Scientists help solve mystery of “alien pod”

David Malmquist - UFO—unidentified floating object—haunts lake at City Center

Tracy Collier, an employee at Home Technologies in City Center at Oyster Point, was walking her employer’s Westie around the Center’s manmade lake on Thursday when she saw a large, mysterious blob floating in the water.

Co-worker Charlie Schmuck says “The lake is behind our office. Tracy was walking by the lake, saw the object, and asked everyone else to come out and take a look.”

Tracy thought it was “a huge dead snake.”

Charlie thought it “looked like some weird underwater fungus, like the ones that explode when you poke them.”

The scientists at VIMS were equally intrigued. The e-mail read “The object is about 4 feet in diameter. It has moved about 6 feet down the shoreline in the last 24 hours. It 'jiggles' when the waves in the lake hit it… when we prod it, it seems to be spongy feeling… The texture appears to be that of a rock with algae spots on it—it is brown and yellow, with a pattern of some type.” ...

A brief flurry of internal e-mails followed. The marine tunicate Eudistoma hepaticum? Unlikely, as the lake contains fresh water. A Halloween prank in which someone moved a marine organism to the lake? Perhaps. The final consensus was that the organism is Pectinatella magnifica—the "magnificient bryozoan." ...

via Virginia Institute of Marine Science - VIMS scientists help solve mystery of “alien pod”.