Second Unidentified Object Found

On Baltic Sea Floor

A ferry makes its way thru the ice in the Stockholm Archipelago on January 15, 2010. During the winter, ferries continue sailing in the Baltic Sea, which is partly frozen between Sweden and Finland. (Olivier Morin/AFP/Getty Images)

News Desk February 3, 2012 00:54

A ferry makes its way thru the ice in the Stockholm Archipelago on January 15, 2010. During the winter, ferries continue sailing in the Baltic Sea, which is partly frozen between Sweden and Finland. (Olivier Morin/AFP/Getty Images)
Have treasure hunters found another unidentified flying object on the floor of the Baltic Sea?

When a Swedish team using side-scan sonar picked up a strange circular object about 200 feet in diameter sitting on the floor of the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Finland last June, experts speculated that the object was just a glitch in the team's equipment, NBC reported.

The object sat in in 275 feet of water and 900 feet of "skid marks" behind it suggested that it may have moved across, or crashed on, the sea floor.

Now, CNN cites the team as saying they have discovered visual evidence of a second "disc-like shape" some 200 meters from the original find.

Team leader Peter Lindberg, who made headlines with his recent haul of two 200-year-old Champagne salvaged from a 19th-century Baltic Sea shipwreck and recently auctioned — joked to CNN that the first object they found might be an unidentified flying object, or UFO.

According to an Associated Press report from 2009, the Baltic Sea is "awash" in shipwrecks.

"There are hundreds of Viking ships out there, hundreds of old trading ships, hundreds of warships," the news service quotes Estonian wreck-hunter Vello Mass as saying. "The Baltic's an archaeological paradise."

However, according to Lindberg's team, the objects they have discovered are too big to have fallen off a ship or be part of a wreck,

"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," Lindberg reportedly said, adding: "We won't know until we have been down there."

Andreas Olsson, head of Archaeology at Sweden's Maritime Museums, while intrigued, questions the reliability of one-side scan sonar images, saying they make it difficult to distinguish between a natural geological formation and something else.

"It all depends on the circumstances when you actually tow the [sonar] fish after the boat," he said.