In December 1964, an American oceanographic expedition aboard the ship "Eltanin", studying Antarctic waters, took a photograph of a strange object at a depth of 4115 meters west of Cape Horn.
This is how the American ufologists Brad Steiger and Joan Rathenauer described this case in their book "UFO Breakthrough" (1968):
“Something very strange is going on under the surface of our seas. One of the most mysterious stories that the explorers of the depths have encountered, happened with the American ship "Eltanin".
On August 29, 1964, Eltanin was stationed a thousand miles west of Cape Horn, working on an Antarctic exploration program. The crew was engaged in photographing the ocean floor, which in this area reached a depth of four and a half kilometers. For this purpose, a specially adapted camera protected by a steel cylinder was towed behind the ship on a cable.
When technicians in a dark room developed the footage that had been shot that day, they found something completely different in one of the images from the contents of all other frames. The photograph captured a strange mechanism sticking out of the bottom silt. From the central "mast" extended four rows of crossing rods, making this object look like something like a television antenna. The rods retreated strictly at an angle of 90 degrees and ended in white balls.
The object appeared to be human made. It looked definitely out of place among the seabed environment. The fact that the camera stumbled upon him was incredible luck: after all, the ocean floor is so vast, and besides, the camera was programmed only to turn on at certain regular intervals.
Be that as it may, on December 4, 1964, "Eltanin" moored in the New Zealand port of Auckland, with photographs of this mysterious mechanism on board. The story somehow leaked to the press, and a local newspaper reporter asked one of the biologists on the ship, Thomas Hopkins, what is it?
Hopkins stated that it is certainly not a plant. At such a depth there is no light, which means that photosynthesis is impossible, and therefore plant life is excluded there.
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“It might be some strange coral formation,” Hopkins said, “but none of us have ever heard of anything like it before. I do not want to say that this thing was made by man, because then the problem arises: how was it possible to deliver it to such a depth. "For obvious reasons, hesitating to recognize this mechanism as artificial, Dr. Hopkins nevertheless admitted that what he saw did not resemble something natural."
The book's authors relied on an interview with a marine biologist published in an Auckland newspaper. Hence the story of a mysterious technical object at the bottom of the Bellingshausen Sea, overgrown with hypotheses sucked from the finger, went for a walk in magazines and books devoted to the mysteries of other civilizations. The most flamboyant hypothesis asserted that the "underwater antenna" marked the zero point of the grid of coordinates along which pilots of flying plates orient themselves on Earth.
Biologists do not read such books, and ufologists do not read boring, in their opinion, multivolume zoological works. Otherwise, they would have known that soon after the return of the "Eltanin" from the flight, in the 60s of the last century, the biologist Charles Hollister determined what kind of object was in the frame of an automatic camera. This is a sea sponge, first caught by zoologists in the same Bellingshausen Sea back in 1880. Such sponges of the genus cladoriza usually grow in these latitudes in large clusters and were caught in the trawls of the first research vessels back in the 19th century. So the whole mystery arose due to the fact that there was no narrow specialist in deep-sea sponges on board the Eltanin (Hopkins was an expert on plankton), and also because only a single sponge got into the frame, and not a group, otherwise even a layman it would be clear that these are clusters of some living beings.
However, enthusiasts of secrets and mysteries were not at a loss and now claim that the version of the sponge was planted by CIA agents who intend to hide the truth about the activities of alien civilizations on our planet at all costs.
