Humm....
TBH This sounds more like a false-flag op. I'm old enough to remember the Glomar Explorer, getting everyone excited about the fortune the Hughes corporation was going to make from manganese nodules from the deep-sea bed - the ship actually built to recover a sunk Soviet sub. Second cover story was that not all of the sub was recovered due to a failure of the grapple...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSF_Explorer (sorry for the wiki quote, too lazy etc..)
Now if the USofA wanted to develop the tech to drop big lumps of rock down the gravity well as part of their 'wars on stuff'; or if there actually was going to be an 'extinction level event' in 2032 or whenever, and we could do with nudging the little bugger out of the way without inconveniencing Joe Public with intimations of mortality what better cover would you need?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
