- Timothy Gallaudet—former Chief Oceanographer of the U.S. Navy—believes the U.S. government should study “unidentified submersible objects.”
- USOs are similar to UFOs, but sighted in the world’s oceans.
- The retired rear admiral claims that these USOs could be a threat to maritime security.
A retired U.S. Navy admiral believes that the government should look to the oceans to help solve a mystery in the skies. Rear Admiral Timohy Gallaudet, former Oceanographer of the U.S. Navy, cited a 2019 sighting by a Navy warship as evidence that the phenomena of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and unidentified submersible objects (USOs) are linked.
The sighting, recorded off the coast of San Diego, involved a hovering spherical object that appeared to abruptly enter the water.
“Transmedium” UFOs Jeopardize U.S. Security
Gallaudet made the case for studying underwater UFOs, or what the government calls unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), in a recent paper titled, “Beneath the Surface: We May Learn More about UAP by Looking in the Ocean.” Gallaudet writes that “transmedium” USOs and UAPs, defined as unidentified objects that appear to travel both in the atmosphere and the water, “jeopardize U.S. maritime security.” The retired rear admiral makes the case that the under-surveyed underwater realm is a threat to maritime security—the oceans form the bedrock of international trade and the American economy, and are where the U.S. Navy operates.
Gallaudet argues that the lack of knowledge about the undersea world poses hazards for submarines such as collisions with other submarines—such as the independent crashes of the submarines USS San Francisco and USS Connecticut, both of which were incidents that resulted in severe damage to the ships and one crew fatality—and undetected underwater seamounts. Further study of this realm, he believes, could shed additional light on these UFO/UAP sightings.
The Omaha Incident
One incident to which Gallaudet points in particular is a July 19, 2019 encounter between the Independence-class littoral combat ship USS Omaha and a so-called transmedium UAP. In the incident, the crew of the Omaha (sailing off the coast of San Diego) used their AN/KAX-2 electro-optical sensor to record a spherical UAP hovering just over the surface of the Pacific Ocean. The AN/KAX-2 is a stabilized sensor turret built for maritime environments that includes a digital video camera, night vision camera, and laser rangefinder.
The video, seen here, is a recording of a screen showing the output of the AN/KAX-2. The video appears to have been taken with the night vision camera, which uses imaging infrared to record objects in darkness. The object seemingly moves, tracked by the sensor operator, and then stops to hover. The object stops and hovers a short distance above the surface of the ocean. At the end, the object disappears, with sailors remarking that it made a splash as it entered the water. Meanwhile, one sailor off camera radios the other ships in the area—the guided missile destroyers Pinckney, Kidd, and Rafael Peralta—asking for a MH-60 helicopter to be launched as soon as possible.
The video was leaked to UFO investigator Jeremy Corbell Lockyer, and was later verified as genuine by the Navy. A search of the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service (the Pentagon’s web site for releasing official photos and video) shows three of the warships in the encounter—Pinckney, Kidd, and Omaha—in formation in the Eastern Pacific six days later, on July 25.
Sightings in Puerto Rico and Elsewhere
Gallaudet also references another sighting from 2013, spotted by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol personnel. The sighting—which took place near Aguadilla, Puerto Rico—was filmed using a similar imaging infrared camera. The video, shown here, depicts another spherical object appearing to enter the water and then re-emerge without losing any speed. The retired admiral writes, “Over three minutes, the object appears to fly at speeds between 40 and 120 miles per hour, enter and exit the Atlantic Ocean without any significant deceleration, reach a maximum underwater velocity of 95 miles per hour, and at one point split into two parts before entering the water again.”
Other possible evidence cited by the admiral includes an incident in 2022, in which the NOAA underwater exploration ship Okeanos Explorer discovered an unusual series of holes on the North Atlantic seafloor at a depth of 1.6 miles. The centimeter-sized holes were in an unusually straight line and scientists are apparently at a loss to explain their origin.
No Ordinary UAP Advocate
Gallaudet entered the U.S. Navy in 1989 after attending the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Gallaudet, according to his official biography, received “masters and doctoral degrees in oceanography from Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1991 and 2001 respectively.” He served with a number of naval oceanography and meteorology commands, and was superintendent of the U.S. Naval Observatory. He assumed command of the Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command in 2014, and served as Oceanographer of the Navy from 2016 until retirement in 2017.
After his Navy career, Gallaudet served for two years as acting administrator in charge of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Today, he sits on the advisory board for Americans for Safe Aerospace, which describes itself as a “nonprofit organization dedicated to aerospace safety and national security with a focus on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP).” ASA is led by Ryan Graves, a former U.S. naval aviator who reports having his own UAP sighting on active duty in 2014. In a 2023 op-ed published in The Hill, Gallaudet called UAPs the “story of the century,” and clearly did not rule out an extraterrestrial cause for them.
It’s rare for a high-ranking U.S. military officer to directly address UAP issues, even in retirement, and the incidents Gallaudet calls attention to are unusual, to say the least. Barring flat-out hoaxing by military and civilian government personnel, the videos and photographic evidence are not easily explained. Whether this will result in greater research to the same extent as the UFO/UAP issue remains to be seen.
Kyle Mizokami is a writer on defense and security issues and has been at Popular Mechanics since 2015. If it involves explosions or projectiles, he's generally in favor of it. Kyle’s articles have appeared at The Daily Beast, U.S. Naval Institute News, The Diplomat, Foreign Policy, Combat Aircraft Monthly, VICE News, and others. He lives in San Francisco.
