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Because they can probably get accurate sizings of the fin from the photograph and scrapes in the sea floor, and no amateur will have built a submarine that big.

"Small U-boats" are small in relation to SSNs, and especially SSBNs, they're not actually small.

_If_ it was an amateur engineer it must have been both a crazy and a skilled motherfucker. The bottom scrape did probably occur when the submarine did hide from the Swedish navy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UC3_Nautilus

Exactly, that's all the point I was trying to make: not exactly unheard of for Scandinavians to be building crazy-awesome submarines in their backyards, essentially.

They were clear that it was a military vehicle.

I don't know that it was "scraping the bottom", some Russian subs are known to have caterpillar treads.

I think that the amateur engineer would have explained by now that it was his sub...