Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. It's Saturday, so once more we have a VAULD episode for you. It is the L ten and Antenna from eight ten, twenty twenty three. That's the original publication date. This is the first of three episodes where we got into looking at the basic some of the out there ideas that emerge in response to lo fi imagery and you know, legitimate mysteries about what's going on in some of the harder to reach places in our world or even beyond
our world. So without further ado, let's jump right in.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert.
Lamb, and I am Joe McCormick. And oh boy, I'm excited because it's anomalist historical photograph Day on Stuff to Blow your Mind. Today we are going to be talking about a moderately famous underwater image that has been classified
by some as an anomaly. Now, I think it's debatable whether the word anomaly could or should still be applied to it, because I guess normally anomaly is defined as something that is different from what is normal or expected or at least appears to be different from what is normal or expected. I don't know if you can still apply that to a photo that you pretty much have conclusively identified and sorted into the mundane category now but still looks weird. Maybe we can adjudicate that later in
the episode. But anyway, one thing that is interesting about anomalist photographs in our culture is that the anomaly kind of has a secondary definition beyond just something that is or appears to be different from what is normal or expected, and that secondary definition is proof of aliens confirmed.
Yes, yeah, this is a this is a topic we've we've touched on a little bit before. I mean, things have come up, like, you know, supposed ancient etchings or carvings of dinosaurs. I remember we did at least in that one episode on that in the past. And then you can also apply this to things like photographs of bigfoot, photographs of strange lights in the sky, and so forth.
And granted, especially in those two categories, you often get into situations where there is often a strong case to be made for intentional fakery on top of all the other things that can be going on with a photograph, you know, actual photographic anomalies, atmospheric anomalies, and so forth. Today's episode deals with an image that is not a work of fakery. It is an actual image that was
gathered through scientific exploration. But without proper expertise, you can easily see well, basically anything you want out of it. You know, the thing about an anomaly like this quote unquote is that, yeah, whatever your preconceived notions happen to be, you can easily attach them to this thing, especially if you don't have that expertise and you don't have that sort of I don't know, general open mindedness about what it might be. Right.
This is one of many cases where if you don't have the requisite contextual knowledge, something that is initially just a weird looking photograph can take on all kinds of significance, and in fact that there has been a historical mythology built around this one weird photo we're going to talk
about today. But I think before we get into the photo we're talking about in today's episode, since this is going to touch on the the idea of proof of aliens confirmed and UFO lore and all that, I feel like it's fair to sort of just announce where we're
coming from. We've talked about this somewhat on the show before, and we've actually gotten some recent listener mail where people were asking us to address the recent news about so called UFO disclosures, So to do that at the top, Rob, I don't want to speak for you, but I think we're probably on roughly the same page here. You can
correct me if I'm wrong. Despite the recent flurry of excitement, and if you haven't kept up with it, the short version is there was recently whistleblower testimony in front of a House Oversight subcommittee in the US Congress from a man who claims that people have told him that the US government knows aliens exist and we are in possession of crash spacecraft and alien bodies, etc. There is no hard evidence publicly available, he's saying people told him this.
So despite the excited media coverage about this, my personal position remains basically unchanged. And I would characterize that as regarding the topic of alien contact or alien visitation of Earth with curiosity and open mindedness, but strong skepticism.
Yeah yeah, and I do want to drive home it's perfectly all right to be excited by all of this. I mean, the idea that somebody's testifying about this in front of the House Oversight Subcommittee is pretty exciting, and he's saying some pretty exciting things and you can't help but ask, well, if true, what does that mean? And raises a lot of questions. But but yeah, I think there are some legitimate questions to be raised before you
really take all that to the bank. And plus, as we've talked about on the show before, the idea of alien life, it's a complex question. You know, the deeper you go, there's obviously a big difference between saying yes, I think there is something else alive in the universe and say saying yes, I think there are other life forms.
They're technologically advanced, they have spaceships, and they have visited us, and oh, some of our secret at advanced technology today is based on things that we were able to pilfer from their crashes. So like, is their life? Is there intelligent life? To paraphrase Arthur C. Clark, Any answer to any such question I think is equally mind blowing.
Right, that's right, And I think it's very good to disentangle those two questions. One the question of whether aliens exist at all somewhere out there on that question, I think we just don't have enough information to decide, so there, I don't even really lean one way or another on that as of today. I think it's just totally open question, not enough information to judge.
Yeah, I mean there you could basically say, well, there is, there isn't. And to get more directly to the Arthur C. Clark quote about this, like either answer is just absolutely stunning to say that we are completely alone in the universe, that we are the anomaly, are planet of life or to say, oh, yeah, there is somewhere out there, there is a planet of life, and it may be just so far from us, so far from us. That also
questions of when become complex to think about. But yeah, it could be out there and we will simply never know about it, and it will never know about us, you know. I mean, it's all this is just mind blowing to contemplate.
But while I think alien existence overall is a totally open question, visitation is a question where I guess my standards are a little bit different, and I do start
to have a lean on that question. I will say I'm not one of those people who thinks it's like gross or shameful to even investigate the idea of alien contact on Earth, like I sometimes see skeptical scientists like getting angry about like Avi Lo coming out in the news and saying, Oh, I'm combing the seafloor looking for metal spheres to run tests on them, and I think maybe they're aliens. I understand their frustration with him sort of maybe jumping the gun on the conclusion and over
hyping results to say I think there are aliens. But I mean, I think it's fine to investigate if that interests you, as long as you are objective about what you find and you don't misrepresent or overhype in conclusive results to the media, which I think is a legitimate thing to get kind of annoyed about. And that is the main thing that I think a lot of skeptics find annoying about that sort of project.
It is kind of interesting that if a scientist is talking about putting like shrimp on a treadmill or something to that effect or of that sort of nature, there's always the follow up question, Oh, have you said you have you solved the problem of cancer? Yet? Have you have you? I guess you've you've you've tackled all of these other big scientific problems. But generally I don't hear that criticism leveled at UFO scientists and so forth. They're not like, well, wait, why are you not curing can
So why are you looking for UFOs? I don't know. You can interpret that how you wish.
Well, that is interesting. I mean, I guess I would say scientifically, and looking for evidence of alien visitation of Earth is like a kind of a high risk, high reward strategy. It's sort of a gambit. It's like you, I mean, here, I'm speaking with you know my personal opinion, I'd say you are very very likely wasting your time, but on the off chance you're not, you will make the most important discovery in human history.
True. Yeah, So it's a it's a big gamble. It's like, you know, it's the Latto, right, you know that the odds are just astronomical, but the prize is enormous, So you go ahead and you buy your ticket and you scratch it off.
But anyway, but coming back to the question of like evidence for alien visitation, I would be you know, I'm not like somebody who doesn't want to find out about this. I would be extremely interested and excited if there were any good reason to believe aliens ever came to Earth. But I have been interested in this topic and never
seen evidence that was even close to convincing. And furthermore, what I have seen is like a pattern of behavior, a pattern of behavior from alien contact advocates of presenting bad evidence as good or promising that there is good evidence somewhere else, maybe being hidden from you, maybe soon to be revealed, and you'd be really convinced if you
saw that, but for some reason you can't. And so that pattern of behavior, I would say, has conditioned me, like it puts my guard up about any explosive claims on this subject, even if they're being listened to by Congress. So you know, at this point, I'm I'm still I would say, I am still waiting for good evidence, and I reserve judgment until good evidence actually shows up. That you know, like that people can look at.
I like how you're always up for the possibility. For me, if I'm being honest, there's some weeks where I'm like, this is not a good week, y'all. If we are going to discover that the alien visitations have been occurring and there's like definite proof that I just would prefer that it happened like maybe next month, because I've got a lot going on right now.
Well, that's a good point, i'd say. Also, yeah, there are some weeks I'm more ready to meet the Grays than other ones.
Now, one thing I want to stress is, you know we're talking about here is the sort of questing for objective evidence, and how often there is a lack of objective evidence here. And I do want to stress something that we've touched on before regarding subjective experiences. Subjective paranormal experiences are certainly real to those who experience them, and they can clearly be life changing in a number of ways. So you know, you or people you know may have
had these experiences. You may have seen something you couldn't completely explain. And as humans, we've always had such experiences, and we can apply skepticism and scientific logic to why these experiences occurred. You know, in short, supernatural or the other worldly explanations are rarely necessary, but we so have to acknowledge the impact of the experience, right.
And this is a thing that I think makes the UFO subjects kind of difficult because a lot of people who are very devoted to belief in UFOs have in some sense had like an experience of their own or they think, you know, they're like personally connected to this subject, and so it's very important to stress that, like, while you've got to keep your skeptical standards of evidence up
when you're actually saying have aliens really been here? You know, you want to have a high standard of evidence, but at the same time be sensitive to people and say, like us, looking for that standard of evidence is not a personal critique of you as a person having had an experience. You know, it is very common for people to have strange experiences that they don't know how to explain.
And it's even if maybe aliens are not the best actual explanation according to the evidence we have, it's not unreasonable that some people would I don't know, seek an explanation of that sort when they've had a very powerful, unexplainable experience.
Right, something you can't explain happens. You look for answers. You also look for patterns in the world around you. But as you look for answers, you also encounter pre existing scripts to try and make sense of what that was. And if it's lights in the sky, well there are a few ready made scripts that are probably the easiest
to absorb, that have like social support. Some of them are religious, some of them do relate to things like space, aliens, and so forth, and so it makes sense that you would latch onto those to make sense of what happened to you. And yeah, then you go out into the world, you look for patterns, you look for supporting information.
Now here's where we're going to start moving back toward our anomalist photo of the day, or supposedly anomalous photo
of the day. There is a counter to everything we've been saying so far, which is sometimes people will say, well, okay, maybe you're not impressed with everything you've seen so far, but what about this photo of a triangular arrangement of lights, or this video of a white object moving across the sky, or this object on the seafloor that looks like a piece of alien radar equipment, etc. There are a lot of pieces of media out there, a lot of photo
and video and sometimes sound recording and stuff where people can say this looks weird or this sounds weird. I can't think of anything that I know of on Earth that would produce an image like this, so shouldn't all
of that stuff count as evidence of aliens? And this brings me to a concept that I've been thinking about recently that is really just based on an offhand phrase I heard when I honestly don't remember exactly which interview this came from, but I was listening to a series of interviews with a science writer and skeptical UFO researcher
named Mick West. West He's written articles for skeptical publications about all kinds of subjects, written about kim trails and things like that, but also about UFOs of late, and has done analysis of popular UFO or UAP videos to try to figure out if you can actually identify what is it we're looking at in this video, where's some kind of weird object appears to move across the sky, and in many cases he is able to identify. In
some cases he's not. And so I apologize if I'm not using West's exact preferred terminology here, but this is just what I heard him say offhand in one moment, and it was the idea of something called the low
information zone. I think maybe another way to think about the same idea would be to call it the zone of low resolution, with low resolution referring in the specific sense to photographs and other attempts at imaging that produce a blurry or fuzzy or indistinct product, but also to think about low resolution in a broader sense, where it would refer to records or pieces of media or accounts, any type of evidence that contain lower desirable ratios of
identifying detail and are generally lacking in context and clarity. I think this concept is really useful when talking about UFOs or UAPs, where it seems to me West's sort of generalization is that all of the pieces of evidence for aliens or other non human intelligence making contact on Earth that remain somewhat interesting or still seem kind of unsolved or viable, tend to exist in this zone of low information or low resolution, where there's a lot of vagueness,
lack of verifiable detail, or lack of context. Essentially, there's not enough information in them that a reasonable observer can be confident that they understand what they're looking at. Meanwhile, when there is evidence in the sort of high information zone, say when there's like really good video that's in focus and has proper foreground background for scale, and has a lot of information in it. It seems like it's specifically those cases that are more likely to turn out to
have provable, clear, identifiable, mundane explanations. These turn out to be plastic bags or balloons or airplanes or stars or well known digital artifacts produced by cameras and other types of sensors.
Yeah, this is also where intentional fakery tends to come out as well.
Oh yeah, And I thought this was interesting because I do not at all want to represent myself as a UFO expert. I'm not in any way, but it just sort of squares with my experience as a generalist like researching extremely variegated, supposedly anomalous phenomena throughout history. We've covered a lot of subjects like this on the show at some point, especially with things that have been claimed as proof of aliens or proof of the supernatural or whatever.
It seems it's very often in the cases where information quality is high that you're most likely to nail down an alternative explanation to figure out, ah, here's what's going on.
It does have an explanation, the explanation is mundane or within the range of known causes and so forth, and it's in cases where the information quality is very low, where details are vague or uncheckable, where crucial context is missing, and so forth, that you end up having to shrug your shoulders and say, I don't know what we're looking at. I don't know what this is, don't know what the explanation is. And in that case, if a UFO enthusiast is so inclined, they could say, ah, you don't know
what it is. Therefore proof of aliens confirmed.
Yeah, this reminds me too of you know, you can also look at various signals that have been it seemed to be observed, you know, coming from elsewhere in the cosmos, sounds that have been recorded coming from the deep ocean, things where you know, there's some there are some definitely some strong hypops He's regarding these various anomalies. But at the end of the day, can you one hundred percent
say what it is? Well, not necessarily, and therefore the window is left cracked at least a little bit, maybe cracked a lot further open, depending on your willingness to interpret it a certain way. But it remains open somewhat to some of these more far fetched explanations and then you can go the extra mile and say, oh, well, prove to me that the bloop is not the sound of mighty Cuthule rising in the deep.
Yeah, elder gods. Disprove or accept. So I guess the question from a reasoning standpoint is if you accept, and I think most people will probably recognize this at some level, you be kind of familiar with this, even beyond like UFOs and stuff. This is just kind of true in life. If you accept this pattern is generally true that evidence one could hold up as viable in terms of proving
something weird. A weird explanation tends to exist in the low information zone, whereas evidence in the high information zone is very likely to end up pointing to a mundane explanation. Should this pattern itself influence how you think about evidence of alien life, I would say personally, I don't think it should bias at all your starting assumptions about whether aliens exist, because, as we said again early on, that's that's just like not really within our search space for
evidence at least so far, so open question there. But I think it probably should increase your resistance to putting apparently anomalous but low information observations into the could be alien's basket because you know this pattern exists. There's lots
of stuff like this. There are many analogies. But usually the higher you are able to to turn up the resolution on what you're looking at, the more information you can add, the more context you can get, the more you know, the sharper you can make the contours of the image itself, the less likely it is that aliens are going to seem like a good explanation, and the more likely you are to be like, oh, that's a
plastic bag, or like oh, that's a recognizable animal. And I think maybe that'll bring us to the case today, a case of an underwater photograph that has been dubbed the el tannin antenna, or maybe if we don't think it's an antenna in the end, should we call it like the eltannan object.
Ah, yeah, that's fair. I have wondered, if everyone keeps calling it the el tann and antenna, why not just call it the altena. It seems like that like the
natural direction to go in. But yeah, the this is going to be a good one to discuss because it is a thing that an image that that was completely embraced by ufaist and sort of paranormal interpretations, and continues to be held up in many circles as being this kind of icon of the paranormal in proof of something, you know what that's something is depending on your exact case that you're making for like the secret nature of reality, and yet at the same time we know exactly what
it is. I mean, experts who know their way around deep sea organisms and the sorts of things you'd expect to find in the deep ocean do not seem to have had any They don't seem like they've had any doubts about this for a number of decades. In fact, it's not that long after the image was taken that we have a pretty solid and convincing answer that everyone seems to be satisfied with outside of the paranormal investigation world.
Yes, I would say to be as fair as possible to the people who want a paranormal or alien explanation. And you can't know for sure what it is because like you can't go back and check it, Like this was a sort of transient phenomenon somewhere in the bottom of the ocean, so we can't go back to the exact spot and say, oh, is it still there? And check it? But I'd say ninety nine point nine percent
sure we know what it was. There's something else that would explain this photo and would be found naturally in the place where it was taken.
All right, let's roll out the story here. And the story, I have to say, does start off with a number of elements that already sound kind of supernatural, because the story concerns the us NSL Tennant, an ice breaking cargo vessel named after a star in the Draco constellation, and I believe the name al Tanan derives from the Arabic for the great serpent. That's all just too.
Good off to a good star.
Yes, yeah, so it already leans into some supernatural ideas here, right, But basically, back in nineteen sixty four it was working as an oceanographic research vessel in the Antarctic Ocean, which it did for more than a decade. The research crew used it to gather a great deal of data, and it was used to discover the hypothetical al Tannan impact crater in nineteen eighty one via sediment cores collected earlier.
That's something to keep in mind with a lot of this, like the data is gathered and then the data has to be analyzed. It's not necessarily being analyzed on the ship. It's bringing this back home and sometimes it's years later that some particular find is made. Anyway, the al Tenant impact crater, this was in the South Pacific and it would have occurred somewhere in the neighborhood of two and a half million years ago.
The impact that caused it would have been two and a half million years ago.
Yeah. Yeah, not the al Tannin, which then goes back in time in a twilight zone scenario. The ship was also used in part to discover Hollister Ridge, a group of seamounts in nineteen sixty five, and the ship's work also provided plenty of evidence to support the continental drift theory. And I believe actual specimens of many marine organisms were also collected. So to be clear, this is a hard working, serious science vessel.
YEP gave us a lot of useful knowledge about the seafloor and the Antarctic oceans.
Yeah. On August twenty ninth, nineteen sixty four, the crew took sample cores and photographed the seabed west of Cape Horn and it took a strange photo, like it is strange. I mean, I look at it and I have to admit this is weird looking. It's a photo of something at a depth of about three nine hundred and four meters or twelve eight hundred and eight feet. This is
the image of the so called El Tannan antenna. Now I'll probably throw this image up on our various accounts where listeners discuss episodes, but in general, you can look up il tan and antenna on Wikipedia and you'll see this kind of vertical image of the eltann And antenna. But there's also this is like a apparently a zoom in a crop of of a wider image, and this
one is less reproduced. But for instance, I found it initially on a Twitter post by science writer Tyler Greenfield from June of twenty twenty three, so you will see it posted in various places. And this is this image in particular, I believe it's from a book that I'm going to reference here in just a bit.
If you've never seen it or are not able to look it up right now, it looks like a pole jutting up from the seafloor, straight up, and then it has radial poles that extend out from the central pole at ninety degree angles. So it does look very strange for something you would see on the seafloor.
Yeah, it kind of like the image itself is kind of haunting because it's all, you know, black and white. It kind of looks like a reverse negative image of
a popcorn ceiling, only upside down. This is the seafloor with this strange multi armed antenna like structure or perhaps weather vane like or kind of like a surrealist street sign has those big gum knobs on the end that you know, kind of reminds you of like a jacks that you know, yeah you're throwing and yeah, I mean, if you if you want to see an antenna, you know, you might say, well, this, this looks like an antenna, not necessarily an antenna I've seen before, but I guess
you could make that case because on the other hand, I don't think this really looks like human technology. But at the same time, there do appear to be right angles in the positioning of the arms relative to its trunk or its spine, and so you can see why this image might elicit mystery in many viewers.
Now it's interesting that the comparison to technology goes back to the very first published article about this. This actually is so I could not find the text of the original article in full, but I found it reproduced in a very good article from the Fourteen Times by Peter Brooksmith from May two thousand and four called the Eltannan Enigma.
This is a very good skeptical article that pretty much lays out the whole history of the case and tells about the various interpretations as well as gives the almost
certain correct mundane explanation of what this is. But in this article Brooksmith finds and reproduces the original article from the New Zealand Herald from December nineteen sixty four called Puzzle Picture from Seabed, which was published apparently right after the Eltannan came into Auckland and was I guess processing or analyzing some of its research materials, And so it's docked here in New Zealand, and we get this New
Zealand News article which says, among other things, quote the photograph, which to a layman shows something like a complex radio aerial jutting out of the mud bottom, was taken on August twenty nine by a submarine camera. The camera is housed in a cylinder pulled along by a cable from the ship. It bounces along the seabed, taking pictures at regular intervals. Doctor Thomas Hopkins, senior marine biologist on board who specializes in plankton studies, says the object could hardly
be a plant. Quote at that depth there is no light, so photosynthesis could not take place and plants could not live. If it is some strange choral formation, then no one on board has ever heard about it before. Doctor Hopkins, a graduate of the University of Southern California, said the ship's photographer had been thoroughly questioned on how he had developed the photograph. However, everyone was certain the picture was
not faked. I wouldn't like to say that the thing is man made, because this brings up the problem of how one would get it there, he says. But it's fairly symmetrical, and the offshoots are all ninety degrees apart. This is why it has been argued over for so long. And then the article goes on to say the object is probably about sixty centimeters high or about two feet high. The photograph is being sent for analysis to some I think some labs or the University of Southern California, and
that's about the end of it. But ooh, it's funny that while nowhere in the article is it actually suggested in seriousness that this object is alien or anything like that.
I think they accidentally laid the groundwork for that kind of mythology to evolve, because there is kind of offhanded suggestion of ruling out mundane explanations like couldn't be a plant because you know, no light gets down there, so that almost sounds too you know, a very a very enthusiastic pro UFO type reader saying like, oh, well, then it couldn't be organic at all. And then you say, well, it couldn't be human made because you know, how would you get it down to the bottom of the ocean.
And somebody could say that that's right, couldn't be human, couldn't be couldn't be a plant, so it couldn't be organic. So, I mean, what's left.
So just as the image has been taken, it's hit the mainstream presses, and yes, at this point it is picked up by the ufology and sort of fringe segment of the population, and you know, it seems I don't know if this was the case with you, Joe. It seems like there might be a lot of this sort of material, especially from like the mid to late sixties that perhaps just hasn't survived, that isn't archive, that hasn't been recorded, or it has where the information has been
reprinted and reused. Maybe the attribution system involved there isn't as rigorous as you would find and like scientific reporting and so forth.
Yeah, I mean, I was wondering about how many things there are like this photo that just like nobody ever noticed and attached any mythology to, you know, like they just like never became a nucleation point for lore. But there are just like a weird poo out there that was taken maybe published in a newspaper article and then forgotten like it.
You know.
So this originally was just published in a New Zealand Herald article. I don't know how many people read that, but the right people saw it and found out about it, and that led to a whole burgeoning mythology and to its inclusion and books and articles about UFOs and the paranormal and so forth.
Yeah, so it seems to sort of maybe make the rounds a little bit, but it definitely gets picked up in what, at least in my research, was the earliest book reference that I could actually like pull up on my end, the earliest book reference to the Eltannan antenna. And this is this would stem from I believe nineteen
sixty eight. The book is Harmonic thirty three by Bruce Cathy, a New Zealand airline pilot who went on to write seven books about UFOs, as well as a supposed world energy grid the powers flying saucers and permits the detonation of atomic explosions, but only at particular juncture points and at specific times.
Kathy's work is explored extensively in this article in the fourteen Times from two thousand and four by brook Smith, and it is what's the right word, I guess just complex. There is a lot of maps and annotation and reading deeply into systems of geographical coordinates and making plots a sort of a pattern seeking run amock.
Yeah. What I gather is that Bruce Cathy was an intelligent, determined man who, having had a paranormal encounter of his own, attempted to find some meaning and pattern in alleged sightings around the world, you know, creating maps, drawing these lines, working out different coordinates, and you know, working with descriptions of things that seem like antennae, is either antennas that are described on UFOs or in this case, an image
of something that can be interpreted as an antenna. The problem, of course, is that the whole enterprise is constructed with narrow focus and a preconceived conclusion, you know, based in part in citing subjective experiences and also the sort of
low res information. So anyway, the first edition of this book comes out, I believe in nineteen sixty eight, but then the nineteen seventy two or nineteen seventy three reprint of the book actually features that photograph of the altanna and antenna on the cover, you know, with some added you know, jazzy title design and like a blue tint, and it is very eye catching, and I think it's important that eye catching aspect of this cover in this illustration.
I think it's important because you have to imagine that this book, you know, certainly it's going to connect with various individuals that are interested in the paranormal and UFOs and so forth, but also it's just going to be on the shelf or or you know, in the layout perhaps in a magazine with other books of this nature.
And in a sense you can imagine how it becomes solidified as a symbol, you know, as one of these sort of articles of faith in the paranormal, alongside things like famous UFO sightings or illustrations, images of stone hinge and so forth.
Ah, So it's not just one instrumental piece of evidence that helps prove your theory about UFOs and alien contact and everything, but it takes on a meaning. It has a kind of significance where it might emotionally feel like if this particular piece of evidence were explained as something actually mundane, it would kind of be an insult to the whole project.
Yeah, but also I think, just I don't know, part of this is me going back to like being in you know, being in stores, whether like they're you know,
movies or albums. You know, even if it's not an album that you've listened to or a book you've read or a movie you've seen, like that poster art being displayed among all the other that album cover being displayed among all the others, there's kind of this codifying effect I feel, Yeah, but at any rate, Yeah, it's no accident though that the altan and antenna is on the cover there, because it does seem kind of like key
to his main ideas here. In particular, in the book, he describes the altan and antenna and briefly explains why he thinks humans couldn't have made it, and doesn't even mention the possibility of organic origin even to dispute it, like it doesn't even say anything like, well, some people think this might be an organism, but it's not, or it doesn't look like an organism. There's none of that. He describes it as a quote bit of iron mungery unquote that no humans could have possibly placed.
Okay, so as he presents, it's just axiomatic. This is made of metal, and it's some piece of technology. And the question is could it be human or must it be other than human? And here's the argument why it could not be human?
Right he In the book, he writes the following quote, it would be interesting to know what the Americans have made of that picture and whether any attempt has been made to salvage the strange object they photographed by accident in view of my earlier sighting in the Capara Harbor. I was willing to accept that the aerial had been placed there by an unidentified submarine object or USO. Can you offer a better explanation.
Some of the writers who prefer an alien explanation specifically cite the claim that, well, it was too far down on the bottom of the ocean for a human made submarine, any human made submarine at that time, to have deposited it.
Submarines couldn't go that deep. And I don't want to I'm not mocking here or anything, but I mean I do kind of think could you not think of another way that, like a piece of metal could made by humans, could have gotten to the bottom of the ocean other than being deposited by a deep sea submersible.
Yeah, it seems like there's a rather obvious way to get something down.
There, right, Otherwise you'd have to say the same thing about like metal drums and barrels and stuff that end up at the bottom of the ocean. I mean, there's gravity, things can fall to the bottom. I guess there is some reasoning militating against this that says, well, but it's standing upright though. I guess you could explain that just by like it being weighted a certain way.
Yeah, okay. For Kathy, his argument seems to be, well, okay, you could probably get some sort of submersible down there, but you wouldn't be able to do this kind of work. So still I agree. It seems like it doesn't seem
like that logic would necessarily rule it out. But anyway, elsewhere in the book, he frequently comes back to the alten and antenna as being part of this elaborate global energy grid, and he also connects the knobs or its apparent knobs, two objects described on the bottoms of UFOs.
So if you were encountering images of this artifact, this object, or this antenna in this book, or in books inspired by it, or in the same sort of realm, could you might well think, well, this is this is truly a mystery, and we've got to go back there and find it someday, or maybe we won't find it because someone else has already come and and and harvested it,
et cetera. So you can imagine how this kind of takes up and takes up this energy and becomes this again, this kind of like icon within the realm of like paranormal UFO investigation.
But as we have teased now multiple times, there's really not much of a question anymore what it actually is. And this is the result of marine biologists weighing.
In that's right. And that's one of the key things about this one is that if you're looking at individuals that actually have you know, the expertise regarding things that might appear on the ocean floor in this part of the world, Yeah, there seems to be no and there hasn't been any mystery for decades and decades. In particular, I mentioned earlier how there's the horizontal version of the image and then there's this wider version of the image
that hasn't been cropped. This appears in a nineteen seventy one book titled The Face of the Deep. This was published by Oxford University Press and was authored by Bruce C.
Heasen and Charles D. Hollister. This book was not a UFOology work, but rather set out to present quote, a selection of the best photographs of the deep sea floor for you to look at and contemplate, which maybe wasn't taking it far enough because Bruce Cathy and others were certainly contemplating it, but they were going off an entirely
different direction. In the book, they note that about it, one third of the photographs in the book were obtained quote over the past few years in Antarctic waters by the National Science Foundation's research ship el Tatnan.
All Right, so what do they say about the photo in question?
All right, Well, the caption for the photo and alone says, note antenna like sponge clataisa in the lower photograph.
All right, So not only are they noting this is an animal, it is a sponge, they specify a genus name, which was at the time Clatterresa. Now, as a kind of confusing note, it seems to me that the same animal they're talking about, this type of sponge, was at the time taxonomized in the genus Clatterresa. So it was known as Clatterresa concretions. But now the same species is sorted into a different genus and it's known as Chondrocladia concretions.
Yeah, and this sort of thing's fairly common.
Yeah, things get differently taxonomized when they get further studied.
Now, elsewhere in the book The Face of the Deep, the authors go into a little more detail. They're right. Quote, while the bath sponges are limited to the warmest shallow water of the continental shelf. A few of their bizarre relatives are rather commonly found in the deep sea. Clatteriza, A particularly dramatic one which sometimes resembles a space age microwave antenna, was not uncommon in the early dredge halls
of Challenger and Blake. Alexander Agassi observed that quote they are sponges with a long stem ending in ramifying roots sunk deeply in the mud. The stem has nodes with four to six clublike appendages. They evidently cover like Bush's extensive tracts of the bottom. Now, a couple of notes here about what they're referring to. Alexander Agassi lived eighteen thirty five through nineteen ten, and he was a noted
Swiss American scientist and inventor. He was also a rather infamous supporter of scientific racism, but his contributions in non human biology and geology of the time seem pretty sound.
And the Challenger there would be referring to the Challenger expedition, which we've talked about on the show before. I think maybe we talked about it in the context of, like maybe William beebe or something.
Yeah, I think so some deep sea exploration dredging up life forms and so forth from the bottom.
Right, But this would have been in the nineteenth century, so like a long time ago. But they're in nineteenth century ships like running sort of devices along the seafloor to try to pull things up and see what's down there.
Yeah. So at this point, this particular species had been known about for decades. It was this was not like, oh, this is some unknown creature. No, they when people wh knew what they were talking about looked at it, they were able to match it up with some actual organisms in the record book.
Right, Well, people who knew about deep sea sponges would know what they were looking at. But to the average person, it just looks like a really weird shape that could well be in antenna. Like you wouldn't expect any just the regular person off the street to recognize this species of sponge.
Right, Yeah, this is special information to be it to be clear. Now, in the book, they note that the photo in question, in a zoomed in horizontal version, is of quote a bizarre antenna like abysal sponge, which quote stands erect towering over the manganese nodules in the bellings Housen basin South Pacific. There were apparently sixteen different images from this location. And again, remember we were talking about
how those images were taken. They were kind of like fired off automatically by this large capsule being pulled at depth behind the ship. But of those sixteen images, only one image captured this sponge.
Now it's mentioned that the sponge is often found in sort of little forests on the seafloor where there would be others of the same type surrounding it. In this case, it was standing alone, and I wonder how it would have been received differently if there were other similarly shaped objects all around it.
Yeah, it's an interesting question because on one hand, you can imagine exactly the same thing occurring. But you could also make it argument that yes, by standing alone and you know, standing out on the seafloor scape around it made it more iconic, made it more mysterious seeming. But the authors here note that while the Challenger and Blake expeditions dredged in an area with considerably more of these, yeah,
this one does seem to have stood alone. Agacy drew the sponge in illustrations with drooping or arching limbs curved in either case, while this image shows the organism erect with horizontally positioned appendages. They also note that quote the tops of the appendages show up so brightly in the photographs to suggest they are either of an extremely light color or that they phosphores So I think that's that's
a good point. We'll probably come back to that. But also this whole idea of well, Agasy drew it one way and it looks a different way. I mean that that pretty much matches up with a lot of what we've talked about regarding deep sea organisms. If you dredge them up for the deep or pull them up even in even in like a cage or something, there's a lot that can happen on its way to the surface. You're taking it out of one environment and bring it
into a drastically different one. All sorts of things can occur to you, you know, decompression, explosions and so forth. So it's not that crazy to imagine that, well, it looked different once they had dredged it up from the bottom as opposed to how it is positioned in its natural habitat.
Absolutely yeah, changes in pressure, changes in temperature, and possibly damage caused just by whatever device you're using to remove it from its habitat and drag it up right.
So we're at an interesting point here with this one, because on one hand, the paranormal the UFO explanation for this is weird and strange and tantalizing. But then the natural world explanation is equally, if not more, amazing and
strange and tantalizing. But of course you have to certainly, in decades past you had to have specialized information or access to scientific data to be able to really get in an understanding of the natural world explanation for this object, and perhaps in some circles the paranormal explanation is going to be a little easier to get your hands on.
I think that's right, And it's also important to emphasize how easy it is to look at some things in nature and just say, well, that looks really weird. I've never seen anything like that in nature, so it must not be natural. And so I think it is time to take a short diversion just to talk about sponges and sponges that look like machines, or sponges that look
like aliens. Yeah, so again, the identification of the Eltannan object as a specimen of Chondrocladia crescens or concretions seems pretty much rock solid to me, Like that, that's almost got to be what it was. But I thought it would be worth it to look at some other sponges as well, especially carnivorous sponges, of which this species is an example concrescens as a carnivorous sponge. So rob, let's look at a photo of a different but closely related
species of sponge. I've got one for you to look at.
Here.
For you people at home, I will describe it. So this is a species from the same genus, both from Chondrocladia. This one is Chondrocladia lira, or the liar sponge, or more commonly, I think the harp sponge. Now I dare say that in some photos this animal looks even more like technology than its cousin, looks even more like technology than concrescens.
Oh yeah, this one is a really weird looking organism. Like I instantly think about the various illustrations of an alien life in one season the art of Wayne Barlow, You know that, And then fantastic illustrator of monsters and aliens, but also paleontology as well. He also did some wonderful dinosaur illustrations. But some of his stuff looks this wild and believable but not, you know, not something of this world.
Can you imagine the hype you could churn up around a good, grainy or blurry, low resolution photo of this creature if it had not yet been identified. It looks like a device that one of James Bond's enemies would use to generate a deadly field of rays.
Oh yeah, absolutely, so.
I'll try to if you're not able to look it up again. It's called the harp sponge or Chondrocladia lira, but I'll try to describe it as plainly as I can. So it is a creature made up of multiple intersecting horizontal veins that run parallel to the seafloor. So imagine a pattern of intersecting sort of bars or branch that
run along the bottom of the ocean. You can think of these as kind of base bars, and they could just be a couple of veins running basically in a line symmetrically at the base, or there might be many of these veins intersecting. In the photo we're looking at, there are five intersecting veins arranged in a star pattern.
This base structure is anchored to the sediment at the bottom with a root like structure called a rhizoid, and then jutting straight up at ninety degree angles from the base veins are the branches, and these are arranged like the bars of a wrought iron fence. It looks like a metal fence standing straight up, evenly spaced and parallel to each other, so they look like a fence, or an array of antenna parts or some other electronic device.
And on some of these animals, the branches gradually increase in height as they get closer to the middle of the star, so out at the end of the veins the branches are very short, and then they slope gently up in smooth slope toward the middle, so that the fence posts or the antenna bars form a pyramid shape with these these smooth sloping edges going up to the middle. What on earth would you make of a blurry photograph of this thing?
Oh? Yeah, I would see it would clearly feel like nothing of this earth, some sort of a strange radar ra or something or some an rray placed on the bottom of the ocean by who knows what. Oh.
And then also they're on the top of these little posts. They're bulbs. Apparently those are sperm sacks. But the species was first described in the literature in a paper from twenty twelve published in the Journal Invertebrate Biology. So twenty twelve, there have been a photo of this thing, grainy photo from decades ago. You wouldn't even have any knowledge to compare it to. So to cite the paper, it was by Welton L. Lee, Henry M. Riiswig, William C. Austin,
and Lanna lund Steen. It was called an extraordinary new carnivorous sponge Chondrocladia lira in the new subgenus Symmetrocladia from
off of northern California, USA. A few notes from the paper here they say it was observed quote from Northeast Pacific sites at the Escanaba Ridge and Monterey canyonate depths of three three one six to three three nine nine meters, And the scientists describe the structure like this, They say, quote the basic structure termed a vein, is harp or lyre shaped from one to six veins extend by radial
growth from the organism's center. The orientation among the veins is approximately equiangular, such that together they display pina, radiate, tetra radiate, tri radiate, or biradiate symmetries. Each vein is formed by a horizontal stolon supporting a series of upright equidistantly spaced branches, each of which terminates at its apex in a swollen ball in all observed specimens except the paratype, so the veins. They can be oriented as a sort of two sided comb, or with three arms or four
or five, always roughly radially symmetrical. Now, the big question I think worth asking is why would it be shaped like this? Like, why does it look that way? Why would evolution make a weird looking animal that could be a sort of technomorph structure. Well, a passage from this paper illuminates that. It says, quote, a linear row of filaments project from the sides, front and back of each branch,
and also from the tops of each stolon. Enclosed crustacean prey on branches and stolons provide direct evidence of carnivory. The structure of the veins maximize the surface area for
passive suspension feeding. So this sponge is a predator. It is a carnivore feeding by catching small animal prey in the filaments that extend between ween these branches, between the posts of the wrought iron fence, the little catch hooks that spread out between the bars, And if you zoom in close enough on any of the pictures, you can
see the little filaments, these little hair like hooks. And of course the scientists say that they found tiny half digested remnants of crustaceans, of animals caught in those branches. I was reading a press release about this research from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, which was involved in the discovery, and the release was written by Dana Lecano, and they write, quote clinging with root like rhizoids to the soft, muddy sediment, the harp sponge captures tiny animals
that are swept into its branches by deep sea currents. Typically, sponges feed by straining bacteria and bits of organic material from the seawater they filter through their bodies. However, carnivorous harp sponges snare their prey, tiny crustaceans with barbed hooks that cover the sponges branching limbs. Once the harp sponge has the prey in its clutches, it envelops the animal in a thin membrane then slowly begins to digest it. So when you look at it with this in mind,
the design makes perfect sense. It looks like some kind of antenna array or a fence or something else because it's trying to maximize surface area for catching things swimming or flowing through the water. It wants to spread out sort of a net across the sea currents and to catch prey. But also the authors say the animal surface area is sort of spread out maximized like that for spermatophor capture, so it helps the sponge reproduce. And then I was reading, so what are the branches on the
original Eltannen organism for? You know, the branches coming off of the so called antenna that is identified as Chondrocladia concrescens. Those are also forefeeding. They also have filaments coming off of them that catch prey and help cover it in the membrane and digest it.
So really, in a way you could compare them to an antenna because they are they're spread out to collect, but instead of collecting waves or transmissions or information, they're collecting prey. They're collecting these tiny crustaceans.
Oh, I guess in a weird way, they also could be like a transmitting antenna because they are releasing sperm from the sperm sacks at the top and then collecting it along the for reproduction purposes.
Yeah. Now, I did want to mention just a couple of other sponges to sort of drive home the weirdness of all of this. Another sponge worth mentioning here is Advena Magnifica. That's Latin apparently for magnificent alien, named in twenty twenty after explorations in the Pacific by the NAA ship Okinos Explorer. This is a quote from an NAA article about this quote. Among the different sponges within this alien like community was one that could not be missed.
Rising high on a stalk. This sponge had a body with two large holes, oddly reminiscent of the large eyes of the alien from the beloved movie E T. The Extraterrestrial. I included comparison images here for you, Joe, in case you don't remember what ET looks like, and you want to know what the et sponge looks like.
Here, it's uncanny. I mean, I think it's they're copying Steven Spielberg.
This is just it is ET's head. It's maybe less, it's not one to one, but you can see it. Yeah, I mean, to be clear, this one doesn't look like a machine. This one doesn't look like an antenna, and it only I guess a little bit looks like ET's head. But still, you know, we're dealing with organisms that, by their very nature feel entirely alien to us, and in this case, they just went ahead and named it after an alien. Now, I also suppose I need to mention
SpongeBob SquarePants and all of those. The cartoon character is, if you're not familiar with him, a sentient talking sponge, and his shape and coloration are clearly based on the common artificial bright yellow cleaning sponge, so not you know, upper depth depth sponges that are harvested and used for sponges, but of course the artificial kind that are manufactured to you know, to help us clean our dishes and so forth. And that's always been kind of the clear joke here
with SpongeBob square pants. But interestingly enough, in twenty twenty one, you know AA's North Atlantic Stepping Stones expedition happened to snap a high quality photograph a mile beneath the waves of a not a perfect square, but a very square like bright yellow sponge, and beside it there's a c star that it doesn't look exactly like SpongeBob SquarePants his friend Patrick, but enough like Patrick to where people were like, behold we have found him.
What are the odds?
Yeah, it also should be pointed out that it doesn't have pants on, but it is square. The color seems right, it's pretty eye catching. It is a yellow glass sponge of the genus Hertwigia. I'm going to read. This is from a National Museum of Natural History article from twenty twenty one by Chris ma Quote. The yellow Herdwigia sponge is what's known as a hexent tittlid or glass sponge
that is composed of biologically secreted silica or glass. Its bright yellow color is unusual for deep sea animals, which are often white or orange. Many sponges have strong chemical defenses, which have made them very intriguing to pharmaceutical and other biochemical industries. Also of note from this article is that the c star here that is sometimes referred to as Patrick this is a possibly new species of Cron's raster, and it is likely about to attempt to eat the sponge.
So if this is SpongeBob SquarePants, yeah, Patrick is about to eat SpongeBob.
That would be a good plot twist. Yes, I don't know how horrifying that is. I'm not a SpongeBob watcher.
I don't know. SpongeBob is pretty weird, so I don't think it's necessarily out of character. There may be an episode where Patrick tries to eat SpongeBob. I mean, this is the show that gave us stuff like a handsome squid word and so forth.
Okay, so sponges are very weird and can look very weird in multiple ways. They can look like known cartoon characters, they can look like known alien characters. They can look like weird suggestive unknown technology. They're all over the map. But I want to add another fact onto this, which is, anytime you see an object in the ocean and you're tempted to say, this looks weird, and it doesn't look
like any known organism, so it can't be biological. Keep in mind another fact, there are organisms in the ocean that have never been photographed, never been described, documented, or classified. There are lots of creatures we don't know about yet, and you might think, yeah, well, but I mean we've probably found most of them, right, I mean, how many could there be out there that nobody's ever seen before? Well?
I dug up a paper from twenty eleven that was just trying to estimate and it wasn't commenting on aliens or anything. It was just trying to answer a basic question, which was how many yet unidentified species are there out there in the world that we have not documented yet. So the paper was called how Many Species are There
on Earth and in the Ocean? In plus Biology in twenty eleven by Camillo Mora at All and from the author's summary they say, quote here we document that the taxonomic classification of subspecies into higher taxonomic groups from genera to phyla follows a consistent pattern from which the total number of species in any taxonomic group can be predicted.
So does that make sense? They're like, we don't have a way to count the species that haven't been found yet, but you can come up with a pretty good estimate of how many you are out there there, Because we know from like the tree of the sort of the bush of life in a way how phyla breakdown, you can form reasonable estimates of how many organisms are in each group, and so just what we know about the higher parts of the branches, you can guess how many
are out there that haven't been documented yet, and their estimate is quote. Assessment of this pattern for all kingdoms of life on Earth predicts about eight point seven million plus or minus an error of one point three million species globally, of which about two point two million plus or minus an era of zero point eighteen million are marine. Our results suggests that some eighty six percent of species on Earth and ninety one percent in the ocean still await description.
Oh wow, so there is room for just about everything down there. We may find handsome.
Squids maybe ninety one percent. That is still a lot of room to see something bizarre in the ocean that matches the appear rants of nothing known to marine biology, and then have it turned out to be another sponge or just turned out to be another Nigerian or another weird crustacean. Remember again that Chondracladia lira. The harp sponge, the one that looks, in our opinion, even more like technology than the Altanan object was first described in the
scientific literature in the last decade or so. The first articles were from like twenty twelve.
Yeah, that's a great point. I also couldn't help but think about the giant squid and all of this, because giant squid, based on an expert analysis, they seem to be abundant enough in the sea that sperm whales eat them by the millions, perhaps even hundreds of millions each year, and yet we don't know their true numbers. We didn't have any footage of a living giant squid until the twenty first century, and mostly new of them from their remains or the scars on the outside or the inside
of sperm whales. You know, it's a highly no organism. In this case, it's a pretty big organism, but it's an elusive one that lives in an extreme environment, and ultimately it illustrates how little we know, even if we think we know.
That is a really excellent point. But so I want to come back to thinking about information in allegedly anomalous photographs or videos or other things that are used as evidence for alien intelligence or alien technology or other paranormal phenomena. It seems to me that the photograph of the Eltannan object could inspire the belief that it was an antenna or was a piece of alien technology because of certain
low information conditions. So it's a fairly low resolution photographs, kind of grainy black and white photograph, or actually, in the ways it's reproduced, it's black and white. I don't know what it was in the original. I don't know if I've ever seen I've never seen like a color original of it.
Yeah, I've just seen the black and white.
But so in various ways, it's low resolution, and it was being shared among people who didn't have important informational context, like knowledge of what types of deep sea sponges there were and what they look like. So it's in this low information environment, with lack of important context and lack of resolution in the photo, that it seems viable this
could be an alien antenna. But like if you had gotten a really sharp photograph of this original thing, even if you didn't have deep sea knowledge, you'd probably be able to look at it and say, ah, just like the textures on it. This does look more like something organic. This is some kind of organism. And likewise, if the people originally looking at it had had knowledge of deep sea sponges that already existed at the time the photo was taken, they would have been able to say, oh, yeah,
this is one of those sponges. So low information or low resolution is really it creates a friendly environment for for paranormal explanations and mythologies to arise around a piece of media or piece of evidence, and Rob, I wonder
what you think about this. I kind of wonder if this is why underwater photos in particular are so popular in this in this sort of media domain, in the you know, fringe and alternative conspiracy theory domain, there are so many videos that are like, you know, mysterious objects underwater that are based on like a sonar image or a kind of murky photograph taken underwater where you can't really tell exactly what you're looking at, but it looks weird and so it just like invites you to start
applying strange stories to it.
Yeah, and you have and also just trying to interpret what you're seeing based on things you have seen before. And in some cases, your mind is going to turn to technology or architecture, and those are going to be the forms that you is to try and make sense of this, this this new confusing information.
The one thing I do want to call out. In fact, I found this to be true with the altanna and antenna and true with a bunch of these other underwater things. There will be like the original image that inspired the all the speculation, and then there will be modified, doctored, or fully faked versions of that image where people have added in new information to make it look more like
whatever they're saying it is. So they're like versions of the altanna and antenna that are not the original image that somebody made to look like an antenna.
Yeah. Yeah, they're enhancing on their own. And you see that with yeah, with this this photo, but also other photographs as well, and honestly, it can become a little confusing in our modern you know, Google image search world, because you'll look up something like this and you'll you'll find hopefully you'll still find those original images. Generally, the original image is going to be what's grounded on any Wikipedia r but on other wikis then it's kind of
up in the air. You may find that original image right next to these enhanced images and and artist interpretations of what it might look like if it were an antenna built by aliens, if this other thing was a spaceship, if this other thing was the work of ancient aliens, And yeah, it can be kind of it can be kind of confusing.
I think, you know, there are some other interesting underwater anomaly images that have actually pretty pretty good scientific tie ins that we can maybe even come back to you next week if you wanted.
Yeah, I think that could be. That could be fun. There's also there's there are also a couple of examples from ancient Egypt that are often misinterpreted that have fascinating, you know, actual stories without having to drag ancient technology and ancient aliens into the scenario.
Perhaps we will return to this subject in the future, all.
Right, but for now we're going to go ahead and close out, and we'll just remind you, Hey, if you want to listen to other core episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you'll find them on Tuesdays and Thursdays and the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed. We have listener mail on Monday. Short form artifact or Monster Fact on Wednesday and on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to talk about a weird film on Weird
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