Antarctica has long been associated with myths of extraterrestrial life. Entertaining but unsubstantiated stories say there are alien bases under the ice and even pyramids. The early 16th century Piri Reis Map seemed to show Antarctica without ice 300 years before its discovery, leading to controversial claims about a lost advanced civilization and aliens.
These ideas may be imaginative nonsense, but satellite analysis has predicted the potential for hundreds of thousands of very real extraterrestrial meteorites yet to be discovered in Antarctica. In April 2024, it was partially satellite data, along with radar and at least 20 weather models, that led to another bizarre story around the icy continent.
Strange Anomalies Appeared Near Antarctica – Twice
On two separate occasions, April 10 and April 25, a tidal weather mapping app, Ventusky, showed a huge red blob denoting high waves moving between Antarctica and southern Africa.
In both cases, the anomalies seemed to show giant waves 80 feet high and spanning 2,000 miles across, which Newsweek compared to being larger than Texas. And both times, the ‘journey’ of the moving blobs ended when they abruptly vanished after about 24 hours. Both appeared to be moving north from Antarctica to Africa.
While the blob from April 10 appeared more solidly round, the anomaly from April 25 looked more crescent-shaped or triangular. Watching the videos is a little disconcerting. What could they have been? Online, everyone had their guess, and some joked they were signs of some kind of underwater extraterrestrial presence.
In 2022, Congress created an Unidentified Aerospace-Undersea Phenomena Joint Program Office, and revised the definition of potential UFOs to include “transmedium objects” which, according to lawmakers, ‘transition between space and the atmosphere, or between the atmosphere and bodies of water.'” So it’s not entirely impossible that such a thing could be real, but in this case, the fact-checkers will tell you “False.”
No Atlanteans But a Giant-Sized Data Error
In both cases, the company spokesman said the anomalies were due to model errors from incorrect data.
On Twitter (X), Ventusky tweeted about the first anomaly: “Despite numerous reports of UFOs or Atlanteans launching from the ocean, yesterday’s image of giant waves near Africa was due to a model error. Fortunately, our provider, the German Meteorological Institute, has already resolved it, and the forecast is fine.”
Waves Detected By Wind and Swell
Ventusky spokesperson David Prantl told Newsweek the error was in data from Germany’s National Meteorological Service. The app has used German ICON model data about wave height forecasts for several years.
According to Fox 5 San Diego, the data picks up on waves by analyzing both winds and swell.
“The visualization focuses on distinguishing waves generated at the location by wind (marked with white animated arcs) and waves generated tens of kilometers away due to swell (marked with black animated arcs).
The report from April 25, 2024 notes that Ventusky recently added data from NOAA’s Surge and Tide Operational Forecast System (STOFS).
“The platform has now added data from the STOFS model calculated by NOAA. This model is unique in that it provides a forecast of tide and surge for the entire world, including the prediction of tidal surges.”
Fact Checkers Get to Debunking
On social media, some posted videos they had downloaded and created themselves. People responded by joking about Godzilla or the Kraken. Others drew a connection to the solar eclipse on April 8 or to CERN, which recently fired up.
Fact-checkers on the site, as well as USA Today and PolitiFact, in partnership with Meta, quickly responded to another Facebook post, which included misleading images of flooding in South Africa from 2023.
Of course, the fact-checkers say the anomalies weren’t real, pointing back to the company’s statement about “model error,” a data glitch. Nothing to see here, folks, they said.
Some Refuse to Accept It Was All a Data Error
Unfortunately, misinformation is always rampant online. But not everyone is buying that the anomalies on two separate occasions were merely due to data errors.
One Facebook user using the app pointed out the anomaly seemed to detect huge waves but not wind. If so, it might just indicate one data set was affected but not the other.
On YouTube, an internet sleuth claimed the anomaly had been previously detected in the same geographic area of a tiny island. He claimed to show the progression of the blob further north, alleging those images were no longer available elsewhere (see video below).
Video by In2ThinAir:
Amphibious Creatures and a Phantom Island Near Antarctica
Is the tiny island and underlying fault line merely coincidental? It looks like the tiny spot is the 19 square mile Norwegian Bouvet Island, an inactive volcano. There is a weather station there, but it’s otherwise an isolated (and frigid) nature reserve.
Interestingly, a tiny phantom island near Bouvet Island was drawn on maps up until 1943. It was called Thompson Island, but if it was ever real, it vanished, possibly after volcanic eruptions in the 1890s.
Coincidentally, the tales of Thompson Island inspired a bizarre fiction horror novel from 2002, “Cold Skin” by Albert Sánchez Piñol. It’s about a man who travels to a remote weather station at a place much like Thompson Island in 1914. There, he encounters a bluish race of cold-blooded amphibious creatures from the sea, Mermaids, if you will. It was turned into a very odd film in 2018. Imagine The Shape of Water meets H.P. Lovecraft.
While these creatures are pure fiction, it’s yet another peculiar thing about this point on the globe. Do you get the feeling we will see more anomalies and strange events here again?
Cold Skin recap (with spoilers!) via Story Recapped:
Image via Wikipedia/1898 German map of Bouvet Island, with Thompson I.