USOs: Unidentified Submerged Objects
Have you ever seen a strange craft or weird lights underneath the water in the Ocean?
This episode is all about strange encounters with unusual lights and spaceships appearing under the water or shooting out of the water. We all love UFOs in the air, so why not give some love to the USOs?
But, are they believable? Listen now!
Have you ever seen anything move just below a body of water?
What can emerge from the deep with explosive energy?
Why are sailors scared of lights in the sea?
What is up, Bizarros?! This week we dive (literally) into some strange objects, Unidentified Submerged Objects (USO)!
What Is An Unidentified Submerged Object?
USO stands for unidentified submerged objects and is very similar to their counterparts to unidentified flying objects.
They sound like they are objects in the water that are not identified.
Either they zip past underwater with great speed or they create enchanting glowing and draw people in. These underwater objects have been known to fly out of the water.
USO Encounters
First Unidentified Submerged Object Encounter
It was my late uncle that really fired up my curiosity with a story he’d relay when I was a kid. All the adults would roll their eyes, but I ate it up!
He served in Korea & three Vietnam tours. I remember he said he was on the side of a ship during his service.
He’d get super animated, eyes bright & say that he saw something big & lit up. It wasn’t anything he’d ever seen before. It was the first account I’d ever heard from anyone I knew.
Since hearing it, ages ago – I’ve always looked suspiciously at our oceans & tell anyone that would listen that I think they’re in the water too.
So now with all this new radar footage & “transmedium craft” talk, it feels a little vindicating, lol.
Second USO Encounter
My dad served on a US Navy destroyer (USS Mansfield) in the early 60’s. When he was low on the totem pole he would be assigned the midnight to 4am watch. One night, somewhere between Hawaii and Japan, he saw an “orange fireball” rise up off in the distance and then streak straight up and disappear.
He said the acceleration was well beyond anything he had ever seen, including missiles, etc. Literally over in a second. He radioed the radar and sonar rooms.
They said no contacts and no other US ships in the area. It was just an inky black night in the middle of the Pacific. Others on the bridge saw it.
But it was over so fast all he could do was wonder what it was. He never saw anything like that again.
He told me about it years ago and then brought it up in a recent conversation because he saw UFOs in the news. Not sure if this is an interesting story but it’s a small data point.
Third USO Encounter
this story was told to me by my sister. as kids we used to live in Guam (next to the Marianas trench) and one night she saw a glowing white orb rise up from the water at the horizon so pretty far away, and then go back down into the water. she told me this years after it happened.
Travel channel from a Redditor
It rose out of the ocean
I used to live next to the beach in an apartment complex. One night I was with my friend looking at the ocean from the balcony.
The light from the moon was enough for us to watch the waves on the shore. We saw a light on the ocean. It slowly came out of the water.
What we saw was like an orb-shaped ball of light. It was so bright for a moment that I almost couldn’t see the object itself. It kept going up slowly and it suddenly took off quickly into the dark sky.
Everything happened in like 8 seconds. We both were freaked out and went inside the apartment.
Years later I saw a report on National Geographic about orb-shaped lights flying around a forest in the USA. I knew it was the same thing I saw.
Fifth USO Encounter
“Marc, who runs a special effects company called FX Models that undertakes Naval contracts, said: “
As a thank you for doing some work for them, Navy asked me if I wanted to go for a ride in a submarine so I said yes.
“Once we got under I was sitting in the sonar station and the sonar operator was sitting right next to me.
“Submarines are loud – people think they are very quiet and it’s true they are on the outside because the sound doesn’t get out.
But inside you hear fans, noise – it’s a constant din on a sub.
“I was sitting there zoning out a little because I was seasick and all of a sudden the sonar kid shouts ‘fast mover, fast mover’ and I’m jolted awake – thinking ‘What’s happening? Is it a torpedo?’
“The executive officer comes out and the operator shows him the path of the object and the officer says ‘How fast is that going?’
“And the kid said ‘several hundred knots’.
I start to lean forward to listen in – and the officer said ‘Can you confirm it?’
“So he goes to another sonar machine and confirmed it wasn’t a machine anomaly – it was real.
I thought ‘Wow that is incredible’.
“When the sonar guy said ‘What do I do with this?’ the officer said ‘log it and dog it’ – in other words log it and bury it.”
Four years later Marc said he was doing some more contract work for the Navy when he spoke to a senior naval figure about what he saw.
“I asked him ‘Can you tell me about the Fast Mover Program?'” Marc explained.
“He looked at me and said ‘Sorry Marc I can’t talk about that program’.
“So he basically confirmed to me that the program exists – he said everything without seeing anything.
“What that told me was that USOs are common – we even have a program in place to classify and log and determine the speed of them and it goes into a vault.”
Marc made the claims at the Devil’s Tower UFO Rendezvous in Hulett, Wyoming – where UFO enthusiasts from around America met at the site of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind rock to discuss alien-related findings.
Mysterious Universe USO Encounter
That very same year we have a report from the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) which comes from Green Bay, a sub-basin of Lake Michigan, at the mouth of the Fox River near Little Suamico, in Wisconsin.
The unnamed witness claims that on November 18, 2017, he was at the lake when he observed a triangular-shaped UFO measuring around 100 to 150 feet in diameter emerge from the water.
Susan Birttnen, of Wisconsin MUFON, would say of the report:
He reports they witnessed a triangular-shaped object fly out of the water of Green Bay, traveling at approximately 35 knots. It was so close that they could hear a muffled jet sound.
As it came out of the water it turned on its side as it traveled west and gained elevation.
The color was dark and it had blue flashing lights. The elevation was at 500 feet and the distance was less than 1,000 feet. The side of the triangle was between 100 to 150 feet.
Based on the evidence and the data provided by the witness, I conclude that this case is in the unknown category.
Mysterious Universe USO Encounter #2
In more recent decades there have been various other reports of USOs as well. From the files of NUFORC is one from February of 2007, reported by a witness who says that at the time she had been aboard a cruise ship Dawn Princess, heading back to San Francisco from a cruise of the Mexican Riviera.
As they passed Half Moon Bay, she claims to have had a very otherworldly experience, of which she says:
I was coughing up a storm at 2 A.M., and my husband went to find a hot lemonade. I was awake anyway, so I pulled back the curtains and stood in the window to watch the ship’s churning water – mesmerizing!
After about 5 minutes, three softly glowing objects came into view – three uniform, nearly spherical objects, evenly spaced in a line parallel to the ship’s hull and hovering just above the water’s surface.
Based on the appearance of dolphins from the window, and of people seen standing on piers, I’d say that these spheres were somewhat larger – maybe 12-15’ high. Perfectly smooth, and with a pale bluish-white glow.
They appeared to stay in one place while the ship moved past them. They were hovering but didn’t disturb the water below them.
Just as they went out of my sight, the left one toward the bow splashed down into the water and disappeared.
Of course, I hadn’t thought to tear myself away from the window to get the cell phone or camera (both in the safe, and of doubtful use through a window at night…).
And, of course, three more glowing spheres, hovering in a straight line along the edge of the wake, came past the window 2 minutes later! 4-5 minutes after that, two more spheres were seen, but farther away from the ship.
The first and second groups had been located just where the ship’s wake or foam line ends.
The last group was about twice as far away. The “bow-ward” of these last two also dropped down into the water and disappeared.
I was still standing at the window, in amazement, when my husband came back with lemon tea.
I told him about the spheres, and we watched for a while, but no more sightings.
Mysterious Universe USO Encounter #3
On July 1 of that year, pilot D.P. Lott and a photographer by the name of R.A. Smith were flying a small aircraft over the Hudson River, New York, when they saw below them two enormous mysterious objects in the water, each one estimated as being around 250 feet in length and traveling parallel to each other through the waves.
The objects were described as being cylindrical in shape and with pointed ends, both leaving an “arrow-shaped wake” in their paths as they lumbered through.
After some period of observation, the two massive objects submerged out of sight. It would later turn out that the Navy had no submarines scheduled to be in the area, and even if they did, these things were much larger than any known submarine of the era except for the very newest models.
Smith was actually able to take a photograph of the objects, although since their altitude was around 5,000 feet it is difficult to know just what it shows. The sighting remains unexplained.”
Mysterious Universe USO Encounter #4
“In 1954 there is a report from the crew of the Dutch ship the Groote Beer, who observed a “flat, moon-shaped object” rise from beneath the grey waves near Long Island, New York. Captain Jan P. Boshoff would describe it as being gray, metallic, and having a ring of lights along its edge.
It then flew off out of sight. Curiously, at around the same time, a strange sight was allegedly seen by the Honduran freighter Aliki P., which reported it as a “ball of fire moving in and out of the water without being extinguished,” trailing white smoke and moving in erratic course.
It is unknown if this could have been the same object witnessed by the Groote Beer.”
Mysterious Universe USO Encounter #5
In 1955, a couple by the name of the Bordes was out rowing at the Titicus Reservoir in Westchester County, New York, at around 1:30 a.m. when a rose-colored, luminous sphere rose from the water just a few feet from their boat and floated off towards shore, after which it rose sharply and then disappeared down into the water with a loud splash.
It was eerie enough that the couple decided to call it a night and head back to shore. As they rowed along, eyes glued to the placid surface of the lake,
they saw around 200 yards away two “parallel lights, wavy in shape but rigid, thirty feet in length” moving under the surface.
Above these shapes was a “round light of lesser brilliance,” which was over the water but not hovering, rather seemingly attached to a larger body beneath, which could be seen as a “dim grey shape against the blackness.”
When the couple reached the shore, they saw that the thing was still out there, but when they returned sometime later it was gone. They would insist it was not another boat out there with them.
Mysterious Universe USO Encounter #6
A strange case that was mentioned in the book Invisible Residents, by Ivan Sanderson. The incident allegedly happened in 1963 off the coast of Puerto Rico, where the U.S. Navy was at the time conducting an anti-submarine warfare exercise.
The command ship at the time was the anti-submarine warfare carrier USS Wasp, along with a fleet of five smaller vessels, mostly destroyers, and an unknown number of submarines below.
It began when one of the sonar stations on one of the destroyers noticed that one of the submarines had broken formation and appeared to be pursuing a smaller, fast-moving unidentified object.
This smaller object was reported as moving in excess of 150 knots, and would apparently lurk about the area for several days, zipping about underwater and tracked by both Naval ships and anti-submarine warfare patrol aircraft.
The mysterious object was reported as doing maneuvers and traveling at speeds far beyond any known submarine technology, as well as doing sudden, rapid dives to depths of up to 27,000 feet.
Apparently, visual confirmation was never made, so it is difficult to tell what this thing could have been.
Mysterious Universe USO Encounter #7
In August of 1965, we have the case of the Soviet steamship Raduga, which was doing maneuvers in the Red Sea when they had a rather bizarre encounter.
It was reported that the crew observed a “fiery sphere” estimated as 60 meters in diameter spectacularly shoot out from underwater to hover over the waves for a time.
It was noted that its exit from the water had caused a huge pillar of water to erupt forth with it.
After a few minutes of hovering there motionlessly, the craft then smashed down into the water, leaving turbulence and roiling waves.
Mysterious Universe USO Encounter #8
Yet another case from the files of the National UFO Recording Center (NUFORC) supposedly happened in 1964 at Laguna Beach, California.
The witness claims to have gone to take a walk on the beach when he had a very weird experience.
He explains what happened:
A long wooden staircase led down the cliffs to the beach and the waves appeared to be in the cliffs’ shadow from Highway 1 headlights.
I saw a series of lights glowing from behind the waves about 5 feet apart and 8 inches in diameter.
It/they gave the appearance of portholes on the side of a submersible. I have no explanation. When I interviewed a CA lighthouse keeper on the radio (his station was becoming automated – and you had to walk through a tunnel to reach it)
and asked him if in all of his years of watching the surf he had seen anything strange – he reported seeing the same thing — with no idea what it could be.
Mysterious Universe USO Encounter #9
From the 1970s there was an account given by an Admiral V.A. Domislovsky, chief of the Pacific Fleet’s Intelligence Department of the Soviet Navy.
He would report that he had witnessed a gigantic cylindrical object around 800-900 meters long, which hovered over the water and emitted swarms of smaller flying objects “like bees from a beehive.”
These smaller objects were then claimed to have shot down into the water to disappear for a time, before flying back out and back into the larger “mothership.” This happened several times, after which the colossal ship loaded up all of the smaller craft and flew off at terrific speed.
Mysterious Universe USO Encounter #9
Another report from NUFORC happened as recently as 2017. In March of that year, a group of unnamed witnesses was aboard an oil rig offshore supply ship (OSV) in the Gulf of Mexico, about 80 miles southeast of New Orleans, when they saw something very bizarre indeed.
They claim that an immense, oval-shaped object estimated as being more than five times bigger than the 240-foot ship they were on rose up out of the ocean, yet oddly appeared to not be wet.
The massive object was completely silent, and rose to hover around 30 feet over the waves before rapidly ascending out of sight at a 30-degree angle.
Mysterious Universe USO Encounter #10
In 2021 from the skies over Leeward, Oahu, in Hawaii.
In January of that year, numerous witnesses began calling 911 to report seeing a glowing blue oblong mass and a smaller white light darting about the sky, before the blue one went crashing into the water below. One witness only known as Moriah would tell Hawaii News Now of her own sighting of the spectacle playing out in the sky:
I look up and then I was like oh s***! I started calling my husband and them because they were all in the garage.
I was like hey. Come look up there. See if you see what I see.
They all said yea! I don’t know what it was. This one was going so fast. It went to land in the water. Whatever it is.
We called 911. (To) have like one cop or somebody (to) come out and come check em out.
My husband went to look up and he saw the white one coming. The white one was smaller. Was coming in the same direction as the blue one.
What Are Unidentified Submerged Objects?
What do you think Bizarros?
Are they never before seen submarines that the Navy has?
Are they aliens living underneath the sea?
Could aliens have bases under the ocean and be the source of UFOs and USOs?
Let us know in the comments.