What's at the bottom of the Baltic?

This is an old UFO story, really.  Why it showed up on Yahoo's front page this morning is anybody's guess.  Must be a slow news day.

Last August, it was announced that a Swedish underwater salvage team discovered something very odd at the bottom of the Baltic Sea.  The Swedes were searching for old shipwrecks that might have valuable treasure still in the holds.  The men had been at sea for nine days and were packing it in for home.  As they did, they made one last sweep with their sonar fish.  That last sweep was enough to convince them to hang on for a bit.

They found an object at the bottom of the ocean.  It is a nearly perfect circle and is 60 meters across.  That's about the size of a 747.  But wait!  There's more!  Another object, smaller in size but about the same shape, sits near the larger anomaly.  Both have drag marks behind them on the sea floor that stretch back 400 feet.  Given that their livelihood is based on plundering sunken treasure, these salvage men know their stuff but even they didn't know what the hell it is.  They are, however, mustering their mettle and planning to dive down to the objects when seas are calmer, perhaps in May.

Naturally, there has been much talk about the objects being UFOs...or USOs might be a more apt term at this point.  That's Unidentified Submerged Object in case you don't know.  I've blogged about those before but suffice it to say, it's very much the same principle as a UFO just underwater.   While the open recovery of alien spacecraft would be welcome news, that's not the only game in town when it comes to explanations.  Not by a long shot.

The salvage team is correct in pointing out that the size and the shape of the objects seem to preclude any kind of conventional sea-faring vessel.  They are correct.  And The Novgorod was not a conventional ship.
The Novgorod was a Russian ironclad battleship built in 1871.  It was almost completely circular.  However, the dimensions seem to be about half that of the object found by the salvage team and from what I've read, it sounds like it saw the bulk of its action on the Black Sea, not the Baltic.  The Novgorod had a sister ship, The Rear-Admiral Popov, which was nearly identical in design, so it may stand to reason that there were more ships of this ilk in different theaters of operation.  These ships proved to be a very unsuccessful design for the Russian Navy, so they might have used them as target practice and sunk them.  Maybe there's a really big one at the bottom of the Baltic.

What else could it be?  The former Soviet Union dumped all kinds of nuclear mishaps into the ocean, although the Baltic Sea would be an odd location for such a thing.  Was there a UFO-shaped Nazi wunderwaffen that crashed into the drink?  That might be almost as cool as a UFO.  Or it could be indications of cryptoterrestrials, another race of humanoids living secretly on our planet beneath the ocean and this thing is their version of Stonehenge.

Or it could just be a natural formation in the seabed.  That would be the simplest explanation and no doubt Mr. Occam would approve of it.  It does unfortunately have a couple strikes against it, namely the shape of the objects and the drag marks behind them.  That doesn't rule out regular rocks, not by any stretch of the imagination.  But it is odd.

Whatever they might be, there is almost certainly going to be a mundane explanation for them.  After all, even if on the off chance they were crashed UFOs, would we even be told about it?


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