September 14, 2024 • 48 mins
In the last vault episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discussed the so-called Eltanin Antenna and how it is at once an identified image of a deep sea organism and an icon of paranormal intrigue. In this episode, they continue this line of inquiry with another underwater image. (originally published 08/15/2023)
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This is
Robert Lamb and it is Saturday. So again we're going
to the Vault once more, this time for the episode
another Enigmatic underwater Image. This is a continuation on the
last Vault episode we did, where we're looking at difficult
to analyze images from the deep ocean and how they
(00:28):
can spin off them in the minds of onlookers into
paranormal intrigue. This one originally published eight fifteen, twenty twenty three.
Here we go, let's dive in.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
And I'm Joe McCormick. And hey, we're back to anomalous imagery.
In the pre episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
we were looking at some photographs that people have wanted
to sort into the proof of Aliens Confirmed column, and
we ended up talking about reasons why that's not necessarily
(01:16):
a wise or well informed move, and we thought we
might come back to talk about more images of this sort.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
And you know what, here we are, Yeah, in the
last episode, and this is this is a situation where
it's probably helpful if you listen to that last episode,
but it's not necessarily a part one in part two,
so I don't know do what you will regarding these episodes.
But in the last episode, we discussed the so called
el tennan antenna, a deep sea photograph of something taken
(01:44):
in nineteen sixty four that ultimately led to a positive
identification of a specific species of deep sea sponge, but
also fed a great deal of paranormal and ufology speculation
about alien technology and global energy grids and the like.
We discussed how images and data like this that dwell
(02:04):
in a kind of low res realm of evidence often
play into arguments for supernatural or other worldly explanations instead
of mundane natural world explanations.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
That's right. So we were developing an idea somewhat jumping
off of some offhand terminology use in comments I've heard
in interviews with a science writer and skeptical UFO researcher
named Mick West, and I think the phrase I had
heard him use at some point was the low information zone.
But we were also talking about the idea of the
(02:37):
low resolution zone, and so the idea we were developing
was that it's in cases of evidence containing less information
or existing in a space of lower resolution that supernatural
or alien explanations tend to retain the aura of viability.
They seem to some people like this might be a
(02:59):
good explanation, And it's in cases of high resolution or
high information where the photo, if it's a photo where
it's like really sharp and taken from multiple angles, and
we have a good idea exactly where and when it
was taken, maybe other people can go check up on it,
people with relevant knowledge have had a look at it.
These are the cases that end up very very often
(03:20):
having pretty clear explanations from within the known range of
natural causes. In other words, there seems to be a
pattern where a fuzzy photo creates way more mythology than
a sharp one. And I think this is applical, applicable
in the broader sense, not just in pure resolution of photos,
but in the general sense of information like evidence, this
(03:43):
kind of vague and fuzzy and not well situated within
an informational context seems oh yeah, maybe that is aliens.
And the further you turn up the resolution, the more
accurate information and context you have, the more often it
seems like, oh yeah, that's a plastic bag, or that's
an airplane, or that's a constellation of stars.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
Yeah. And as we discussed in the last episode, and
we'll continue to discuss here, to whatever extent, you can
also cut out the context for the image, or ignore
the context and or ignore the expertise in a given
field that could be vital to understanding what you're looking
at exactly.
Speaker 3 (04:25):
Yeah. So the background knowledge of the observer can also
be one of the information states, and that can be
high information or low.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Yeah. And it's not necessarily a situation either where someone
is like willfully, I refuse to listen to the experts
because because you know, I know what I see. You know,
sometimes it's maybe a little more nuanced than that. So
I do want to acknowledge that. But just throwing that
out there as well. We'll come back to the idea
as we roll farward.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Now.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
Another one of the ideas we talked about in the
last episode was how popular it seems underwater images in
particular are in the UFO slash UAP and general fringe
explanation idea space. Of course, the Eltannan object was an
underwater photo, and I mentioned in the last episode the
(05:13):
idea that apparently anomalous. Underwater images are especially useful nucleation
points for these types of narratives because they're sort of
inherently low resolution or low information. The details are often obscured.
Images of things underwater often look weird, but you can't
(05:34):
tell exactly what they are, which means you can start
making up whatever explanation you find the most exciting. And
I was thinking about how underwater imagery often qualifies as
low information evidence in multiple dimensions at once, So like
the original image is usually grainy and indistinct if it's
taken in visible light, like it's a photograph taken invisible light,
(05:57):
light conditions are usually low, and sometimes they're is you know,
is something obscuring the image in the water. Maybe the
water is cloudy, maybe not. Sometimes the image is not
even based on visible light. Maybe we're looking at a
sonar image or something like that, which further complicates your
ability to identify what it is you're looking at. And
(06:17):
sometimes things are even obscured in other ways, like partially
buried or have things on top of them. Beyond all this,
objects and formations that may be common underwater do not
seem common to people who spend their lives on land
and on the surface. Think of the sponge we talked
about last time. If you lived on the ocean floor,
you'd probably recognize that. You would be like a tree
(06:38):
to you. You know, you've seen lots of these before,
but not living on the ocean floor. That's totally weird.
You've never seen anything like it. You have no idea
what it could be.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
Yeah, as we touched on in that one, the so
called antenna occurred as a singular object without any fellow
antenna around it in this one photograph. Previous dredges in
the deep ocean had revealed places where they seem to
be quite numerous.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
That's right. Sometimes they're kind of a forest, but in
this case it wasn't. It was just one standing alone
in the image. So that I don't know, that mean
to seem more monolithic and kind of strange and dangerous
and inviting of calling out for some kind of otherworldly explanation. Finally,
I was thinking about one more thing about the low
information nature of underwater images, especially in the case of
(07:28):
deep sea objects. It's difficult, expensive, and sometimes impossible for
other people to check the object for themselves because it's
on the bottom of the ocean, So you are unlikely
to get somebody else imaging the same thing with different
equipment in different conditions to get more context and clarity.
Unless it's like a really famous and valuable thing and
(07:50):
you've you know, published coordinates of exactly where it is,
there's like huge interest in it. Maybe, but like for
the most part, if you're talking about something on the
bottom of the ocean, whatever imagery you release of it
that you initially produce, it's that you know that that's
going to be all there is.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Yeah, Yeah, Because I mean, ultimately, whether your idea is
based in just pure scientific inquiry or if it's based
in some sort of paranormal interest or some sort of
fringe theory, you're still going to have to somehow get
that funding together to pay for an expedition to an
extreme environment. And you know, are the numbers going to
(08:27):
add up at the end of the day.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
And in some cases, I think it might be more
financially lucrative for an object to remain in the low
information zone than it would be to increase the information
because that might well dispel the mystique surrounding it.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
Exactly. Yes, Because as we touched on in the first episode.
You know, these images become kind of articles of faith
within a given belief system, within a given worldview, and yeah,
you go down there, there's you've got to admit, okay,
you know, lining up with your hopes and dreams. Maybe
you'll get that high res image of this thing and
(09:04):
it will literally change the way we think about ourselves
and we think about the world. But what are the
chances that you'll just know it'll be that face on
Mars scenario, you know where Oh well, you realize that
once you have some different imagery, some different information to
go on, the face is not there at all, and
then how are you going to feel?
Speaker 3 (09:23):
So this brings us to the particular underwater image that
you dug up, Rob that we're going to talk about today.
This image is the so called Baltic Sea anomaly. Would
you like to introduce it?
Speaker 1 (09:35):
Sure? Yeah. I found this the way probably I think
a lot of people find it is that you find
these various lists of strange, unexplained things beneath the ocean,
and they're generally they're generally a weird array of objects
and alleged objects, some of which are verified realities, some
(09:56):
are you know, blurry, low res images. But yeah, this
and this sonar image was taken by Swedish Ocean X
on the floor of the Northern Baltic Sea at the
center of the Gulf of Bothnia in June twenty eleven
during a hunt for I believe possible sunken treasure. So
(10:17):
they were on the lookout with their imagery for you know,
things that might be ships, things that might be man
made objects on the bottom. Now, the image that came
out of all of this, the sonar image, has captured
the imagination of ufologists because it does look roundish and
many illustrations and I want to stress that illustrations based
(10:40):
on this imagery readily, and these will readily come up
and search for you. Don't worry. You don't have to
look hard for them. In fact, it's harder to sort
of wean them out and just focus on the sonar
data they lean into. This kind of interpretation of this
roundish object is perhaps a millennium Falcon s spaceship, or
perhaps something akin to the ship that the engineers have
(11:03):
in the Alien franchise.
Speaker 3 (11:06):
I was thinking something that, yeah, from Prometheus. It looks
like that technology style.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
Yeah, which is an iconic derelict spaceship that has mysteries
aboard that we absolutely should on Earth, We actually absolutely
should get in there and get some of that right.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
But I guess for now we're just going to focus
on this original sonar image that was released to the
media back in the summer of twenty eleven by again
Ocean X, which is this Swedish treasure hunting and salvage
diving operation.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
Yeah, the actual image here is definitely in the low
information zone, and various critics have pointed this out as
a reason that not much can be made out of it,
aside from the consensus that we're almost certainly looking at
a geologic formation here and not a spaceship, not part
(11:57):
of a lost city on the bottom of the ocean,
some part of a lot of civilization. Their whole article
speculating that as well. And you know, it's it's worth
driving home that like these ideas, just as pure ideas,
are very exciting, Like who wouldn't want to learn more
about a possible alien spaceship on the bottom of the ocean.
Who would want to hear more about a lost city
(12:17):
that was you know, Atlantis style that was swallowed up
by the waves in ancient times, but more likely than anything,
this is just geology down there, and if you're into geology,
it's pretty exciting. But I guess we have to sort
of look at the at the end of the day,
perhaps geology doesn't have necessarily as much of an excitement
(12:39):
value in the mainstream or certainly in the in the fringe.
So if you're if you're given two possibilities, even though
one is far more likely, some people are just going
to go for the the sexier answer, and of course
the answer that confirms or seems to confirm some ideas
and aspirations one has for the universe.
Speaker 3 (13:03):
Interpretations I've come across in addition to saying this is
an alien spacecraft. Oh and by the way, I should say,
early articles about this from around the time it was
first released often like would draw outlines around parts of
this sonar image, like asking you to lean into certain
shape interpretations, And one of the outlines that was often
(13:27):
drawn was essentially the millennium falcon. So they there's a
weird kind of space where they can almost like if
you're a journalist doing an article and drawing an outline
like that, you can be like, oh, it's just funny.
You know, it's a funny joke, but also you probably
know that you are getting some traffic from like playing
(13:47):
into the hand of UFO interpretations.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
Yeah, I've also seen some where they're like, okay, these
are stairs and then this is you know, pointing out
like architectural supposed architectural details on this object. And you know, again,
you're you're a lot of people they're seeing this image
for the first time. You're giving them all the interpretation,
given the full script for interpreting this low res image.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
Right, But anyway to come back to so, there are
a lot of people who say, yeah, this is a
crashed alien flying saucer, or crashed alien spacecraft or crashed
ancient human spacecraft from lost you know, lost technology from
an ancient civilization. There are also people who say it
was a monument built by the Atlantean civilization, So they
(14:30):
say Atlantis built this, it was like a temple. There
are various flavors of secret Nazi interpretations. It's a it's
a U boat model we've never seen before, some kind
of underwater Nazi bunker.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
Oh yeah, yeah, obviously there's a great deal of Nazi stuff.
Once you get into the paranormal in fringe movements.
Speaker 3 (14:51):
But what does it actually look like? I mean, if
you take away the outlines and everything, what we can
see in this image is that it is a kind
of roughly sur killer looking texture on the ocean floor
that has some parallel lines kind of running across it that,
you know, you could well want to interprets as I
don't know something they're like grooves or tracks or walkways,
(15:15):
but also they could just be like layers of rock.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
You know. One of these images you included where it's
been traced. It looks kind of like I'm going to
I'm gonna throw this out there. It looks kind of
like one of the helmets of the giant warriors from
Nausacaa the Valley of the Wind like on its side.
So perhaps this is a remnant from that time before
the Seven Days of Fire.
Speaker 3 (15:38):
Oh well, we certainly wouldn't want to awake it then,
but meddlesome men and their war machines they want to anyway.
So other claims about this image, So they say the
people who discovered it say that the disc part of
the object is roughly sixty meters wide or about two
hundred feet wide in diameter. It was found on the
(16:01):
ocean floor at a depth of about ninety meters or
three hundred feet. Okay, so actually not that deep when
it comes to ocean or seafloor. And again this is
in the Gulf of Bothnia, which is the northern part
of the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Finland. Peter Lindberg,
one of the explorers behind the original image, claimed that
(16:22):
the object was perfectly round, and there is a sort
of light colored area on the seafloor extending away from
the disc shaped object that people say could be a
runway or a streak cut in the seafloor from a
crash landing. And then the next thing, this one starts
(16:42):
being a real red flag for me. At some point,
ocean X started saying that they tried to return to
the object and get more information about it and imagery
of it, and they said that proximity to the object
was causing all of their electronic equipment to function, and
they couldn't come within I think they said two hundred
(17:04):
meters of the object without all of their electronics failing. Hmm.
I'm a little doubtful of that kind of story.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
You know, given that this is near Finland. I would
be shocked if no one has suggested that it might
be the lost Sampo, which of course is this object
from Finnish mythology that was essentially like it brought riches
and good fortune and treasures. It was this font of wealth,
(17:34):
and if memory serves like the myth is that it
was lost at sea during a battle. So I don't know,
it sounds like it could be the Sampo. If I'm
going to lean into mythology for my.
Speaker 3 (17:45):
Interpretations, do they say what the Sampo looks like.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
I've seen some illustrations where it is actually kind of
kind of round, Yeah, but I think maybe smaller. I
don't know.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
Okay, Wiki at least mentions a bunch of different ways
it's been depicted, and they are wide ranging, so I
would guess in the original they don't say the shape
it takes, but it says here it could be anything
from a world pillar to a compass or astrolabe, or
a bunch of other things, a coin, dye, a shield.
So why not a giant disc at the bottom of
(18:19):
the ocean.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
Now.
Speaker 3 (18:21):
One of the reasons that people say this must be
a spaceship or some other piece of out of place
technology is I think, essentially an intuitive reaction to certain
patterns of geometry. When you look at this sonar image,
it appears to be a large circular disc. In some versions,
the circular disc appears to be made out of smaller
(18:44):
rectangles or squares, and a circle filled in with rectangles
or squares. That doesn't sound like any natural object I've
ever seen, so it just looks like it could not
be natural. It had to be made. Now regarding the
square tile or rectangular tiles appearance in this particular sonar image,
(19:05):
the one we've been looking at here, there are different
versions of it you can find on the Internet. But
even the fact that it appears to be made of
the rectangular blocks or tiles, I think is actually somewhat
influenced by the fact that the image has some sort
of digital artifact lines running parallel from top to bottom
(19:25):
across the image. And these parallel bars crossing the image
are not just on the object, but they're covering the
whole bitmap, and thus they are obviously a byproduct of
the imaging process, not a reflection of the object itself.
The image is also lined up so that these parallel
lines are exactly perpendicular to some ridges or lines that
(19:48):
seem to actually be on the object whatever it is,
that seem to sort of run parallel across it. So
I think these digital imaging artifacts create a false impression
of a kind of right angled brickwork pattern that is
not actually present on the object itself. That's just a
byproduct of the way the image looks with these lines
(20:09):
running up and down on it. On the images we see.
Second thing is, Rob, you already mentioned this, but the illustrations.
This is another case, just like we talked about last time,
of what was originally a low resolution or low information
piece of evidence being subject to mythologizing in grandiose elaborations
in artworks. So if you Google image search this object,
(20:33):
results containing the actual sonar image will be vastly outnumbered
by full on fictional illustrations. I've included a few for
you to look at here, Rob, Folks at home, you
can look them up yourself, just type in Baltic Sea anomaly.
To be clear, these are not photos of the actual object.
They are imaginative artworks. All of the interesting and provocative
(20:54):
sharp detail shown in them is made up. But articles
and videos about the object seem to use things like this. Nonetheless,
it's kind of like, look, here's one way of imagining
what this could look like up close if you could
see it sharply. And for some people this seems to
suggest it's legitimate to assume that's the way it actually is.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
Yeah, and be clear, this can also take place at
kind of a subliminal consumer level where you just you
pull up a bunch of images of this thing, and yeah,
most of the ones on your page are going to
be perhaps leaning into some sort of fantastic illustration, and
the illustrations are cool, Like you can't help but look
at this and feel a certain kind of way.
Speaker 3 (21:39):
Yeah, don't want to knock the artists, but I mean
just like to emphasize these are not images of a
thing in the world. These are essentially fictional artworks that
are based on a grainy, indistinct original image.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
Now I want to throw out another wild speculation. What
if this is a tetromino or a tetris block, And really,
instead of trying to get down there to it, what
we need to do is construct a tetromino to interlock
with it and drop it down and make sure that
we have lined it up appropriately so that it will
(22:16):
fill in the space next to it.
Speaker 3 (22:18):
Well, that's a great point, but it would have to
be a kind of hybrid game piece because it like
one half of it seems to be a tetronomo. It's
got the blocky parts that seem like they could interlock,
and then the other half is rounded like a connect
four piece. So maybe it is for a hybrid type
game something we haven't seen yet.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
I mean, this does touch on the rea. It's like
it's not square enough. It's not it doesn't have enough
right angles that it really shouts unnatural object as loudly
as some would perhaps insist that it does. It's also
not round enough, it doesn't have the end. Would not
in either case necessarily mean that it is not of
(23:02):
this world, but certainly like those are the sorts of
shapes one would want to see in their spaceship. You
would want to see a more perfect circle, You would
want to see a lot of angles that we usually
don't think of as occurring naturally in nature.
Speaker 3 (23:25):
We will come back to in a minute commentary on
this Sonari image itself and what kind of conclusions we
should draw from it. But let's say that this did
actually depict an object to the bottom of the ocean
that had that looked like it had sort of some
blocks or some rectangular bricks in it. In the spirit
of the previous episodes, let's talk about sponges that look
(23:47):
like technology. I think it's time for it. Let's talk
about natural rock formations that look like architecture. There are
lots of them. You can just google lists of things
that are natural geologic formations that look like things made
by humans or made by intelligence, maybe alien intelligence. So
I wanted to just focus on one example because I
(24:09):
thought the images were so striking. Let's look at what
is called tessellated pavement. Now, to be clear, I'm not
saying that's what this is an image of. I'm just
citing this as an example of things that are natural
geologic formations that totally look like they could not be
that they must have been made by intelligence. Rob, you
(24:30):
can have a look at the photos I included for you.
How would you describe these?
Speaker 1 (24:36):
So one of these images, the one with the sunset
over it, This is one of my favorite images. I
used to have this on my computer, as was one
of my desktop wall papers. It's just so splendid. To
look at, and it does. It looks kind of otherworldly.
It has a psychedelic feel to it. It just makes you
feel nice. A couple of the other images of this
(24:57):
sort of thing maybe let feel less surreal, less visionary,
and more like, oh, this was once a shopping mall
of some sort, Like clearly some sort of structure was
built here and it's gone. So I don't know, shopping
malls of the gods.
Speaker 3 (25:15):
Okay, but you're saying shopping mall because it's got rectangular
paving stones right where you're looking at, like a flat
expanse of rock that reaches out into the surf so
you can see the ocean beyond, and then all across
the surface of this rock there are just rectangular tiles basically.
Speaker 1 (25:32):
Yeah, rectangular tiles, rectangular spaces, and you get this sense
like if you've ever seen a large building like a
you know, a storage facility, factory or a mall, and
it's been torn down, like and the junk has been
cleared away and you're just left with the with the base,
it often looks something like this, you know, where you
(25:53):
can see where rooms used to be, you can see
bits of tiling, et cetera. So yeah, it it's whispers
some sort of human origin when you look at it,
if you again, if you don't have the proper context
and the proper expertise.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
So all of these photos that you're looking at here
rob are of the same rock formation which can be
found on an isthmus in the Australian state of Tasmania.
The isthmus is called the Eagle Hawk Neck and it's
on the southeast of Tasmania, connecting the mainland to the
Tasman Peninsula. I mentioned that these formations are known as
(26:31):
tessellated pavements. Tesselated as a synonym for tiled, so it
means the practice of covering a surface with tightly locking tiles.
And it's called this because, of course it looks like
a tiled floor or a pavement made by human hands. Now,
how on Earth could natural processes ever produce something that
looks like this? Well, I found a passage in an
(26:52):
academic book that discusses this very thing. So the book's
called The Coastlines of the World with Google Earth Understanding
Our Environment by Scheffers, Scheffers and Keletot, published by Springer
twenty twelve. The authors say that these formations are rare,
and they seem to only occur in sedimentary rock platforms
located in the intertidal zone. Intertitle means that the rocks
(27:16):
are covered by seawater at high tide and then uncovered
at low tide, so they can go through patterns of
wedding with seawater and then drying out. And they also
tend to occur only in low energy coasts, meaning coasts
without very strong wave action. So the authors write that
these tesselated patterns in Tasmania in particular, began millions of
(27:38):
years ago when fractures formed in siltstone due to stress
in the Earth's crust sometime between like sixty million and
one hundred and sixty million years ago. In geology, these
cracks that form in large bodies of rock are known
as joints, and they're found in all kinds of rock,
most often appearing as patterns of crack that extend all
(28:01):
the way through this big body of rock, and sometimes,
for a variety of reasons, these patterns can be parallel
or otherwise surprisingly regular and symmetrical. Another striking pattern of
jointing in large bodies of rock that might look unnatural
to some is hexagonal jointing. If you've ever seen columns
(28:22):
of basalt that have hexagonal shapes, that that's another type
of strange jointing that doesn't look like that could happen
in nature, but it does. That's caused by just patterns
of how certain types of rock cool and then crack
as they cool. In the case of the tessellated pavements,
here you get kind of rectangular patterns of cracks. And
(28:43):
in the time since the jointing occurred in this rock,
the cracked sedimentary rock has been exposed to the surface
and the tides which have caused it to erode in
a way that accentuated the rectangular grade of cracks in
what's known as pan and loaf formation. So the basic
difference here is that some of these rectangles seem to
(29:05):
be sort of raised at the outline and then depressed
in the middle where they can hold pools of water
in them, and then other ones seem to be kind
of raised in the middle and depressed at the outline,
so in the middle they sort of puff up like
a maybe like a cobble stone or like the top
of a loaf of bread rising over the pan. The
(29:26):
author's right that at areas farther away from the contact
with the water, the pavement spends a longer time drying
out during low tide, which gives more opportunity for salt
crystals to form on top of the rock, and the
salt crystals erode the rock surface, and the erosion happens
(29:47):
faster inside the pan than it does in the cracks
around the pan, you know, forming the rim. So you
end up with this depressed pan appearance where it can
hold pools of water. Meanwhile, the loaf formation are closer
to the water, there's less drying in between tides, less
salt crystal, less salt crystallization, and more erosion just due
(30:09):
to water flowing in the cracks in between the rectangles
and like sand and abrasion eroding those. So you end
up getting this raised, puffed bread like kind of appearance. Rob,
I've got another image for you to look at that
is more of the loaf formation down below here. This
is the one in black and white, and man, these
(30:30):
really really do look like human made bricks. But it's
a natural formation.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
Yeah yeah, I mean, if you just glanced at it,
even if you I don't know, I guess if you
looked at it long enough, you might wonder why the
bricks are not of uniform size, but certainly it's smacks
of masonry. It smacks of brickwork.
Speaker 3 (30:51):
So that's just one example, but I hope that should
be a convincing illustration yet again that we should not
always trust our intuitions about what looks natural and what
looks intelligently designed. We are presented with example after example
of things that look like they must be technology, or
they must be architecture, they must have been built by
(31:12):
intention and intelligence, but are actually just totally, uncontroversially a
result of biological evolution or geological and hydrological processes, just
things that happen in nature without any human intervention or
alien intervention. So my point there is that without the
relevant expertise since a marine biology or geology or whatever
(31:33):
it is, it's easy to sort something into the unexplainable column,
when in fact it's just like totally looks like something
that is well known if you happen to know about
certain things.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
Right.
Speaker 3 (31:56):
But to come back to the sonar image from the
Baltic Sea, the Baltic Sea nomaly, which again some are
quick to label an anomaly in need of explanation based
in Aliens or Atlantis or secret Nazi technology. Again, all
of this speculation is only possible because we're operating in
the zone of low resolution. One problem here is that
(32:17):
you and I and most people looking at this image
lack context. We don't know much about the Baltic Sea floor.
We also don't know anything about how sonar images are produced.
Is it possible that we could get a higher information
perspective by asking somebody who knows about those things? So
I came across an article published in February twenty twelve
(32:38):
in Popular Mechanics called Underwater UFO Get Real Experts Say,
by Douglas Main. And this article consulted several experts for
perspective on this sonar image. One was Hanumant Singh, who
was at the time a researcher with the Woods Hull
Oceanographic Institute. I think now he's a professor at Northeastern
(32:58):
University who has a number of research focuses I found,
including robotics and things in that domain, but also quote
imaging in visually degraded environments, including underwater and in polar regions.
Speaker 1 (33:11):
Oh that's perfect.
Speaker 3 (33:12):
So what did Singh have to say? About the anomaly well.
He cautioned that we should not put too much trust
in the sonar image itself for a number of reasons.
He says it was created using a type of sonar
technology called side scan sonar, which is perfectly useful for
locating large objects like sunken ships, but could potentially introduce
(33:34):
false details into an image if it's not functioning correctly,
and he cited several indications in the image itself that
the sonar should not be trusted. He said that there
are signs of cross talk between the two different instruments
that are used to create the image. He says one
channel is electrically contaminating the other, and this results in
(33:56):
parts of the image on one side being mirrored and
reflected on to the other side of the map. He
also says that the black parallel lines in the image
I already mentioned these earlier just because I didn't have
any expertise, but I just noticed that these create the
false impression that the disc is more made of rectangular
blocks than it probably actually is. He said that these
(34:18):
black parallel lines in the image showed that there are
places where the sonar is dropping out, so that's an
image quality problem. He also says that the edges of
the image have lost detail, also showing that the sonar
is not calibrated properly. This article also consulted someone named
Charles Paul, who is a senior scientist at the Monterey
(34:39):
Bay Aquarium Research Institute, who said that even if the
sonar image is roughly is a roughly accurate picture of
what's down there, there's no reason to think it's a spaceship.
It could be, first of all, a roughly circular rock outcropping.
No reason that's implausible, or he says quote the result
of fluid or gas venting. Such venting causes inexplicable and
(35:02):
poorly understood structures like pock marks circular depressions that Paul
has seen are all around the world. In one area
off California alone, he says he has mapped more than
fourteen hundred such pock marks. So gas venting from the
seafloor can cause unusual formations. That's something you wouldn't know
if you weren't familiar with looking at the seafloor. Another
(35:23):
possible explanation, which I thought was very interesting, Remember how
this thing is actually not all that deep. It's only
about three hundred feet down, and because it's not all
that deep, Paul says it could be a pattern created
by a fishing troll.
Speaker 1 (35:37):
Quote.
Speaker 3 (35:37):
For example, Paul says the jaws or opening of a
troll could easily have struck the bottom elsewhere and dropped
a disk like mound of sediment or a trail of
pebbles that make up the track marks, he says. Another
option mentioned in this article, Hana mont Singh, even said
that the original image could have been produced by fish.
(35:57):
He describes how the use of side scans sonar can
produce all sorts of confusing images and often has to
be double checked by passing back again from another angle
to really figure out what it was you saw on
the first pass. Now I wanted to mention one more
article from twenty twelve that addresses this and interviews a
irrelevant expert who had access to some materials that may
(36:20):
have been from the object. This article is by the
science writer Natalie Wolkover. It's from August thirtieth, twenty twelve,
called Mysterious Baltic Sea object is a glacial deposit, so
this article was written after the head of this or
one of the heads of this Ocean X group. Peter
Lindberg was in the media again and had been making statements,
(36:42):
I think on a radio program about the nature of
the seafloor object being very mysterious and unsolved and baffling
to scientists. He claimed it had stare formations that may
have been constructed, and it seemed to be being kind
of ambiguous, but saying things like if this is Atlantis,
(37:03):
that would be amazing. Now. Apparently the explorers who discovered
this sonar image at one point gave some rock samples
to a researcher in Sweden named Vulkar Brukert, who is
an associate professor of geology at Stockholm University. Gave him
some rocks for analysis. These rocks I couldn't find a
(37:25):
lot about exactly how they were sourced, but they allegedly
came from the object, so I guess they're claiming to
have collected them on a dive. Brukert was then quoted
in a Swedish tabloid in a way that ambiguously suggested
he might be like it's kind of an ambiguous quote.
He says, you know, oh, it's surprising to find this
(37:45):
black rock here, and the ambiguity suggests he might be
signing on to the idea that this object is actually
quite mysterious and unexplainable by science. But when other journalists
followed up with him, this same scholar was not of
that opinion at all, that it was like a baffling
unexplainable thing. He said that the rocks they gave him,
(38:05):
whether they came from the object or not, were mostly
just ordinary seafloor rocks, with one exception, which was a
piece of basaltic rock, which is made out of hardened
lava and not normally the kind of rock you'd find
all over the floor of the Baltic Sea. But it's
still not all that baffling because rocks get moved around,
and in this case, it's very likely this kind of
(38:27):
rock could have been left at the bottom of the
Baltic Sea by a glacier, Brookert says in a statement
given for this article. Quote because the whole northern Baltic
region is so heavily influenced by glacial thawing processes, both
the feature and the rock samples are likely to have
formed in connection with glacial and post glacial processes. He wrote,
(38:48):
possibly these rocks were transported there by glaciers. So this
is another fascinating thing about nature. You know, nature is
very weird. Glaciers can get rock stuck in them. They
pick up a rock from one place, carry that rock
to another place as the glaciers move. Then when the
glacier melts, it drops the rock, and this leaves behind
(39:11):
rocks that are called glacial erratics, rocks that are out
of place because a glacier carried them to the place
where they now rest.
Speaker 1 (39:18):
Now, this is obviously a slow process compared to the
imagined fast process of alien spaceship settling down from the
bud the bottom of the sea.
Speaker 3 (39:27):
Right, So I would say, based on everything I've read
about this, we don't really know what the object in
this sonar image is. But this one geologist suggests that
the best guess is that it's some sort of rock
formation left over by the freezing and thawing of glaciers
from the last glacial maximum, from the last peak of
(39:48):
the ice age. So I don't think I would sort
this one exactly like the Eltannan and antenna, where in
that case I would say it's, you know, ninety nine
point nine percent certain we know exactly what that image
is of you have the right context, you can identify it.
In this case, it seems like there's a little more
wiggle room. It's like, this is a grainy image. We
don't know what it was exactly, And there are some
(40:11):
good candidates, but there's not really enough information to zero
in on one and be certain and looking for more
recent sources on this good lord, there are some, but
they are mostly hosted on like tabloid sites that felt
like they were just made of high density malware. They
would make numerous unbelievable sounding claims, like repeating the stuff
(40:33):
about how like all of the electronics malfunctioned when they
tried to get near the object again, and they would
lean heavily on images that appeared to be fake without
clarifying where the images came from, which I find very annoying. Also,
they don't appear to like I'm fine with using like
fake illustrations if it's clearly labeled like this is not
the object, this is an you know, an artist's imagination.
(40:57):
But also like they don't appear to add much of
anything new except additional wild claims from the Internet. For example,
vague claims I read on some article with no sourcing
that the object contains metals not possible to produce on Earth,
So I just I don't know if that's worth addressing.
But as far as I can tell, this is sort
of peak low information zone, right. It's an indistinct and
(41:21):
grainy but weird looking original photo produced with a fragile
imaging system that is well known to spit out all
kinds of errors and artifacts, and it is presented to
the media in a way that encourages interesting unusual explanations, like,
you know, for example, just drawing the spaceship outline around
(41:43):
it is kind of like, hey, you know, maybe think
about it as a spaceship, or saying that it might
be constructed as if, you know, by an ancient civilization
or something, and then coming up with a story about
why you can't produce more high quality images, electrical equipment,
malfunctions in the vicinity, et cetera. So I don't know.
I checked in, and it seems like the explorers are
(42:04):
they had at some point been working on a documentary
about this, and we're claiming that there would be more
to come about it. But I would say, I don't know.
For now, this is it's stuck in that low resolution,
low information area, and if we were to get better
information on it, I strongly suspect it would turn out
to be just a kind of interestingly shaped rock.
Speaker 1 (42:26):
Yeah, it would turn out to be either an interestingly
shaped rock or there would be nothing. And in a way,
that's the worst answer, right, because you can always just
move the goalpost on it. You can say, well, I
guess the ship moved also was a functional spaceship, and
so the mystery continues in a way that proves what
(42:49):
we thought it was. Or hey, if anyone wants to
take up my Sampo theory, well, clearly some of the
major powers of this world saw that it was the Sampo,
and they went and claimed the Sampo, and they are
busy getting the Sampo back online somewhere to produce, you know,
unlimited riches. But in either case, you know, it's like,
like we've been saying, it's it's it's a far simpler
(43:12):
exercise to turn to explanations for which we have additional
data that we can We can look at other rock
formations and say, yes, this is potentially the sort of
thing that's happening here. We can look at other glacial
situations and say, yeah, this is potentially the model at
work here, and we have examples of this model. Whereas
when you turn to UFOs, when you turn to the
(43:35):
law City of Atlantis or the Sampo, you know, these
are not things for which we have any additional reputable
data to really throw in to compare it to.
Speaker 3 (43:47):
There are no solid examples of those to compare it to. Yeah, exactly,
there are a lack of dependable analogies, which, yeah, should
should make you hesitate before resorting to that kind of explanation.
And then the other thing again is just like when
you're in the low resolution zone or the low information zone,
it's okay to just reserve judgment, you know, you can,
(44:09):
like it's important to acknowledge, like we don't have a
lot of information here, so you know, it's you can't
really say what this is.
Speaker 1 (44:16):
Yeah, more information is required.
Speaker 3 (44:19):
Oh and I forgot to mention this until now. But
also there was an article I found where the divers
from Ocean X did release some photos allegedly of the objects,
so not sonar, but like camera photographs allegedly taken of
the object on a dive. But you can't really see
what you're looking at rob I've shared a link to
(44:40):
a CBC article with you here that includes one of
these photos. And yeah, it just looks like a rock.
It's like a like a kind of blurry piece of
rock with like the glare of a flashlight shining off
of it. So it's not really it doesn't really add
any information as far as I can tell.
Speaker 1 (44:57):
Hmmm, yeah, I you know, I CBC does great work,
and I have no reason to doubt that this is
an actual underwater picture. Yet at the same time, the
closer I look at it that I get more of
a feel that this is like skin Like this really
feels like I feel like I see the crease between
like thigh and groin taken in a like maybe underwater.
(45:20):
I don't know, is that a pimple I see? Yeah, yeah,
I mean just it just speaks to the ambiguity of
the shot, like it's what is it? It's kind of
whatever you want it to be.
Speaker 3 (45:31):
In fact, one paragraph in the CBC rite up of
these photos says, quote the new photos released Friday lacked
perspective and were apparently taken during the Ocean Explorer team's
most recent dive.
Speaker 1 (45:44):
Okay, well there you go. Just another piece of evidence
that could be something but could be absolutely nothing. And
like again, I just really feel like I'm looking at
somebody's leg here, Like, isn't it? Is it? I feel
like I see stretch marks.
Speaker 3 (46:01):
You know, Yeah, I know what you're saying.
Speaker 1 (46:04):
Like I'm not just trying to be a you know,
a geek here and you know, making fun of somebody's
UFO information, But this really feels fleshy but almost but
not like like I'm also like, what's the shape of
this person? But oh my goodness, I don't know.
Speaker 3 (46:21):
Well, I see exactly what you're saying. Yeah, it does
look like stretch marks and skin, but it also looks
like it could be striations in sandstone, if you're true
bands and sandstone. I'm not even saying that's what it is,
because once again, for the millionth time, like it's just
not clear what it is, not enough information to decide.
Speaker 1 (46:39):
Yeah, all right, well, we're gonna go ahead and close
this episode out, but we're gonna we're gonna continue this
line of thought in the next episode of Stuff to
Blow Your Mind on Thursday. We're gonna get into the
realm of Egyptology and of course, pseudoscience and pseudo history,
and look at some other examples where if you take
something of context, if you take something without proper you know,
(47:03):
expertise applied to some degree, then yeah, you can. You
can make various interpretations that speak of ancient high tech
civilizations and alien involvement and whatever it is you happen
to look for, or even the Sampo, the Sampo moving
through time and emerging in ancient Egypt.
Speaker 3 (47:20):
I'm sure I really like that you're cementing that the
Sampo theory is like a new a new major thread,
a fringe explanation.
Speaker 1 (47:28):
I think it deserves it to due. Yeah, and the
Sampo's pretty interesting. We could come back. We can come
back and cover Sampo on both Stuff to Blow your
Mind and Weird House Cinema, because there's also a great
movie about the Sampo.
Speaker 3 (47:42):
Okay, I'm gonna have to research this thing.
Speaker 1 (47:44):
There. Actually there's more than one potentially interesting movie about
the Sampo now that I think about it. Anyway, that'll
be a tale for another time. So in the meantime,
if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff
to Blow your Mind, our Poor Science and Culture episodes
published on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Monday's we do listener mail.
On Wednesdays we do a short form Monster Factor Artifact episode,
(48:04):
and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to
just talk about a weird film on Weird House.
Speaker 3 (48:08):
Cinemam huge thanks to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 2 (48:30):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This is
Robert Lamb and it is Saturday. So again we're going
to the Vault once more, this time for the episode
another Enigmatic underwater Image. This is a continuation on the
last Vault episode we did, where we're looking at difficult
to analyze images from the deep ocean and how they
(00:28):
can spin off them in the minds of onlookers into
paranormal intrigue. This one originally published eight fifteen, twenty twenty three.
Here we go, let's dive in.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
And I'm Joe McCormick. And hey, we're back to anomalous imagery.
In the pre episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
we were looking at some photographs that people have wanted
to sort into the proof of Aliens Confirmed column, and
we ended up talking about reasons why that's not necessarily
(01:16):
a wise or well informed move, and we thought we
might come back to talk about more images of this sort.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
And you know what, here we are, Yeah, in the
last episode, and this is this is a situation where
it's probably helpful if you listen to that last episode,
but it's not necessarily a part one in part two,
so I don't know do what you will regarding these episodes.
But in the last episode, we discussed the so called
el tennan antenna, a deep sea photograph of something taken
(01:44):
in nineteen sixty four that ultimately led to a positive
identification of a specific species of deep sea sponge, but
also fed a great deal of paranormal and ufology speculation
about alien technology and global energy grids and the like.
We discussed how images and data like this that dwell
(02:04):
in a kind of low res realm of evidence often
play into arguments for supernatural or other worldly explanations instead
of mundane natural world explanations.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
That's right. So we were developing an idea somewhat jumping
off of some offhand terminology use in comments I've heard
in interviews with a science writer and skeptical UFO researcher
named Mick West, and I think the phrase I had
heard him use at some point was the low information zone.
But we were also talking about the idea of the
(02:37):
low resolution zone, and so the idea we were developing
was that it's in cases of evidence containing less information
or existing in a space of lower resolution that supernatural
or alien explanations tend to retain the aura of viability.
They seem to some people like this might be a
(02:59):
good explanation, And it's in cases of high resolution or
high information where the photo, if it's a photo where
it's like really sharp and taken from multiple angles, and
we have a good idea exactly where and when it
was taken, maybe other people can go check up on it,
people with relevant knowledge have had a look at it.
These are the cases that end up very very often
(03:20):
having pretty clear explanations from within the known range of
natural causes. In other words, there seems to be a
pattern where a fuzzy photo creates way more mythology than
a sharp one. And I think this is applical, applicable
in the broader sense, not just in pure resolution of photos,
but in the general sense of information like evidence, this
(03:43):
kind of vague and fuzzy and not well situated within
an informational context seems oh yeah, maybe that is aliens.
And the further you turn up the resolution, the more
accurate information and context you have, the more often it
seems like, oh yeah, that's a plastic bag, or that's
an airplane, or that's a constellation of stars.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
Yeah. And as we discussed in the last episode, and
we'll continue to discuss here, to whatever extent, you can
also cut out the context for the image, or ignore
the context and or ignore the expertise in a given
field that could be vital to understanding what you're looking
at exactly.
Speaker 3 (04:25):
Yeah. So the background knowledge of the observer can also
be one of the information states, and that can be
high information or low.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Yeah. And it's not necessarily a situation either where someone
is like willfully, I refuse to listen to the experts
because because you know, I know what I see. You know,
sometimes it's maybe a little more nuanced than that. So
I do want to acknowledge that. But just throwing that
out there as well. We'll come back to the idea
as we roll farward.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Now.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
Another one of the ideas we talked about in the
last episode was how popular it seems underwater images in
particular are in the UFO slash UAP and general fringe
explanation idea space. Of course, the Eltannan object was an
underwater photo, and I mentioned in the last episode the
(05:13):
idea that apparently anomalous. Underwater images are especially useful nucleation
points for these types of narratives because they're sort of
inherently low resolution or low information. The details are often obscured.
Images of things underwater often look weird, but you can't
(05:34):
tell exactly what they are, which means you can start
making up whatever explanation you find the most exciting. And
I was thinking about how underwater imagery often qualifies as
low information evidence in multiple dimensions at once, So like
the original image is usually grainy and indistinct if it's
taken in visible light, like it's a photograph taken invisible light,
(05:57):
light conditions are usually low, and sometimes they're is you know,
is something obscuring the image in the water. Maybe the
water is cloudy, maybe not. Sometimes the image is not
even based on visible light. Maybe we're looking at a
sonar image or something like that, which further complicates your
ability to identify what it is you're looking at. And
(06:17):
sometimes things are even obscured in other ways, like partially
buried or have things on top of them. Beyond all this,
objects and formations that may be common underwater do not
seem common to people who spend their lives on land
and on the surface. Think of the sponge we talked
about last time. If you lived on the ocean floor,
you'd probably recognize that. You would be like a tree
(06:38):
to you. You know, you've seen lots of these before,
but not living on the ocean floor. That's totally weird.
You've never seen anything like it. You have no idea
what it could be.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
Yeah, as we touched on in that one, the so
called antenna occurred as a singular object without any fellow
antenna around it in this one photograph. Previous dredges in
the deep ocean had revealed places where they seem to
be quite numerous.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
That's right. Sometimes they're kind of a forest, but in
this case it wasn't. It was just one standing alone
in the image. So that I don't know, that mean
to seem more monolithic and kind of strange and dangerous
and inviting of calling out for some kind of otherworldly explanation. Finally,
I was thinking about one more thing about the low
information nature of underwater images, especially in the case of
(07:28):
deep sea objects. It's difficult, expensive, and sometimes impossible for
other people to check the object for themselves because it's
on the bottom of the ocean, So you are unlikely
to get somebody else imaging the same thing with different
equipment in different conditions to get more context and clarity.
Unless it's like a really famous and valuable thing and
(07:50):
you've you know, published coordinates of exactly where it is,
there's like huge interest in it. Maybe, but like for
the most part, if you're talking about something on the
bottom of the ocean, whatever imagery you release of it
that you initially produce, it's that you know that that's
going to be all there is.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Yeah, Yeah, Because I mean, ultimately, whether your idea is
based in just pure scientific inquiry or if it's based
in some sort of paranormal interest or some sort of
fringe theory, you're still going to have to somehow get
that funding together to pay for an expedition to an
extreme environment. And you know, are the numbers going to
(08:27):
add up at the end of the day.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
And in some cases, I think it might be more
financially lucrative for an object to remain in the low
information zone than it would be to increase the information
because that might well dispel the mystique surrounding it.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
Exactly. Yes, Because as we touched on in the first episode.
You know, these images become kind of articles of faith
within a given belief system, within a given worldview, and yeah,
you go down there, there's you've got to admit, okay,
you know, lining up with your hopes and dreams. Maybe
you'll get that high res image of this thing and
(09:04):
it will literally change the way we think about ourselves
and we think about the world. But what are the
chances that you'll just know it'll be that face on
Mars scenario, you know where Oh well, you realize that
once you have some different imagery, some different information to
go on, the face is not there at all, and
then how are you going to feel?
Speaker 3 (09:23):
So this brings us to the particular underwater image that
you dug up, Rob that we're going to talk about today.
This image is the so called Baltic Sea anomaly. Would
you like to introduce it?
Speaker 1 (09:35):
Sure? Yeah. I found this the way probably I think
a lot of people find it is that you find
these various lists of strange, unexplained things beneath the ocean,
and they're generally they're generally a weird array of objects
and alleged objects, some of which are verified realities, some
(09:56):
are you know, blurry, low res images. But yeah, this
and this sonar image was taken by Swedish Ocean X
on the floor of the Northern Baltic Sea at the
center of the Gulf of Bothnia in June twenty eleven
during a hunt for I believe possible sunken treasure. So
(10:17):
they were on the lookout with their imagery for you know,
things that might be ships, things that might be man
made objects on the bottom. Now, the image that came
out of all of this, the sonar image, has captured
the imagination of ufologists because it does look roundish and
many illustrations and I want to stress that illustrations based
(10:40):
on this imagery readily, and these will readily come up
and search for you. Don't worry. You don't have to
look hard for them. In fact, it's harder to sort
of wean them out and just focus on the sonar
data they lean into. This kind of interpretation of this
roundish object is perhaps a millennium Falcon s spaceship, or
perhaps something akin to the ship that the engineers have
(11:03):
in the Alien franchise.
Speaker 3 (11:06):
I was thinking something that, yeah, from Prometheus. It looks
like that technology style.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
Yeah, which is an iconic derelict spaceship that has mysteries
aboard that we absolutely should on Earth, We actually absolutely
should get in there and get some of that right.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
But I guess for now we're just going to focus
on this original sonar image that was released to the
media back in the summer of twenty eleven by again
Ocean X, which is this Swedish treasure hunting and salvage
diving operation.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
Yeah, the actual image here is definitely in the low
information zone, and various critics have pointed this out as
a reason that not much can be made out of it,
aside from the consensus that we're almost certainly looking at
a geologic formation here and not a spaceship, not part
(11:57):
of a lost city on the bottom of the ocean,
some part of a lot of civilization. Their whole article
speculating that as well. And you know, it's it's worth
driving home that like these ideas, just as pure ideas,
are very exciting, Like who wouldn't want to learn more
about a possible alien spaceship on the bottom of the ocean.
Who would want to hear more about a lost city
(12:17):
that was you know, Atlantis style that was swallowed up
by the waves in ancient times, but more likely than anything,
this is just geology down there, and if you're into geology,
it's pretty exciting. But I guess we have to sort
of look at the at the end of the day,
perhaps geology doesn't have necessarily as much of an excitement
(12:39):
value in the mainstream or certainly in the in the fringe.
So if you're if you're given two possibilities, even though
one is far more likely, some people are just going
to go for the the sexier answer, and of course
the answer that confirms or seems to confirm some ideas
and aspirations one has for the universe.
Speaker 3 (13:03):
Interpretations I've come across in addition to saying this is
an alien spacecraft. Oh and by the way, I should say,
early articles about this from around the time it was
first released often like would draw outlines around parts of
this sonar image, like asking you to lean into certain
shape interpretations, And one of the outlines that was often
(13:27):
drawn was essentially the millennium falcon. So they there's a
weird kind of space where they can almost like if
you're a journalist doing an article and drawing an outline
like that, you can be like, oh, it's just funny.
You know, it's a funny joke, but also you probably
know that you are getting some traffic from like playing
(13:47):
into the hand of UFO interpretations.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
Yeah, I've also seen some where they're like, okay, these
are stairs and then this is you know, pointing out
like architectural supposed architectural details on this object. And you know, again,
you're you're a lot of people they're seeing this image
for the first time. You're giving them all the interpretation,
given the full script for interpreting this low res image.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
Right, But anyway to come back to so, there are
a lot of people who say, yeah, this is a
crashed alien flying saucer, or crashed alien spacecraft or crashed
ancient human spacecraft from lost you know, lost technology from
an ancient civilization. There are also people who say it
was a monument built by the Atlantean civilization, So they
(14:30):
say Atlantis built this, it was like a temple. There
are various flavors of secret Nazi interpretations. It's a it's
a U boat model we've never seen before, some kind
of underwater Nazi bunker.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
Oh yeah, yeah, obviously there's a great deal of Nazi stuff.
Once you get into the paranormal in fringe movements.
Speaker 3 (14:51):
But what does it actually look like? I mean, if
you take away the outlines and everything, what we can
see in this image is that it is a kind
of roughly sur killer looking texture on the ocean floor
that has some parallel lines kind of running across it that,
you know, you could well want to interprets as I
don't know something they're like grooves or tracks or walkways,
(15:15):
but also they could just be like layers of rock.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
You know. One of these images you included where it's
been traced. It looks kind of like I'm going to
I'm gonna throw this out there. It looks kind of
like one of the helmets of the giant warriors from
Nausacaa the Valley of the Wind like on its side.
So perhaps this is a remnant from that time before
the Seven Days of Fire.
Speaker 3 (15:38):
Oh well, we certainly wouldn't want to awake it then,
but meddlesome men and their war machines they want to anyway.
So other claims about this image, So they say the
people who discovered it say that the disc part of
the object is roughly sixty meters wide or about two
hundred feet wide in diameter. It was found on the
(16:01):
ocean floor at a depth of about ninety meters or
three hundred feet. Okay, so actually not that deep when
it comes to ocean or seafloor. And again this is
in the Gulf of Bothnia, which is the northern part
of the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Finland. Peter Lindberg,
one of the explorers behind the original image, claimed that
(16:22):
the object was perfectly round, and there is a sort
of light colored area on the seafloor extending away from
the disc shaped object that people say could be a
runway or a streak cut in the seafloor from a
crash landing. And then the next thing, this one starts
(16:42):
being a real red flag for me. At some point,
ocean X started saying that they tried to return to
the object and get more information about it and imagery
of it, and they said that proximity to the object
was causing all of their electronic equipment to function, and
they couldn't come within I think they said two hundred
(17:04):
meters of the object without all of their electronics failing. Hmm.
I'm a little doubtful of that kind of story.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
You know, given that this is near Finland. I would
be shocked if no one has suggested that it might
be the lost Sampo, which of course is this object
from Finnish mythology that was essentially like it brought riches
and good fortune and treasures. It was this font of wealth,
(17:34):
and if memory serves like the myth is that it
was lost at sea during a battle. So I don't know,
it sounds like it could be the Sampo. If I'm
going to lean into mythology for my.
Speaker 3 (17:45):
Interpretations, do they say what the Sampo looks like.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
I've seen some illustrations where it is actually kind of
kind of round, Yeah, but I think maybe smaller. I
don't know.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
Okay, Wiki at least mentions a bunch of different ways
it's been depicted, and they are wide ranging, so I
would guess in the original they don't say the shape
it takes, but it says here it could be anything
from a world pillar to a compass or astrolabe, or
a bunch of other things, a coin, dye, a shield.
So why not a giant disc at the bottom of
(18:19):
the ocean.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
Now.
Speaker 3 (18:21):
One of the reasons that people say this must be
a spaceship or some other piece of out of place
technology is I think, essentially an intuitive reaction to certain
patterns of geometry. When you look at this sonar image,
it appears to be a large circular disc. In some versions,
the circular disc appears to be made out of smaller
(18:44):
rectangles or squares, and a circle filled in with rectangles
or squares. That doesn't sound like any natural object I've
ever seen, so it just looks like it could not
be natural. It had to be made. Now regarding the
square tile or rectangular tiles appearance in this particular sonar image,
(19:05):
the one we've been looking at here, there are different
versions of it you can find on the Internet. But
even the fact that it appears to be made of
the rectangular blocks or tiles, I think is actually somewhat
influenced by the fact that the image has some sort
of digital artifact lines running parallel from top to bottom
(19:25):
across the image. And these parallel bars crossing the image
are not just on the object, but they're covering the
whole bitmap, and thus they are obviously a byproduct of
the imaging process, not a reflection of the object itself.
The image is also lined up so that these parallel
lines are exactly perpendicular to some ridges or lines that
(19:48):
seem to actually be on the object whatever it is,
that seem to sort of run parallel across it. So
I think these digital imaging artifacts create a false impression
of a kind of right angled brickwork pattern that is
not actually present on the object itself. That's just a
byproduct of the way the image looks with these lines
(20:09):
running up and down on it. On the images we see.
Second thing is, Rob, you already mentioned this, but the illustrations.
This is another case, just like we talked about last time,
of what was originally a low resolution or low information
piece of evidence being subject to mythologizing in grandiose elaborations
in artworks. So if you Google image search this object,
(20:33):
results containing the actual sonar image will be vastly outnumbered
by full on fictional illustrations. I've included a few for
you to look at here, Rob, Folks at home, you
can look them up yourself, just type in Baltic Sea anomaly.
To be clear, these are not photos of the actual object.
They are imaginative artworks. All of the interesting and provocative
(20:54):
sharp detail shown in them is made up. But articles
and videos about the object seem to use things like this. Nonetheless,
it's kind of like, look, here's one way of imagining
what this could look like up close if you could
see it sharply. And for some people this seems to
suggest it's legitimate to assume that's the way it actually is.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
Yeah, and be clear, this can also take place at
kind of a subliminal consumer level where you just you
pull up a bunch of images of this thing, and yeah,
most of the ones on your page are going to
be perhaps leaning into some sort of fantastic illustration, and
the illustrations are cool, Like you can't help but look
at this and feel a certain kind of way.
Speaker 3 (21:39):
Yeah, don't want to knock the artists, but I mean
just like to emphasize these are not images of a
thing in the world. These are essentially fictional artworks that
are based on a grainy, indistinct original image.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
Now I want to throw out another wild speculation. What
if this is a tetromino or a tetris block, And really,
instead of trying to get down there to it, what
we need to do is construct a tetromino to interlock
with it and drop it down and make sure that
we have lined it up appropriately so that it will
(22:16):
fill in the space next to it.
Speaker 3 (22:18):
Well, that's a great point, but it would have to
be a kind of hybrid game piece because it like
one half of it seems to be a tetronomo. It's
got the blocky parts that seem like they could interlock,
and then the other half is rounded like a connect
four piece. So maybe it is for a hybrid type
game something we haven't seen yet.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
I mean, this does touch on the rea. It's like
it's not square enough. It's not it doesn't have enough
right angles that it really shouts unnatural object as loudly
as some would perhaps insist that it does. It's also
not round enough, it doesn't have the end. Would not
in either case necessarily mean that it is not of
(23:02):
this world, but certainly like those are the sorts of
shapes one would want to see in their spaceship. You
would want to see a more perfect circle, You would
want to see a lot of angles that we usually
don't think of as occurring naturally in nature.
Speaker 3 (23:25):
We will come back to in a minute commentary on
this Sonari image itself and what kind of conclusions we
should draw from it. But let's say that this did
actually depict an object to the bottom of the ocean
that had that looked like it had sort of some
blocks or some rectangular bricks in it. In the spirit
of the previous episodes, let's talk about sponges that look
(23:47):
like technology. I think it's time for it. Let's talk
about natural rock formations that look like architecture. There are
lots of them. You can just google lists of things
that are natural geologic formations that look like things made
by humans or made by intelligence, maybe alien intelligence. So
I wanted to just focus on one example because I
(24:09):
thought the images were so striking. Let's look at what
is called tessellated pavement. Now, to be clear, I'm not
saying that's what this is an image of. I'm just
citing this as an example of things that are natural
geologic formations that totally look like they could not be
that they must have been made by intelligence. Rob, you
(24:30):
can have a look at the photos I included for you.
How would you describe these?
Speaker 1 (24:36):
So one of these images, the one with the sunset
over it, This is one of my favorite images. I
used to have this on my computer, as was one
of my desktop wall papers. It's just so splendid. To
look at, and it does. It looks kind of otherworldly.
It has a psychedelic feel to it. It just makes you
feel nice. A couple of the other images of this
(24:57):
sort of thing maybe let feel less surreal, less visionary,
and more like, oh, this was once a shopping mall
of some sort, Like clearly some sort of structure was
built here and it's gone. So I don't know, shopping
malls of the gods.
Speaker 3 (25:15):
Okay, but you're saying shopping mall because it's got rectangular
paving stones right where you're looking at, like a flat
expanse of rock that reaches out into the surf so
you can see the ocean beyond, and then all across
the surface of this rock there are just rectangular tiles basically.
Speaker 1 (25:32):
Yeah, rectangular tiles, rectangular spaces, and you get this sense
like if you've ever seen a large building like a
you know, a storage facility, factory or a mall, and
it's been torn down, like and the junk has been
cleared away and you're just left with the with the base,
it often looks something like this, you know, where you
(25:53):
can see where rooms used to be, you can see
bits of tiling, et cetera. So yeah, it it's whispers
some sort of human origin when you look at it,
if you again, if you don't have the proper context
and the proper expertise.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
So all of these photos that you're looking at here
rob are of the same rock formation which can be
found on an isthmus in the Australian state of Tasmania.
The isthmus is called the Eagle Hawk Neck and it's
on the southeast of Tasmania, connecting the mainland to the
Tasman Peninsula. I mentioned that these formations are known as
(26:31):
tessellated pavements. Tesselated as a synonym for tiled, so it
means the practice of covering a surface with tightly locking tiles.
And it's called this because, of course it looks like
a tiled floor or a pavement made by human hands. Now,
how on Earth could natural processes ever produce something that
looks like this? Well, I found a passage in an
(26:52):
academic book that discusses this very thing. So the book's
called The Coastlines of the World with Google Earth Understanding
Our Environment by Scheffers, Scheffers and Keletot, published by Springer
twenty twelve. The authors say that these formations are rare,
and they seem to only occur in sedimentary rock platforms
located in the intertidal zone. Intertitle means that the rocks
(27:16):
are covered by seawater at high tide and then uncovered
at low tide, so they can go through patterns of
wedding with seawater and then drying out. And they also
tend to occur only in low energy coasts, meaning coasts
without very strong wave action. So the authors write that
these tesselated patterns in Tasmania in particular, began millions of
(27:38):
years ago when fractures formed in siltstone due to stress
in the Earth's crust sometime between like sixty million and
one hundred and sixty million years ago. In geology, these
cracks that form in large bodies of rock are known
as joints, and they're found in all kinds of rock,
most often appearing as patterns of crack that extend all
(28:01):
the way through this big body of rock, and sometimes,
for a variety of reasons, these patterns can be parallel
or otherwise surprisingly regular and symmetrical. Another striking pattern of
jointing in large bodies of rock that might look unnatural
to some is hexagonal jointing. If you've ever seen columns
(28:22):
of basalt that have hexagonal shapes, that that's another type
of strange jointing that doesn't look like that could happen
in nature, but it does. That's caused by just patterns
of how certain types of rock cool and then crack
as they cool. In the case of the tessellated pavements,
here you get kind of rectangular patterns of cracks. And
(28:43):
in the time since the jointing occurred in this rock,
the cracked sedimentary rock has been exposed to the surface
and the tides which have caused it to erode in
a way that accentuated the rectangular grade of cracks in
what's known as pan and loaf formation. So the basic
difference here is that some of these rectangles seem to
(29:05):
be sort of raised at the outline and then depressed
in the middle where they can hold pools of water
in them, and then other ones seem to be kind
of raised in the middle and depressed at the outline,
so in the middle they sort of puff up like
a maybe like a cobble stone or like the top
of a loaf of bread rising over the pan. The
(29:26):
author's right that at areas farther away from the contact
with the water, the pavement spends a longer time drying
out during low tide, which gives more opportunity for salt
crystals to form on top of the rock, and the
salt crystals erode the rock surface, and the erosion happens
(29:47):
faster inside the pan than it does in the cracks
around the pan, you know, forming the rim. So you
end up with this depressed pan appearance where it can
hold pools of water. Meanwhile, the loaf formation are closer
to the water, there's less drying in between tides, less
salt crystal, less salt crystallization, and more erosion just due
(30:09):
to water flowing in the cracks in between the rectangles
and like sand and abrasion eroding those. So you end
up getting this raised, puffed bread like kind of appearance. Rob,
I've got another image for you to look at that
is more of the loaf formation down below here. This
is the one in black and white, and man, these
(30:30):
really really do look like human made bricks. But it's
a natural formation.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
Yeah yeah, I mean, if you just glanced at it,
even if you I don't know, I guess if you
looked at it long enough, you might wonder why the
bricks are not of uniform size, but certainly it's smacks
of masonry. It smacks of brickwork.
Speaker 3 (30:51):
So that's just one example, but I hope that should
be a convincing illustration yet again that we should not
always trust our intuitions about what looks natural and what
looks intelligently designed. We are presented with example after example
of things that look like they must be technology, or
they must be architecture, they must have been built by
(31:12):
intention and intelligence, but are actually just totally, uncontroversially a
result of biological evolution or geological and hydrological processes, just
things that happen in nature without any human intervention or
alien intervention. So my point there is that without the
relevant expertise since a marine biology or geology or whatever
(31:33):
it is, it's easy to sort something into the unexplainable column,
when in fact it's just like totally looks like something
that is well known if you happen to know about
certain things.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
Right.
Speaker 3 (31:56):
But to come back to the sonar image from the
Baltic Sea, the Baltic Sea nomaly, which again some are
quick to label an anomaly in need of explanation based
in Aliens or Atlantis or secret Nazi technology. Again, all
of this speculation is only possible because we're operating in
the zone of low resolution. One problem here is that
(32:17):
you and I and most people looking at this image
lack context. We don't know much about the Baltic Sea floor.
We also don't know anything about how sonar images are produced.
Is it possible that we could get a higher information
perspective by asking somebody who knows about those things? So
I came across an article published in February twenty twelve
(32:38):
in Popular Mechanics called Underwater UFO Get Real Experts Say,
by Douglas Main. And this article consulted several experts for
perspective on this sonar image. One was Hanumant Singh, who
was at the time a researcher with the Woods Hull
Oceanographic Institute. I think now he's a professor at Northeastern
(32:58):
University who has a number of research focuses I found,
including robotics and things in that domain, but also quote
imaging in visually degraded environments, including underwater and in polar regions.
Speaker 1 (33:11):
Oh that's perfect.
Speaker 3 (33:12):
So what did Singh have to say? About the anomaly well.
He cautioned that we should not put too much trust
in the sonar image itself for a number of reasons.
He says it was created using a type of sonar
technology called side scan sonar, which is perfectly useful for
locating large objects like sunken ships, but could potentially introduce
(33:34):
false details into an image if it's not functioning correctly,
and he cited several indications in the image itself that
the sonar should not be trusted. He said that there
are signs of cross talk between the two different instruments
that are used to create the image. He says one
channel is electrically contaminating the other, and this results in
(33:56):
parts of the image on one side being mirrored and
reflected on to the other side of the map. He
also says that the black parallel lines in the image
I already mentioned these earlier just because I didn't have
any expertise, but I just noticed that these create the
false impression that the disc is more made of rectangular
blocks than it probably actually is. He said that these
(34:18):
black parallel lines in the image showed that there are
places where the sonar is dropping out, so that's an
image quality problem. He also says that the edges of
the image have lost detail, also showing that the sonar
is not calibrated properly. This article also consulted someone named
Charles Paul, who is a senior scientist at the Monterey
(34:39):
Bay Aquarium Research Institute, who said that even if the
sonar image is roughly is a roughly accurate picture of
what's down there, there's no reason to think it's a spaceship.
It could be, first of all, a roughly circular rock outcropping.
No reason that's implausible, or he says quote the result
of fluid or gas venting. Such venting causes inexplicable and
(35:02):
poorly understood structures like pock marks circular depressions that Paul
has seen are all around the world. In one area
off California alone, he says he has mapped more than
fourteen hundred such pock marks. So gas venting from the
seafloor can cause unusual formations. That's something you wouldn't know
if you weren't familiar with looking at the seafloor. Another
(35:23):
possible explanation, which I thought was very interesting, Remember how
this thing is actually not all that deep. It's only
about three hundred feet down, and because it's not all
that deep, Paul says it could be a pattern created
by a fishing troll.
Speaker 1 (35:37):
Quote.
Speaker 3 (35:37):
For example, Paul says the jaws or opening of a
troll could easily have struck the bottom elsewhere and dropped
a disk like mound of sediment or a trail of
pebbles that make up the track marks, he says. Another
option mentioned in this article, Hana mont Singh, even said
that the original image could have been produced by fish.
(35:57):
He describes how the use of side scans sonar can
produce all sorts of confusing images and often has to
be double checked by passing back again from another angle
to really figure out what it was you saw on
the first pass. Now I wanted to mention one more
article from twenty twelve that addresses this and interviews a
irrelevant expert who had access to some materials that may
(36:20):
have been from the object. This article is by the
science writer Natalie Wolkover. It's from August thirtieth, twenty twelve,
called Mysterious Baltic Sea object is a glacial deposit, so
this article was written after the head of this or
one of the heads of this Ocean X group. Peter
Lindberg was in the media again and had been making statements,
(36:42):
I think on a radio program about the nature of
the seafloor object being very mysterious and unsolved and baffling
to scientists. He claimed it had stare formations that may
have been constructed, and it seemed to be being kind
of ambiguous, but saying things like if this is Atlantis,
(37:03):
that would be amazing. Now. Apparently the explorers who discovered
this sonar image at one point gave some rock samples
to a researcher in Sweden named Vulkar Brukert, who is
an associate professor of geology at Stockholm University. Gave him
some rocks for analysis. These rocks I couldn't find a
(37:25):
lot about exactly how they were sourced, but they allegedly
came from the object, so I guess they're claiming to
have collected them on a dive. Brukert was then quoted
in a Swedish tabloid in a way that ambiguously suggested
he might be like it's kind of an ambiguous quote.
He says, you know, oh, it's surprising to find this
(37:45):
black rock here, and the ambiguity suggests he might be
signing on to the idea that this object is actually
quite mysterious and unexplainable by science. But when other journalists
followed up with him, this same scholar was not of
that opinion at all, that it was like a baffling
unexplainable thing. He said that the rocks they gave him,
(38:05):
whether they came from the object or not, were mostly
just ordinary seafloor rocks, with one exception, which was a
piece of basaltic rock, which is made out of hardened
lava and not normally the kind of rock you'd find
all over the floor of the Baltic Sea. But it's
still not all that baffling because rocks get moved around,
and in this case, it's very likely this kind of
(38:27):
rock could have been left at the bottom of the
Baltic Sea by a glacier, Brookert says in a statement
given for this article. Quote because the whole northern Baltic
region is so heavily influenced by glacial thawing processes, both
the feature and the rock samples are likely to have
formed in connection with glacial and post glacial processes. He wrote,
(38:48):
possibly these rocks were transported there by glaciers. So this
is another fascinating thing about nature. You know, nature is
very weird. Glaciers can get rock stuck in them. They
pick up a rock from one place, carry that rock
to another place as the glaciers move. Then when the
glacier melts, it drops the rock, and this leaves behind
(39:11):
rocks that are called glacial erratics, rocks that are out
of place because a glacier carried them to the place
where they now rest.
Speaker 1 (39:18):
Now, this is obviously a slow process compared to the
imagined fast process of alien spaceship settling down from the
bud the bottom of the sea.
Speaker 3 (39:27):
Right, So I would say, based on everything I've read
about this, we don't really know what the object in
this sonar image is. But this one geologist suggests that
the best guess is that it's some sort of rock
formation left over by the freezing and thawing of glaciers
from the last glacial maximum, from the last peak of
(39:48):
the ice age. So I don't think I would sort
this one exactly like the Eltannan and antenna, where in
that case I would say it's, you know, ninety nine
point nine percent certain we know exactly what that image
is of you have the right context, you can identify it.
In this case, it seems like there's a little more
wiggle room. It's like, this is a grainy image. We
don't know what it was exactly, And there are some
(40:11):
good candidates, but there's not really enough information to zero
in on one and be certain and looking for more
recent sources on this good lord, there are some, but
they are mostly hosted on like tabloid sites that felt
like they were just made of high density malware. They
would make numerous unbelievable sounding claims, like repeating the stuff
(40:33):
about how like all of the electronics malfunctioned when they
tried to get near the object again, and they would
lean heavily on images that appeared to be fake without
clarifying where the images came from, which I find very annoying. Also,
they don't appear to like I'm fine with using like
fake illustrations if it's clearly labeled like this is not
the object, this is an you know, an artist's imagination.
(40:57):
But also like they don't appear to add much of
anything new except additional wild claims from the Internet. For example,
vague claims I read on some article with no sourcing
that the object contains metals not possible to produce on Earth,
So I just I don't know if that's worth addressing.
But as far as I can tell, this is sort
of peak low information zone, right. It's an indistinct and
(41:21):
grainy but weird looking original photo produced with a fragile
imaging system that is well known to spit out all
kinds of errors and artifacts, and it is presented to
the media in a way that encourages interesting unusual explanations, like,
you know, for example, just drawing the spaceship outline around
(41:43):
it is kind of like, hey, you know, maybe think
about it as a spaceship, or saying that it might
be constructed as if, you know, by an ancient civilization
or something, and then coming up with a story about
why you can't produce more high quality images, electrical equipment,
malfunctions in the vicinity, et cetera. So I don't know.
I checked in, and it seems like the explorers are
(42:04):
they had at some point been working on a documentary
about this, and we're claiming that there would be more
to come about it. But I would say, I don't know.
For now, this is it's stuck in that low resolution,
low information area, and if we were to get better
information on it, I strongly suspect it would turn out
to be just a kind of interestingly shaped rock.
Speaker 1 (42:26):
Yeah, it would turn out to be either an interestingly
shaped rock or there would be nothing. And in a way,
that's the worst answer, right, because you can always just
move the goalpost on it. You can say, well, I
guess the ship moved also was a functional spaceship, and
so the mystery continues in a way that proves what
(42:49):
we thought it was. Or hey, if anyone wants to
take up my Sampo theory, well, clearly some of the
major powers of this world saw that it was the Sampo,
and they went and claimed the Sampo, and they are
busy getting the Sampo back online somewhere to produce, you know,
unlimited riches. But in either case, you know, it's like,
like we've been saying, it's it's it's a far simpler
(43:12):
exercise to turn to explanations for which we have additional
data that we can We can look at other rock
formations and say, yes, this is potentially the sort of
thing that's happening here. We can look at other glacial
situations and say, yeah, this is potentially the model at
work here, and we have examples of this model. Whereas
when you turn to UFOs, when you turn to the
(43:35):
law City of Atlantis or the Sampo, you know, these
are not things for which we have any additional reputable
data to really throw in to compare it to.
Speaker 3 (43:47):
There are no solid examples of those to compare it to. Yeah, exactly,
there are a lack of dependable analogies, which, yeah, should
should make you hesitate before resorting to that kind of explanation.
And then the other thing again is just like when
you're in the low resolution zone or the low information zone,
it's okay to just reserve judgment, you know, you can,
(44:09):
like it's important to acknowledge, like we don't have a
lot of information here, so you know, it's you can't
really say what this is.
Speaker 1 (44:16):
Yeah, more information is required.
Speaker 3 (44:19):
Oh and I forgot to mention this until now. But
also there was an article I found where the divers
from Ocean X did release some photos allegedly of the objects,
so not sonar, but like camera photographs allegedly taken of
the object on a dive. But you can't really see
what you're looking at rob I've shared a link to
(44:40):
a CBC article with you here that includes one of
these photos. And yeah, it just looks like a rock.
It's like a like a kind of blurry piece of
rock with like the glare of a flashlight shining off
of it. So it's not really it doesn't really add
any information as far as I can tell.
Speaker 1 (44:57):
Hmmm, yeah, I you know, I CBC does great work,
and I have no reason to doubt that this is
an actual underwater picture. Yet at the same time, the
closer I look at it that I get more of
a feel that this is like skin Like this really
feels like I feel like I see the crease between
like thigh and groin taken in a like maybe underwater.
(45:20):
I don't know, is that a pimple I see? Yeah, yeah,
I mean just it just speaks to the ambiguity of
the shot, like it's what is it? It's kind of
whatever you want it to be.
Speaker 3 (45:31):
In fact, one paragraph in the CBC rite up of
these photos says, quote the new photos released Friday lacked
perspective and were apparently taken during the Ocean Explorer team's
most recent dive.
Speaker 1 (45:44):
Okay, well there you go. Just another piece of evidence
that could be something but could be absolutely nothing. And
like again, I just really feel like I'm looking at
somebody's leg here, Like, isn't it? Is it? I feel
like I see stretch marks.
Speaker 3 (46:01):
You know, Yeah, I know what you're saying.
Speaker 1 (46:04):
Like I'm not just trying to be a you know,
a geek here and you know, making fun of somebody's
UFO information, But this really feels fleshy but almost but
not like like I'm also like, what's the shape of
this person? But oh my goodness, I don't know.
Speaker 3 (46:21):
Well, I see exactly what you're saying. Yeah, it does
look like stretch marks and skin, but it also looks
like it could be striations in sandstone, if you're true
bands and sandstone. I'm not even saying that's what it is,
because once again, for the millionth time, like it's just
not clear what it is, not enough information to decide.
Speaker 1 (46:39):
Yeah, all right, well, we're gonna go ahead and close
this episode out, but we're gonna we're gonna continue this
line of thought in the next episode of Stuff to
Blow Your Mind on Thursday. We're gonna get into the
realm of Egyptology and of course, pseudoscience and pseudo history,
and look at some other examples where if you take
something of context, if you take something without proper you know,
(47:03):
expertise applied to some degree, then yeah, you can. You
can make various interpretations that speak of ancient high tech
civilizations and alien involvement and whatever it is you happen
to look for, or even the Sampo, the Sampo moving
through time and emerging in ancient Egypt.
Speaker 3 (47:20):
I'm sure I really like that you're cementing that the
Sampo theory is like a new a new major thread,
a fringe explanation.
Speaker 1 (47:28):
I think it deserves it to due. Yeah, and the
Sampo's pretty interesting. We could come back. We can come
back and cover Sampo on both Stuff to Blow your
Mind and Weird House Cinema, because there's also a great
movie about the Sampo.
Speaker 3 (47:42):
Okay, I'm gonna have to research this thing.
Speaker 1 (47:44):
There. Actually there's more than one potentially interesting movie about
the Sampo now that I think about it. Anyway, that'll
be a tale for another time. So in the meantime,
if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff
to Blow your Mind, our Poor Science and Culture episodes
published on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Monday's we do listener mail.
On Wednesdays we do a short form Monster Factor Artifact episode,
(48:04):
and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to
just talk about a weird film on Weird House.
Speaker 3 (48:08):
Cinemam huge thanks to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 2 (48:30):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
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