It’s Tuesday again! Time for your weekly dose of the Spooky, culled from around the web, the world, and life. Every week I’ll have something new to send a shiver down your spine.

This week’s theme is The Baltic Sea Object.

At some point, everyone fantasizes about what might lie beneath the murky ocean depths. The more optimistic of us imagine treasure, or perhaps Atlantis. The more adventurous imagine shipwrecks. It’s the deep darkness of the ocean that fascinates me. My first exposure to it was a stack of National Geographic magazines someone gave me in the early 90’s. One of them was the Titanic issue.

The image of something made appearing faintly out of the darkness captivated my four-year-old mind and hasn’t let up. It isn’t just the darkness that scares me. I think it’s the fact that for something we made to appear out of the darkness like that it first has to be lost. The thought of something slowly (or quickly) sinking beneath those inky fathoms terrifies me in a way that little else does.

A few years ago I stumbled upon an article that purported to have found… something, buried beneath the waves in the Baltic Sea. Said something appears to be circular in shape, either some kind of monument, or perhaps even a craft of some kind. (The UFO thing never really occurred to me; I thought it was much cooler and spookier if it were a long lost manmade object.)

The article included a picture, included at the top of this article. Spooky, right?

I clipped the article, filed it under “D&D Plot Inspiration,” and haven’t done anything with it since. I’ve kept coming back to the image in the years since then. Now that it’s Tuesday, I think it’s time to dust my old clippings off and drag you down into the depths with me to go check it out.

All of this started when Swedish researcher Peter Lindberg of the Ocean X Team saw something strange in their sonar feed: his crew discovered, in the 300-foot-deep water of the Gulf of Bothnia, “a large circle, about 60 meters in diameter … [t]he shape is completely round” (Lindberg’s description; there is some disagreement in the reporting of whether it is 60 meters or 60 feet. The only source I read in the original Swedish said meters, so that’s what I’m using here.) Mysteriously, he said he saw evidence of marks on the ocean floor, as if the object had crash landed and skidded to a halt.

The implication is that the object they discovered is a UFO. Is this a convincing explanation? I don’t personally think so (or perhaps I simply don’t find that explanation interesting or even Spooky), but I do have to admit that the object does look an awful lot like the Millenium Falcon.

At the time I discovered the existence of the Baltic Sea Object I was doing research into fictional undersea architecture; think HP Lovecraft’s “The Temple” or X-Com: Terror From the Deep, both of which are much more in line with the artist’s impression of the object—and yes, sorry to disappoint everyone, but that top image is an artist’s representation—and constitute a much more interesting possibility: that of an ancient construction that has since been submerged.

So what is it? Well, the possibilities range from the ridiculous: one article claims that it might be a “top-secret Nazi anti-submarine defence list since the Second World War,” to the mundane (and most probable): it’s a glacial deposit.

The divers reportedly gave samples of the object to Volker Brüchert, associate professor of geology at Stockholm University. Tabloids reportedly quote the professor as saying “I was surprised when I researched the material I found a great black stone that could be a volccanic rock. My hypothesis is that this object, this structure was formed during the Ice Age many thousands of years ago.” That would fit Lindberg’s radio statement that “It has these very strange stair formations, and if it is constructed, it must be constructed tens of thousands of years ago before the Ice Age.”

Unfortunately, the story unraveled almost immediately after I began tugging at the edges.

According to Life’s Little Mysteries, a subsidiary of LiveScience, it turns out that the professor doesn’t think there’s anything mysterious about the stone. Instead, the stone is of exactly the type that would be expected to find in an undersea glacial basin. He also said that most of the rest of the samples they brought up were ordinary granites, gneisses, and sandstones.

The “perfectly round” structure? It turns out that the sonar resolution isn’t good enough to confirm its round nature; it could just ben an optical illusion a la The Face on Mars. The marks do appear to lead up to the object, but they could also be nothing. I’m not an expert on sea bottom tidal forces, so I don’t know if gouges in the floor would have been eradicated over time or not, but my guess would be yes, so unless someone corrects me (please do; if I’m wrong and it turns out that it’s possible for gouges to remain for a long time on the bottom of the sea, that would be quite neat!), I’m going to say that rules out the UFO crash. (And to be fair to Lindberg and his team, none of them have claimed it’s a UFO—the community has done that.)

Lastly, the artist’s impression. It isn’t a real picture of the object, which made me sad. I’d nearly dropped my coffee when I saw the image. I admit that I wanted to believe, but I really did think the picture was real. The truth? It was made by an artist named Hauke Vagt, and Lindberg went on record as saying the image was “the closest so far.” That comment alone reeks of sensationalism. However, his comment may have been tongue-in-cheek: Lindberg says his team “has neither the interest nor the resources to further investigate the anomaly. Deep ocean research is time-consuming and expensive. If the object were indeed a flying saucer, recovering it could potentially be worth millions or billions of dollars. If it’s a natural formation, on the other hand, it would probably be a waste of time and money.” This is coming from a man who runs a shipwreck discovery company. In other words, he does not himself consider it probable that the object is anything interesting, but no doubt he wanted to enjoy sharing a neat find. I don’t blame him, and I’m glad he did. It’s a really fun discovery.

Oh, and the day he discovered it, June 19, 2011? That was a Tuesday.

Just kidding, it was a Sunday. That would have been awesome though. See you next week.

Sources (by publication date):

Åsberg, Dennis. “Strange anomaly was found during a sonar, USO / UFO or Stonehenge standing on the bottom?” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 4 Jul. 2011. Web. 28 Jul. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=jwHE5816_XY>.

Radford, Benjamin. “UFO Found on Ocean Floor?” LiveScience. Livescience.com, 29 Jul. 2011. Web. 28 Jul. 2015. <http://www.livescience.com/15311-ufo-ocean-floor.html>.

Radford, Benjamin. “Second ‘Sunken UFO’ Claim Doesn’t Hold Water.” LiveScience. Livescience.com, 03 Feb. 2012. Web. 28 July 2015. <http://www.livescience.com/18307-baltic-sunken-ufo-image.html>.

Wolchover, Natalie. “New ‘Sunken UFO’ Images Unconvincing, Experts Say.” LiveScience. Livescience.com, 18 June 2012. Web. 28 July 2015. <http://www.livescience.com/34009-sunken-ufo-baltic-sea.html>.

Vagt, Hauke (sonofmabarker). “New Image Of Baltic Sea Anomaly July 8th.” Online video clip. YouTube. Youtube, 8 Jul. 2012. Web. 28 Jul. 2015. < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mv23EfAgv3A>

Waugh, Rob. “Sonar scans show that ‘UFO’ at bottom of Baltic sea may actually be a top-secret Nazi anti-submarine defence lost since the Second World War.” DailyMail. Dailymail.com, 13 Jul. 2012. Web. <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2172503/Sonar-scans-UFO-Baltic-sea-actually-secret-Nazi-super-weapon-lost-World-War-II.html>.

Wolchover, Natalie. “’Mysterious’ Baltic Sea Object Is a Glacial Deposit.” LiveScience. Livescience.com, 30 Aug. 2012. Web. 28 Jul. 2015. <http://www.livescience.com/22846-mysterious-baltic-sea-object-is-a-glacial-deposit.html>.

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