Real World Horror: Mystery ‘pinging noise’ coming from the Arctic seafloor

It sounds like the opening scene to John Carpenter’s 1982 classic The Thing, but it’s it’s very real.

Animals in northern Canada have recently been spooked by a mysterious “pinging noise” that appears to be coming from the Arctic seafloor. The sound has been heard in the Fury and Hecla Strait, about 75 miles from the Inuit hamlet of Igloolik in Foxe Basin, Nunavut.

“The sound that has been heard in the area seems to be emitted from the seabed and underwater,” Aggu MLA Paul Quassa said in an Oct. 25 statement, adding that the sound can only be detected by audio equipment and not by the human ear.

According to the Nunatsiaq News, a sailboat picked up the sound on its on-board sonar over the summer. Several people have called in to local radio stations to say that they, too, have heard the noise.

“Our constituents as well as hunters and boaters have reported that the area in question is almost devoid of sea mammals and that hunting has been poor in the area for quite some time,” Quassa said. He also announced that Premier Peter Taptuna’s office contacted the Department of National Defence in Ottawa.

“The Department of National Defence has been informed of the strange noises emanating in the Fury and Hecla Strait area, and the Canadian Armed Forces are taking the appropriate steps to actively investigate the situation,” DND senior media liaison Evan Koronewski told Nunatsiaq News.

The Canadian military conducted a 90-minute survey of the area but found only walruses and whales, and no irregular pings or hums. “The cause of the pings remains mired in mystery,” a military spokesperson told the BBC.

Several theories have arisen as to the origin of the sound, including mining operations or Greenpeace trying to scare animals away so they couldn’t be hunted, but both of those organizations have denied any involvement or that they are even operating in that area. “Not only would we not do anything to harm marine life, but we very much respect the right of Inuit to hunt and would definitely not want to impact that in any way,” Greenpeace spokesperson Farrah Khan said.

For now, the source of the sound remains a mystery. Perhaps it’s a UFO frozen in the ice. Or perhaps, as is the popular theory on Twitter, Cthulhu is waking up to save us from the 2016 election.