Unidentified submerged object

An unidentified submerged object (USO; pl. USOs) is a category of unidentified flying object (UFO)/unidentified anomalous phenomenon (UAP) observed to operate underwater or transition between water and air. Considered by researchers including Richard Dolan to be the aquatic equivalent of the UAP phenomenon, USO reports describe objects seen entering or emerging from oceans, lakes, and rivers; objects tracked on sonar without surface contact; and objects witnessed by naval vessels and submarines performing maneuvers no known human craft can replicate. USOs are considered a subcategory of trans-medium UAP and are distinct from conventional aerial UAP in that they reportedly appear capable of operating at depth without detectable propulsion, noise, or electromagnetic interference. The phenomenon has been documented across hundreds of years of maritime records, represented in the logs of naval vessels, submarine crews, and coastal observers on every inhabited continent.

Characteristics

Reported USO shapes vary widely across cases, including saucer-shaped craft with external machinery, disc-shaped objects, teardrop forms with no visible propulsion, and spherical luminous objects.

History

UFO researcher Richard Dolan, who collected nearly 700 USO cases for a multi-volume study — the earliest of which he rates as a strong case dating to 1717 — noted a statistical shift in sighting timing: before approximately 1967–1968, reported USO events split evenly between day and night; after that point, roughly 75 percent occurred at night. Dolan theorized this shift corresponded with the deployment of more sophisticated Navy sonar surveillance systems capable of detecting anomalous underwater movement — suggesting USOs may have adapted their behavior in response to human monitoring, notably after the introduction of operational nuclear submarines in the 1950s and the proliferation of undersea sonar mapping.

In 1965, Navy chief scientist John P. Craven reportedly received a classified briefing on Project Sand Dollar — described as an itemized inventory of objects on the sea floor of national security interest, spanning the Atlantic and other ocean regions, predating any Navy capability to retrieve them. Craven subsequently oversaw the creation of the Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle (DSRV) and Deep Submergence Search Vehicle (DSSV) programs, which he reportedly stated in his memoirs were used for numerous clandestine operations beyond their official rescue mandate.

Geographic distribution

Based on Dolan's compilation of nearly 700 cases plotted on a global map, USO activity clusters in several regions. Puerto Rico — particularly the northern coast, the western coast near Aguadilla and Aguada, and the deep Puerto Rico Trench (approximately 28,000–30,000 feet deep, the deepest point in the Atlantic Ocean) — is identified as a major hotspot, with cases recorded from the early 1960s through the 2000s. The U.S. Navy has long maintained a significant presence in these waters — including the Roosevelt Roads naval station on Puerto Rico's northeast coast — and military personnel stationed in the region have contributed sighting accounts, typically disclosed only decades after retirement. Additional hotspots include the entire Atlantic seaboard of the United States from Florida to Canada, Florida on all sides of its peninsula, Catalina Island off Los Angeles, the coasts of Brazil (particularly at the mouth of the Amazon River), Argentina, Norway, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the north Atlantic corridor strategically critical to Cold War submarine operations. The Bahamas region, location of the Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center (AUTEC), is also identified as an active USO area.

Government and military context

Classification and suppression

Military witnesses to USO events have consistently described immediate classification orders. The captain of the USS Tiru classified the 1966 encounter on the spot and sent a radio message before the submarine was out of range. A former Navy officer described to Rep. Burchett being warned after witnessing a USO that "if y'all don't talk about this — this is national security — if you ever talk about this, you'll be busting rocks for the rest of your life if you're lucky."

Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center (AUTEC)

The Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center (AUTEC), operated by the U.S. Navy in the Bahamas, has been described by researchers including Dolan as a classified facility with an unusual role in tracking anomalous underwater activity. Its location in one of the most USO-active ocean regions in the world — near the Puerto Rico Trench and the Florida straits — has led to speculation that it functions partly as a monitoring station for non-human underwater activity.

National Underwater Reconnaissance Office (NURO)

The National Underwater Reconnaissance Office (NURO) — characterized as "the hidden younger brother of the NRO" — was established in 1969 to coordinate the U.S. Navy and CIA's underwater reconnaissance activities, analogous to how the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) coordinates aerial surveillance. Former CIA Deputy Director and NASA administrator Bobby Ray Inman reportedly stated in a 2018 university speech that he had directed NURO but that he was unable to discuss its activities in detail. Dolan has noted that NURO is "incredibly secretive" and "may never" disclose its knowledge of anomalous underwater contacts.

Notable cases

Main article:

List of USO sightings

Documented USO encounters span at least two centuries of maritime records — the earliest of which Richard Dolan rates a strong case dating to 1717, with roughly 700 catalogued across his multi-volume study. Frequently cited examples include an 1825 luminous sphere recorded by the naturalist Andrew Bloxam, the 1945 Adak Island disc that circled a U.S. transport ship, the 1966 USS Tiru UFO sighting of a football-field-sized craft transiting between ocean and sky, the October 1967 Shag Harbour splashdown, the 1971 USS John F. Kennedy orange-sphere encounter, a 2017 Gulf of Mexico oil-rig sighting, and the 2019 USS Omaha encounter.

Soviet submarine encounters

Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, previously classified Soviet Navy accounts became accessible to researchers. Soviet submarines operating in the northern Atlantic through the late 1960s and 1970s reportedly encountered objects in the water that produced distinctive croaking or pulsing sounds — referred to in Russian naval slang as "Kari" (reportedly derived from the Russian word for frogs, due to the sound). Personnel initially assumed these were novel American acoustic systems; analysis ultimately could not attribute them to known U.S. technology.

Behavioral patterns

Richard Dolan, in the course of compiling his second volume of USO case histories covering the 1970s and 1980s alone, identified several recurring behavioural patterns across hundreds of documented encounters. USOs routinely tracked and shadowed military vessels — both surface ships and submarines — approaching at high speed before stopping and then departing. Dolan assessed that electromagnetic interference directed at military vessels appeared intentional rather than incidental, occurring at significantly higher rates against military targets than civilian ones. He characterised the entities operating USOs as "very confident in their capabilities" and engaging in what he termed "managed visibility" — a strategic calibration of how much they allow themselves to be observed as human sensing capabilities improve.

Gallaudet Sol Foundation report (2024)

Retired Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet — a former acting NOAA administrator — released a report through the SOL Foundation in March 2024, covered by Fox News and Quartz, documenting underwater UFO sightings and marking one of the first formal military acknowledgments that the UAP phenomenon extends into the ocean domain. Gallaudet wrote: "The fact that unidentified objects with unexplainable characteristics are entering US water space and the DOD is not raising a giant red flag is a sign that the government is not sharing all it knows about all-domain anomalous phenomena." Gallaudet assessed that the technology involved is not of human origin: "Pilots, credible observers and calibrated military instrumentation have recorded objects accelerating at rates and crossing the air-sea interface in ways not possible for anything made by humans." The report also stresses that much of what is known about the ocean floor is classified — a point Michael Salla interprets as a hint that official records of anomalous underwater activity exist at a classification level above public FOIA access. Gallaudet has been among the most prominent recently retired U.S. military figures to raise the subject of USOs publicly as a legitimate national security and scientific concern.

Congressional testimony

Former Navy pilot Ryan Graves, testifying publicly on UAP encounters and discussing the phenomenon on The Joe Rogan Experience, confirmed receiving reports of USO activity from submarine operators: "I have reports from submarine operators of very fast objects under the water... USOs, underwater or unidentified submerged objects. Our planet is mostly covered in water. Our sensing underwater is not as good as in the air. There's less traffic under there. It would be, you know, a logical place to set up shop."

Alleged underwater base locations

A central hypothesis in USO research is that one or more non-human intelligences maintain permanent infrastructure in Earth's deep ocean environments — bases or habitats that may predate human civilization and that would explain the geographic clustering of USO activity around specific oceanic features. The ocean reportedly provides pressure stability, electromagnetic shielding, thermal consistency, biological richness as a scientific observation environment, and concealment from surface observers. Researcher Richard Souter documented illustrations commissioned by the U.S. Navy in the late 1960s depicting undersea bases and operations, suggesting that the military establishment had by then already entertained the engineering feasibility of permanent underwater installations.

Michael Salla cites ancient records — Babylonian accounts of the sea deity Ea/Enki and Phoenician records of the fish god Dagon — as the earliest documentation of NHI emerging from the ocean and sharing advanced technology, wisdom, and cultural knowledge with surface humanity. He interprets USO sightings as manifestations of a still-present underwater civilization that has maintained continuous residence in Earth's oceans since these ancient encounters.

U.S. Army contact JP, a recurring source for Salla, reportedly described being transported on a non-human craft to an underwater city complex in the Bermuda Triangle area — three distinct cities under large domes, each containing a metropolitan-scale area, connected by large glass tubes; the craft that transported him was described as an advanced submarine-type vehicle operated by the underwater civilization. French contactee Jean-Charles Moyen independently described being taken as a ten-year-old to an underwater complex in the same area, describing it as three hemisphere-shaped structures connected by tubes — a description Salla considers consistent with JP's account, close enough that he regards them as the same installation.

Constitutional attorney Danny Sheehan identified a separate alleged underwater base location off Guadalupe Island in the Pacific, southwest of Baja California — stating that the entire USS Nimitz carrier group was deployed to monitor USO activity at that site and that submarines recorded over one hundred objects entering and exiting the ocean there: "There's an underwater base for sure right off Guadalupe Island down underneath the sea... they monitored over a hundred sightings of UFOs coming and going down into the ocean right there and going down to the bottom of the ocean and they were monitored by the submarines." Sheehan distinguished this from a separate alleged installation in the Sedona, Arizona area, which he characterized as a different type of base involving Tall Whites and mantis-category beings accompanied by helicopters.

Naval Institute biological framing

The U.S. Naval Institute's Naval History Magazine has framed USOs in biological rather than anomalous terms. A 2022 article noted that "it has been mysterious creatures from inner space rather than outer space that have posed an actual threat to the Navy," citing the 1978 USS Stein (DE-1065) incident — in which giant-squid claws far larger than any previously documented specimen were found embedded in cuts in the ship's sonar dome coating — and the 1976 capture of the first megamouth shark by a Navy torpedo recovery boat. The article acknowledged that "there are an unknown amount of animals in the ocean that have yet to be identified." USO researchers note that the Navy's public framing of underwater unknowns as biological, while simultaneously maintaining the highly classified National Underwater Reconnaissance Office (NURO), is consistent with a broader pattern of institutional compartmentalisation on the subject.

Farrell oceanic-domain framing

Historian Joseph P. Farrell characterized the underwater dimension of the phenomenon as strategically attractive to any non-human intelligence precisely because Earth's oceans remain largely unexplored — making the ocean floor the ideal operating environment for a civilization that wishes to remain concealed from surface observers. Farrell cited the multi-decade record of USO reports — objects traveling at speeds no submarine technology could match — as evidence that something has been operating in the ocean domain consistently throughout the modern UFO era.

References

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