Golden Orb at the Bottom of the Sea

Count how many horror and apocalyptic movies started with scientists on a research mission finding something. Now add one.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is just such a group of scientists, and they just found something in the Gulf of Alaska that they can’t identify.
So its deets: a ‘golden orb’ about four inches across, found two miles below the sea on a sea mountain, or ‘seamount.’ And it is biological in origin.

We’ll, it didn’t eat the ship, and at this point, we don’t know if it inserted any funky fungus or tendrils into the brainstems of the exploring party. But it may be smart. The NOAA scientists are limited as far as how much they can study the thing on the boat, so it is in transit to somewhere, hopefully locked tighter that my wallet before the bills are paid. There, all of the experts can tear the thing apart and figure out what it is.

Is it alien? Did one of the Unidentified Submersible Object (USOs) drop an egg out of the hatch? Seriously, what if that was the husk of embryo Godzilla? Are they taking it to a lab in Tokyo, because that would be pretty sweet. I swear, though, that if we don’t hear anything about this, the conspiracy is on. Or they find out it was the regurgitated liver of a Pacific Deep Sea Turdfish that’s got the face of an old drunk man.

In actual seriousness, we don’t know a lot about what’s in the sea. We have the stars mapped out better. And we haven’t made contact with an alien race, but who knows, there might be an alien colony carved into the Mariana’s trench. And we just grabbed what they call a soccer ball that drifted waaaay off their field.

Add this to the 47,000 year-old worm they just woke up. The movies write themselves.