Unidentified Submerged Objects

The following article was written by Paul Meehan.

In 1970, anomaly researcher Ivan T. Sanderson published a book entitled Invisible Residents. While unidentified objects are usually associated with travelling through Earth’s atmosphere, Sanderson pointed out that 50 percent of UFO sightings had occurred over, coming from, going away over, plunging into or coming out of various bodies of water. One may argue with Sanderson’s statistics, but in the book he cites numerous reports of “Unidentified Submerged Objects” or USOs that occurred during the 1950s and 60s.

Fast forward to October of 2025, when Tennessee congressman Tim Burchett revealed in an interview that U.S. Navy personnel described chasing USOs that moved at impossible speeds of hundreds of miles per hour underwater. He also claimed that an anonymous admiral had told him about a documented case of a craft as large as a football field moving at such speeds. Burchett also claims that extraterrestrials have five or six underwater bases in deep sea areas off the U.S. coast. 

UFO researcher Dr. Michael Salla corroborated Burchett’s statement, claiming that a very deep area of the Atlantic Ocean near the Bahamas was the site of one of these alleged USO bases.  Salla revealed that the U.S. Navy operates a research facility in that area called AUTEC, which is an acronym for Atlantic Undersea Testing and Evaluation Center.  He compared AUTEC to the Air Force’s Area 51, where captured alien craft are allegedly tested.

Unidentified underwater craft have recently been caught on camera, including the infamous “Tic Tac” videos captured by U.S. Navy commander David Fravor while flying his F/A-18 off the coast of California in November, 2004. In February, 2023 crew members of the U.S.S. Jackson recorded four similar objects coming out of the ocean off the coast of Southern California. The objects were detected on the ships radar and thermal imaging systems before flying off at high speed. In July 2019 an unidentified flying object was videoed from the deck of the U.S. Navy destroyer U.S.S. Omaha descending into the ocean off the coast of California. A phone camera video depicting two mysterious lights moving underneath the waters of the Fort Lauderdale River, Florida in 2025 has also been recorded. On October 26, 2005 a  UFO reporting app named Enigma, claimed that they have received reports of more than 9000 USO sightings within five or ten miles of the U.S. coastline with the majority of these reports recorded from Florida and California.

In  March 2024, a  report to the think tank known as The Sol Foundation, by the U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, warned that these USOs jeopardize U.S. maritime security by posing a navigation hazard to our naval forces. His report states that, “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.” As about 71 percent of the Earth’s surface is covered by water, and only about 5 percent of the world’s oceans have been explored, this environment could easily constitute the hidden domain of an unknown presence.