At a secret location somewhere in the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Finland, lie some strange objects, the likes of which the Ocean X Team that discovered them have never seen before.
It all started when the team, renowned for their 1997 discovery of the sunken ship Jonkoping containing 2,400 bottles of champagne and cognac, spotted a strange, disc-shaped object on their sonar scans of the Baltic Sea one year ago. This led the crew to prepare for an expedition to the seafloor, approximately 275 feet beneath the surface of the waves, to where the mystery formation rested.
"We need to explore what we have found. Media has been speculating about everything from UFOs to Russian space ships, and the time has come to find out what the sonar image actually is", said Peter Lindberg, professional wreck diver and co-owner of Ocean X-Team at the time.
That expedition kicked off last week, and the results of what the crew claim to have seen (and photographed) are eliciting equal amounts of excitement and skepticism. What they first believed to be nothing but a stone outcropping upon approach, later appeared to be something straight out of a science fiction novel; a large circular object approximately 60m in diameter, with some sort of egg-shaped opening on top.
If that weren't enough, scattered across the top of the structure were strange stone formations that resembled fireplaces, and were covered in a soot like substance that further lent credence to the fireplace line of thinking. To top it off, they found another, smaller disc-shaped object nearby, and both of these strange objects had long trail marks leading away from them for approximately 300 metres.
"I can't explain what we saw, and I went down there to answer questions, but I came up with even more questions," said Ocean X Team member Stefan Hoegborn in a statement.
"(this is) the strangest thing I have ever experienced as a professional diver." added Lindberg.
If this all sounds like an incredibly exciting discovery, it should. If it also sounds a little too perfect, that all signs are pointing to the UFO angle, it should as well. In addition, the photographs released of the scene are grainy and inconclusive, and that's likely where all the skepticism about this discovery is coming from.
The investigation of the mysterious formations continues, and we should have more information from the team in the coming days, which will hopefully answer the question of whether this was all an elaborate publicity stunt, or possibly the discovery of a lifetime.
