By 3 News online staff
Divers have failed to come up with an explanation for a strange object found at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, saying their visit has only raised even more questions.
Swedish treasure-hunting company Ocean X first discovered the object, shaped like Han Solo's Millenium Falcon ship from the Star Wars movies, using sonar last year.
Ocean X makes money by finding sunken ships and selling off their contents, so they sent a dive team down to see what they had found. But it wasn't what they expected.
Diver Stefan Hogeborn says he came up with more questions than answers.
“During my 20-year diving career, including 6000 dives, I have never seen anything like this," says Hogeborn.
What they found 86m below the surface was "a huge mushroom, rising three or four metres from the seabed, with rounded sides and rugged edges".
Eighteen metres across, it has an egg-shaped hole in the top, as well as several "stone circle formations, almost looking like small fireplaces" covered in "something resembling soot".
But perhaps the strangest find was "a runway or a downhill path that is flattened at the seabed with the object at the end of it", as if the strange object was in motion, clearing a 300m path before settling in its current resting place.
“First we thought this was only stone, but this is something else," says Ocean X's Peter Lindberg.
"Since no volcanic activity has ever been reported in the Baltic Sea the find becomes even stranger. 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."
A second similarly-shaped disc was found about 200m away, apparently also leaving a trail.
"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," says Lindberg.
"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."
The team is continuing to investigate the site, and are hoping scientists and sonar imaging experts can shed some more light on just what it is they've found.
3 News