In 1973, the coastal population of Australia was agitated by the news of the disappearance of divers (mostly Japanese pearl divers) in coastal waters without a trace
For example, the southeast coast newspaper Melbourne Leader described such an incident. The skipper of the Japanese pearl schooner Yamata Maru dived for pearls from a sunken ship. He gave the signal to rise in time, but the sailors took out only the rope and the catcher's helmet from the water. Other divers immediately threw themselves into the water, but found nothing.
On August 7, 1938, the Sunday Times reported a similar incident on the northwest coast of the continent. Japanese Masao Matsumoto dived from the Felton luger to a depth of 72 m near the island. Darpley, near Darwin. He gave the signal to rise, but the sailors pulled his helmet, belt and basket of pearls out of the water. Several people immediately dived after the disappeared, but found no one.
It remains to be seen whether there is a connection between these tragic events and the story of the Australian doctor Christopher Lope about a meeting underwater in 1953 with an eerie formless creature of enormous size during the testing of the latest scuba diving equipment (wetsuit, scuba gear and shark deterrent) with the aim of setting a new record for human immersion in the South Pacific.
“While I was diving,” said the Australian, “a 4-meter shark accompanied me with obvious curiosity. She circled around me; but as if she was not going to attack. I wondered how deep she would dive. Finally, I found myself on an underwater ledge - a black abyss stretched beyond that seemed bottomless. The shark lagged behind me by six meters in depth, in total we were separated by about nine meters.
It was dangerous to continue the dive. I stood looking into the abyss; the shark was waiting for what I would do next. Suddenly the water became noticeably colder. For some reason, the temperature dropped rapidly; at the same time I noticed a kind of black mass rising from the depths. She emerged very slowly. When the light fell on her, I saw something huge - about an acre (0.4 ha) - dark brown, flat, with fringes around the edges. The creature throbbed listlessly. I had no doubt that it was a living creature, although I saw neither eyes nor limbs.
Continuing to throb, the dread vision rose above me; it became quite cold. The shark froze motionless, paralyzed by either cold or fear. Fascinated, I watched as the brown monster reached the shark and touched her "back". The shark shuddered, then limply plunged into the body of the monster.
I stood motionless, not daring to move. As slowly as it surfaced, the brown thing sank into the abyss. She disappeared into the darkness and the water warmed again. God only knows what kind of creature it was. But I have no doubt that it was created by the primeval slime of unknown depths."
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The same opinion was held by the divers of the Chilean hydrographic expedition, who met 15 years later, judging by the strikingly similar descriptions, the very creature near the outlet of deep waters.
A more detailed genesis of the monstrous jelly was proposed in 1969 in their book Three Quarks by oceanologists M. Yemtsev and E. Parnoe after meeting with him at Fr. Small Inagua of the Bahamas Archipelago of the Oceanological Expedition of the USSR Academy of Sciences. As in the southern latitudes, a giant jellyfish-like creature appeared from the side of a deep-sea basin, and its appearance was preceded by a panic among the inhabitants of the sea. In some seconds, masses of fish rushed from the depths to the surface, seeking refuge in the coral reef of the island.
Then "an immense brown mass with a dull bluish fringe slowly, like a jellyfish," swam out of the blue depths. She covered up all the blue and, like a dirty, impenetrable fog, clouded everything. There was no end to it. She only drowned indistinctly in distant muddy spaces, clearly more than a kilometer in size. Trembling, iridescent with some bubbles of jelly, the edge of which fluttered like the wings of a giant stingray - a manta ray, it very slowly rose from the ocean abyss like a ghost and the embodiment of silent horror.
“Around everything calmed down and froze, as in a frozen frame. Fish, sharks, which were above the gigantic mass, froze motionlessly. And the brown mass also suddenly stopped, hung over the bottom. And then like an electric spark hit all the fish. They bent in half and, shuddering convulsively, began to slowly sink into the bubbling jelly, melting in it like sugar in a glass of jelly."
The scuba diver who watched this scene could not even lift a finger, the body did not obey him. An unspeakable horror swept over him, darkness covered his eyes, heart arrhythmia began. He bent sharply and began to slowly sink into the depths.
A boat with scuba divers was immediately lowered from the oceanographic vessel, one of whom caught up with the drowning man at a depth of 10 meters. His teeth gripped the mouthpiece in a death grip, but the air from the scuba tank did not enter his lungs due to spasm. The rescued person did not regain consciousness for almost two months and woke up in Moscow, in a hospital. His savior only saw how brown jelly slowly plunged into a deep cleft, in which paralyzed fish disappeared. And although nothing happened to him in the water, after a few hours he began to have a chill, which quickly turned into a deep faint, which lasted about four days. Apparently, the force of impact on a living organism was determined by the distance separating people from the monster, and the duration of stay in the water.
Attempts to bombard the monster from the ship with TNT bombs did not produce any effect: the torn black holes in the brown mass of jelly slowly tightened without causing any harm to the creature. Everything also slowly plunged into the abyss, leaving behind stunned fish on the surface of the water.
Such an unusual animal of the World Ocean, according to M. Emtsev and E. Parnov, is evidence of the existence of a qualitatively different form of life in deep-sea depressions associated with the evolution of primary organisms in the Archaeozoic era.
According to the generally accepted concept of the development of life on earth, the improvement of the species occurs due to only a few pairs of producers most adapted to the habitat conditions (giving their amazing endurance to the offspring during reproduction) due to natural selection, as a result of which all other individuals of the species die from various unfavorable environmental factors (mutations, enemies, etc.). A classic example: cod spawns millions of eggs, but of them only a couple of fish survive and give birth to the next spawning. Such wastefulness of biological material in the calculation of the worst variant of the existence of a species, although it guarantees it life in the course of natural selection, has an extremely low efficiency (tenths, or even hundredths of a percent).
However, nature explores all the possibilities of evolution of the species, including resource-saving ones. And since seawater itself is energy-intensive, therefore it was in it that the transition from the Archaeozoic coacervate drop to a primitive living cell took place, the development of primary organisms could proceed not only along an extensive path, but also along an intensive path associated with a colonial form of life, when generation goes in the increase in body weight and differentiation of cells in the image and likeness of maternal cells (parthenogenesis).
Stable conditions of abyssal depressions, and above all constant indicators of temperature, salinity, oxygen, water illumination, contribute to a slowdown in the rate of evolution of the creatures inhabiting them and the conservation of primitive forms. Indeed, why should such forms evolve if the factors of variability in a given habitat are practically absent for hundreds of years? Therefore, at great depths, they find "living fossils" like pogonophores, neopilines, nautilus, coelacanths.
In addition, the colonial giant in question has no enemies and food competitors, which also does not contribute to its evolution. And wandering constantly along the cold monotonous gloomy deep-sea basins of the globe, this animal lives, as it were, outside time and space in relation to the changeable conditions of the shelf zone, where it rises in search of food from unproductive depressions.
It remains only to guess about the life span of this monstrous jelly: one thing is clear - it exceeds the limits of the existence of an ordinary animal and is most likely equal to the age of long-lived trees (several thousand years), since it assumes the genesis of that primitive cell, which was not yet characterized by the difference in animal and vegetable. The potential of such a cell is enormous, which explains the gigantic size of the monster and its electrokinetic phenomena.
The nervous system of this "overgrown" primitive cell is probably just as primitive, since it is focused only on nutrition and reproduction (regeneration), which excludes the possibility of any conscious contact with any animal, especially because of its colossal size: the jelly does not care, who is the object of food for him - plankton or a giant whale - is just an automatic process of satisfying the food needs of simple nature. Hence the complete indifference to the surrounding world, which is not of food interest, fundamental alienation, even "alien" in the literal sense of the word.
Indeed, the monster is unique, its properties are fantastic, and hence its material structure, which presupposes organization, metabolism and energy balance, different from the usual forms of life on the planet. And such a creature could arise only on a qualitatively different basis, which is the very physical environment of deep-sea depressions, where over billions of years of the Earth's existence heavy water and heavy elementary particles with a fractional electric charge - quarks - have concentrated.
Considering that quarks are born when particles of cosmic rays of high energies (about 1011 - 1019 electron volts) collide with atomic nuclei of the upper layers of the atmosphere, we can assume that the terrifying gaze of the phenomenon of great depths is inherent, probably, not only on the Earth, but on any planet with an atmosphere and hydrosphere or without it. And there is no guarantee that when exploring such planets, astronauts will not have to face similar creatures, incidentally, reliably described by I. Efremov in 1957 in the famous novel "The Andromeda Nebula".