By Chethana Janith, Jadetimes News
Legislators went so far as to formally change the way they refer to UFO sightings over and under bodies of water.
In 1992, “multiple witnesses” in California reported that more than 200 disk-shaped objects soundlessly exited Santa Monica Bay waters, hovered for a moment, and then sped away into the sky. Six years later, U.S. Navy Chief Petty Officer Charles Howard wrote an account of an apparent underwater anomaly. “My ship was visiting Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, when I saw three strange, big white lights in the water,” he said in the History Channel show UFO Files. They were “10 or 20 feet on each side with a rounded shape,” according to Howard’s written account.
Claims of such Unidentified Submerged Objects, or USOs, have intrigued UFO enthusiasts for decades. Based on eyewitness reports, some of the objects have even seemed to traverse the boundary between air and water, traveling at shocking speeds of hundreds of miles per hour.
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 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,” reflecting lobbyists’ concerns about underwater threats.
The slight name change may appear to be a simple case of semantics, but it proves the Pentagon sees underwater UFOs as a legitimate concern.
The Department of Defense has made it clear that it doesn’t assume UAPs necessarily indicate extraterrestrial activity. In fact, these phenomena have so far proven to have mundane explanations. These include human-made technology like drones and weather balloons, Starlink satellites, or atmospheric events such as lenticular cloud formations.
The Government’s Name Game
A shift in how the government handled UFO reports first came to a head in the 2010s. Pressure from legislators, as well as public interest in the government’s disclosure of classified UFO reports, started changing defense culture. For instance, after decades of shielding information on sightings from the public, the military now encourages service members to report unexplained phenomena. Today, Navy pilots report odd incidents in the interest of national defense, such as the 2019 sighting by a Navy warship that seemed to link UFOs and USOs.
In 2021, the Department of Defense created the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, a program within the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence meant to “standardize collection and reporting” of UFO sightings. Aiming to integrate knowledge and efforts across the Pentagon and other government agencies, the Office of the Secretary of Defense established the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) soon afterward. By law, every federal agency must “review, identify, and organize each Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) record in its custody for disclosure to the public and transmission to the National Archives.”
Prior to the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act-which authorizes funding levels for the U.S. military and other defense priorities, UAP originally stood for only aerial objects. Now, it includes underwater and trans-medium phenomena. It’s why AARO was so named, to investigate “All-domain” anomalies. But, before the legal name change, AARO was already considering objects over and in the water, so it was a little confusing to keep calling them all “aerial.”
In 2022, the terminology to describe unexplained incidents officially switched from “aerial” to “anomalous.” Congress enacted the name change that December. At the time, Ronald Moultrie, the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security told a roundtable of AARO:
“You may have caught that I just said unidentified anomalous phenomena, whereas in the past the department has used the term unidentified aerial phenomena. This new terminology expands the scope of UAP to include submerged and trans-medium objects. Unidentified phenomena in all domains, whether in the air, ground, sea or space, pose potential threats to personnel security and operations security, and they require our urgent attention.”
This legal change traces back to pressures from UFO enthusiasts who believed submerged and trans-medium objects, which seem to fly between air and sea, should be included in the government’s potential threat evaluation. These proponents include U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, Ph.D., who published a report on the potential maritime threat of USOs, and Luis Alizondo, who once ran the government’s secret Pentagon unit, the 2007–12 Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. A dearth of data about USOs and UAPs is “unsettling,” because they “jeopardize US maritime security, which is already weakened by our relative ignorance about the global ocean,” Rear Admiral Gallaudet wrote in his report. In addition, this is an opportunity to expand maritime science and meet the security and scientific challenges of the future, he added.
The Hunt For Solid Evidence
Yet, evidence of submerged objects is murky at best, says UAP investigator Mick West. There is “vastly less evidence than for flying objects,” he explains in an email. “You can’t see very far underwater, so there’s no video or photos. There are only stories about anomalous sonar returns and occasional sightings that might as well be of sea monsters.”
The Puerto Rico “Aguadilla” incident of 2013 also influenced USO and trans-medium enthusiasts, West says. However, they base their claim largely on one video of the incident, which when analyzed turns out to have “a perfectly reasonable explanation of two wedding lanterns and parallax illusions,” West says.
Based on the angle of the camera, positioned on a moving airplane, and consequently its changing line of sight on the flying objects, the viewer sees the objects streaking rapidly over the ocean, apparently diving in, and then emerging again. West’s analysis confirms a theory first proposed by Rubén Lianza, the head of the Argentinian Air Force’s UAP investigation committee.
The objects were wedding lanterns that originated at a nearby hotel and floated on the wind. Lianza confirmed the hotel typically released lanterns that were consistent with the video. The thermal camera (which reads heat) made it appear that the objects merged with the ocean because when the lantern’s flames were hidden, they were about the same temperature as the water they floated over. At the same time, the lanterns seemed to emerge from the water when the flame was visible again.
New trans-medium and submerged UAP reports could crop up in the future. The government will only be able to take reports of strange underwater lights or objects flying out of the water seriously, says West, if the sightings come with enough solid evidence to follow up with a solid analysis.
