Underwater UFOs: What USO Reports Actually Show

Among the best documented cases is Shag Harbour, Nova Scotia. On the night of 4 October 1967, several people, including local residents and officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, reported lights over the water and an object that appeared to descend into the harbour. Rescuers who went out expecting a downed aircraft found a patch of foam on the water but no wreckage or survivors. The Royal Canadian Navy later sent divers to search, and they reported finding nothing. No aircraft was reported missing. The case appears in Canadian government records.

A second frequently discussed case comes from April 2013, when a U.S. Customs and Border Protection aircraft near Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, recorded infrared video of a small object moving low over land and water and at one point appearing to pass into and out of the sea. The footage later circulated publicly and was analysed by private groups who reached very different conclusions.

In May 2021, the filmmaker Jeremy Corbell released a short video recorded in July 2019 aboard the U.S. Navy combat ship USS Omaha off southern California. It showed a round object over the ocean that appeared to descend to the surface and disappear. The Pentagon confirmed that the footage had been taken by Navy personnel and was being examined by its UAP task force. It did not confirm what the object was.

The strongest cases rest on a combination of multiple witnesses and official involvement. At Shag Harbour, the witnesses included police officers and the search was an official operation, which makes the sighting itself well established even though what was seen is not. The Omaha and Aguadilla cases have video recorded by government sensors, which is unusual in ufology.

The limitations are significant. Video from a single infrared or night-vision sensor often cannot establish an object’s distance, size or speed, and apparent entry into water can be an effect of perspective or of an object passing behind a wave or dropping below the sensor’s view. In none of these cases was an object recovered, tracked continuously under water by sonar in a publicly released record, or independently confirmed to have been submerged.

No government has confirmed that any object has been observed moving between air and water in a way conventional technology cannot explain. The Pentagon acknowledged the authenticity of the Omaha footage but gave no public explanation of the object. The Canadian search at Shag Harbour ended without finding anything, and officials did not identify the source of the lights.

The ODNI and AARO reports on UAP have described objects observed in air, space and maritime domains and have noted that many cases lack enough data to be resolved. They have not publicly confirmed any case of a transmedium object, and AARO has said that the cases it has resolved had ordinary explanations such as balloons, birds, drones and clutter.

Independent analysts have proposed conventional explanations for the video cases. The science writer Mick West and others have suggested that the Omaha object was consistent with a balloon or drone descending toward the sea, seen in night-vision video that exaggerates its apparent strangeness. For Aguadilla, sceptical analysts argued that the object’s motion matched something drifting with the wind, such as a pair of balloons or sky lanterns, with the water entry being an effect of parallax. A private group, the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, disputed this and concluded the object remained unexplained.

For Shag Harbour, suggestions have included a flare, a meteor or wreckage, though none has been confirmed. Separately, beliefs about undersea alien bases often cite these cases as support, but the documented record says only that something unidentified was seen. Believers argue that the absence of wreckage and the official interest point to an unusual craft; sceptics say they reflect the difficulty of searching the sea at night.