[ SKEPTICAL INQUIREE
There Be Monsters! Is it True We’ve Only Explored 5 Percent of the Oceans?
BENJAMIN RADFORD
Benjamin Radford is a research fellow at the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and author or coauthor of fourteen books, including America the Fearful: Media and the Marketing of National Panics.
Q:
We’ve only explored 5 percent of our great oceans and know more about deep space than what’s here under our waters! Why is that?
A:
This canard surfaces regularly in many myster y-mongering c o ntexts, including television shows and articles. The question evokes images of wide swaths of
aquatic terra incognita:
huge blank spaces on maps under seas and oceans where we simply have no idea what’s down there. Could it be Atlantis, extraterrestrial alien bases, or Godzilla? Maybe underground caves leading to a hollow earth populated by dinosaurs!
There be monsters!
This particular question arose in a discussion about something called the “Baltic Sea Anomaly,” allegedly “four meters thick and sixty meters wide. Sonar found drag marks on the object, meaning it was not formed naturally.” This claim was breathlessly promoted by a team called Ocean-X and suggested to be an alien spacecraft in mystery-mongering press releases.