I was a part of a Navy Seal team called SAC-OP Recon. If you know anyone who was a Navy Seal they’ll tell you they never heard of us which is by design. They’ll think you mean Spec Ops. We’re above that. Spec Ops guys don’t even know we exist. The team operates within special access programs, all of which are programs and projects that have the highest security clearance the US government uses.
I can’t tell you any of the things I worked on and I wouldn’t if I could. Let’s just say that if the military or an intel group needed to see or do anything underwater that no one could know about and that also required knowledge of technologies and information that even regular seals aren’t cleared to have access to, they’d send us in.
Our job was to survey the site in detail. Not like you see on National Geographic, where they do some sonar scans and sit back and write a paper about it and pat themselves on the back. They take years, sometimes decades to do what we have to do in a few days. We map out every inch of the area with high quality sonar, infrared, visible light, x-ray, backscatter microwave, and a few things I can’t mention. By the time we’re done, if there’s a dime sitting buried in the sand on the ocean floor you can find it in our data.
Our work is quickly processed and handed over to our sister team called SAC-OP Strike. Normal Seal teams call these guys Fire Teams. They do everything from sabotage, disarming mines, to underwater combat. Yes combat. Actual underwater combat. They have special weapons designed to work underwater and I’m not talking about mere knives and spearguns.
Anyway, it was 2013 and we were sent to the Baltic Sea with orders to check out something that had recently been found on the ocean floor by some sunken treasure hunters. It’s called the Baltic Sea Anomaly. The Swedish government had quietly shut the treasure hunter’s study of the object down and made them sign national security oaths to keep their mouths shut and play it off like they can’t find funding for further expeditions. Meanwhile they called the U.S. for assistance. They have their own divers of course, but this thing was shutting down any and all electronics that came within 200 feet of it. They were stumped.
The object itself was located about 300 feet below the surface and was just sitting there on the ocean floor. It was almost perfectly round except for a few sections that looked as if they had been cut out. It had the basic shape of that ship Han Solo flew in the Star Wars movies - the Millenium Falcon. The treasure hunters original sonar image had been published before the Swedes had the situation under control so the public was already theorizing it to be a UFO. It was not.
The object sat at the end of a long trail in the sand that stretched out on the bottom and into a ravine that appeared to be cut out of a small undersea mountain. This gave the impression to some that this was a crash landing scar on the ocean floor where the object had slid to a stop upon it’s sinking. It was not.
I was looking forward to the challenge of performing a reconnaissance mission without the aid of electronics. We brought a few devices with us just in case, but were fully prepared and expecting not to be able to use them. We even had underwater flares in case our lights shut off.
Our mission was simple: determine the basic nature of the object and survey it’s exterior in detail. This sounds easier than it is. Especially without cameras and electronics. To determine the nature of the object we used the null hypothesis approach. This is where you try to rule things out by attempting to disprove your hypothesis. In this case we were acting on the hypothesis that the formation was natural in origin. Was it sandstone or a build up of sediment that just happened to form a shape that coincidentally looked like a construction?
Deep down I was thinking it was probably some WWII equipment that had been scuttled or blasted off of a ship during the war. Maybe the base of a large ship mounted gun. But why would it be knocking electronics out? And how? At any rate all of us were Geologists, Marine Biologists, and Oceanographers so we knew exactly what to look for. I know that might sound odd to you. You have to understand that knowing what we are doing in all situations that we might encounter is what the military was paying for. You are not deployed in our group without these skills. If you don’t want to do the schooling stay in the regular Seals.
In addition to our skill set our team only had two squads of three men each and no commanding officers. All six of us were officers of equal rank. We designed the missions ourselves and operated with extreme self discipline. If you need an officer to tell you what to do, then you aren’t fit for our kind of work. The Navy learned the hard way a long time ago that a commanding officer’s ego can ruin a mission in certain circumstances. And while it might be necessary to have one when the men under him need that to perform, in the case of SEC-OP missions they only get in the way and risk lives and mission failure, and we did not fail at our missions. It wasn’t allowed. Teams in the old days had to keep shanking their commanding officers to ensure mission success and finally the Navy just started letting us do our thing.
My squad was going to start by taking samples of the surface material that had settled or otherwise built up on the object. We would drill through it with diamond tipped hand powered drills we had to determine what the object beneath was composed of. We’d do this with the aid of special chemistry test kits we had which were designed to work in ocean water. Remember, we couldn’t use spectrometers because electronics were useless. The other team was going to examine every inch of the thing looking for signs of manufacturing. Both teams would also create a map of the object’s magnetic field and variance if there was any, using only hand held compasses and underwater pencils. Yes, we were that good.
We began our dive when the sun was exactly 45 degrees above the horizon. This would provide enough light so we wouldn’t need to use our flares for most of the day. We didn’t bring air tanks except small ones for emergencies, and instead had hoses coming from the surface, supported by air bags every fifty feet. This would allow us to stay down as long as we needed. The Strike team was topside in the boat making sure the air pumps were working and preparing for whatever they might have to do once we came back with our assessment. They weren’t expecting to have to do anything as we all assumed that this was either a piece of wartime hardware or an ancient ruin but they were prepared anyway. They always were.
On the way down, I noticed there were no fish or life of any kind in the waters around us. Usually that time of year you could find flounder, herring, Cod, and other species of fish swimming about. Maybe it was an odd coincidence but I found it noteworthy just the same.
As we approached the object a strange feeling came over us. It was an unusual feeling for us all. It was mild fear and apprehension. We had all been in much more dangerous situations that this before and we were trained not to fear. We didn’t fear death, injury, or even drowning, yet all of us reported this same sensation.
We wore special dive masks that covered our entire faces so we could speak to each other. Sound travels well in the water and so as long as we were close enough we could all discuss what we needed to. We agreed to continue the mission in spite of this feeling but to make sure we kept each other aware of any increase in feelings of duress that we might experience. We soon arrived at the object and split up into our respective squads.
Up close the object was clearly not a natural formation, but we would go through our process anyway to be thorough. The object was somewhat flat on top except for a small perfectly smooth dome on the right side. To the left side there was a stairway going up to the flat top. The right angles and straight lines on the object had been dismissed as a rare but real natural phenomena that occurs due to the molecular nature of certain types of stone combined with water erosion from tides and currents. But here the stairs were sandwiched between flat stone walls on both sides which would prevent water from moving in the necessary directions to erode the stairs into the perfect steps that they were.
I chipped off a small chunk of the material on the side of the structure and put it into my test kit’s receptacle, squeezed some chemicals into the enclosure, and shook it. I already knew but the resulting color of the mixture verified that the object was indeed covered with a thick layer of silt and sand that had built up, compacted, and hardened over time. It must have taken a long time to get into the state it was in because that part of the Baltic Sea didn’t have a lot of turbulent water or natural silt.
I got the drill out and turned the hand crank as the bit sunk into the caked on silt and sand. It went down about four inches when it hit the underlying structure. I withdrew the drill, blew the silt out of the hole with a turkey baster type of device we use, and looked in. I recognized the material right away. It was coarse grained granite. Pink, black, and white specks together. The surface of the object wasn’t just made from granite which shouldn’t be found at the bottom of the sea, but it was polished granite! Perfectly flat and smooth. I cleared off some more of the compacted sand covering the area and showed it to my team: Brent, and David, both of whom were busy mapping the magnetic variance of the object. David swam over to the other squad to inform them of the discovery while Brent showed me the map they had made thus far.
It was unbelievable. They drew on a plastic sheet that had a sketch of the object on it with a special kind of grease pencil that worked under water. The lines they drew around it represented the distance from the object where the magnetic field the object emitted varied from standard north/south, and each line had a number on it indicating how many degrees off from the expected compass reading it was at that point. According to the map, the object was pulling the compass needle a full forty five degrees away from magnetic north towards itself. This effect was not present at the surface as we had checked before descending.
Just then David swam back over and told us that the other squad had found something that we needed to see. We met them behind the object where the bottom of the structure met the ocean floor. The men had discovered a small doorway. My squad volunteered to go inside. We removed our air lines and hooked up our emergency air tanks, each containing about a half hour of air.
It was dark inside the passageway and so I lit up a flare. We were in a hallway that led back towards the front of the object, but underneath it. The walls had less silt on them and we could wipe it off with our hands down to the polished granite. About halfway back the passageway ramped upward and we walked up and out of the water into a large room inside the structure.
The room was dark and cold. My flare lit the walls and ceiling revealing the same polished granite as the outside. There were engravings in the stone wall every four feet or so. The ceiling was about 12 feet from the floor. The room was a half circle in shape and had three granite tables that resembled altars a little bit, one on each side of the ramp and one behind it. The rest of the room was bare.
I tried to turn on my flashlight and as expected it did not work. David started sketching the images on the engravings which appeared to me to be depictions of human sacrifice. In the images, the rituals were taking place on the top exterior of the very structure we were inside. It was clear from the scenes depicted that this building wasn’t always underwater. Either the oceans had risen since it was in use, or the land had sunken.
Brent pulled me over to one of these engravings and pointed. There in the image was some creature devouring the sacrifice. The men in the scene weren’t sacrificing people to some deity, they were feeding a monster.
It was like a man in that it had two legs and feet, however at the waist it appeared to have about a dozen tentacles coming off its body but no arms. It did have a head though but it looked more like a giant mouth gaping open with a large teeth. The thing had large feathers coming off its back and the top of it’s head as well. I’ve never seen anything like it depicted before however there are some Aztec and pre-Columbian figures that are similar in a few ways.
Brent and I quickly measured the room’s dimensions and did a walkthrough, covering every square foot of the place. We found a stone door that appeared as though it was supposed to rotate on a central shaft, however we could not get it to budge. We discovered a stairwell that descended downward, but not back into the water. This went down into stone. We surmised that the structure had been built on top of an even larger rock or mountain that was now buried by the seafloor.
We descended the stone stairwell, which was not made of the same granite as the upper chamber. Instead this material looked like standard seafloor Basalt. The stairs ended about forty feet down into a small antechamber. There were some relics on the floor there, a spear and a set of ankle shackles. Both appeared completely oxidized to the point where they would probably disintegrate upon our attempting to pick them up.
The room had an opening that led into a huge cavern which was lit by an abundance of bioluminescent algae which coated much of the cave walls as well as a small river that flowed in and out of a set of pools. The water glowed a bright aqua color from this algae which made the water cloudy and opaque. There were large quartz crystals embedded in the rock along with iron pyrite and veins of gold. The view was spectacular.
We wondered aloud what had been in those shackles. We suspected it was the creature from the engravings or perhaps a sacrificial victim. There were footpaths that ran between the rock and stalagmites that formed the floor of the cavern. We split up and each proceeded down different paths giving ourselves exactly ten minutes time to meet back at the foot of the stairwell. Our air would be running out by then and we weren’t going to risk trying to breathe the ancient air down there. We’d have to head back soon.
We took air, water, and sand samples as well as photographs using old fashioned, non electronic cameras loaded with a special film designed for low light. The cavern seemed to go back at least three hundred feet, with a ceiling around thirty feet high. The width I estimated in the neighborhood of fifty to sixty feet.
I could hear water pouring into water coming from the rear of the cave and so I headed back to ascertain whether or not there was some kind of waterfall back there someplace. I rounded a bend in the footpath and saw the source of the sound. A two foot diameter flow of water was pouring out of the sidewall of the cave about twenty feet up, arcing into a pool that was recessed in the floor. Behind the waterfall there were several skeletons chained up to the back wall. I started to take some photos of this when I felt something wrap around my right ankle.
Looking down I beheld a black tentacle protruding up out of the pool which had wrapped around my lower leg several turns. I instinctively pulled my leg away but it tightened its grip as I did so. I sounded a distress call from a noise making device we each carried on our wetsuit as I struck the tentacle with my fist in the hope it might release me.
It pulled back a bit which caused me to fall onto my back. I reached for my rock pick as the thing rose up out of the water. It was hideous. It used it’s tentacles for support on the black rocky ground. Its head was like an octopus only the mouth was front facing. It growled, baring what reminded me of shark teeth with several rows going towards the back of its throat. It started to pull me towards it and lift me up off the ground when Brent reached me with David not far behind. He struck the tentacle that held me with his rock pick letting loose a glowing aqua colored fluid from the creature’s flesh. It immediately dropped me and turned its attention to Brent.
Its saucer sized, amber eyes twitched back and forth as it examined him a moment before it lashed out with two of its tentacles. As it did, both of these appendages projected long, thin, sharp, white ribbed rods from their tips which pierced Brents torso. The creature then lifted him up and pulled him in towards its gaping and shrieking mouth.
David had arrived at my location by then and began to drag my body backwards away from the thing as it put Brent’s head into its mouth and closed it in a circular fashion around his neck where its teeth cut through Brent’s wetsuit and flesh. He flayed around trying to break free for a moment before the creature had bitten his head clean off. We could only watch and take a few photos from a distance as it used it’s tentacles to peel back his wetsuit and munch on Brent’s body like a human would when deshelling a shrimp.
I got to my feet as David announced that we needed to let the strike team handle it. The two of us headed for the stairwell as fast as we could. Before we could get there, the creature swam along the river next to us and jumped out of the water, tackling David while thrusting it’s pointy rods through him just like it did to Brent.
David and the beast fell over sideways and it proceeded to feed on him. It did so with such ferocity and speed that I had no time to try to save him. All I could do was run and take advantage of the fact that it would be stalled from killing me for a minute as it feasted on David.
I glanced back as I ran and saw that the creature had put David’s lifeless body down and had begun to pursue me. I guess it didn’t want to lose any of that rare human meal it had discovered. I suppose it had been feeding on the algae in the water for so long that the taste of blood once again after all these years was too much for it to resist.
Just as I was reaching the opening into the small chamber where the stairwell was, the thing flung itself at me and I landed on my back. I had my rock pick in hand by then so I started to bang it’s pointed tip into the meat of one of the monster’s tentacles. It withdrew it but as it did, the thing wrapped its body around my upper torso and pressed it’s flesh against the back of my neck where I could feel tiny bristle-like hairs stick into my spine. Like little needles they inserted deep into my nervous system where the creature hijacked my motor control.
It used this method to couple with my brain and our minds became one mind. I knew its entire history, thoughts, and experiences. I understood its deepest motivations and desires and it knew mine. It used my legs to walk as it rode me like a horse back up the stairwell, into the chamber above, and down the ramp to the open sea outside.
It hadn’t been out of the cavern in over a millenia as it needed a human host to climb the stairs. I could feel its excitement as we exited the structure and proceeded to kill the three men in the other squad who had been waiting for our return.
Knowing the lethality of the strike team it opted to steal an inflatable motorized raft and sink the boat by having me chip a hole in the hull with my rock pick. The sound of my doing this alerted the seals inside to our presence and two of them entered the water to check it out as we sped off in the raft.
I got an oversized trench coat to hide the creature on my back so I could move about among the masses without causing a stir. I haven’t checked in with the Navy in several weeks now and am currently sitting in a cheap hotel room in Barcelona typing this.
While I would like to be rid of this thing, I also have to admit that I feel its pleasure at the taste of human blood and meat. Our minds have become one and I am as much it as I am me. I know the military will have sent a wet team to track me down by now and I know they will probably eventually find me. I have to stay on the move. The trail of dead will soon give away my whereabouts as the method of the kills is unique and leaves its own signature.
I’m putting this story online as a last ditch effort to get a message through to my dear mother, Jane, the only person I still feel connected to and whom I miss dearly. I love you mom. I’m sorry about all of this and maybe someday if I’m lucky we can meet again.
I’ve already left too many bodies here, so I’m leaving Barcelona tonight before daybreak. But first I feed again. X