Are there aliens at the bottom of the ocean?
A deep dive into deep sea conspiracy theories and the ocean's place in our collective psyche.
Thanks for reading Ink Roads! This essay is a part of Cosmic Junkyard, a biweekly series about the world’s most interesting unanswered or unanswerable questions.
The ocean covers 71% of the planet, but humans have explored about 20% of it. You don’t need to know those statistics to understand why this dark and deep mass of sunken bones, cavernous trenches, and unfathomable pressure has always captivated humanity’s collective imagination.
People have always speculated about what might be down there in those untellable, unspeakable depths, where oxygen and light cannot reach, where the pressure is so intense that exposure would mean instant death to a human body.
Down there, reason and order mean nothing at all. Down there, all our cities, towers, and philosophies crumble. Down there, there are other rules, other gods.
Down there, way at the bottom of the deepest dark, things start to glow.
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The deep sea has spawned countless myths, legends, and conspiracy theories. Everything from 16th century maps to the tales of H. P. Lovecraft teem with stories of tentacled sea monsters rising from the depths. Fantastic tales of sunken cities like Atlantis abound.
Truth is stranger than fiction when it comes to the otherworldly deep, with its errant megalodon jaws and translucent-skinned, fanged array of fauna. Many of these legends are in fact based in reality, and there are undeniably mysterious and monstrous creatures in the depths.
There also are a number of very real undersea cities, including Baia, Italy, which was submerged after volcanic activity over two thousand years ago, or Mahabalipuram, India, which was a legend until its existence was proven in 2004 after a tsunami exposed fragments of its remains.
In our collective consciousness, the ocean seems to occupy a similar place to outer space. Like outer space, the very deep ocean is inhospitable to life. Like outer space, when you go far enough, you’ll eventually stumble upon something that shines. Perhaps that subconscious association is part of why humans seem intent on finding connections between extraterrestrial life and the deep sea.
One of the main conspiracy theories I’ve encountered involving the ocean has to do with the fact that NASA — America’s preeminent space exploration authority — was originally created to explore the sea in addition to space. Much ado has been made over the fact that in 1978, NASA’s Seasat satellite was sent out to explore the oceans, but the organization suddenly pulled the plug just after 105 days of activity.
Today, there are many YouTube and TikTok videos with eye-catching titles such as “Why NASA Stopped Exploring The Ocean Will Shock You!” “NASA started exploring the deep sea in 1958 but stopped in 1978. After that, they started working on getting us off the planet,” the narrator of that video says. “They even detonate a massive explosion in the ocean, in 2021. What did they discover down there? What are they so afraid of?”
Reuters, of course, has an answer: NASA didn’t actually stop exploring the deep sea in 1978. In fact, they’re still working on it. In 2021, they even launched a very aptly named probe called Orpheus to explore the also aptly named hadal zone (named after Hades), which is the official name for the very deepest part of the sea, the part that stretches from 6,000 to 11,000 meters below the sea’s sun-dashed, wind-sliced surface.
(Orpheus, of course, is the mythic musician who descended down to the underworld to rescue his lost love, Euridyce; he manages to persuade Hades to let them go on the condition that he won’t look back at her on the way out, but of course he can’t resist, and down she goes again into the darkness).
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Before we dive into some of the main conspiracies about the deep sea, let me say this: I could not find much, or any, substantial information to back up any of the theories floating around about aliens or cosmic horrors at the bottom of the ocean. It looks like there probably isn’t anything extraterrestrial or multidimensionally horrific under those endless waves.
That has not stopped people from speculating, and Reddit, YouTube, and TikTok teem with theories. “They probably discovered the Beast mentioned in the book of Revelation that says its supposed to rise up out of the ocean! It probably saw the eyes and heard a growl and got out of there quick!! I would not even doubt it!!” says one YouTube commenter under “Why NASA Stopped Exploring The Ocean Will Shock You!”
One of the main conspiracy theories about the deep sea appears to be the idea that there might be aliens at the bottom of the ocean. This idea is not new. “Ships’ logs have information about UFOs coming out of the water, hovering next to the ships and then taking off going back into the 1800s. This has been going on a long time,” Kevin Knuth, an astrophysicist and a former NASA researcher, told Vice in 2022. “They are very often associated with water. They’re very often seen coming out of water, seen going into water, and sometimes seen underwater.”
In1977, residents of the Welsh village Broad Haven said they saw a silver disc drop into the ocean. Today, residents of Mexico’s Miramar Beach reportedly believe in the existence of a nearby underground UFO base called Amupac. It is also true that in 2022, the Pentagon did announce its UFO investigation department would study “transmedium objects,” or objects that can pass between air and water. And of course, YouTube and Reddit are rife with stories about underwater alien bases from Alaska to the Red Sea, stories that amount to the closest thing we have to modern folklore.
In November, this folkloric idea made it all the way to Congress when Republican rep Lauren Boebert asked a group of UFO experts if they knew if the Department of Defense had been involved with creating alien “bases” at the bottom of the sea. She also asked if they knew of projects involving the “manipulation of human genetics” with “non-human genetic material.” Journalist Michael Shellenberger, who was on the panel, claimed he “didn’t know about a base” but had spoken to a source who saw an orb emerging out of the sea and meeting another orb.
On the very day I began this article, another Republican named Tim Burchett happened to give some airtime to the underground-base theory. "I haven't been briefed on this, just from what I'm putting together, but we have some secret sonar,” he told disgraced former attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz in a rather nonsensical rant. “But what's so crazy about it, like we're hiding it from the Chinese. Well, heck, Matt, the Chinese sold us the components for it. They know what's in our sonar probably better than we do. But when they tell me something's moving at hundreds of miles an hour underwater, and our capabilities are—I don't think we have anything that'll do 40 miles an hour, and this one was as large as a football field underwater, and this was a documented case, and I have an admiral telling me this stuff.”
Whether the admiral appeared to him in dreams or reality is another question more appropriate for a David Lynch film (RIP). And while I’ve seriously contemplated the existence of aliens elsewhere on this blog, I’m not as interested in whether there is something to the whole aliens-underwater thing in this context. Instead I think there’s something deeper here, something more important than the real-not real question.
Conspiracy theories are interesting to me because I think they illuminate aspects our collective hunger for magic and our innate awareness that there is much more going on in the world than meets the eye. At their core, they come from an instinctual knowledge that the world is more strange and powerful than we can imagine, and they signify our desire to merge with the more-than-human, interconnected reality beyond our individualist minds and religions that have confused metaphors for truth.
Many of us live in a world divorced from magic. We are increasingly separate from the unknown. This has been going on at least since the Enlightenment, but now that we can look up anything online, there’s less and less room for mystery.
At the same time, interest in religion and spirituality are rising among the masses. Everywhere I look people are looking for meaning and finding it in engaging with things we cannot definitively know are real.
No matter how much light we try to shine on the dark, the world remains a mysterious place. Nature is embedded with deep wisdom we can only engage with by diving into the intuitive parts of ourselves. Truth and insight are often found in the darkness, when we go deep enough to hit bioluminescence.
There may not be any aliens in the ocean. There also might be. I am not one to act like I’m certain about something I actually don’t and can’t know. But I am certain that the ocean’s power, like all of nature’s, cannot be denied.
Nature has immense power over us humans, a power is difficult to recall sometimes in our world of walls and insulation. And yet, as climate change and environmental destruction continue to wreak havoc on our Earth, we will continue to be confronted by this power day in and day out. Wildfires are already destroying whole cities, decimating industries. Hurricanes are flattening transit systems.
The deep is rising, and it is coming for us all.
As temperatures rise, ice will melt and sea levels are also beginning to encroach upon land. Deep sea mining is also bringing us closer and closer to those airless depths, potentially unleashing untold chaos on our planet’s oldest ecosystems. As the deep emerges and we get closer to that interminable edge — and closer to the dark beyond it — certainly things that are wonderful and strange and terrible will begin to emerge from those airless chambers.
America and much of the world is now being led by people who believe conspiracy theories and take them at face value rather than investigating the deeper forces that may be fueling these theories: paranoia, for one, and also, the possibility of actual sacredness and power in the world that exists beyond the slim realm of organized religion and nuclear families that they deign acceptable, a world which was always built on the backbone of bloodshed and subjugation.
Perhaps at this time we must look to deep, which is a place of questions rather than answers.
It is often geopolitically difficult to tell who owns what part of the ocean. The sea erases our borders and boundaries. Laws shift and sink out there. Perspective mutates. Possibilities emerge that were not there before. Order fails. Something new and wild emerges. And certainly, it is time for something new.
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In many of my favorite books, when confronted with some impossible life change, characters tend to venture out to the sea, walking in and letting the salt clear away their pasts. Sometimes they die there. Sometimes they emerge changed. Always they are reborn, remade by salt and storm.
It’s possible to read the deep as a metaphor for the unconscious mind, the deeper parts of the psyche, and the sunken and hidden parts of reality. The unconscious is where the foundations of all old stories live, like sunken whale bones upon which civilizations are built, and it is also where new stories can be born. The deep reminds us that there is life there too, beyond the edges of our comprehension.
There are parallels between the deep sea and the womb-space, which is really the space of the feminine and the unknowable and the mystic and the wild. There are parallels between the deep sea and dreams and death and outer space and the deep forest and anything that exists beyond the visible realm. These are dream-threads, not logical links, and yet they are there if you look for them, like fine beams of light connecting psyche to salt and sand.
Of course we want to imagine alien bases down there. Of course, in our hubris, we want to project militarism onto the ocean floor as well as the stars.
Yet what if the deep sea contained something much older and much, much stranger?
In our world of destruction, where ever-more-corrupt powers that be continue their efforts to destroy all life, we will probably see more and more conspiracy theories rising up about everything from the deep sea to wildfires and plane crashes. We can dive into these theories. We can wonder what lies out there among the anglerfish and the sunken whale bones, and we can project our human thoughts onto these dimensions. Yet we must sometimes leave room for questions.
At the end of the day, we do not really know what is at the bottom of the sea. It could be gods or ancient monsters, or simply stones heated by the furnaces at the heart of the earth and delicate, vengeful glowing creatures that can survive and thrive in seemingly impossible situations.
But whatever is down there, it is far more powerful and so much older than any of us, and it will outlast us long after we, too, have rejoined its dark oblivion.
So many many things covered, here. The thing that’s now rolling in my mind, is how climate change has risen the sea levels. Not just in our time but in times before. I wonderful of the ocean was always this deep. Fascinating to think of. Regardless of conspiracy theories (that just distract us) the ocean is definitely a portal to another realm.
This really ruffled my imagination. Thank you 🧜♀️🌊🩵