When Wired spoke to NOAA seismologist Robert Dziak, he made it clear that nobody tasked with uncovering the mystery behind the “bloop” seriously thought a giant animal was responsible.
He also explained what led the public to believe otherwise.
As Dziak told Wired, “What has led to a lot of the misperception of the animal origin sound of the Bloop is how the sound is played back.”
By that, he meant that the noise commonly heard by the public was about 16 times the normal speed of the “bloop’s” original audio file, which made it sound like an animal cry.
Dziak further explained that when the sound was slowed down to its normal speed, it sounded more like an earthquake or a rolling thunderstorm.
That meant that for NOAA scientists, the most likely explanation was that a sustained natural process was causing the “bloop.” They just had to figure out what it was.
What made the “bloop” so exciting to researchers was the fact that it’s actually quite rare for the NOAA’s hydrophones to pick up a sound they didn’t recognize.
As Dziak explained to Wired, almost every sound that comes in fits into one of five major categories: Geophysical, anthropogenic, ice, weather, and animals.
