Helsinki reports thousands of phantom military ships off Finnish coast

Thousands of NATO “ghost ships” were detected in the Baltic Sea, although most were actually located elsewhere, Helsingin Sanomat reports, citing the Finnish Transport and Communications Agency (Traficom).

On Monday, November 3, signals from thousands of military vessels were recorded in the Baltic Sea. However, journalists noted that in reality, the majority of these ships were far from the sea’s coastlines.

For instance, a Spanish warship was registered in the Gulf of Finland, even though it was reportedly en route from Somalia to Japan. The error is believed to have originated at the Automatic Identification System (AIS) receiving station in Parainen, Finland.

Typically, this station receives data only from ships in the Archipelago Sea, the area of the Baltic Sea between the Gulf of Bothnia and the Gulf of Finland, and normally tracks fewer than 100 vessels per hour. On Sunday evening, however, the station claimed to have connected with nearly 18,000 ships in just one hour.

Helsingin Sanomat highlighted that the company operating the Parainen receiver is a private entity, and the issue is confined to commercial tracking services. According to Aleksi Uttula, head of Traficom’s maritime monitoring department, there were no malfunctions in the official systems used by authorities to transmit information on military vessels.

By Tamilla Hasanova