What if the most compelling evidence for unidentified craft isn’t in the skies at all, but hiding beneath the waves?
That’s the argument being made by Timothy Gallaudet, a retired U.S. Navy Rear Admiral and former head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Gallaudet has launched his own investigation into what researchers call USOs, or unidentified submersible objects, and he believes the U.S. government should be pouring resources into ocean research rather than scanning the skies.
His push comes after sonar revealed something strange on the seafloor off the coast of San Diego: an abnormal trench that looks as though a large object crashed into a ridge and skidded to a stop.
“I cannot explain this feature and therefore want to use a ROV (remotely operated underwater vehicle) to dive from a ship and capture video of it,” Gallaudet told The Telegraph. “That may allow us to identify its detailed characteristics and potentially determine what caused it. No one has agreed to provide a ship or ROV yet. A hypothesis is that it may have been formed by an interaction of an UAP or USO with the seabed.”
Who Is Timothy Gallaudet?
This isn’t someone on the fringe. Gallaudet served as the Oceanographer of the Navy and commanded the Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command. He holds a PhD in oceanography from the Scripps Institution and later led NOAA as its Acting Administrator. His career was built on understanding the ocean at the deepest levels, both scientifically and militarily.
He’s also not new to the UFO conversation. Gallaudet has publicly stated that he witnessed UAP-related footage while on active duty. He has described receiving a classified email through the Navy’s secure SIPRNet system during the now-famous “Go Fast” incident, which was titled “Urgent Safety of Flight Issue.” The email reportedly warned of multiple near mid-air collisions with unidentified objects. By the next day, it had been deleted from his inbox and the inboxes of his subordinates.
“No one spoke to me about it afterwards,” Gallaudet later said.
The Case for Looking Underwater
Gallaudet’s argument is straightforward: if these objects can move seamlessly between air and water, what researchers call transmedium travel, then the ocean may actually be where they spend most of their time. And unlike the sky, which is watched by thousands of satellites, radar systems, and commercial aircraft, the ocean floor remains largely unexplored.
We’ve mapped more of the surface of Mars than the bottom of our own oceans. For something that wanted to avoid detection, the deep sea would be the perfect hiding spot.
Over the past 18 months, Gallaudet has interviewed dozens of military personnel, Coast Guard members, commercial sailors, and submariners who say they’ve observed unidentified objects in the water. The sightings span the globe, from the eastern and western Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, and the North Atlantic.
“I don’t have any data yet. That’s the next step,” he said at a Sol Foundation conference. “But this is several dozen people that have seen phenomena in our oceans. So this is happening, and I am trying to get a better understanding of it.”
Military Encounters That Went Underwater
Some of the most well-documented UAP encounters already have a strong ocean connection.
In 2019, the crew of the USS Omaha filmed a dark spherical object moving rapidly before plunging into the ocean off the coast of San Diego. The object entered the water and was not recovered.
The most famous case remains the 2004 Tic Tac incident, in which Navy pilots from the USS Nimitz carrier group encountered a 40-foot oblong craft hovering just above the water off the California coast. Commander David Fravor, who engaged the object, reported seeing a large area of churning “whitewater” on the ocean surface below it, as though something massive was just beneath the waves.
Retired Navy Lieutenant Commander Alex Dietrich, who also witnessed the Tic Tac encounter, has spoken publicly about the experience. “I don’t consider myself a whistleblower. I don’t identify as a UFO person,” she said. “But we don’t know what it was. The point was that it was weird, and we couldn’t recognise it.”
The Classified Data Problem
Gallaudet believes the U.S. Navy likely already has significant evidence of USOs buried in its acoustic data, the sonar recordings that submarines and underwater listening networks collect continuously. But that data remains classified.
“I have not seen signatures on such data, but I have spoken to one former submarine officer who has,” Gallaudet has said.
He co-authored a report with a group of academics, military officials, and government researchers urging the U.S. government to make underwater anomaly research a national ocean research priority. The report also highlighted the Aguadilla, Puerto Rico incident, in which a thermal imaging system on a U.S. Customs and Border Protection aircraft tracked a fast-moving craft that entered the Atlantic Ocean.
The establishment of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) by the Department of Defense was a step in the right direction, Gallaudet has acknowledged. Between August 2022 and April 2023 alone, 274 UFO sightings were reported by military personnel according to a report by the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
But Gallaudet argues that AARO’s focus has been too heavily tilted toward aerial phenomena, while the ocean remains largely ignored.
A New Frontier for the Unknown
The concept of USOs is not new. Sailors and naval personnel have reported strange underwater objects for centuries. But what makes Gallaudet’s push different is the credibility he brings to the table. This is a PhD oceanographer, a retired Rear Admiral, and a former head of a major federal agency saying, on the record, that something unexplained is happening in our oceans and that the government should be investigating it seriously.
Whether these underwater anomalies turn out to be natural geological features, classified military technology, or something far stranger, the ocean remains one of the last great unknowns on Earth. Gallaudet’s work is a reminder that when it comes to the unexplained, we may have been looking in the wrong direction all along.
The truth might not be out there. It might be down there.
Seen something unexplained? We’d love to hear your story. Send your report to Reports@ParaRational.com
