I went for a walk with Brenda Malloy out beyond the Retreat House to the place we call “Evelyn’s Point”, where Evelyn Howe died. During the walk we encountered some very strange things that neither of us had ever seen before. From a distance, the tidal pool looked like it was ringed with dried salt, but on closer inspection, it was some kind of white fiberous stuff. We also found pure white crab and lobster shells. And then there was the large cityscape looking thing on the horizon again, different from what I saw the other day – larger and more defined, and definitely not a cloud formation. Charlie Carroll said he thought what I saw the other day was a mirage. I don’t know what this is. Does anyone have any ideas, or have you seen any of these things before? I think we’re being invaded by UFO’s.
UPDATE: I think I’ve discovered what the UFO is. It is actually an IFO (identified floating object), the Excelerate Northeast Gateway Floating LNG Terminal, which you normally can’t see from here unless the visibility conditions are just right, or maybe as Charlie Carroll said, we are seeing its mirage. We sailed past it last summer on Tom Robinson-Cox’s Triad, and the thing was masssive.
The Excelerate Northeast Gateway deepwater port is a ship that is three football fields long, a football field wide, with its own helicopter landing pad, and carries enough natural gas to heat 21,000 average New England homes for a year. It cost $250 million, weighs 200 million pounds, and is powered by 36,000 horsepower worth of engines that drive the ship and warm liquid gas to vapor — and can also produce electricity equivalent to the demand of 11,000 homes.
Northeast Gateway is said to be as environmentally friendly and have the minimum environmental footprint possible, through technologies that recover waste heat, function like a catalytic converter removing pollutants from exhaust, and virtually eliminate the need for using sea water in the vaporization process.
I still wonder what is causing those white crab and lobster shells and very sickly looking tidal pool.
Here is a great photo of the Excelerate taken by Donna Ardizzoni from Manchester, all lit up and more clearly visible as what it is.
E.J. Lefavour
Good Morning Gloucester 
Watch your back, EJ — the NSA may be coming for you . . . and all of us!?!
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Apparently “the website for the US National Security Agency suddenly went offline Friday in what some claimed was an Anonymous DDoS attack. The agency denied it was under attack, however, saying it was merely updating software.” Maybe these alien floating cities are cropping up all over the ocean, messing with big brother, leaving behind the shells of white crabs and lobsters that are the main food staple on their planet, and shedding their fibrous white skin when they come on land. I think they are Highly Evolved Beings that have come to help show us the way to save ourselves and our planet.
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E.J. ~ I think you will enjoy the morning post “using technology to create.” We do all talk about the magic of Gloucester ~ do you think? E.J. ~ “did you know?” 😉
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That was very cool. I can see Charlie Carroll and his quad crew developing something like that for us to enjoy here in Gloucester.
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About that sick tidal pool and bleached shells – – wondering if you could take a sample of the white foam stuff and send it to a lab for analysis? SW
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I’m going for sea smoke..
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It does look like a ghost city. I think your story is the sketch of a much longer one. Another book?
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Yeah, this is definitely weird guys !! Especially the thing on the horizon !! Halloween joke maybe?? Please let us know what it is when you find out. Kinda scary . 😉
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The distant view is atmospheric distortion, which happens over water. I bet what we’re seeing is a large ship. It is said that the same effect was seen by the Vikings in Iceland, seeing a body of land in the distance – North America.
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Brenda and EJ. Tom said it’s probably a temperature inversion at sea. The white crab stuff is a mystery, unless it was bleached out but that is unlikely this time of year. The white fibrous stuff and writing on the rocks beats the hell out of me !! inversions can play tricks on one’s eyes.
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I saw the same thing off of Magnolia beach and it looked like a barge.. Will send photo.. Thanks E.J.
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Bleaching out of shell fish shells by the sun, remnants of summer for sure. Oh to be back in summer time!
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Well ~ I took Joeys advice ~ I googled ~ as I googled around I came to the conclusion that the white stuff may be gypsum. The wikipedia post for gypsum display a couple of photos that seem to match the Gloucester photos. part of the post says “electric power stations burning coal with flue gas desulfurization produces large quantities of gypsum as a by product from the scrubbers.”
Wondering if all this has anything to do with that boat…ummmm
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And E.J. ~ they have gypsum on MARS!
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I was contemplating a dive at the breakwater. Is there anyplace for access near this site? I’m curious to see what’s going on there under the water!
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A good friend of mine drowned out there. I wouldn’t recommend it. I suppose you could always go in at Brace Cove (with a buddy) which is more protected.
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Not insinuating that you are not an experienced and safe diver, but where these photos were taken is out beyond Brace Rock in an area where you could not safely get in and out of the water without courting injury (large slippery rocks). If you went in at Brace Cove, you could make your way out beyond Brace Rock and around to the right and be at this area.
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I can appreciate that. Why is my comment back not posted, though? I wasn’t answering only you.
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I can not recommend where to dive, not being a diver. But I do know the hazards of Dog Bar Breakwater. This time of the year, explore the INSIDE of the breakwater, not the outside (save that for summer). Go with a diving buddy, and hopefully we won’t read about your rescue or body recovery in the Police notes. I say this, not for dramatic effect, but just reporting on what happens here all too often.
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Thanks for your concern but I’ve been diving for over 20 years and am familiar with Brace Cove and Dogbar Breakwater (inside is one if the simplest dives ever, btw) and can assure you that you won’t be reading about my rescue. I’ve lost plenty of friends also diving and also do non-recreational stuff as well. Thanks for your answer. I surely hope this isn’t what people think of divers in Gloucester!
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Could have been a Fata Morgana.
A Fata Morgana is an unusual and complex form of superior mirage that is seen in a narrow band right above the horizon. It is an Italian phrase derived from the vulgar Latin for “fairy” and the Arthurian sorceress Morgan le Fay, from a belief that these mirages, often seen in the Strait of Messina, were fairy castles in the air or false land created by her witchcraft to lure sailors to their death. Although the term Fata Morgana is sometimes incorrectly applied to other, more common kinds of mirages, the true Fata Morgana is not the same as an ordinary superior mirage, nor is it the same as an inferior mirage.
Fata Morgana mirages distort the object or objects which they are based on significantly, often such that the object is completely unrecognizable. A Fata Morgana can be seen on land or at sea, in polar regions or in deserts. This kind of mirage can involve almost any kind of distant object, including boats, islands, and the coastline.
A Fata Morgana is often rapidly changing. The mirage comprises several inverted (upside down) and erect (right side up) images that are stacked on top of one another. Fata Morgana mirages also show alternating compressed and stretched zones.[1]
This optical phenomenon occurs because rays of light are bent when they pass through air layers of different temperatures in a steep thermal inversion where an atmospheric duct has formed.[1] (A thermal inversion is an atmospheric condition where warmer air exists in a well-defined layer above a layer of significantly cooler air. This temperature inversion is the opposite of what is normally the case; air is usually warmer close to the surface, and cooler higher up.)
In calm weather, a layer of significantly warmer air can rest over colder dense air, forming an atmospheric duct which acts like a refracting lens, producing a series of both inverted and erect images. A Fata Morgana requires a duct to be present; thermal inversion alone is not enough to produce this kind of mirage. While a thermal inversion often takes place without there being an atmospheric duct, an atmospheric duct cannot exist without there first being a thermal inversion.
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Excellent explanation. You can see by looking at the mirage and the photo of the ship that they are similar enough looking to probably be the same thing, but this explains why it looks more stretched out. It also does change rapidly – seeing it clearly one moment and then not seeing it at all the next time you look for it. I look out to that point on the horizon all the time and had never seen it before, but then I usually would be back in Annisquam at this time of year, when the conditions for seeing it apparently are right.
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EJ, for the first time ever I saw a bleached lobster shell on the rocks in Rye NH. So odd!
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Hi Jane,
Yes, I think it is very odd. You see bleached sand dollars and other more porous types of sea life on the beach, but I have never in my life seen a pure white bleached lobster or crab. The lobster claw was actually under the overhang of a rock not exposed to direct sunlight, so I don’t think the sun had anything to do with it, but something did.
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We saw the Northeast Gateway at the end of the summer off Good Harbor Beach very clearly and wondered what it was. Thanks for explaining it.
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By Jay Fitzgerald | GLOBE CORRESPONDENT JANUARY 23, 2013
ARTICLE PREVIEW
Built to great fanfare just a few years ago, two liquefied natural gas terminals off the coast of Gloucester haven’t processed a drop of fuel in two years for the New England market, and now appear to be little more than $750 million worth of unused buoys and pipes sitting idle in in the ocean. The facilities had counted on selling imported natural gas into a New England market with high fuel prices, only to see that business radically undercut by much cheaper gas from within the continental United States.
(News to me…)
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Actually Devera your wrong. The terminal has been receiving ships for years (hence the tanker in the picture). The ship in the picture is not the terminal, it is just another LNG tanker offloading it’s cargo of Liquefied Natural Gas into the Hub line.The teterminal itself is just a pair of large underwater “floats” that are winched up into the ship, sealed, and then the cargo is offloaded through them. The terminal itself is not visible above the water, it is entirely submerged. The mooring system is so strong that it can hold a 900′ LNG tanker secure, in a category 2 hurricane! I hope I have made you more aware with correct information.
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Sometimes what looks “sickly” is just completely normal. Lobster shells, if protected from the surf, will eventually turn white with or without the sun. We have had very little rain the last month or two so the bacteria, the algae, everything living on the tidal berm might seem a little different as stuff dries out and gets concentrated without any fresh water.
Reminds me of a conversationI had with my sister while overlooking Andrews Point:
Sister: What is that brown greasy foam? It must be pollution. Isn’t it awful!
Me: Not sure but I will take a guess, there are about 10 million closely packed mussels all along the point as well as a cornucopia of other living things. They all contain proteins including fat. All living things have to die. Maybe 5% of the biomass out there might die in a month. Or a change in weather speeds that up but more mussels are born to take their place. All those dead mussels dying naturally exude fat. Go clamming and you run into one dead one and it is like a gasoline spill.
Soap is made of fat. So as those mussels die they make soap suds on the surface when the tide and the wind is right which makes quite a foamy surf.
Sister: you just made all that up!
Me: I said I was just guessing. I would have to set a grid, count some mussels, to gain some accuracy.
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As always, thanks Paul for the scientific perspective.
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Yes, thanks Paul! And w no major storms, the lobster shell I saw was high and dry and had prob been there a long while. It looked so odd. Glad to know its a normal bleaching.
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Joey – That building you see floating out in the water is just that. It was built in New London Ct. nobody here that I am aware of knows what it is either…top secret. It is on it’s way to Maine for whatever reason. I know this isn’t much information, but at least you all know you are not crazy now.
Lisa
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