Peter Lindberg, a commercial diver who trawls for treasure in the Baltic, has mapped a sonar image that he intends to excavate in the Spring. The object is circular, with a diameter of 195 feet.

While the type of sonar image that Lindberg recorded does occasionally give a false read, there is definitely something down there. And, from the looks of those sonar images, it is something from a long time ago… in a galaxy far, far away…

With news of this possible UFO in the Baltic Sea, Twitter ignited with buzz. People on the social media giant can’t get enough of the story.

Is There a UFO Wreck in Baltic Sea? Treasure Hunters Probe Mystery abcn.ws/xphWJB

— ABC News (@ABC) January 31, 2012

Shipwreck in Baltic Sea? A UFO? The Millennium Falcon? Disc-Shaped Object on Sonar as Large as 747 abcn.ws/xWju7h — Riki Beck (@rlbocean) January 31, 2012
 

Shipwreck in Baltic Sea: Disc-Shaped Object on Sonar as Large as 747 – ABC News#.Tyf-iCOkl4s#.Tyf-iCOkl4s abcn.ws/zMNqG4 (via @ABC)

— Barry Leis (@Barry_Leis) January 31, 2012

The Truth is at the bottom of the ocean. Shipwreck in Baltic Sea: A UFO? Disc-Shaped Object on Sonar as Large as 747 -http://abcn.ws/AoWouN — Dan Hacker (@danhacker) January 31, 2012
 

Baltic Mystery: Disc-Shaped Object on Sonar as Large as 747 sgp.cm/3f8254

— Trey Dunn (@oncetreyminator) January 31, 2012

Paranormal stories: Shipwreck hunters find mysterious UFO-like object at the bottom of the Baltic Sea – Daily Mail bit.ly/xkeGzS — spacebuggz (@spacebuggz) January 29, 2012
 

Unexplained Object Discovered At Bottom of Baltic Sea – Shipwreck hunters have located an unusual object at the bott… ow.ly/1gWOYS

— The_Professorr (@The_Professorr) January 26, 2012

Team Leader Peter Lindberg said:

“I have been doing this for nearly 20 years so I have a seen a few objects on the bottom, but nothing like this, we had been out for nine days and we were quite tired and we were on our way home, but we made a final run with a sonar fish and suddenly this thing turned up.”

On the run, the team used a side-scan sonar, with this tool they found a 60 meter in diameter disc shaped object with a tail-like protrusion measuring 400 meters long, then on a second pass they discovered a second object 200 meters away.

In the professional opinion of Lindberg’s team, they say the objects are too big to have fallen off a ship or to even be part of a wreck, but they say it’s anyone’s guess as to what’s down there.

Lindberg went on to say:

“We’ve heard lots of different kinds of explanations, from George Lucas’s spaceship — the Millennium Falcon — to ‘it’s some kind of plug to the inner world,’ like it should be hell down there or something, but we won’t know until we have been down there.”

Andreas Olsson, Sweden’s Head of Archaeology at Maritime Museums says he is intrigued by the picture, but he remains a skeptic on what it could be. The problem with the picture is the reliability of one-side scanners, It makes it difficult to tell if it’s a natural formation or something un-natural. Lindberg says the picture “isn’t the best it could be”, but the team plans to investigate further into the matter. If the mysery object doesn’t turn out to be something awesome, still adrenaline junkies with money want to pay to get an up-close view via submarine.

Project Blue Book has accounts of UFO sightings from every state, which are available online at Footnote.com. Project Blue Book allows users to decide for themselves if the UFO sightings are a conspiracy theory, hallucinations or evidence of extraterrestrial visitors.

"The collections on our site illustrate how Footnote.com is changing the way people access and interact with history," said Russell Wilding, CEO of Footnote.com.

"Through our social networking tools people from around the world can come together to discuss their findings and provide their own unique insights through annotations and creating their own web pages."

Along with free access to Project Blue Book records, Footnote also offers a seven-day free trial of records that have been digitized from archives in the U.S., such as the National Archives.

Since then, IBM and Yahoo have added a few partners to sweeten the appeal of the lengthily-named IBM OmniFind Yahoo Edition. Some prominent tech names have signed on with the project.

Cognos does various business intelligence applications. The company integrated its GO! Search from Cognos 8 with OmniFind Yahoo to enable users to sift through both Cognos and unstructured document repositories.

The SEM crowd who work with Fortune Interactive and OmniFind Yahoo have a new add-on available. Called Feature Match, part of Fortune Interactive’s SEMLogic product, the add-on extends the featured links capability within OmniFind Yahoo.

“Not only will your featured links appear above the search results, but other results found by the OmniFind algorithm will be given more importance when they are found to be thematically similar to the featured links,” Fortune Interactive noted on their site.

The OmniFind Yahoo product may be downloaded at no charge. It is supported on Windows XP/2003, and RedHat and SuSE Linux Enterprise distributions.

That movie came out in 1992, just ahead of the World Wide Web, a few years ahead of decent search technology, and over a decade before IBM and Yahoo started giving away Omnifind to any site publisher who wished to implement it.

IBM Omnifind Yahoo Edition is advertised as an enterprise search solution, capable of supporting up to 500,000 documents. The companies tout it as an easy to install and manage solution, and by Phillips’ account, they succeeded.

In a phone chat with WebProNews, Anomalies.net founder Phillips described how the process did go as smoothly as advertised. UFOCrawler launched with Omnifind providing the infrastructure for searching such esoterica as UFO evidence, strange contrails in the skies, and the aforementioned cattle mutilation.

Phillips said UFOCrawler has about 140,000 URLs indexed, which took about a day to crawl to get the search ready to launch. They switched from the open source Nutch search engine, which is part of Apache’s Lucene project.

Lucene also powers OmniFind, but for Phillips the improvements really came in the administrative interface. Being an experienced Unix admin, he had no trouble navigating Nutch for configuration purposes. Other folks in the project needed better administrative tools, and Omnifind delivered them.

UFOCrawler has held up well under recent, heavy interest. It continued to function without problems even under the effects of a powerful Slashdotting, Phillips said, after the popular tech news site featured it in a post.

Mother would approve.

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UFO Hunters Actively Use Internet

All the conspiracy theorists and X-Files fans who didn’t stick to their French language studies after school ended will give online translation sites a workout once CNES, the French space agency, opens up its archives of UFO sightings to the Internet.

Reuters noted the names of people who submitted reports related to 1,600 incidents would not be included in the online accounts. That is probably a prudent move, since they could be subject to a lot of intrusions on their time.

The reports include accounts from professionals like airline pilots, who in turn reported sightings to law enforcement. CNES has been collecting these since the late 1970s with an eye on studying and eventually releasing them.

With 6,000 reports on 1,600 incidents, duplicate observations of the same incident will be among the information CNES releases. Since some of these reports will come from pilots, who have the training to understand whether they are seeing naturally occurring phenomena or something else, they should make for some compelling reading.

Many UFO sightings have been attributed to factors like secret aircraft tests by the military, weather balloons, and other plausible reasons. But cases do exist where UFOs remain unidentified.

One very current example happened in early November 2006 at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. An AP report said accounts of a saucer-shaped object hovering over the airport made it to the Federal Aviation Administration.

The FAA initially denied such reports had been made. They promptly backtracked when the Chicago Tribune smacked them with a Freedom of Information Act request that revealed evidence FAA lied to the paper.

The sighting has been dismissed as weather-related phenomena. When the French reports come online, there will probably be lots of similar accounts from that archive.

The truth is out there.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.