The Bloop!
In the summer of 1997, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (supposedly under direction from a spying U.S. Navy) recorded several strange underwater sounds that have never been classified. What makes this collection of sounds so exciting to biologist is that they could have come only from a living creature...but we’re talking about a living entity that may be several times larger than the largest known now living animal- the monstrous Blue Whale, which can get as big as 110 feet in length. It almost certainly did not come from a manmade object, shifting plates, underwater volcanos, or any other pedestrian inanimate source. That much has been confirmed by everyone who has investigated the recordings.
This sound was repeated several times during that summer, on the Equatorial Pacific Ocean autonomous hydrophone array. The sound rises rapidly in frequency over about one minute and was of sufficient amplitude to be heard on multiple sensors, at a range of over 5,000 km. It yields a general location near 50oS; 100oW. The origin of the sound still remains unknown, although there have been many theories put forth—gigantic mollusks, prehistoric amphibians, giant squids. But perhaps the one that would most interest horror fans is the fantastic (and preposterous) theory that H. P. Lovecraft wasn’t writing fiction at all, and that The Bloop recordings are actually Cthulhu stirring in his sunken city of R'lyeh.
We at The Black Glove will let our readers decide the origin of The Bloop.
(Note to reader- just for that extra shiver: The Bloop is far from the only strange sounds we have recorded in the darkest depths of the ocean. There are the Slow Down
and The Hum that have never been explained, to name a couple. For more about bioacoustics research, see The Acoustic Monitoring Program
--Nickolas Cook
