The Baltic Sea Anomaly; A Crashed UFO or Natural Rock Formation?
In the annals of unexplained mysteries, the Baltic Sea Anomaly is one of the more bizarre deep-sea finds of the past decade. The discovery occurred in 2011 when a deep sea exploration team called Ocean-X, came across an unusual formation 300 ft. below the surface, off the coast of Sweden.
Upon further inspection, divers and surface crew reported malfunctions in their electrical equipment whenever they came within 200m of the object, which appeared to be shaped, oddly enough, like the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars.
Peter Lindberg and Dennis Åsberg came across the giant 180 ft. diameter mass on June 19, 2011, while trolling the Baltic and observing sonar imaging along the seafloor. They quickly picked up on the anomaly due to its circular shape and distinctively straight protrusions. Adding to the mystery was what appeared to be an extensive trail – what some speculated could be evidence that a crash landing may have taken place.
The Baltic Sea Anomaly Documentary
Shortly after their discovery, Lindberg and Åsberg set out to create a documentary that chronicled their attempts to dive down and study the anomaly.
The two parlayed their clout from a previous exploration, in which they recovered a cache of vintage champagne from a 1907 shipwreck that sold for record prices at a Christie’s auction. This allowed them to embark on the bold endeavor of investigating the Baltic anomaly, which they hoped was either an extraterrestrial spaceship or a secret Nazi structure from WWII.
Looking at sonar imaging, the anomaly showed interesting characteristics that seemed to distinguish it from a natural rock formation. The explorers pointed to what appeared to be a staircase and a rounded hole encircled by a square frame as what they believed were distinctively artificial features.
The crew returned to the surface with samples of the object that were later tested by Volker Brüchert, an associate professor of geology at Stockholm University.
“I was surprised, when I researched the material I found a great black stone that could be a volcanic rock,” Brüchert said. “My hypothesis is that this object, this structure was formed during the Ice Age many thousands of years ago.”
But despite his analysis, Brüchert said it was possible that the samples they collected may be covering up something beneath the surface – something artificial – and the Ocean X team believed that was the case. They wanted to go back down and capture definitive proof, though acquiring the funding would prove difficult.
And Brüchert’s assessment didn’t necessarily help with publicity, as news outlets that originally claimed the find was an extraterrestrial craft, picked up on the fact that their collected samples were simply gneiss and granite.
Headlines began to appear, which quickly shifted the narrative and labeled the anomaly “debunked.” This frustrated Lindberg and Åsberg who, still to this day, haven’t been able to finance another trip down to determine whether it’s definitively natural or artificial.
A WWII Remnant of the Nazis
Less than five percent of the planet’s oceans and seas have been explored, and though the Baltic is almost entirely landlocked, it is a massive body of water located in what was a hotly contested area during WWII.
At that time, the Baltic Sea created a natural boundary between the Allied Soviet Union, neutral Scandinavia, and the Axis powers of the Third Reich. Needless to say, it was an epicenter of naval activity, primarily in the battle to control the Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia.
In the struggle for control over this key real estate, countless mines were planted, and naval warfare waged to protect key shipping routes, especially for the Germans who relied on a supply of iron ore imported from Sweden. During this time, it is believed the Germans constructed underwater structures to scramble communications signals and possibly disrupt enemy mines.
Could this explain why the Ocean-X team’s electrical equipment failed within 200 meters of the anomaly?
The Germans also allegedly ran a clandestine program, which attempted to create flying saucers – leading some to posit the possibility that this be a crash site of one of the elusive Nazi Foo Fighters.
These potential explanations are more practical than an extraterrestrial space craft, though they’re just as intriguing.
But according to Russian publication PravdaReport.com the Baltic has had UFO sightings in the past, notably during an instance in 2008, in which a silver disc was witnessed hovering around the Russian province of Kaliningrad. There are a dearth of reports to corroborate this claim.
Baltic Sea Anomaly Update
Lindberg and Åsberg haven’t posted any updates to the Ocean X page in a few years, however a YouTube video from 2012 appears to show another trek down to the anomaly in a submarine rover.
Unfortunately, the video doesn’t provide much in the way of answers or even anything visually distinctive, as there’s a lot of sand and dust kicked up, which obfuscates the view. However, there is a momentary glimpse of one of the anomaly’s walls, showing a rock face that appears too smooth and well-shaped to be a natural feature – though this is an observation from a layman’s perspective.
In subsequent reports there have been claims that rock sample tests turned up limonite and goethite – metals one geologist claims could not be found occurring naturally in an underwater rock formation at the bottom of the Baltic.
Others studying the inconsistencies and strange features of the anomaly have compared it to the Yonaguni monument off the coast of Japan. Located just 25 meters below the coast of Yonaguni Jima Island, these ancient ruins present another point of contention among archeologists who argue over its provenance.
Could these structures have any relation or are they simply uncanny natural formations? Unless Lindberg and Åsberg find a sponsor to fund their exploration, we may never know.
Avi Loeb's Galileo Project to Use Satellites to Scan Earth for UFOs
The search for UFOs usually has us looking out into the depths of space, but what if we flipped it around and looked towards the Earth from space? Can we find UFOs from above?
An attempt to search for UFOs by pointing satellites at Earth; that’s the idea in Harvard professor Avi Loeb’s latest article for The Hill.
Loeb, also the author of “extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth,” and founder of the Galileo Project, explains,
“We are planning to use satellite data and potentially look at unidentified objects from above. Of course, the advantage of that is we can cover the entire Earth, if we put telescopes on the ground, we need to put a lot of them to cover the same area. The goal is to establish the reality of objects, first of all, from both directions; from above using satellite data, and from below using telescope systems, and one would guide the other. So, if we see regions of activity we can put our telescope systems there. If our telescope systems see something of interest, we can monitor what that thing does from satellite data. So, I think it’s an extremely powerful method of verifying and guiding the inquiry to the nature of unidentified aerial phenomena.
Founded in the summer of 2021, the goal of the Galileo Project is to bring the search for extraterrestrial technological signatures into the mainstream. What is the next step when we find something?
“The Galileo Project has two branches: one is to figure out the nature of any object near Earth. We plan to pursue that by using ground-based telescopes that we build, but also satellite data from Planet Labs, for example.