In 2011, Swedish divers discovered a baffling object at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. One that bears an uncanny resemblance to the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars and makes electrical equipment stop working when you get too close. Say it with me: whaaaat?
During an expedition to find an old shipwreck in the summer, treasure and salvage hunters Ocean X picked up an ‘interesting image’ on their sonar equipment. The image showed a 60-metre circular object with features that looked like stairways and ramps and other structures not normally produced by Mother Nature.
A lack of funding prevented the divers from going down and seeing the object for themselves until a year later. When they did, they encountered mysterious electrical interference when in the object’s proximity. One of the Ocean X team, Stefan Hogerborn, said:
“Anything electric out there, and the satellite phone as well, stopped working when we were above the object. And then when we got away about 200 metres, it turned on again, and when we got back over the object it didn’t work.”
Weird.
Even more interesting is that Ocean X could see a 985-foot, flattened out ‘runway’ leading up to the object. They said this implied that the object had skidded along the seabed before coming to a stop.
Ocean X diver Peter Lindberg said, “I was kind of prepared just to find a stone or cliff or outcrop or pile of mud, but it was nothing like that.”
Diver Dennis Åsberg added that he was “100% convinced” that they had discovered something “very, very, very unique”. He speculated that it could be a meteorite, or a base from a Cold War U-boat, or a UFO.
A meteorite with stairs?
Theories about the Baltic Sea anomaly being a crashed alien spaceship really caught on when artist Hauke Vagt produced a 3D graphic of the object. Tabloid newspapers noted similarities to Star Wars’ Millennium Falcon while others suggested the object could be a portal to another world or an underwater Stonehenge.
Sure, scientists have come along to spoil everybody’s fun, citing several distortions in the sonar image that suggest cheap and improperly calibrated equipment. Others have said that the anomaly is indeed likely to be a rock outcropping or the result of gas venting from the seafloor. The prevailing scientific explanation is that it’s a glacial deposit. Plus, samples recovered at the site by Ocean X have been analysed and revealed to be granites, gneisses and sandstones and even diver Peter Lindberg has said, “It’s not obviously an alien spacecraft. It’s not made of metal.”
Damn those scientists for their, you know, science. Doesn’t stop people’s imaginations running all over the shop though. Know what I reckon? It’s a spaceship that travelled back in time and crashed into the ocean so long ago that its metal hull got transformed into stone.
Well, alright, I don’t actually think that. But it’d make a good story, wouldn’t it? Maybe I’ll write one 😊
C.R. Berry 