Thinking Sideways: The Bloop

all of the legwork on this thing. They'll also notice if you had listened to what we're calling the last twenty six episodes before and you're re listening now, the music and sound effects are gone. Yes, we've we've gone back to straight audio, so be warned. We sound a little different today than we do in what you're about to listen to. Yeah, bye bye, Thinking Sideways. I don't think you never know stories of things we simply don't

know the answer to. Hi, welcome to Thinking Sideways the podcast. I'm Devin, I'm Steve, I'm Joe, and we're here to talk about a mystery. Yeah, this one's a little out of my norm. Although no, I guess that's not true, because the other thing that I like, other than like middle aged men who die under weird circumstances, is weird noises that we don't totally know what's going on with you do I have a pattern? It's true, It's it's

still disturbing to me. Yeah, this one should be less disturbing because it doesn't have to do with random deaths. Perfect you don't know, I mean, it could be the sound of someone dying. I guess that's true. So we're gonna talk about the blue Oh yeah, you talked to us about this one. Yeah. And you know, every time you kind of go anywhere and think about you know, it's on all the lists, every single top ten mysteries that nobody can explain on our favorite like black background

white text websites. Yes, that's it's one of the mysteries. So I thought we'd just talk about it. Well, why not, let's take it on all right. Um, there's this thing. It's called the SOCAS, which stands for the Sound Surveillance System. It's a chain of underwater listening posts located all around the world. Um, there's one in Cou's Bay, Oregon, which is like really close to us. Yeah, there's a there's a bunch up and down the Pacific, you know, they're

all over the place, literally all over the place. And originally they were set up during the Cold War to listen for submarines and things like that. Since the Cold War, instead of just you know, getting rid of them and scrapping them, they decided that this would be a great thing to use as a research tool to kind of you know, we haven't explored a lot of undersea anything, so being able to listen at least to the undersea

world seemed like a good idea. I know it is, actually, but yeah, you know, I saw that in one of those articles, and yeah, the Navy still uses They didn't they didn't turn it over to private use. They just let a lot of access to the data. Yeah, yeah, I think I think that's great. Um. One of the arrays is called the Equatorial Pacific Ocean Autonomous Hydrophone Array. Yes,

you're welcome. Can't even hardly say it once fast. So this sound array is located in a remote point in the Pacific Ocean that's just west of the southern tip of South America. They talk about it being in proximity to Chile a lot. Okay, yeah, okay, I got a reference for that all right in the source has picked up a sound that's referred to as one of the loudest sounds ever to be recorded by a lot of sources. Most of those are not particularly reputable sources, but they're

pretty interesting sources. And we call it the bloop because it sounds like a bloop. Did you guys want to hear it? Okay? I have two versions of it. One is the version which it's only ever officially been released in, which is sped up sixteen times. So well, listen to that one. First does sound like a blue Well, it sounds like a giant way I just sort of. And then the second one, but we'll listen to is it's just the little bit we're talking about, but it's been

slowed down from the released sixteen sped time sped up version. Wait, so let me just let me make sure I get this right in my head, because this is this is a word problem. So it's released, it's sixteen times, it's the original recorded speed, yes, and then somebody else has gone ahead and taken it slowed it back down. So

what this is like? Uh, somebody releases a picture and it's zoomed really really far in and somebody says, oh, well, I want to zoom this picture out a little bit so I can kind of see what it might have actually been supposed to be about. But you've only got so many pixels it's gonna it's gonna be grating. So the sound quality on this one is grating. So the reason I wanted to give that disclaimer was because you know, it's not supposed to be metallic. It's supposed to just

be more of significant of the duration of it. And um, it's totally possible. And I don't know the answer to this. They probably changed the sound range that it's in because it's really low frequency range, so I don't know, to my own discredit, I don't know what the human ear

can hear. And actually that might have been the reason for changing the sound range, because it didn't sound that much lower in frequency in the in the slowed down version of it, and what you would think that it would be if you slowed it down that far, it

should be much much lower and pitched. So I don't know what the situations, what kind of adjustments were done, but I do know, Um, the bloop rises quote rises lap rapidly in frequency over about one minute and was a sufficient amplitude to be heard on multiple sensors, which ranged from over five thousand kilometers away. That's a little bit of distance. That's a big, big distance. So for

kind of a frame of reference. One of the things they talked about is that a blue whale or a humpback whale is the loudest recorded aquatic mammal ever their songs um and the lot of the biggest distance whale sound has ever traveled is eight hundred kilometers, so this is what like little five times more. Okay, that's that's really loud. So it's really loud, but lower frequency, little frequency sound ways traveled further in the ocean too. Sure,

that's true. So the analysis initially concluded that it was not a man made noise, so it wasn't bomb or something some kind of machinery or something weird you know, tip yeah, or anything like that, Nor was it consistent with any kind of geological activity, like there wasn't an underground earthquake that had happened or volcano erupting or anything like that. Loud, right and travel far, but they said that the sound wasn't consistent with that, and the record

of geological activity was also not consistent with that. At that time. So there's this guy named Dr Fox when he was in charge of analyzing this stuff, and he said initially he said it might be an ice shift, and then later he updated his opinion to say it was probably of animal origin. But again, we've talked about how big a thing would need to be to create

a noise that loud. If a humpback whale, which are giant, only creates you know, eight d kilometers unless unless it was a somewhat small sound was closer to the to the hydrophones. Well, so the thing about that was is that it was recorded at that kind of similar frequency just you know, thousands of kilometers apart just one Mike. It was a bunch of Mike's recording a super loud noise that were really far away from each other, you know.

And I remember reading in one of the articles that I found, they were talking about that if it was an animal that had made that noise, it would have to be an order of magnitude larger than a whale, or at least be something that had some crazy huge sound making apparatus in its bodies on the way to say it's got he's got to have some kind of crazy vocal chamber. Nothing is built with that, I mean, doesn't happen. Well, it's kind of like the aquatic version

of the Howler monkey. Yeah, maybe maybe there are such things that it could be. But if that was the case, and they used to be getting picked up on hydrophones all of it all the time. And that's the other big question mark about this is that it's the only time that a sound like this has recorded. Actually, but addressing the whole issue of this is the only time, I mean, most of most of those sound recordings there's there's sometimes listened to in real time by by navy guys,

but a lot of it is just saved. It's just saved a hard drives, saved the tapes whatever, and later analyzed.

And so is it possible as anybody actually made a concerted effort to go through the record and see if there are analyzed to see if there are similar noises, and just because it's such a loud anomaly, and actually they are five other sounds that are they're all classified as unidentified sounds that have been recorded by these arrays around the world that I'd love to also kind of talk about a little it in conjunction with the plunk and actually it's um, it's the Julia, the Train, the slowdown,

the whistle, and the up sweep, and they're they're all released. So we should just like listen to each one of them who comes up with these names. Well you'll listen to them and you'll hear why they're Okay, all right, So here's the Julia. Do you hear how it kind of sounded like a muffled Julia's almost something. Yeah, it's definitely a weird noise. I mean, you know, don't get me wrong. I'm okay, what's calling it? Julia? I don't So Julia was heard on March on in the same

general location as the Blue was heard. Okay, so the next one is the Train, which was heard on March five, which was the same year that the Blue was heard um in the raw Sea near Cape Andrea, Antarctica. So the n O A A, which are the only people who released these recordings, only released them at sixteen times sped up of any anomaly. What are they trying to hide?

I think it's that's just like the Witching Hour for all these that like they actually sound like they don't really sound like much of anything that their actual, Yeah, it's just kind of like it's really long drawn out whatever. So the next one is the slowdown. The slowdown was heard May couple of hundred miles north of Easter Island. Now that one sounds like Julia. Actually, that sounds like a have you ever been in a subway and you hear the train coming and it slows down? That's exactly

been the train. Should have called that the subway train. Yeah, I mean I get the train, I hear the whistle, right, Okay, except for the next one. It's called the whistle. And where did the whistle come from from? J um And it's just southwest of Mexico City. It's like a couple hundred miles southwest of that. The whistle to me just kind of sounds like wind. It does sounds a little weird underwater, right like I understand, but it just kind of sounds like that's probably just a fast current over

a hydrophone, a lot of hydrophones. And then there's one more and it's called the up sweep and it was recorded on August slightly southwest of New Zealand. That, yeah, I think that was like being in a swamp with frogs. What this one's called the up Sweep, but it's in the middle of the ocean, in between New Zealand and Antarctica. So these all happened in the all in the southern

hemisphere right between. Yeah, and you know, I guess the thing is is that not all of them, actually half of them are close to Antarctica, but half of them are kind of spread out through the rest of the ocean, more close to the equator and things like that, So they're kind of all over the place, all right. So there are a couple of theories here. One, of course, animal.

We've kind of talked about it a little bit, that it would be the vocalization of some kind of living organism, which still seems it would have to be a big living organism, like really big, and correct me if I'm wrong, because I swear in the research when we were going through things, I swear I saw something that one of

the one of the articles was talking about. Like I said before, it would have to have something that just had some huge noise making chamber on it, or it was potentially something that lived super far down where the water is a denser and be colder so that the sound travels farther yea, so those are actually those were absolutely the two kind of theories. One was that it was a sort of like a giant squid type thing using um like kind of a gas filled sack and

that it would have like exploded or whatever. So that was one theory. And then the other theory was that it would have been something that was really that was a deep dweller, but this would have been like really uncomfortably shallow area for something like that to be existing.

These microphones are not particularly deep down well. And and first again because these just sped up sixteen times, so the original sound would be very very low frequency, and I don't know, I can't it's hard to imagine any animal that could actually usefully use such a low frequency

For example, your perception of this sound. How big would your ear drum have to be to pick up something that low and frequency if you're trying to communicate using sounds like that, I suppose, but I guess you know, the argument is that it may not be the sound, but the vibration that's important, vibration that that noise makes, and I don't know what kind of vibrations. Yeah, we don't have a way to imagine that because we hear

in the air, not underwater. But then again, if you you know, we've all been swimming, you've been underwater, and you've heard things and they're very muffled. High frequencies really get dropped down underwater. So it would make sense theoretically that lower frequencies would be a better form of communication because you can do them up easier. Yeah, I mean definitely.

And and that's another thing about these sounds is that they're inherently distorted by the distances because because higher higher frequencies, and if you have if you have any particular events, there's gonna be high and low frequencies, like take let's take an explosion for example, there's gonna be low frequency and high frequency parts of that whole thing. But in the water, the high frequency part of that is going

to be attenuated by the distance. Only the low frequency part is going to carry through the entire way to the hydrophone. So we're not you know, so we're just hearing a bit of this sound and now not necessarily actual representation of right. So on top of the animal theory, also is the theory is actually what about the trip

of Chabra one? No, well, listen the Casula theory. If we can suspend disbelief enough to say Casu is real this instant, it only happened one thousand, seven hundred and sixty kilometers away from the location of the sunken city where Cathulu was imprisoned. Can nope? Can you? I cannot show No, I can't. I'm not even sure that we're pronouncing correctly. Who knows I mean in his language for anybody who doesn't know who is Oh, Cathulu is a

mythical beast written about by HP Lovecraft. Okay, all right, just want to make sure everybody gets on board so they know what we're talking about. This isn't just a random term because we tend to almost do that. We do sometimes it's true. So you know, I think that if we can get to the point of Cthulhu is real, that's a totally viable theory because he lives like not very far away. He's giant, right, he could totally swim that far. It wouldn't It would be like no thing

for him. And you know, he's just exploring, so he's just checking out his hood. Yeah, and he he would definitely fit the ill of a creature that's can make that kind of noise and travel that kind of distance. Yeah, I can see this. I don't I'm gonna I'm gonna just suspend my disbelief of Cthulhu for the moment and say, yes, you're right. It would be a large enough creature to get away with making that noise. So if if Cthulhu is real, it was Cthulhu, But Becauthulu isn't real. Probably

that's as far as I'm aware. Unfortunately, unless he is. Unless, Yeah there you go, okays be so again more We're just gonna like delve deeper and deeper into the weird outlandish theories. Yes, the next weird outlandish theory is Mermaids. I this can I can I stop for a second and just everybody, including our listeners. I was reading this story and going through this, and I got so excited I threw my arms in the air and I shouted in my house. It's Cathulhu in the Killer Mermaids. Yeah,

which I think is a great band name. Did Yeah, obviously, I mean mermaid voices are kind of high pitched. You know. They had that sirens song thing that they used to marriners to their death or something like that I don't think there's the sirens anyway, so I forget that. But anyway, but they don't have that those kind of deep streaty voices. So it was mermaids. No, no, no, you only you have to assume. And I think this is fair that they built an enormous gong and they were wapping it

with their tails in Unison. Well, so that actually is that brings up my biggest problem with the mermaid theory, aside from the like mermaids exist part right, is that mermaids are ostensibly about human size, and if a humpback whale can't make a noise loud enough to travel more than eight hundred kilometers, how's a mermaid gonna do it? I mean, maybe some kind of technology, But then why

aren't we picking up like way more of these things? Right, Yeah, there's there's a there's a problem with that one to me. So okay, next outlandish awesome theory is that it was trans dimensional travel entering or leaving our dimension deep blow the sea? What what? What is that based on? You know, I think the theory that if you were going to travel trans dimensionally, it would rip a loud whole in whatever fabric of time space we have and that might

be allowed thing. Okay, but that's literally all that's all you found. That's all I found. Okay. So there's that. Traveling a little back into the more valid theories are well, a few um that it would be what's called a U s O an unidentified submerged object, so like a UFO, right, but it's a U s S aentually aliens of alien of nature or some black ops sub that we don't know about that's being tested. My next theory, which is Soviet Russia. Oh so specifically Soviet Russia doing what exactly. No,

I you know, it probably wasn't Soviet right in the nineties. Yeah, they were kind of gone by that time. But you know it could have been a bomb. I mean, it probably wasn't. The analysis says it wasn't. But those people are also paid by the Navy. True Navy saying no, it doesn't sound anything like a bomb. You guys are crazy, But it was actually a bomb detonating that would be you know, kind of the place in the sea where

you would want to detonate a bomb. There's not a whole lot of well, you know, that is one thing that arena and have to assume The Soviets that the Russians, excuse me, have been a bit experimenting around with is active sonar, and we've had active sonar for many decades, but submarines don't actually use it. It's been because because it gives away your position. And well, active sonar is when whenever you're watching the movies or TV and they

show a submarine and you hear that noise. Active sonar and so active centers when you send out a burst of energy and it can be generated by your sonar, electronic la or can be generated by an explosion and they can echo that way, but active energy and then you get a return signal and that allows you to localize, you know, your opponent another submarine. Typically submarines don't use that.

They use passive center, which is they only use their hydrophones and they never use their active center because it will give away your position. It's like looking for somebody in the dark field in the middle of the night with a flashlight. They're going to see your flashlight long before your flashlight picks them up. And so the problem with passes sonar, it's have been very effective, it's used not only by submarines, but also by the socist nets

to to detect all kinds of objects out there. But the problem is that submarines are getting much quieter, and they're they're not they're now considering the problem of how do we if they get to the point where our hydrophones can't reliably pick up enemy subs, how are we going to find them? And so they're they're returning to

the idea of active sonar. The idea would be very powerful active sonars in your own submarine or uh an energy source that's not actually localized in your submarine that transmits a lot of energy and basically it's like setting off a flash like a flash bowlb in a in a huge dark room. You know, they get this big flash of energy and suddenly it's all illuminated and you can see who's there. And so they have been experimenting

with this kind of stuff. So it insconceivable that we were talking some sort of like massive active sonar experimenting. I guess that's true. Yeah, that if that somebody just miscalculated where all these microphones were right, and they just the plan that it would be able to go. Yeah, I mean, that would make sense if it if it were giant and it went off, that would hit all of those mics at about the same time. It would be really fast. Okay, I'm sing into this theory. Yeah,

I'm getting there. And here I thought I had to figure it out. I'm sorry, okay, but I mean it's like, you know again, it's like I had no idea the exact strength of when with their active soner experiments that the Navy has been doing, the exact strength of the

signal they've been sending out. Uh, something that massive would would send what you know, it's hard to say if you could if there's a point of sending sending out something that huge, because after all, you know, you're not trying to identify targets a thousand miles away, You're trying to identify targets, you know, miles away. You know, if that even? Do you guys have any theories you want to talk about before I dropped the bomb on this, all right, An, I'm sorry to tell you I've brought

a mystery that they're pretty sure resolved. They're pretty sure there. Well, I mean, you know, I think that it's these people who are in charge of these systems covering things up. Well, if you want to go the conspiracy theoryst route, which at this podcast we try to keep an open mind to all possibilities. You know, the people who are telling us what has happened here are also the people who

are in charge of telling us everything that's happening. And the Navy is paying them and intelligence agencies are paying them, and there could be you know, as Joe was just saying, it could have been a massive stone ar blast something like that. But there's this guy named Robert Dazak. He's a seismologist at the Oregon State University, but he also works for the n O a A. And he said the bloop was an ice quake. Yeah, is that like? So is it like instead of tectonic sheets shifting, it's

ice sheets shifting and grinding against one another. Okay. And here's the thing is that Julia was an iceberg that ran aground in Antarctica. The train was probably generated by really large iceberg grounding in the raw sea. The slow down was moving ice in Antarctica. The whistles hard. It was detected off you know, kind of more in the Northern Pacific area, and they don't have an ice related theory for it, although we were listening to it and it just does kind of sound like wind, like a

high current or something like that. Although one would assume that this is what these people listen to all the time if it were just the current the up sweep, it turns out they hear a lot and it's seasonal and they think it's I smelt all right, So I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna go ahead and rail against this because correct me if I'm wrong, all but one of these so far that we've gone over, we're all detected in the southern hemisphere, right, yeah, okay, do socis is

in the northern hemisphere as well, And we only heard these things so far, it's about five six times. But iceburgs do stuff and I shifts constantly, So why have we not heard these before and continue to hear them, and why aren't they in the north. So that that's that's my problem, because I read the I read the ice theory and and it was Okay, it's justifiable. It makes sense. I can I can see it being a viable solution, except it only happens in one hemisphere, and

it's only been recorded in these couple of times. You know, I don't you know that it's a valid point, but you know, you don't know exactly which a raise researchers have been granted access to, maybe not necessarily all of them. So researchers don't have access to everything that so picks up. Is that correct? It's my impression is that they do

have access to all that stuff. But I will say that apparently that they have picked up sounds really spectrographically similar to the bloop quite allowed, but similar in their range and tone and all that stuff. You know, they've been doing this constantly. I mean, you know, in the in two thousand they picked one up that was near Georgia and they actually got to watch the iceberg like sink into right where the array was, and you know, they seemed to kind of be picking this stuff up.

The only thing is is that the magnitude is ginormous compared to what they pick up usually. And you know,

maybe it was just a really big iceberg. I guess I could see if it was a series of abnormally warm seasons and things are starting to shear for some and I hate to say it, but global warming is the term everybody throws out but if there's some temperature fluctuations going on, and okay, I can see that being possible, but it's just seems weird to me that we suddenly had so many in such a short period of time and they've never really heard it before. That's you know,

it was a question mark for me. You know. But if you if you think about a large number of arrays and and massive amounts of years of data, and you have to set through the data because this is not something that the Navy is not going to pick this stuff up, probably because they're not listening at these incredibly low frequencies. You know, they're listening for the sounds

of submarines and stuff like that. So it might be the stuff that's been going on for years, and the Navy guys who've been listening to it for all this time, I haven't really picked up on it because they're not really interested in those frequencies. And you know, I'm about to ask something really horribly silly, but when did the

Cold War finally end? Uh? I think so in the first sound that we have that was recorded was a nice to anyone, which would have been about when they were getting around to actually getting to use these are raised, right, it's andy and and I mean, you know, the war doesn't end and then eat They're like, actually, let's give the scientists all this data. You know it takes a

year or two. Yeah, but it's it all. All this has happened around the you know, the turn of the century, and we is there anymore that they've talked about that have happened in recent years? And maybe that's because they haven't had enough time to sift through all that data. Is Joe was saying, But you know, I don't I don't want to sound, you know, as if I'm throwing a conspiracy, but it just it seems hinky to me that that's the exact answer that we've got. Yeah, I agree.

The thing to add on to that is that this guy Dr Fox right, he said, yeah, it was it was a nice quake, and then he said, oh no, actually it's a is an animal. And then a bunch of other people were like, no, it's a nice quake. No, it's totally a nice quake. No, dude, dude, it's an ice quaked. Who knows what they're Is it possible? The Dr Fox and all these other people, their servants up to Tolu and yeah, they're helping to cover up it

could be the cover up here absolutely right. Well yeah, yeah, but my my answer to here to which is a valid point that you may, but my answer would be that that's just they haven't maybe gotten around of sifting through that data yet, and they might not have been given access to some of the northern hydrophone networks too. That's my big question. Yeah, you don't know what you don't know what networks they've been allowed to get data from.

And you're right, you're you're right on that. It's just still, like I said, something smells a tad off. And I'm not saying that it's not the right answer. He just not everything is there for me to put the fossils together. I agree with you. I'm not convinced. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure at least one of our listeners is, you know, working for the Navy and listening on the Socist network, so you know, if you know what Socist arrays civilians being allowed access to and which ones they're not, please

Cloe us in. Yeah, that'd be awesome, that'd be great. Well, we'll be give in our email at the end of the show that seems like a perfect segue to me. Unless anybody else has anybody else anything else to say, Well, then if you do have that information, please email us at Thinking Sideways podcast at gmail dot com. Visit our websites Thinking sideways podcast dot com. You can find links

to the story. Um any additional information we feel like providing you with, you can leave us a comment, and of course you can listen to us on the website. You're probably listening to us on iTunes, but we're on Stitcher now, so definitely give that a check. If you're on the go, you don't feel like downloading it or whatever, you know, you can stream it straight through your Stitcher app. So that's pretty exciting. Yeah, pretty cool. Yeah, yeah, so

thanks for listening. Let us know if you have anything you want to tell us, or if you have any ideas for shows, because we love suggestions. Yes, yes, we do love the listeners suggestions. Yeah, and if you have top secret underwater you know, hydrophone net work information for us, please send it along and keep blooping. Yeah. Thanks you guys. Good night,