Strange Cases of Alien Artifacts at the Bottom of the Sea

The oceans of our earth are undoubtedly mysterious places. There is much we do not understand about their depths, and much of it might as well be the surface of some alien world. There have been many mysteries and conundrums dug up from the watery depths of our planet as we have delved deeper into the murky darkness, and some of these have been stranger than most. Perhaps strangest of all are all of the alien artifacts that seem to be lying down there in the frigid darkness keeping their mysteries close.

Probably among the most well-known of a possible underwater alien artifact or even spaceship supposedly lies in the dark depths of the northern Baltic Sea, which is an arm of the Atlantic Ocean that is enclosed by Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, and Sweden. In June of 2011, treasure hunters and salvage operators Peter Lindberg and Dennis Åberg were with their Swedish Ocean X diving team searching for sunken shipwrecks and treasure in the center of the Gulf of Bothnia, between Sweden and Finland in the Baltic Sea, when they came across a very strange sonar signature. Although the image was rather blurry, sonar showed what appeared to be a massive roundish object measuring 200 feet across and adorned with straight edges, construction lines and boxes drawn, as well as what look like features resembling ramps, stairways, and other structures decidedly not natural in origin, and it even had cracks that seemed to be filled with some mysterious black material, as well as a 985-foot runway leading to the object. The general impression of the strange object seems to be rather like that of a mushroom blooming from the seafloor, rising an estimated 10 to 13 feet from the bottom, with many pointing out a resemblance to the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars, and considering it was just sitting out there with nothing around it was baffling, to say the least.

In an attempt to gather clearer images of the anomalous object, the team revisited the site the next year, but claimed their efforts were thwarted by strange electrical signals that interfered with their equipment, with sonar instruments and even satellite phones going haywire or becoming completely inoperable. However, they were apparently able to retrieve some samples of stone from the site. Not long after this the story was making the news and it was immediately pounced on by people saying it was obviously a crashed UFO on the seabed of the Baltic Sea, and that it resembled nothing found in nature. In the meantime, the samples that were studied, which included granites, gneisses sandstones, basaltic rock, were only odd in that some of them were out of place, but nothing suggested they were from outer space. It was concluded that they had most likely been transported there by glacial movement, but this did not stop speculation that what was being called the Baltic Sea Anomaly was alien in origin.

Of course there was plenty of skepticism aimed at the claims that this was some sort of crashed spaceship, and it was pointed out that the images were too distorted to make any real judgement on what the thing is. Nevertheless, the sheer size of the object and its anomalous circular shape had theories swirling on what else it could actually be. Ideas included that it was a glacial deposit, a rock outcrop or other natural, geological formation, sediment dropped from a fishing trawler, an asteroid or a meteorite which fell on the sea floor thousands of years ago, the wreck of a U-Boat or a Nazi ship, a German ballistic object landing in the depths of the Baltic Sea during the peak of the Second World War, a school of fish, or even a secret underwater base built during the Cold War, but none of these have been conclusively proven, and there is still the fact that the ones who discovered it insist that electrical equipment malfunctions in its vicinity. No matter what the case may be, it is hard to even investigate further, as Swedish Ocean X have declined to teach anyone the exact location and all images produced of it come from them, and there are also the rough, frigid conditions of the sea in that area.

Probably the most widely known ancient, possibly alien technological anomaly was found quite by chance in 1900, when sponge divers off the remote coast of the Greek island of Antikythera found an ancient shipwreck that held ensconced within it a device from the far corners of history that would eventually go on to baffle the scientific world. At first the artifact looked to be merely a rusted out misshapen blob of bronze corroded and degraded over millennia banished under water, and it was placed in the National Museum of Archaeology in Athens along with other artifacts from the wreck, where it sat collecting dust for years before anyone would take another look at it, seemingly an unimportant, ugly mass of metal and rock at the time.

It was the archaeologist Valerios Stais who first realized that there was perhaps more to this strange lump of crud than met the eye, when he uncovered what appeared to be a whole gear wheel embedded within its mishmash. Stais surmised that this was perhaps part of some complex ancient machine, but at the time the scientific community was skeptical of this, and so the exciting discovery sat there without any further serious research for several more decades, a mere curious anomaly that no one could really make any sense of or was even willing to try. It would not be until the 1970s that another close look was taken at it, and what would come to be called the Antikythera Mechanism would finally have its ancient mysteries revealed after 2,000 years of being buried at the bottom of the sea.

In the 1970s, advanced imaging procedures allowed archeologists to peer into the device for the first time, and they were astounded by what they found. Rather than a solid clump of bronze and rock, it was found that there were dozens of complex gears, dials, and rotating hands embedded within, all precisely positioned into some sort of clockwork machine, with some marked with cryptic inscriptions. Over the years the complexity of this amazing machine was slowly revealed, and it quite frankly stumped the scientific community. Here was an ancient machine entwined with the mists of time, utilizing complicated, incredibly precise gear works far ahead of its time, with the earliest such machines of this quality previously thought to have emerged in around the 14th century. It was amazingly, impossibly advanced for its era, far beyond what was thought possible, and by all rights this thing should not have existed at all, but there it was.

At first it was unknown as to just what the purpose of the device could have possibly been, and it was often speculated at first to be some sort of navigational device. However, later research would show it to have most likely been a sort of early analog computer of sorts, in this case one for making precise astronomical calculations and mapping out the positions and movements of the sun, moon, planets, stars, as well as track the lunar phase and predict lunar and solar eclipses. Although there are parts still missing, reconstructions have shown that such is the amazing craftsmanship, sophistication, and ingenuity of the device that it was shockingly accurate, and could even compensate for the extra quarter-day in the astronomical year, long before the idea of a leap year had even been introduced into the mainstream Julian calendar, although there has been some debate as to how accurate it actually would have been.

Considering that it is all still a mystery as to who built the machine, how it was made, or why it ended up on that unassuming ship, as well as the fact that nothing else remotely like it has been found from that era, the Antikythera Device is quite a perplexing anomaly indeed, and has sometimes even been claimed to be some sort of ancient artifact left behind by aliens. However, there has been some criticism aimed at these wilder theories of extraterrestrial meddling, largely due to the fact that the device seems to have been made of materials from Earth and worked based on the understanding of the universe of the ancient Greeks. Commenter Vincent Maldia has argued against suggestions that it is alien in origin, and said of it on the site Quora:

The construction – bronze alloy and gears – as well as the tolerances of construction was well within the tech of greece at the time. The teeth are not perfectly regular and there is looseness or slop. Typical of handmade teeth of the time. It has Koine Greek inscriptions. The hands displayed celestial time: one hand for the Sun, one for the Moon and one for each of the five planets visible to the naked eye—Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Beyond Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are not visible to the naked eye? Coincidence or evidence for lack of detailed knowledge of the solar system?

Furthermore, it modeled epicycles with trains of small gears riding around larger ones. Epicycles dont exist in the real life heliocentric solar system. Epicycles are a hack to explain why some planets go retrograde and are only necessary if your astronomy still believes that the planets rotate around the earth. A dial that displayed the timing of major athletic festivals, including the Olympics, lists Naa, a festival held in northwest Greece, and Halieia, held to the south on the island of Rhodes. On the inner ring, there is a dial marked with the Greek signs of the Zodiac. The mechanism is not particularly accurate, the Mars pointer being up to 38° off at times. This is because it was made using the earth centric astronomy of the greeks. To improve you need to switch to a heliocentric solar system model with elliptical orbits. That was not available until Kepler. The loose tolerances also have an effect but not as large as the outdated earth centered model of the solar system. In addition, other contemporary greek geared machines exist, like the Polybolos which was a magazine fed repeating ballista.

What is going on with this device and what does it represent? It has remained a perplexing mystery. Another of these weird objects is surely a strange structure found on the bottom of the Antarctica seas, which was found by chance and which has incited discussion to this day. In the 1960s, Antarctica might as well have been an alien world. It was a faraway, isolated, frigid land largely inhospitable to life as we know it, and although we still don’t know much about this continent today, at that time is was like another planet unto itself. In order to do research in the forbidding region, the National Science Foundation of the United States in 1962 created an elaborate, technologically advanced floating laboratory called the USNS Eltanin, which was the world’s first dedicated Antarctic research vessel and tasked with exploring Antartica and surrounding waters over a four-year period, at the time in waters just about uncharted as the furthest reaches of the solar system. While they made many findings and shed light on our knowledge of the region, they would also uncover things out there in those secluded depths that would go on to propel themselves into truly great mysteries.

On August 29, 1964, the USNS Eltanin was engaged in photographing the ocean floor 1,000 miles west of Cape Horn with a cable mounted camera at a depth of approximately 3,904 meters (13,500 feet) when they made a remarkable find. There along the mostly bleak and barren bottom they managed to snap pictures of a very strange structure, which stood upright at 2 feet high in the middle of nowhere on the lifeless seabed and with its symmetrical nodules, spokes and protrusions ending in a spherical top, it looked very much like an elaborate artificial radio antenna array. It was surely an unexpected thing to find down there, an anomaly, and when it the photographs were picked up and released by the New Zealand Herald on December 5, 1964, the puzzling images immediately caught the attention of UFOlogists and Fortean researchers, who would dub it “The Eltanin Antenna” and claim that it was an out of place alien artifact put there in that remote location for inscrutable purposes. The object would be excitedly discussed and debated for years, with famed paranormal writer Brad Steiger in 1968 calling it “an astonishing piece of machinery… very much like the cross between a TV antenna and a telemetry antenna.”

Theories swirled at the time, ranging that it was a piece that had simply fallen off a boat, to more conspiratorial theories such as that it was a secret Russian project, to more fringe ideas that it was the doing of aliens. Others suggested that it was perhaps some type of undiscovered plant life, but marine biologists were skeptical of this, as there was no sunlight down there to support it, and one biologist, a Dr. Thomas Hopkins, would say of it:

I wouldn’t like to say the thing is man-made because this brings up the problem of how one would get it there … But it’s fairly symmetrical and the offshoots are all 90 degrees apart. This is why it has been argued over for so long.

In the end, no one knew, and since it was so far under the surface in one of the most hostile and inaccessible environments on earth there was no way to reach it again and no efforts made to try and relocate it. In the meantime, the bizarre object made the rounds in numerous UFO and paranormal publications, including SAGA Magazine, The INFO Journal, and Fortean Times, a habitat in which it often seemed to pick up added details and conjecture that really muddied the waters as to trying to figure out what was actually going on and what it really was. At the time it was aggressively pushed by many writers, in particular Steiger, as a true anomaly and possibly alien artifact, but in more recent years the story has picked up more mundane possibilities. One of the most popular of these was the suggestion that what is seen in the images is a type of deep sea carnivorous sponge called Cladorhiza concrescens, which was discovered in 1888 by Alexander Agassiz and was described in the initial report:

It somewhat resembles a space-age microwave antenna, with a long stem ending in ramifying roots, sunk deeply into the mud. The stem has nodes with four to six club-like appendages. They evidently cover like bushes extensive tracts of the bottom.

This seems like a very rational approach to the mystery, but there have been arguments against this idea. One is that the crew of the USNS Eltanin, with their crew of scientists and marine biologists, did not come to that conclusion on their own. Another is that this species of sponge is known to exist in large colonies, where as this object was solitary out on a desert of nothingness. There is also the fact that when compared to photos of Cladorhiza concrescens, the Eltanin Antenna does not seem to completely match, looking somewhat different, especially in that it is obviously more symmetrical, regimented, and even in form than one would expect one of these sponges to be. Details like this have made sure that the Eltanin Antenna has remained discussed and debated to this day, with many proponents of the idea that it is indeed an anomalous artifact placed there by either nefarious human organizations or aliens, for purposes ranging from measuring fault activity to mind control.

There is really no way to know what this strange artifact was when looking at it based solely on a few photographs. It could really be anything, although no one explanation has really seemed to satisfy everyone at this point. Was this just some anomalous sea sponge that managed to find its way way out there on its own? Or was it something else entirely? Whatever the case may be, no one has found the original Eltanin Antenna since, and we will probably never know the full answer.

Even more recently, in 2014, an object streaked through the Earth’s atmosphere to crash into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. A US Space Command report would find that the object was definately interstellar, making it certainly unique, but concluded that it was simply a meteor, yet Loeb was not so sure. Using his own data on the path, speed, and behavior of the object, as well as the light curve of the explosion of this object, astrophycisist Avi Loeb concluded that it exhibited unique properties that made it inconsistent with a traditional meteorite and composed of material far tougher than any other known space rock, meaning it could be something completely new or even alien technology. In order to get his hands on it and study it, in 2022 Loeb went about putting together an expedition to go find it, raising money from private donors in order to scour the ocean floor looking for the mysterious object or fragments of it. He has said of it:

We found that actually there was a meteor that was discovered by the US government, which moved really fast at 28 miles per second, disintegrated in the lower atmosphere of the Earth about 100 miles off the coast of Papua New Guinea, and it came from outside the solar system. The fundamental question is whether it was an unusual rock from another star, or was it a spacecraft? We’re planning an expedition to Papua New Guinea and scoop the ocean floor and figure out the composition of this object. It’s a fishing expedition, literally speaking. And what we can do is basically take the trajectory of this meteor and extrapolate it all the way to the ocean’s surface. We’re planning to board the ship and build a sled and a magnet attached to it that will scoop the ocean floor. And we will go back and forth, like mowing the lawns across the region, 10 kilometers in size and collect with the magnets, all the fragments that are attracted to it, and then brush them off and study their composition in the laboratory.

There is the possibility that it will be made of some alloy that nature doesn’t put together, and that would imply the object is technological. If you ask what my wish is, if it’s indeed of artificial origin, and there was some component of the object that survived, and if it has any buttons on it, I would love to press them. This would be the most important scientific discovery that humanity ever made. Because if you think about it, it will change our perspective about our place in the universe. It’s not a philosophical question whether we live in an environment where objects are flawed. Around that are representing extraterrestrial technologies. We just need to use our telescopes and find out. In fact, we are not even the first to say that. Galileo Galilei said that four centuries ago and he was put on house arrest. Today he would have been canceled on social media. Once I realized that we found an object from a technological origin that was produced elsewhere. I would not seek approval from anyone else. I don’t need likes on Twitter. I just want to know what it is.

Of course there have been plenty of skeptics, who think that Loeb is wasting money and tarnishing his reputation with all of this talk of an alien artifact on the bottom of the ocean, but he has stuck by it all, and hopes to get the answers no one else even seems to be willing to look for. He also continues to scour the solar system for possible alien spacecraft and probes, and hopes that the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory that’s under construction in Chile and set to open in 2023 will shed light on these mysteries with its 3.2-billion-pixel camera that should be able to survey the entire southern sky every four days, and of which he says,

A high-resolution image could reveal bolts and screws on the surface of an artificial object and distinguish it from a nitrogen iceberg, a hydrogen iceberg or a dust bunny.” Is there anything to any of these wild theories and pursuits, or is Loeb just chasing ghosts? Is he completely off-base, or is he maybe right? It remains unknown, but one thing no one can really doubt is that he is certainly no crackpot, and perhaps with such expertise it might be wise to at least listen to what he has to say. Whatever one may think about Avi Loeb, he has certainly cemented himself as one of the more colorful and credible scientists to dip their foot into the field of UFOs and aliens, and whether he is right or wrong, it has definitely stirred debate and gotten people thinking about the possibilities of what might lie beyond our conventional understanding of the universe and our place within it.

What is it and is there anything even there to be found at all? All of these cases provide conundrums that we may not soon be able to answer. What are these objects, if anything? Are they misrepresented mundane features of the natural world, mistakes and wishful thinking, or what? If they do indicate alien intelligences then what are they and how have they ended up at the bottom of the sea to remain mysterious enigmas? Unless someone gets a chance to go get a good look, we will probably never know, and it all remains firmly in the realm of speculation, mystery and intrigue.