Iranian officials responded by calling the incident a routine contact of a sort that happens all the time in the crowded waters of the Persian Gulf.

The New York Times pointed out that the United States-released audio includes no ambient noise of the kind that might be expected if the broadcast had come from one of the speedboats.

[8] The Navy Times wrote that the incident could have been caused by a locally famous heckler known as the "Filipino Monkey", noting that the threatening voice sounds different from that of the Iranian officer.

[17] On 12 January 2008, it was revealed that, contrary to previous reports, the packages the Iranian boats had dropped into the water posed no threat to the United States vessels.

If they commit such a stupidity, Tel Aviv and U.S. shipping in the Persian Gulf will be Iran's first targets and they will be burned," according to the student news agency ISNA.

[11][20] To travel through the Strait of Hormuz, which at its narrowest is 21 nautical miles (39 km) wide, ships pass through the territorial waters of Iran and Oman under the transit passage provisions of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.