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Since August 2025, a UFO-reporting app has recorded more than 9,000 sightings of mysterious unidentified objects close to U.S. coastlines and major bodies of water, according to Marine Technology News.
These reports are emblematic of a public fascination with Unidentified Submerged Objects, or USOs. Based on eyewitness accounts, some of the objects spotted in and around Earth’s waters seem to travel between air and water at shocking speeds of hundreds of miles per hour. UFO enthusiasts believe they may be alien spacecraft in and around Earth’s waters.
In what is arguably the latest era in a long history of such sightings all over land and sea, these strange objects have gone largely unexplained, if not denied. But a small group of UFO devotees, including government security and military officials, have believed for years that the U.S. should be seriously looking into potentially threatening anomalies in bodies of water, as well as on land and in the air. In a bipartisan effort, that group ultimately helped convince the U.S. government to legislate a name change for the term it uses to refer to UFOs today—from “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” to “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena,” or UAPs.
The Pentagon has been disclosing documents related to UFOs. In one recently released iPhone video, called “Orbs Over the Pond,” the Pentagon describes “a light source below the horizon, hovering above a pond at an estimated distance of 2,700 feet.” This object appeared as “a ‘plasma-like sphere’ intermittently changing shape and luminosity. At times, the primary light source appeared to separate into smaller luminous points,” the Pentagon said. The object disappeared after about 45 minutes.
An analysis attributed the sighting to “sunlight backscattering” from reflected snow illuminating the underside of low-altitude clouds. However, this description came with “low confidence,” and the case is considered unresolved.
Most of the thousands of USO sightings people have reported on the Enigma app come from California and Florida, according to the nonpartisan organization’s website.
It was off the coast of San Diego, California that perhaps the most infamous USO incident occurred—the “Tic-Tac” sighting. U.S. Navy Cmdr. David Fravor and his F/A-18F squadron spotted a radar anomaly about 100 miles off the coast on November 14, 2004. That afternoon, Fravor looked down from his fighter jet and noticed something white and oblong right above the whitewater. He saw an object onscreen, observed in both infrared and visible light, that was about 45 feet long without wings or other protrusions. It seemed to be eerily moving along with the plane, leaving no exhaust behind. But when Fravor made an attempt to intercept the strange craft, it took off at warp speed. It accelerated so fast that the sensor was unable to keep tracking it.
The incident remained classified for more than a decade. When a bootleg video of this UAP (unidentified anomalous phenomenon) surfaced on the internet several years after the encounter, it went mostly unnoticed, and so did the rumors of a possible alien spacecraft. That is, until Fravor’s account of it exploded onto the front page of The New York Times in 2017. The Tic-Tac incident would spark the creation of the Department of Defense’s UAP Task Force.
Fravor, now retired, testified at a hearing of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee’s Subcommittee on National Security, the Border and Foreign Affairs in 2023. At that same hearing was retired Rear Adm. Tim Gallaudet, former chief meteorologist of the Navy. He would eventually give a testimony of his own about another UAP video, taken when he was an active-duty officer, at a later congressional hearing. Gallaudet has been investigating these phenomena for much of his career both in and out of the military, and he believes they are USOs of potentially alien origin.
“We are pretty convinced these craft are operated by higher-order intelligence that is not human,” Gallaudet says. “I don’t believe they’re of the natural world as we know it. They may come from Earth, but I don’t believe they belong to the plant and animal kingdoms as we know them.”
Gallaudet’s testimony spoke to the 2015 “Go Fast” video captured by the infrared sensor on a Navy F/A-18 aircraft during an exercise on the East Coast. In this video, an object that appears as hardly more than a white dash zooms across the screen. The speed of the object in the water—and whatever could be discerned about its structure—appeared to defy the laws of physics.
“So far, we have not built anything that can go that fast in the water and does not change speed from water to air,” Gallaudet says. “Many have had super-fast acceleration and made right-angle turns. We have not yet been able to engineer vehicles that can do that.”
What sort of beings could have invented something so advanced? Gallaudet thinks they could be extraterrestrials that found a home in the oceans of Earth or an undiscovered intelligent species that might have been around for millennia. But not knowing what their intent or full capabilities are “is a potential security risk,” he says.
Not everyone was convinced. In a hearing shortly after the one Gallaudet testified in, the director of the Pentagon’s UAP office, Jon Kosloski, stated that no extraterrestrial technology or activity could be verified. What another species might be trying to achieve with these objects remains unknown.
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