Inexplicable Seismic Waves Recorded Globally Baffle Geologists
On Nov. 11, a strange series of seismic waves rocked an area in the Mozambique channel near the French island territory of Mayotte. The waves were picked up by seismic instruments as far as 11,000 miles away in such places as Canada and Chile, reverberating for more than 20 minutes – except, no one actually felt them.
Geologists are at a loss to explain these bizarre wave clusters, which may have gone entirely undetected, had it not been for an amateur earthquake aficionado on Twitter who noticed the anomalies on the U.S. Geological Survey’s real-time seismogram displays.
“I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it,” Göran Ekström, a seismologist who specializes in unusual earthquakes at Columbia University, told National Geographic.
Twitter user @matarikipax, picked up on the epicenter of the tremors off the coast of Madagascar, before noticing subsequent recordings from seismograms in Kenya, Spain, and New Zealand.
According to geologists, one of the most confounding factors observed in these waves was their monotonous, low-frequency ring – possibly the reason they went undetected by anyone in the direct vicinity.
Typically, following an earthquake, there are several types of follow-up reverberations that resonate in varied oscillations. These, on the other hand, are what scientists call monochromatic – a singular zigzag on a 17-second loop.
The epicenter of the waves has seen significant seismic activity in the past, it is after all, a volcanic island in a volcanic archipelago. And typically, one would expect waves of this nature to follow a large earthquake, but scientists say there was no major seismic activity in the area leading to this particular event.
Geologists are still struggling to figure out the cause, with the most agreed upon possibility being that it may have been a magma reservoir below the Earth’s crust shaken by small earthquakes. But the precise intervals of the waves make it difficult to say anything for certain. And as Gizmodo pointed out, this type of regularity is typically caused by artificial means.
Unsurprisingly, this led to wild speculation in the conspiracy world, as well as some far-out responses from scientists themselves, including speculation about mythological monsters such as Cthulhu, or a previously undiscovered prehistoric creature.
“Submarine volcanism sounds most likely. However, isn’t that where the coelacanth was first found to be alive? I’m rooting for the event to be a giant prehistoric sea monster…” said one Twitter user.
But while most of the sea monster theories have been tongue-in-cheek, another interesting conspiracy has resurfaced related to a WikiLeaks article released in 2013, which alleged that a mysterious vortex opened over the Gulf of Aden just off the horn of Africa, creating catastrophic weather in the early aughts.
Now, the Gulf of Aden is in the same area of the world, though it’s not necessarily close to the Mozambique channel. If one were to fly from Djibouti to Madagascar it would be about a seven-hour flight. But we digress.
According to the report, allegedly prepared for Vladimir Putin by Russian Northern Fleet Admiral Nikolay Maksimov, the anomalous disturbance was reported in the Gulf of Aden in late 2000. This was supposedly when the U.S. established a base in the area in response to the report, before it issued a warning to other major powers. The response was reportedly covered up in the media with stories that naval forces were sent to the region to deal with Somali pirates terrorizing important shipping lanes.
The report goes on to claim the mysterious vortex posed an extraterrestrial or inter-dimensional threat to the planet and that opposing superpowers, including Russia and the United States, were set to join forces to defend humanity. Others have speculated that the portal could be the result of machinations at CERN or another particle collider, as a similar vortex was allegedly reported above Norway in 2009.
TL;DR: some conspiracy theorists believe the latest unexplained seismic waves may have something to do with the alleged Gulf of Aden Vortex.
Surely, this sounds absurd and the sources provided in the document to corroborate its claims are equally as sketchy. Many have also pointed out that it could be a piece written by a highly dubious and often fraudulent conspiracy theory site, before being widely disseminated under other aliases. But there are also some questions as to why it was published by WikiLeaks, which wouldn’t normally release something so fantastic.
As it turns out, the documents come from a private American intelligence firm called Stratfor, which provides global intel for large corporations, aerospace contractors, and even certain branches of the U.S. government.
This particular article, once possessed by Stratfor before being published by WikiLeaks, closes with a line that states, “to what is contained in the United States secret ‘Gulf of Aden Vortex’ file WikiLeaks has in its possession and is threatening to release, it is not in our knowing.”
Could WikiLeaks have more on the Gulf of Aden Vortex? Moreover, could there be any relation between the latest seismic waves and the Gulf of Aden Vortex? Or equally as conspiratorial, is the private intelligence firm Stratfor intentionally spreading disinformation? Could this all be explained by natural seismic phenomena? Quite possibly. We’ll need to do more serious digging.
Could Julian Assange and WikiLeaks hold the key to the Gulf of Aden Vortex files? Learn more about his tribulations in the documentary, Digital Dissidents:
About the Author
Is a Parallel Universe Changing Our Reality?
Sometimes referred to as the Berenstain Bears Conspiracy, the Mandela Effect is a phenomenon in which people report having the same false memories, leading to a belief that something is changing reality.
We all experience life through our own subjective lenses, interpreting day-to-day happenings differently than everyone else. This contributes to individuality, free will, and the ability to think for ourselves. But of course, the way that we witness our world often results in lapses of memory or perception. We sometimes seem to remember events happening differently than others or our perception of time is skewed.
And individual memory lapses are easily written off when everyone else’s memory says otherwise. But how does one explain false memories that are held by a significantly large portion of the population?
Confabulation is the psychiatric term for replacing a gap in your memory with a falsification. So, what about mass confabulation? Well, that’s become a conspiracy of sorts, referred to as The Mandela Effect.
Examples of The Mandela Effect
The Mandela Effect was given its name by Fiona Broome, who seemed to remember hearing about the death of Nelson Mandela on the news while he was imprisoned in the 1980s. In “reality,” Mandela survived until late 2013 and did not even become president of South Africa until 1994. But as it turned out, her memory was shared by a deluge of similarly convinced people, resulting in many other instances in which large swaths of the population have claimed to experience the same confabulated memories.
Could this be the result of one person incorrectly remembering a historical event or cultural icon propagating their misinterpretation to be inaccurately remembered by the masses? Or could it be evidence of a multiverse in which waves of events from a parallel universe have washed over into ours, creating subtle nuances in the time-space continuum, where there was once a children’s book called the Berenstein Bears, instead of the Berenstain Bears? It’s more interesting to explore the latter.
While the Berenstain Bears is ostensibly a mundane and inconsequential example of the Mandela Effect, there are other instances that are so uncanny, they’re hard to ignore. For example, when Darth Vader reveals his paternalistic relationship to Luke in Star Wars, most remember him saying, “Luke, I am your father.” In ‘reality,’ he says, “No, I am your father.” While an intransigent Star Wars fan might scoff at someone who misquotes such an important scene, it can’t be ignored that most people remember it in the former. Even James Earl Jones, who voiced Darth Vader, remembers the line incorrectly.
Movie quotes aside, an example of a famous real-life event that has been brought into the mystery of the Mandela Effect regards the famous protester at Tiananmen Square. The ‘Tank Man,’ whose defiant act of rebellion, standing in front of a tank with grocery bags in hand, is remembered by many as resulting in his death from being run over. In fact, he was not run over and there is no evidence of it, but many remember his crushing demise distinctly.
This is nothing new to those familiar with the theory and there are many other examples that support it; so many that there is an entire subreddit devoted to the effect. With topics ranging from movies that never existed to discrepancies in historical events, people vehemently claim to remember very particular things differently, but on a large, collective scale. Some people’s reactions are visceral when they experience new revelations due to the Mandela Effect, to the point of incurring panic attacks or questioning reality.
Mandela Effect Theories and CERN
One pragmatist theory for explaining the Mandela Effect is that it is simply a failure in the collective memory. Our brains are very easily influenced by our own filters, as well as the perception of others. Many common instances of the Mandela Effect are trivial and maybe just went unnoticed in the past, or are the result of conclusions that our brains jump to based on the context of an image or video. But some are substantial, like an entire country hundreds of miles out of place.
One of the more intriguing theories that attempt to explain this phenomenon points a finger at CERN and the large hadron collider in Switzerland. CERN’s experiments are intended to find elusive particles that could potentially show evidence of a multiverse, create tiny black holes, or discover dark matter. While all of this sounds very exciting, it also sounds potentially dangerous. What could possibly go wrong if we opened up a black hole in Europe, or tapped into another dimension with consequences unknown? While the scientists at CERN assure us their experiments are conducted on such a controlled, small scale as to have little, if any, negative consequences, some believe that their meddling in quantum fields has led to some strange effects, resulting in some kind of interdimensional entanglement.
One of the quantum particles that CERN has been searching for is the graviton. These elusive particles correspond with how gravity would react between different dimensions and are still only hypothetical, but the way CERN describes them is intriguing.
“If gravitons exist, it should be possible to create them at the LHC, but they would rapidly disappear into extra dimensions. Collisions in particle accelerators always create balanced events – just like fireworks – with particles flying out in all directions. A graviton might escape our detectors, leaving an empty zone that we notice as an imbalance in momentum and energy in the event. We would need to carefully study the properties of the missing object to work out whether it is a graviton escaping to another dimension or something else.”
Is CERN inducing these gravitons, creating holes to other dimensions, and swapping idiosyncrasies in our world? Or are we just having a collective memory lapse?
