Strange sounds come from the bottom of the ocean. Who publishes them - monsters unknown to science or inhabitants of an underwater civilization?
The depths of the oceans are so unexplored that even aliens may be hiding there. So says the head of the International Acoustic Monitoring Project, Professor Christopher Fox.
Mysterious underwater inhabitants are not visible, but, in his opinion, they can be heard. For several years now, the scientist has been recording and analyzing mysterious sounds coming from the abyss in his laboratory for the study of the Pacific Ocean environment in Newport, Oregon.
The corpse of a monstrous architeutis squid weighing a quarter of a ton and with 15-meter tentacles dotted with pronged suckers was found last year near Macquarie Island, halfway between Tasmania and Antarctica. Squid expert Steve O'Shea, a senior researcher at Oakland University of Technology, determined that the monster was just a "tiny" calf that could grow to several tens of meters in length. Indeed, in the stomachs of dead sperm whales came across huge "beaks", which, apparently, belonged to other, even larger squids. On the sperm whales themselves, they found scars left by monstrous suckers. Oceanologists complain that science knows more about dinosaurs than about the giant inhabitants of the ocean abyss.
Sharks over 30 meters long have lived in the ocean for 50 million years. And they are not extinct, as previously thought. This is the conclusion reached by American white shark experts Richard Ellis and John McCosker after studying hundreds of 12-centimeter teeth that divers collect from the ocean floor around the world. It is not for nothing that, literally translated, the scientific name of the fish - megalodon - sounds like "great tooth". Such a shark could swallow a car. Ellis is confident that the monstrous teeth are not fossil finds - giant sharks are losing them nowadays in old age.
The last time the toothy monster was seen in 1963 off the coast of Australia, in the vicinity of Bruton Island. According to the stories of the fishermen, their schooner was attacked by a 40-meter creature that looked like a shark. And some claimed that it was all 90 meters! In a huge jaw the size of a garage door, several containers of lobster, hanging overboard, instantly disappeared. And each container was three meters in diameter.
If you believe these bikes, then the safest way to fish from an aircraft carrier - no less. In turn, the history of zoology shows that very large animals, like the same giant squids, can indeed hide from science at uncharted depths.
The sounds of the deep sea are captured by a system that came to science from the military. In the 1960s, US Navy specialists installed a global network of underwater hydrophones underwater, which was aimed at tracking Soviet submarines. However, in 1991, civilian scientists were also admitted to it.
Promotional video:
Listening posts located at a depth of several hundred meters allow most sounds to be recognized by spectrograms - a kind of voice prints. They can be used to calculate the "songs" of whales, the rumble of submarine propellers, the friction of icebergs on the bottom, or the rolling of underwater earthquakes. But Professor Fox hears something else.
Unknown sources broadcast on long waves that travel over vast distances, in fact, throughout the ocean. They are detected by sensors located on opposite sides of the globe. Sounds are low-frequency, similar to the echoes of the work of some technique or to signals addressed to someone. Recorded on a tape recorder and scrolled at increased speed, they become audible to human ears. Moreover, they acquire characteristic features. Scientists gave them their names: "Train", "Whistle", "Braking", "Howl".
“Take Braking, for example,” Fox says. - This sound, similar to the one that is emitted by the landing plane, first appeared in 1997 in the Pacific Ocean. Now he has moved to the Atlantic. The source is located far from the hydrophones, and we cannot detect it.
A frequency modulated and seemingly meaningful signal called "Upstream" sounded constantly from 1991 to 1994. Then he suddenly disappeared. But this year it has appeared again - it has significantly increased and become more diverse. US Navy analysts, who are trying to figure it out, conducting research in parallel with civilian scientists, are making a helpless gesture. Whose signals are not clear to anyone. Where exactly they come from is unknown, it is impossible to detect the sources of mysterious sounds. They seem to deliberately "nest" far from hydrophones and move. NZO - unidentified sound objects. This is what these anomalies are called by analogy with UFOs.
Who is making noise? Unknown to science monsters or aliens?
Or maybe these are "floating plates"?
From time to time, the US Air Force captures mysterious underwater objects that move at a depth of more than 6,000 meters at an incredible speed of 370 km / h. And at present the speed of the most powerful nuclear submarines does not exceed 60 - 80 km / h. The diving depth of a standard submarine is a maximum of 1.5 kilometers. Here is one of the cases told by the researcher of anomalous phenomena Maxim Bulle.
In March 1966, US specialists conducted tests on long-distance underwater communications. A kilometer antenna was laid along the continental shelf. A ship was sent to sea with the locators lowered to the bottom. But after the start of the experiment, something strange began to happen. First, they received the signal itself, then something like a repetition of the signal, like an "echo", and some strange, as if encoded messages. The experiment was repeated several times - and with the same result. One of the participants in the experiment, Colonel Alex Sanders, later admitted that "someone there, in the depths, received our signal, imitated it in order to attract our attention, and then began to transmit his message on the same wavelength." When they spotted the source of these signals, they foundthat it is located in one of the little-studied areas of the Atlantic Ocean at a depth of 8000 meters. They could not understand the anomalies, and the experiment was terminated as a failure. However, 30 years later, in 1996, the recorded signals were passed through the Pentagon computers. What the decryption gave, the cryptographers of the US Navy have not yet told, but military oceanographers have noticeably stepped up studies of both the bottom itself in this area of the Atlantic, and all kinds of options for long-distance underwater communication.and all kinds of options for long-distance underwater communication.and all kinds of options for long-distance underwater communication.
“Nobody really knows what can be heard from them (monsters),” Christopher Fox recalls, hinting at mysterious sounds.
But another thing is also unclear: are living creatures or any other objects capable of rushing through the water at the speed of a meteor? It turns out that there are such observations.
For more than a century, sailors from merchant and naval vessels have reported strange phenomena - bright lights and unidentified objects under water. Most of the reports refer to the waters of the Persian and Siam Gulfs, the South China Sea and the Strait of Malacca. And to explore one of the deepest canyons of Mindanao with a depth of 9 thousand meters, from where strange sounds are increasingly heard, scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the United States are preparing an expedition. Maybe this trip will finally reveal the secrets of the underwater world?
The deeper, the more terrible
The ocean depths extend down to 4.5 km. However, in some places the bottom drops sharply up to 11 km. Here is how the zoologist William Beebe describes his journey into the abyss of the Bahamas on a bathyscaphe:
“637 m: Solid darkness. Mysterious ghosts rush to and fro.
670 m: The darkest place in the world. Something flashes and sparkles. Huge fish with glowing teeth.
725 m: A fish-devil with an open mouth - an image as from hell. Fish that consist only of mouths.
760 m: The water is blacker than black. A long monster is seen passing by in the light of the searchlight."
SVETLANA KUZINA