hour, a man showed up at the door. He called himself “Doctor S.” The doctor was dressed in ordinary slacks and a button-down shirt, and had a clean shave. I remember noticing the roughness of his hands when he shook mine. He was big, but too well-spoken to be some bruiser. I have trouble explaining what I mean, but the plainness of his appearance and the calm of his demeanor felt very menacing to me, like he was about to murder every person in the house, Patrick Bateman-style. The thing I remember most about him, however, was that he carried the acrid stench of chemicals, as if he’d been varnishing wood or something.

The doctor had a quiet conversation with my uncle on the back patio, and then he politely excused himself and left. He told my mom and I that “Brian is going to be fine, he just needs a bit of rest. I’ll order a prescription and you can pick it up for him tomorrow.” When my mother asked if it was dangerous to be alone with Brian, the doctor just laughed and said “Not anymore. I promise.” He squeezed my shoulder and walked away.

Two things really disturbed me about “Doctor S.”’s visit. The first was that between hello and goodbye, the man wasn’t there any longer than four minutes. What could he possibly have said to Brian in that amount of time? And second, when I ran upstairs to watch the doctor drive away, he didn’t get into a car. He literally walked out of the neighborhood.

Brian immediately seemed better after his meeting with the doctor. He apologized to me, and ate dinner with us. He was in much higher spirits, like he’d been relieved of every burden he carried.

My mom and I slept in the guest room with the door locked that night, simply because we had no idea what to expect from him. Brian was like his precious light switches: on or off, and nothing in between. But in the middle of the night, I woke up to my mother shouting. The house was dark, the patio door was wide open, and Brian was gone. He didn’t take anything with him – not his shoes or his checkbook or watch. His car still sat in the garage, and keys on the counter.

We tried to call the number on the fridge, but the line was disconnected. The phone wouldn’t dial out at all.

Early the next morning, a bunch of men showed up to the house. They took all Brian’s possessions away in boxes, and asked my mom and I a ton of really strange, nonsensical questions – things like, “Did Brian ever tell you his favorite color?”

“What food does he hate the most?”

“Is he good with kids?”

“Did he ever go to church?”

“What is your earliest memory of him?”

“Was he right or left-handed?”

The interrogation left us baffled. I was really confused by all of this, but my mother was downright mortified. No matter what answers she gave, they always doubted her, and told her she must be wrong, and gave some ridiculous explanation as to why. On the other hand, they never questioned a single thing I said. I still don’t understand what the point of all that was.

Almost a year later, after the shock of his disappearance began to settle into a dull pain, my mother decided to sell her car. Under the floor of the trunk, tucked into the spare tire, she found a VHS tape. It was from Brian. He probably left it there while we were asleep.

In it, Brian was standing way out in the desert somewhere. He looked a few years younger, and appeared to have not slept in days. He described the nature of his work to my mom, and some of the things he’d seen and done. I pieced together everything I know about him from this tape and some conversations between my mom and Brian’s ex-wife.

I haven’t seen the tape since we found it, and I’m sure my mom got rid of it, as Brian instructed. But here are the things I remember best – the weirdest and scariest things he found while working sunken ships and submarines:
 * Rooms that remained pressurized, where people appeared to live for weeks after the submarine sank. Some of the sailors appeared to have lost their minds and wrote all over the walls or killed each other.


 * Loud banging sounds on the hull and in passageways. These wrecks were mostly from WWII and the Cold War, some Vietnam – so years or decades old. But Brian swore he heard “SOS” in Morse code on more than one occasion. He even claims he once heard “LEAVE.”


 * Frozen bodies that looked mummified, suspended in the wrecks with smiles on their faces (the skin freezes and flakes off, revealing a ‘grin’).


 * The body of a young woman who appeared to have died much more recently than anyone else on the ship. She was wearing a flowing white dress, and “looked like an angel” when Brian found her. She wasn’t desiccated like the other bodies; her skin was pristine, despite being locked in a British submarine that sunk in the 1940’s and now lays at the bottom of the North Sea.


 * Strange things on Soviet ships. Human experiments, fetuses in bottles, remains that looked both human and animal, cages, chains, extensive prison networks in the bowels of one nuclear-class icebreaker in the Arctic, etc. Brian claims he found the body of what looked like a baby, floating in a laboratory, but its limbs were 2-3 feet long and dangled together like a dead wasp’s. When he moved it, it broke apart and dissipated in the water. Very few bones at all.


 * Brian talked of discovering a passenger jet that had never been reported missing. It crashed into the ocean and sank. All of the corpses were still buckled into their seats. The unusual thing was that the jet had sunken next to an old ship, and the corpses on the jet all wore dog tags that were traced to that ship. It was as if someone had played a practical joke by moving the dog tags, but my twelve-year-old mind imagined the corpses of the ship walking across the sea floor and buckling themselves into the crashed jet, hoping it would take them back to their families.

There’s more, and I’ll try to remember/ask my mother if anyone is interested
 * Scrubbers going mad in the depths. Two of Brian’s friends went missing during a dive off the Alaskan coast. One of them was found sealed inside a room of the submarine they were exploring, a door that could only be locked from the outside. He was nearly dead of hypothermia, and swore that a woman without a face had put him there. The other managed to remove a small part of his helmet, instantly killing himself because of the pressure difference.

In the years after Brian’s disappearance, strange men visited me once in a while, always asking about Brian. They found me in random places and always asked random questions. They were always polite, but never identified themselves. No matter where my mom and I moved, they found us. One time, a substitute teacher showed up to my high school biology class in Senior Year and gave the standard lecture, but at the end of the day, he asked me if I had any relatives who worked in the government, and if I could remember what my uncle’s favorite color was. On another occasion in college, my then-girlfriend/now-fiancée and I went to a bar for a friend’s birthday, and the bartender kept trying to serve me alcohol (I don’t drink) and then asked me if I’d ever consider moving to Phoenix. He told me his buddy Brian used to live out there, and asked me if I’d ever been scuba diving. At the end of the night, he asked how my mother was doing – and used her full name.

Most recently, while jogging the forest trail near my house in California, a guy on a bicycle stopped me and told me I looked just like a guy he once knew – Brian, a dude he met in the Navy. He mentioned that they lost touch, and said, “Last I heard, he was out livin’ in the desert or somethin’, far away from the ocean. He  hated  the ocean.” I replied sarcastically that he probably went to Phoenix, and the guy’s expression went cold as a dead fish. He said, “That’s right. He’s happier there, I’m sure of it.” Then the man rode off. The one thing all these people had in common was that they reeked of chemicals, just like “Doctor S.”

Brian’s ex-wife Jill once told me “Your uncle had brain bubbles,” and told me that the crazy things he’d say were the result of brain damage from diving. The mixture of gasses, pressure, and tight spaces, coupled with other stressors of the job could certainly do real harm to a person’s mind. But then again, Jill also worked in the government; that’s how they met, and after Brian disappeared, she acted like she barely remembered him at all. It was almost as though she wanted me to dismiss him as a nut job.

And come to think of it, she always smelled like chemicals too.

TheColdPeople