Anomaly: a deviation from the common rule, type, arrangement, or form (dictionary.com). The one thing virtually all observers can agree on, in regards to the Baltic Sea Anomaly, is that it is just that, strikingly anomalous. In June of 2011, treasure hunters, Peter Lindberg, Dennis Åberg and the Swedish “Ocean X” diving team were performing sonar scans of the Baltic sea floor, within the Gulf of Bothnia. Eventually discovering the unusual shape of something that struck them as odd (or anomalous). The treasure hunters homed in their sonar equipment and still couldn’t identify exactly what it was they were looking at.

“Upon further inspection, divers and surface crew reported malfunctions in their electrical equipment whenever they came within 200m of the object.”

—Gaia.com, 2019

While many sources (like the one above) state there were technical difficulties associated with getting close to the object, the average depth of the Gulf of Bothnia is about 60 meters (197 feet), maximum depth is around 295 meters (967.848). The anomaly itself lies 100 meters beneath the surface of the water, so the exact circumstances of technical anomalies and interference leaves much to be desired. If entirely substantial and not embellished by reports to further sensationalize the nature of the oddity.

This unusual circular looking formation has a diameter of approximately 70 meters (230 feet). Divers retrieved samples of the formation, later revealed to be granite, gneiss and sandstone. The divers also discovered what later revealed to be a lone piece of basalt (volcanic rock), not commonly found on the seafloor in the Gulf of Bothnia, but not inexplicable. The consensus of the scientific community that commented on this discovery is that what we are observing, though highly unusual in appearance is an entirely natural geological formation.

“A natural, geological formation can’t be ruled out. I agree the finding looks weird since it’s completely circular. But nature has produced stranger things than that.”

—Göran Ekberg, Marine Archaeologist

The less covered discovery, often left unmentioned by most intrigued by the Baltic sea anomaly, is the Baltic sea anomaly 2, the second anomaly found 200 meters away from the first.

“I confirm that we have found two anomalies. We did find the other anomaly approximately 200 meters (about 219 yards) from the circular find at the same sonar run.” Lindberg explained why his team had not released the sonar image of the second object: “We decided not to expose that anomaly so much because there is a lot of disturbance on the sonar image when we passed it, so it’s very blurry. We can see it’s something but to an untrained eye it might just look like ‘pea soup.’”

—Snopes, January 9th, 2015

“Charles Paull, senior scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Landing, California, said the anomaly is probably just a rock outcropping or the result of gas venting from the seafloor. Other experts argue it is merely a glacial depost [sic]. Even Peter Lindberg, the man behind the discovery, expressed skepticism about the object’s supposed otherworldly origins: “It’s not obviously an alien spacecraft. It’s not made of metal.” Team Ocean X’s discovery created a stir due to the fact that they could not identify the object at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, not because any evidence supported the idea it was a UFO.”

—Snopes, January 9th, 2015

Interestingly, the Baltic Sea is considered a relatively ‘young’ sea:

“The Baltic Sea, one of the largest brackish water areas in the world, can be characterized as a young, cold sea containing an impoverished ecosystem due to salinity stress. The present Baltic Sea was formed as late as 2000 to 2500 years ago when the Danish sounds became more narrow and shallow. The inflow of freshwater from the surrounding land areas caused the Baltic to gradually attain its brackish character. Today the Baltic covers an area of some 366,000 km² as a series of basins separated by shallower areas and filled with about 22,000 km³ of brackish water. These basins are, from north to south, the Gulf of Bothnia, the Gulf of Finland, the Gotland Sea and the Bornholm Sea.”

—T. Sörlin, The gulf of Bothnia: The northernmost part of the Baltic Sea, 1982

Before the Baltic Sea was a sea, in a time period dating back 8 to 9 thousand years ago, it was the Ancylus Lake. Even earlier still, some estimations ranging as far as 12,600 years ago, the area was the Baltic Ice Lake. To put things in perspective, the Pleistocene Epoch (Ice Age) is typically defined as the time period that began about 2.6 million years ago and lasted until about 11,700 years ago.

So if you’re looking at this Baltic Sea anomaly and a part of you is thinking maybe it didn’t form entirely by the natural will of the elements, the area has been beneath water and/or ice for a period stretching beyond 2 million years to the present.

If it wasn’t the natural world that created this anomaly, how then did it come to be?