"The American ship Eltanin, owned by the Military Sea Transportation Service, was designed for use in the National Science Foundation Antarctic research program."

"On August 29, 1964, the Eltanin was a thousand miles west of Cape Horn," and just north of Antarctica, "and its crew was busily engaged in photographing the ocean floor, which reaches a depth of 13,500 feet (3,105 meters) in that area. A specially designed camera, housed in a metal cylinder, was being pulled along by a cable."

"Later that day, when darkroom technicians developed the exposed film, they found that the camera had captured an image of a strange device jutting out of the mud of the ocean. A central mast supported four series of cross rods, which made the object appear to be something like a cross between a television antenna and a telemetry antenna. The cross rods were spaced at ninety-degree angles and showed white knobs on their extremities. The mysterious object appeared to be man-made and seemed definitely out of place in the anticipated natural environment of the ocean floor."

"The specially constructed underwater camera had been designed to bounce along the seabed and to take pictures at regular intervals. It was only a fortunate, albeit engimatic, accident that the unidentifiable object had been photographed."

"When the Eltanin docked at Auckland, New Zealand on December 4, 1964, a reporter questioned Dr. Thomas Hopkins, senior marine biologist on board, about the 8 X 10 prints of the underwater anomaly. Dr. Hopkins was quoted as saying that the device could hardly be a plant, for at that depth, there is no light.

Without light there is no process of photosynthesis and plants cannot live.

Larry Hatch reports on his website that: A marine biologist pointed Tom DeMary to the book The Face of the Deep (1971) by Heezen and Hollister which reproduces the photo taken by the USNS Eltanin, and a redrawing of an earlier drawing by Alexander Agassiz in 'Three Cruises of the Blake' (1888).

An extract from The Face of the Deep: "Cladorhiza, a particularly dramatic [sponge] which somewhat resembles a space-age microwave antenna, was not uncommon in the early dredge hauls of Challenger and Blake.

Agassiz observed that 'they are sponges with a long stem ending in ramifying roots, sunk deeply into the mud. The stem has nodes with four to six club-like appendages. They evidently cover like bushes extensive tracts of the bottom.'"...