The return of the Baltic Sea Anomaly

So, the Ocean X Explorer Team and the Baltic Sea Anomaly are back in the news, and not because anyone has much in the way of new information about it.

Natalie Wolchover, writer at Life's Little Mysteries, has written an article (here) that claims that the "Anomaly" is a glacial deposit.  Or, to put it more bluntly, a bunch of rocks, which is what I suspected it was right from the get-go.  The most interesting thing about her article is the part that describes how Peter Lindberg, leader of the Ocean X team, contacted Volker Brüchert, an associate professor of geology at Stockholm University, and supposedly got Brüchert to agree that the "Anomaly" was unexplainable as a natural formation.

Lindberg only released one quote from his interview with Brüchert, following Lindberg's providing Brüchert with a black rock from the "Anomaly" site to study.  "I was surprised when I researched the material, I found a great black stone that could be a volcanic rock," Brüchert told Lindberg.  "My hypothesis is that this object, this structure was formed during the Ice Age many thousands of years ago."

Implying, of course, that the "Anomaly" can't be explained by science, and therefore must be (1) a crashed UFO site, (2) a sunken Nazi superweapon, (3) a remnant of the lost civilization of Atlantis, or (4) any of the other bizarre suggestions that people associated with researching the "Anomaly" have made.

Of course, it turns out that Brüchert never meant to imply any such thing.  Reporters at Life's Little Mysteries took the expedient of contacting Brüchert, and asking him in more detail what he thought.

"It's good to hear critical voices about this 'Baltic Sea mystery,'" Brüchert responded in an email.  "What has been generously ignored by the Ocean-X team is that most of the samples they have brought up from the sea bottom are granites and gneisses and sandstones."  He then goes on to state that this is exactly what you'd expect to see if the "Anomaly" is a glacial deposit, which would be no surprise given that the Baltic Sea was largely carved out by glaciers.

"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 postglacial processes," he wrote.  "Possibly these rocks were transported there by glaciers."

So, an expert has weighed in on the subject, and has a perfectly conventional explanation, as I suspected.

The problem is, I did what I should never do, and scrolled to the bottom of the article and looked at the "Comments" section.  A sampling:

• Who's to say stories like Atlantis and the Biblical Flood aren't merely memories of such a widespread calamity?
• Being a skeptic requires no knowledge and no investigation of evidence or facts. Anyone can be a skeptic. Congrats Natalie, you are ordinary.
• What in the hell are you people trying to hide? This needs to be explored much more deeply and we need to be told what this thing really is, how it got there, and why it is still there. Frankly, we just need the truth and "glacial deposit" is certainly not it. It is plain this thing has been manufactured by someone, at someplace, at some time. It's not just a fluke of nature.
• Probably some sort of space ship the "authorities" don't wan't [sic] anyone to know about!
• This report is very misleading. The object was never ID.  People only gave an explaination [sic] how it end up there.  We still don't know what it is and where it come from !!!!
• Well if this is an accurate depiction than it has to be a design from an intelligent source man made or what ever.  There are to [sic] many perfect geometric shapes and lines, a glacier or volcanic deposit I think not.

Well, Natalie, I think we can all agree that they told you, can't we?

It's not that I don't sympathize with the sentiment that it would be cool if the "Anomaly" was something beyond what science currently can explain.  No one would be more thrilled than me if it was a downed spacecraft, or a remnant of a hitherto-unknown human civilization.  And if there really was evidence of something like that, real scientists -- the people whose day-to-day lives are spent pushing the boundaries of what we know, who live for opportunities to study things that haven't yet been explained -- would be tripping over themselves to analyze it.  The fact that a real, working geologist has taken a look at the hard evidence (a sample of the "Anomaly") and said, basically, "Meh," is pretty indicative of the likelihood that there isn't anything much there to study.

And now, I really have said all I have to say on the subject, unless Lindberg and his team unearth something a lot more earthshattering than they have done so far.  As I've said before: I am perfectly ready to eat crow and print a retraction if it turns out that there really is something weird down there.  Until that time, I'm siding with Brüchert.  Oh, and one other thing: I really need to stop reading the "Comments" sections on articles, because I don't need any further reasons to faceplant directly onto my keyboard.

*ding* You've got mail!

I'm frequently the recipient of posted responses and emails, and I'm pleased to say that the majority of them are quite pleasant and supportive.  Some, unfortunately, are downright hostile.  Others fall somewhere in the middle -- questioning my views, requesting that I reconsider, providing me with additional source material that I didn't have before.  And while compliments are awesome, I really appreciate the people who take the time to provide me with constructive criticism -- because, as I recently commented, I'm always happy to revise my views when presented with facts, evidence, or even a logical argument I hadn't heard before.

Last week, I was the recipient of three responses to recent posts, that I thought were worthy of responding to in a subsequent post.  So, lo, here is the response.  In order not to leave my readers on a negative note, I present them in decreasing order of vitriol.

The first one was a reply to my last post, regarding the "Baltic Sea Anomaly," in which I described the beliefs of certain folks that the structure is a sunken Nazi superweapon.  The response I got said, in part, that the structure was "perfectly circular" with "vertical straight lines," and therefore couldn't be natural in origin; the writer then went on to say that "no one except me" claimed that the thing could interfere with planes, and asked why if I "obviously had no understanding of the facts" I "waste my time and my reader's time writing this drivel."

Well, okay, then.  First of all, I'm not the one claiming that the alleged "Nazi superweapon" was interfering with airplanes; the source did, which I both quoted and posted a link to.  I, you might recall if you'd read more carefully, was the one that doubted such claims were true.  Second, I don't know where the responder took geometry class, but the "Anomaly" is certainly not a perfect circle.  And as far as straight lines -- those abound in nature.  In fact, I just saw yesterday, in a park not ten miles from my house, fault lines in a cliffside so straight they look like they were cut with a saw.

However, allow me to clarify one thing, because perhaps I did overstate my case.  The point of the post was to rail against people who seem bound and determined, without any hard evidence, to turn this thing into something bizarre.  My statement, "It's just a pile of rocks," should have said, "As far as the evidence we now have, there is no reason to reject the conclusion that it's just a pile of rocks."  Could it be something else?  Of course.  It could be a drowned structure from a Stone Age settlement, constructed when the sea level was far lower.  It could be a something-or-another from the Nazis.  It could, although it is much less likely, be a crashed spaceship.  But thus far, all we have is a few images, and some anecdotal reports of electronic equipment malfunctioning -- and myself, I am hanging onto the conclusion that William of Ockham would have favored, which is that it is some sort of geological formation, such as a faulted pillow basalt.  If hard evidence proves me wrong, that's fine, and will undoubtedly be more interesting than my rather ho-hum explanation -- and I will happily eat crow and print a retraction here.  But until that time, the wild speculation is getting to be rather tiresome.


The second response came as an email, shortly after I posted "Thought vs. experiment," which was about how experimentation (and data, and hard evidence) should be the sine qua non of understanding -- that knowledge, in my opinion, is seldom ever arrived at by simply "thinking about stuff."  This generated a response, which I quote in part:

You have written more than once in your blog that you will only accept something if you have hard evidence, and that beliefs in the absence of hard evidence are what you call "woo-woo."  I think the flaw in your argument has to do with what you would consider "hard evidence."  Why couldn't there be a natural phenomenon that we haven't yet designed a machine to detect?  Maybe ghosts exist, and the only way to sense them is with our minds.  You would rule that out because you don't see a needle moving on a device, and yet it's real.  And my sense is that you're so closed-minded that even if you were to be presented with evidence for the supernatural, you'd rule it out because you'd already decided that none of that stuff is true.

First of all, I must point out that the latter is the hazard not only with perennial skeptics like myself, but with everyone.  We all come with our set of preconceived notions about how the world works.  If I hear a creaking noise in an old house at night, of course my first inclination will be to assume that it's some sort of natural phenomenon (a branch rubbing the roof, an animal in the attic, or the like).  But how is that different than the True Believer?  To him/her, a creaking of the floorboards is automatically assumed to be evidence of haunting.

The difference, I think, is that for a skeptic (and I would include here skeptics who are inclined to believe in ghosts -- and there are a few out there), you don't stop at that assumption.  You examine your evidence, and you keep your biases out front where you can see them -- and you look for more data.  Skeptics, I think, tend to have restless minds, and aren't content with just saying, "Oh, okay, I know what that is, I can stop thinking about it now."  We are, in our best moments, open to a revision of our explanations -- but only if the evidence supports it.

And as far as there not being a machine to detect ghosts, that one I've heard before -- the argument that goes along the lines of, "We didn't know x-rays existed until scientists built a sensor that could detect them.  Maybe there are energies we haven't learned to detect, yet."  That is possible, but I'd put it in the "doubtful" category -- physicists have become exceedingly good at measuring energy of varying types, even when those traces are faint (to give just one example, look at the Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropy study, which detects extremely small fluctuations in the microwave background radiation in the sky as a way of elucidating the structure of the early universe).  I find it hard to believe that with all of the big effects that the woo-woos claim -- telekinesis, telepathy, spirit survival, and so on -- that none of our current devices can demonstrate unequivocal hard evidence of any of them.


The third response was to my post, "Grilled cheese sandwiches and sacred stones," which looked at the rather difficult question of how to respond to people who claim that you're not showing proper respect to an object that they venerate and you don't:

You shouldn't scoff at people for venerating, or finding spirituality, in objects.  All of our ancestors did that very thing.  I'll bet that there are objects you are attached to -- for sentimental reasons, perhaps, but still, it's not "just a thing" for you.  And maybe the people who find spirituality in objects are right, and you're missing a big part of the universe by considering everything around you to just be inanimate matter.

Well, first of all, I reread my post, and I didn't think I did much scoffing.  At least, not nearly as much as I usually do.  Maybe I did some covert, implied scoffing, I dunno.  But in any case, the responder is correct that I don't think there is "spirit" in matter, and that our ancestors did, in general, believe that there was.  Our ancestors, you might recall, believed a lot of other things, too, and a good many of them have since been proven to be false, so just because some great-great-grandmother of mine thought that a particular ring had magical powers doesn't impel me to believe it out of some sense of familial respect.

In any case, it all comes back to my favorite word, "evidence."  A random pattern burned into a piece of toast is just not sufficient for me to conclude that Jesus has sent me his Holy Image.  Some people in Venezuela declaring that a particular rock is their Wise Grandmother doesn't mean that out of respect for their cultural beliefs, I have to accept that it is literally true.  I will fall back on what I said in the post; I believe in treating all people with respect, dignity, and kindness, but that does not require me to accept that what they're saying is correct.


In any case, I really appreciate the feedback, and although I would prefer not to have what I write referred to as "drivel," it's better to have hostile responses than no responses.  As Brendan Behan famously said, "There's no such thing as bad publicity."  So keep those cards and letters comin'.

The Baltic Sea Anomaly, the Nazis, and "Vril"

The "Baltic Sea Anomaly" is becoming the woo-woo phenomenon that will not die.

You probably remember that the whole thing started last year, when some Swedish treasure-hunters discovered a pile of rocks on the floor of the Baltic Sea that was vaguely circular.  The presence of a circular pile of rocks on these people had exactly the effect it would on anyone, provided he had the IQ of a jar of peanut butter: the people who took the photograph decided it was a downed spaceship.

This caused all sorts of excitement amongst the world of woo-woo, especially when the Ocean Explorer team who had made the initial "discovery" told the press that they couldn't go back because of funding problems and the onset of winter.  They promised, however, to return this year, and anticipation grew, until a couple of months ago, they went back, took more photographs, and found that the downed spacecraft was...

... still just a pile of rocks.  But they were really special rocks!  Really!  And this definitely isn't a publicity stunt intended to draw the whole thing out interminably!

The latter, of course, is happening anyway, because woo-woos are nothing if not tenacious.  So, now we have a new proposal, based on the claim by the Ocean Explorer team that the "Baltic Sea Anomaly" (as the rocks have come to be known) was interfering with electronic equipment, that their cameras and so on "refused to work" when they got close to it.

So now, the pile of rocks has been morphed from a downed spacecraft into...

... wait for it...

... a superpowerful Nazi secret weapon.  (Source)

Yes, this is quite an amazing pile of rocks, isn't it?  It is a remnant of "super-secret WWII technology" that was "designed to block enemy radar and even causing ships and airplanes to lose their way, either crashing into the sea or sinking below the waves."

And as I've commented before, there is no silly idea that someone can't make sillier, so now the buzz is that this is the at-long-last evidence needed to prove the discovery by the Nazis of an ultrapowerful energy source called "Vril."

The whole Vril thing has been going around for years -- that the Nazis had found evidence of alien technology from a civilization on Alpha Centauri, and were working on a doomsday weapon that would be powered by "Vril."  Apparently the story of the Nazis looking for Vril is true; it was one of a whole lot of ridiculous, pseudo-mystical lines of "research" the Nazis were pursuing.  The fact that they were looking for Vril, though, is especially comical, because the whole idea came from an 1871 novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton called Vril: The Power of the Coming Race, which the Nazis evidently didn't notice had been shelved in the "Fiction" section of the bookstore.

But that, of course, never stops either Nazis or conspiracy theorists, because they always have recourse to saying, "Of course it's shelved as fiction -- it was written in the guise of a fictional novel to cover up the fact that it was all true!  How's that for a clever strategy?"  And the result is that there are numerous secret and not-so-secret societies today that base their philosophy (if I can dignify it with that name) on the truth of the Vril story.  (Here's a webpage that goes into detail about the Nazi Vril program, but unfortunately seems to take the whole thing a little too seriously; and a highly, but inadvertently, comical page that tells you how to purchase your very own hand-held "Vril Generator.")

So.  Anyway.  Can we just clarify a couple of things, here?

1)  The "Baltic Sea Anomaly" is a PILE OF ROCKS.  How many times do I have to say this?  The Ocean Explorer team, in a sudden fit of honesty, admitted this when they went back there in May.

2)  Call me a cynic, but I just flat-out don't believe that the pile of rocks is interfering with electronic equipment.  That's just too convenient.

3)  There's no such thing as "Vril."  Bulwer-Lytton made it up for his novel.

4)  The Nazis were, for the most part, superstitious, irrational loons, whose only use for science was to make weapons.  Many of the reputable scientists they had fled to safety when the Nazis came to power, including Albert Einstein, Max Born, Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, Hans Bethe, Erwin Schrödinger, Hans Krebs, and Bernard Katz, with the result that most of the "science" they accomplished with the ones who stayed behind was pure garbage.

5)  Can we just move on to some other crazy idea, now?  Because this one is seriously getting old.

Baltic Sea UFO redux

One of the most mysterious things to me about the aficionados of woo-woo is their ability to suspend disbelief indefinitely.  Psychic Sally is proven to be a fake every which way from Sunday?  No, she's still "Britain's Favorite Medium."  Homeopathy fails every last controlled medical test for efficacy?  No, it's still "a scientifically supported modality for treating and curing human disease."  Young-Earth creationism is demonstrably false?  A recent poll suggests that 51% of Americans believe that "evolution is incorrect/unsupported by fact."

Contrast this to science, where information contrary to the hypothesis being tested is usually sufficient to demonstrate the falsity of your idea -- and forces you to question your original assumptions.

The latest indication of this inclination was our old friend the Baltic Sea UFO, which has reappeared in the news recently because the expedition to find it was relaunched from Sweden earlier this month.  You might remember when it was first spotted, back in July of 2011 (read my post about it here).  My own prediction was that any resemblance to the Millennium Falcon was pure coincidence, and that it would turn out in the end to be a weird-looking rock formation.

Well, at the beginning of this month, the group that found the "UFO" in the first place (Ocean Explorer) began to generate press releases that they were returning to the site now that summer was approaching and the weather up north was improving.  Reports came in that they had relocated the thing, confirmed that it was still there and that the original images were correct.  Mysterious, one line notes began to appear on the Ocean Explorer website:  "THE TREASURE HUNTERS, OCEAN X TEAM, DISCOVERED SOMETHING UNIQUE WHEN THEY DOVE DOWN TO THE MYSTERIOUS CIRCLE-SHAPED OBJECT IN THE BALTIC SEA."  "Treasure hunters confirm they have found something abnormal in the seabed."  Woo-woos worldwide held their breath, waiting for the final release of the bizarre object's identity, which (the Ocean Explorer team said) would come in a week or two.  Tension mounted.

And just yesterday, the Ocean Explorer team released the final, earthshattering results of their expedition:  the Baltic Sea UFO is...

... wait for it...

... a weird-looking rock formation.

But, of course, they couldn't just say that.  No, we must at all costs cling to the woo-woo explanation, that what they found is mysterious and inexplicable and mind-blowing.  Here's a direct quote from their press release:

The Ocean X Team dove down to the circle-shaped object in the Baltic Sea and met something they never experienced before. First they thought it was just stone or a rock cliff, but after further observations the object appeared more as a huge mushroom, rising 3-4 meters/10-13 feet from the seabed, with rounded sides and rugged edges. The object had an egg shaped hole leading into it from the top, as an opening. On top of the object they also found strange stone circle formations, almost looking like small fireplaces. The stones were covered in something resembling soot.
“During my 20-year diving career, including 6000 dives, I have never seen anything like this. Normally stones don’t burn. I can’t explain what we saw, and I went down there to answer questions, but I came up with even more questions," says Stefan Hogeborn, one of the divers at Ocean X Team.
The path to the object itself can be described as a runway or a downhill path that is flattened at the seabed with the object at the end of it.
“First we thought this was only stone, but this is something else. And since no volcanic activity has ever been reported in the Baltic Sea the find becomes even stranger. As laymen we can only speculate how this is made by nature, but this is the strangest thing I have ever experienced as a professional diver“, continues Peter Lindberg, one of the founder Ocean X Team.

Other news stories about this non-event call it "the oldest structure on Earth" (whatever that means), and "a find that will revolutionize geology and archeology."  Me, I kind of doubt it, given that thus far, the scientific community has looked at it, and their general response has been:  *silence*

So okay, Mr. Smarty-Pants, you may be saying; what do you think it is, then?  Well, some have suggested that it is the remains of a human settlement of some sort -- thus the "soot marks" and "fireplaces."  This is certainly a possibility, given that the sea level was a lot lower 18,000 years ago, during the last ice age (the object itself is currently under 275 feet of water, and current estimates are that the sea level has risen since then by about 400 feet -- so the site of the object would have been on dry land at the time).  There is still a possibility that it is a natural rock formation -- there are a lot of reasons that rocks could be black other than "soot."  As my previous post described, there are a great many natural structures that appear man-made at first glance, because of their regularity; but upon examination, they turn out to be from entirely natural, non-human origins.

Of course, this hasn't stopped the woo-woos from leaping up and down and making little squeaking noises about how bizarre the "Baltic Sea Anomaly" is, in an apparent desperate desire to hang on to their original claim that it was the result of extraterrestrial visitation.  Unfortunately, though, even the Ocean Explorer people are now saying that the object is made of rock.  And whatever else you might conjecture about aliens, I doubt seriously whether they have stone spaceships.  So myself, I would consider that idea shot down.

My guess, though, is that most of the people who have been following this story won't see it that way.  The Ocean Explorer expedition will continue to garner attention, and will one day be the subject of a documentary on the We're More Interested In Woo-Woo Nonsense Than History Channel.  And almost no one will say, "Rats.  It was just a bunch of rocks.  Let's just move on, folks... nothing to see here."