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.

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."