Meghan Keneally – Daily Mail June 17, 2012

Sceptics expected that a deep-water dive would debunk the slew of extra-terrestrial theories surrounding an unidentified object sitting at the bottom of the Baltic Sea.

But the Swedish expedition team that took the plunge surfaced with more questions than answers – and certainly no solution to its origins.

The divers found that the object, which some have likened to the Millennium Falcon because of its unusual round outline, was raised about 10 to 13ft above the seabed and curved in at the sides, giving it a mushroom shape

They added that the object has ’rounded sides and rugged edges’

‘First we thought this was only stone, but this is something else,’ diver Peter Lindberg said in a press release.

At the center of the object, which has a 60-meter diameter, has an ‘egg shaped hole leading into it from the top’

Surrounding the hole, they found a strange, unexplained rock formation. Adding fuel to the speculative fire, they said that the rocks looked ‘like small fireplaces’ and the ‘stones were covered in something resembling soot’.

‘Since no volcanic activity has ever been reported in the Baltic Sea the find becomes even stranger,’ Mr Lindberg continued.

A brief video clip of the dive was released to Swedish-language paper Expressen and can be viewed on Gizmodo.

‘As laymen we can only speculate how this is made by nature, but this is the strangest thing I have ever experienced as a professional diver.’

The soot also proved cause for concern for Mr Lindberg’s colleague on the Ocean X explorer team, Stefan Hogeborn.

‘During my 20-year diving career, including 6,000 dives, I have never seen anything like this. Normally stones don’t burn,’ Mr Hogeborn said in the release.

‘I can’t explain what we saw, and I went down there to answer questions, but I came up with even more questions.’

Another find that they saw in person for the first time was the 985-foot trail that they described ‘as a runway or a downhill path that is flattened at the seabed with the object at the end of it’.

The object was first found this month last year, but because of a lack of funding and bad timing, they have were not able to pull a team together to see for themselves – just the strange, metallic outline, and a similar disk-shaped object about 200 metres away.

As it was before the recent dive, the story behind the object is anyone’s guess.

‘We’ve heard lots of different kinds of explanations, from George Lucas’s spaceship – the Millennium Falcon – to “it’s some kind of plug to the inner world,” like it should be hell down there or something,’ Mr Lindberg said.

Speaking to Fox News, he said: ‘We don’t know whether it is a natural phenomenon, or an object. We saw it on sonar when we were searching for a wreck from World War I. This circular object just turned up on the monitor.

While the Ocean Explorer team is understandably excited about their potentially earth-shattering find, others are slightly more sceptical and are questioning the accuracy of the sonar technology.

In the past, such technology has confused foreign objects with unusual- but natural- rock formations.

Part of the trouble they face, however, is that they have no way of telling what is inside the supposed cylinder- whether it is filled with gold and riches or simply aged sediment particles.

They’re hoping for the former, and history seems to be in their favour.

The Baltic Sea is a treasure trove for shipwreck hunters, as an estimated 100,000 objects are thought to line the cold sea’s floor.

The company have created a submarine that they hope will appeal to tourists and wannabe shipwreck hunters who will pay to take a trip down to the bottom of the Baltic Sea to see for themselves.

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