The Eltanin Antenna

In this episode of Stuff to Blow your Mind, Rob and Joe discuss the alleged Eltanin Antenna and the natural-world explanation for the image. What does this case and others like it reveal about our craving for extraordinary explanations of perplexing evidence?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
Lamb, and I am Joe McCormick. And oh boy, I'm
excited because it's Anomalous 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

(00:38):
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 soared into the mundane category now, but

(01:02):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:25):
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,

(01:48):
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 fiery 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.

(02:10):
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.

(02:31):
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

(02:52):
it might be right.

Speaker 3 (02:54):
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, 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

(03:18):
touch on 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,

(03:39):
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

(04:00):
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

(04:21):
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.

Speaker 2 (04:37):
Yeah, yeah, and I do want to drive on. 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 yeah, I think there

(05:00):
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 saying yes,

(05:20):
I think there are other life forms. They're technologically advanced,
they have spaceships, and they have visited us. And oh,
some of our secreted 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.

Speaker 3 (05:41):
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,

(06:02):
not enough information to judge.

Speaker 2 (06:04):
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 our planet of life, or
to say oh, yeah, there is somewhere out there, there
is a planet of life. And it may be just

(06:25):
so far from us. It's 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.

Speaker 3 (06:42):
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 of
alien contact on Earth, like I sometimes see skeptical scientists

(07:08):
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.

(07:28):
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.

Speaker 2 (07:47):
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 if
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

(08:10):
hear that criticism leveled at UFO scientists and so forth.
They're not like, well, wait, why are you not not
curing cancer? Why are you looking for UFOs? I don't know.
You can interpret that how you wish.

Speaker 3 (08:24):
Well, that is interesting, I mean, I guess I would say, uh, 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

(08:45):
the off chance you're not, you will make the most
important discovery in human history.

Speaker 2 (08:50):
True. Yeah, So it's a it's a big gamble. It's
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 your ticket, you scratch
it off.

Speaker 3 (09:02):
But anyway, but coming back to the question of 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,

(09:24):
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

(09:47):
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 still I would say,
I am still waiting for good evidence, and I reserve
judgment until good evidence actually shows up. That you know,

(10:10):
like that people can look.

Speaker 2 (10:11):
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.

Speaker 3 (10:32):
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.

Speaker 2 (10:39):
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.

(11:01):
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 still have

(11:22):
to acknowledge the impact of the experience.

Speaker 3 (11:25):
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

(11:46):
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 have had
an experience. You know, it is very common for people
to have strange experiences that they don't know how to explain.

(12:06):
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.

Speaker 2 (12:22):
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,

(12:46):
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.

Speaker 3 (12:57):
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,

(13:22):
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

(13:45):
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, I 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

(14:07):
researcher named Mick West. West He's written articles for skeptical
publications about all kinds of subjects, written about Kim Trail's
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

(14:29):
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

(14:53):
the same idea would be to call it the zone
of low resolution, with low resolution referm ring 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,

(15:16):
any type of evidence that contain lower than 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

(15:40):
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

(16:02):
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

(16:24):
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.

Speaker 2 (16:44):
Yeah, this is also where intentional fakery tends to come
out as well.

Speaker 3 (16:48):
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 researching
extremely variegated, supposedly anomalous phenomena throughout history. You know, we've
covered a lot of subjects like this on the show
at some point, especially with things that have been claimed

(17:11):
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.

(17:34):
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

(17:56):
what it is. Therefore proof of aliens confirmed.

Speaker 2 (17:59):
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 hypotheses regarding these various anomalies. But at the

(18:24):
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 maybe
cracked a lot, 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.

(18:46):
And then you can go the extra mile and say, oh, well,
prove to me that the bloop is not the sound
of mighty Cuthulea rising in the deep.

Speaker 3 (18:52):
Yeah, elder gods, disprove or except 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.

(19:13):
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

(19:33):
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

(19:55):
evidence at least so far, so open question there. But
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

(20:18):
you are able 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 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,

(20:40):
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 Eltannin antenna, or maybe
if we don't think it's an antenna in the end,
should we call it like the eltannan object.

Speaker 2 (20:58):
Ah, yeah, that's fair. I have wondered that everyone keeps
calling it the l ten and antenna. Why not just
call it the Eltenna. It seems like that like the
natural direction to go in. But but yeah, the 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 ufologists and and sort of paranormal

(21:22):
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 you know, 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,

(21:43):
experts who know their way around deep sea organisms and
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

(22:04):
pretty solid and convincing answer that everyone seems to be
satisfied with outside of the paranormal investigation world.

Speaker 3 (22:12):
Yes, I would say, to be as fair as possible
to the people who want a paranormal or alien explanation,
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.

(22:34):
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.

Speaker 2 (22:44):
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 L ten And derives from the
Arabic for the great serpent. That's all just too good

(23:08):
off to a good stard. 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

(23:31):
to discover the hypothetical L ten And 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 L ten

(23:54):
And 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.

Speaker 3 (23:59):
The impact that caused it would have been two and
a half million years ago.

Speaker 2 (24:02):
Yeah, yeah, the 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

(24:22):
organisms were also collected. So to be clear, this is
a hard working, serious science vessel.

Speaker 3 (24:28):
YEP gave us a lot of useful knowledge about the
seafloor and the Antarctic oceans.

Speaker 2 (24:34):
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

(24:56):
the image of the so called El Tannin and ten.
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 eltan and antenna.
But there's also this is like apparently a zoom in

(25:18):
a crop of a wider image, and this one is
less reproduced. But for instance, I've 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,

(25:40):
I believe it's from a book that I'm going to
reference here in just a bit.

Speaker 3 (25:43):
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.

Speaker 2 (26:06):
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 sea
floor 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

(26:27):
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

(26:49):
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.

Speaker 3 (26:59):
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

(27:19):
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

(27:43):
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

(28:04):
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 metal cylinder, pulled along by a cable
from the ship. It bounces along the seabed, taking pictures

(28:25):
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.

(28:47):
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

(29:09):
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

(29:31):
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

(29:51):
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 was
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

(30:12):
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?

Speaker 2 (30:19):
So just to refresh, 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,

(30:41):
that perhaps just hasn't survived, that isn't isn't archive, that
hasn't been recorded, or that 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.

Speaker 3 (30:59):
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 photo out there that

(31:20):
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

(31:42):
and articles about UFOs and the paranormal and so forth.

Speaker 2 (31:46):
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 Altannan antenna,
and this is this would stem from I believe nineteen

(32:07):
sixty eight. The book is Harmonic thirty three by Bruce Kathy,
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

(32:28):
at specific times.

Speaker 3 (32:30):
Kathy's work is explored extensively in this article in the
fourteen Times from two thousand and four by Brooksmith, 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

(32:54):
sort of a pattern seeking run amock.

Speaker 2 (32:57):
Yeah, what I gather is that Bruce Kathy, he 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 antenna's, either

(33:20):
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 sighting subjective experiences and also the
sort of low res information. So anyway, the first edition

(33:42):
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
altana 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.

(34:05):
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 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

(34:27):
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.

Speaker 3 (34:39):
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.

Speaker 2 (35:02):
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 they're like they're you know,
movies or 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 others, that album cover being
displayed among all the others, there's kind of this codifying

(35:24):
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

(35:46):
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 mongery
unquote that no humans could have possibly placed.

Speaker 3 (36:04):
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?

Speaker 2 (36:17):
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

(36:42):
you offer a better explanation.

Speaker 3 (36:45):
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 posited it.
Submarines couldn't go that deep. And I don't want to
I'm not mocking here or anything but I mean, I

(37:07):
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.

Speaker 2 (37:18):
Yeah, it seems like there's a rather obvious way to
get something down.

Speaker 3 (37:21):
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.

Speaker 2 (37:41):
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

(38:02):
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

(38:23):
by it, or in the same sort of realm, could
you might well think, well, 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 harvested it, et cetera. So you
can imagine how this kind of takes up and takes

(38:44):
up of this energy and becomes this again, this kind
of like icon within the realm of like paranormal UFO investigation.

Speaker 3 (38:52):
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.

Speaker 2 (39:03):
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 the expertise regarding things that might appear
on the ocean floor in this part of the world, yeah,
there seems to be no mystery, and there hasn't been
any mystery for decades and decades. In particular, I mentioned earlier,

(39:27):
how there's this 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 he's In, Bruce C.
Heasen and Charles D. Hollister. This book was not a

(39:49):
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 far enough, because you know, Bruce Cathy and others
were certainly contemplating it, but they were going off in an
entirely different direction. In the book they note that about it.

(40:10):
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 Tatin.

Speaker 3 (40:20):
All right, so what do they say about the photo
in question?

Speaker 2 (40:23):
All right, Well, the caption for the photo and alone says,
note antenna like sponge clattaresa in the lower photograph.

Speaker 3 (40:33):
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 Clatterisa. 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

(40:57):
is sorted into a different genus and known as Chondrocladia concretions.

Speaker 2 (41:03):
Yeah, and this sort of thing's fairly common.

Speaker 3 (41:05):
Yeah, things get differently taxonomized when they get further studied.

Speaker 2 (41:09):
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
waters 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

(41:30):
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

(41:54):
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.

Speaker 3 (42:16):
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.

Speaker 2 (42:27):
Yeah, I think so, some deep sea exploration dredging up
life forms and so forth from the bottom.

Speaker 3 (42:34):
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.

Speaker 2 (42:45):
Yeah. So at this point, this particular species had been
known about for decades. 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.

Speaker 3 (43:03):
Right, Well, people who knew about deep sea sponges would
know what they were looking at. Yeah, 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 regular person off the street to recognize this
species of sponge.

Speaker 2 (43:18):
Right, yeah, this is specialized 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

(43:40):
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.

Speaker 3 (43:56):
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.

Speaker 2 (44:13):
Yeah, it's an interesting question because on one hand, you
can imagine exactly the same thing occurring. But you could
also make an argument that, yes, by standing alone and
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

(44:34):
in an area with considerably more of these, yeah, this
one does seem to have stood alone. Hagacy 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

(44:57):
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, Agasi 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

(45:18):
up for the deep or pull them up even in
I mean 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 know, decompression, explosions and so forth. So
it's not that crazy to imagine that, well, it looked

(45:41):
different once they had dredged it up from the bottom
as opposed to how it is positioned in its natural habitat.

Speaker 3 (45:47):
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.

Speaker 2 (45:56):
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

(46:18):
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
an understanding of the natural world explanation for this object,

(46:43):
and perhaps in some circles, the paranormal explanation is going
to be a little easier to get your hands on.

Speaker 3 (46:49):
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

(47:12):
like aliens.

Speaker 2 (47:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (47:14):
So again, the identification of the Altannan object as a
specimen of Chondrocladia concrescens 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

(47:36):
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 lyre sponge, or
more commonly, I think the harp sponge. Now, I dare

(48:00):
say that in some photos this animal looks even more
like technology than its cousin. Looks even more like technology
than concrescence.

Speaker 2 (48:10):
Oh yeah, this one is a really weird looking organism.
Like I instantly think about the various illustrations of supposed
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

(48:31):
dinosaur illustrations. But some of his stuff looks this wild
and believable, but you know, not something of this world.

Speaker 3 (48:39):
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.

Speaker 2 (48:57):
Oh yeah, absolutely, so.

Speaker 3 (48:59):
I'll try to if you're not able to look it
up again. It's called the harp sponge or chondrocladia era.
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 branches that

(49:20):
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.

(49:40):
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

(50:02):
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

(50:26):
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?

Speaker 2 (50:38):
Oh, yeah, I would see it would clearly feel like
nothing of this earth, some sort of a strange radar
array or something, or some an array placed on the
bottom of the ocean by who knows what.

Speaker 3 (50:49):
Oh and then also they're on the top of these
little posts. They are 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.
Grany photo from decades ago. You wouldn't even have any

(51:10):
knowledge to compare it to. So to cite the paper,
it was by Welton L. Lee, Henry M. Riiswig, William C. Austen,
and Lonnie Lunstein. 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

(51:32):
here They say it was observed quote from Northeast Pacific
sites at the Escanaba Ridge and Monterey Canyon at depths
of three three one six to three three nine nine meters,
and the scientists described the structure like this. They say, quote.
The basic structure termed a vein is harp or liar
shaped from one to six veins extend by radial growth

(51:56):
from the organism's center. The orientation among the veins is
approximate equiangular, such that together they display pinta, 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.

(52:18):
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

(52:39):
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 stolones provide direct evidence of carnivory. The structure

(53:04):
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 these branches, between the posts of the wrought
iron fence, the little catch hooks that spread out between

(53:26):
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

(53:49):
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 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

(54:12):
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

(54:32):
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

(54:52):
say the animal's 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 elt Hannan organism for you know,
the branches coming off of the so called antenna that
is identified as Chondrocladia concrescens. Those are also for feeding.

(55:16):
They also have filaments coming off of them that catch
prey and help cover it in a membrane and digest it.

Speaker 2 (55:23):
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 you know, waves or transmissions or information,
they're collecting prey. They're collecting these tiny crustaceans.

Speaker 3 (55:39):
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.

Speaker 2 (55:51):
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
at Vena 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

(56:15):
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 ET the Extraterrestrial.
I included comparison images here for you, Joe, in case

(56:37):
you don't remember what ET looks like and you want
to know what the ET sponge looks like.

Speaker 3 (56:41):
Here, it's uncanny. I mean, I think it's they're copying
Steven Spielberg. This is just it is ET's head.

Speaker 2 (56:49):
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 he'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

(57:10):
suppose I need to mention SpongeBob square Pants 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

(57:30):
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

(57:53):
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 Spungebob Squarepants's friend Patrick,
but enough like Patrick to where people were like, behold,
we have found him, what are the odds? Yeah, it

(58:16):
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 Hertwigia sponge is what's
known as a hexat tittlid or glass sponge that is

(58:39):
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

(59:00):
star here that is sometimes referred to as Patrick, this
is a possibly new species of a Crown'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.

Speaker 3 (59:18):
That would be a good plot twist. Yes, I don't
know how horrifying that is. I'm not a SpongeBob watcher.

Speaker 2 (59:24):
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.

Speaker 3 (59:35):
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

(59:56):
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.

(01:00:16):
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

(01:00:38):
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

(01:01:02):
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 are out there because we know from
like the tree of the sort of the bush of

(01:01:24):
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

(01:01:47):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:02:06):
Oh wow, so there is room for just about everything
down there. We may find handsome.

Speaker 3 (01:02:10):
Squids, maybe ninety one percent. That is still a lot
of room to see something bizarre in the ocean that
matches the appearance of nothing known to marine biology, and
then have it turn 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

(01:02:34):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:02:46):
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

(01:03:07):
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 novel organism.
In this case, it's a pretty big organism, but it's
an elusive one that lives in an extreme environment. And

(01:03:27):
ultimately it illustrates how little we know, even if we
think we know.

Speaker 3 (01:03:31):
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

(01:03:53):
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

(01:04:15):
if I've ever seen. I've never seen like a color
original of it.

Speaker 2 (01:04:19):
Yeah, I've just seen the black and white.

Speaker 3 (01:04:21):
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

(01:04:42):
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 organistm And likewise, if the
people originally looking at it had had knowledge of deep

(01:05:04):
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
paranormal explanations and mythologies to arise around a piece of

(01:05:24):
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 sort of media domain, in the you know, fringe
and alternative conspiracy theory domain. There are so many videos

(01:05:46):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:06:05):
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 use to try and make sense
of this, this this new confusing information.

Speaker 3 (01:06:24):
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

(01:06:45):
whatever they're saying it is. So they're like versions of
the eltanna and antenna that are not the original image
that somebody made to look like an antenna.

Speaker 2 (01:06:53):
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

(01:07:17):
original image is going to be what's grounded on any
Wikipedia article, 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 artist interpretations of
what it might look like if it were an antenna
built by aliens, if this other thing was a spaceship,

(01:07:39):
if this other thing was the work of ancient aliens.
And yeah, it can be kind of it can be
kind of confusing.

Speaker 3 (01:07:46):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:07:59):
Yeah, could be that could be fun. There's also 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.

Speaker 3 (01:08:17):
Perhaps we will return to this subject in the near future, all.

Speaker 2 (01:08:21):
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
House Cinema. Also a reminder, if you're listening to us

(01:08:43):
in the UK and you want to listen on Apple
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Speaker 3 (01:08:55):
Huge thanks to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If
you would like to get in touch with us with
feedback on this episode or any other to suggest a
topic for the future, or just to say hello. You
can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:09:16):
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