Look! Down in the ocean! It’s a golden idol! It’s a piece of a UFO!
Alas, the “golden orb” that had captured online attention isn’t quite as earth-shattering as an ancient statue or extraterrestrial salvage.
Turns out that the mysterious golden object found off the coast of Alaska was a chip off of a curious sea creature.
Scientists have solved the mystery of a “golden orb” found thousands of feet underwater by researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association in 2023, the agency said on Wednesday.
— CBS News (@CBSNews)April 23, 2026
The object was first found in the Gulf of Alaska in 2023, perCBS News.
It was discovered by a remotely operated underwater vehicle, which spotted the “strange, golden, mound-shaped object with a hole in it, stuck to a rock” about two miles underwater.
Samples of the mysterious object were collected and sent to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History to be analyzed — but things weren’t as simple as scientists expected.
“This turned into a special case that required focused efforts and expertise of several different individuals. This was a complex mystery that required morphological, genetic, deep-sea and bioinformatics expertise to solve,” Allen Collins, the director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries’ National Systematic Laboratory,saidof the find.
Collins added, “We work on hundreds of different samples and I suspected that our routine processes would clarify the mystery.”
Source: VidNews » Feed
