'Not of the Natural World': Retired Rear Admiral Claims Undersea UFOs Are Operated by Non-Human Intelligence

Retired US Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet has told lawmakers in Washington that mysterious underwater UFOs spotted off American coastlines could be operated by 'higher-order intelligence that is not human,' as more than 9,000 such unidentified objects have been reported near US shores since August 2025.

For context, those thousands of sightings have been logged through Enigma, a civilian UFO-reporting app cited by Marine Technology News, and they focus on so-called Unidentified Submerged Objects, or USOs.

These are the watery cousins of UFOs and UAPs, reported skimming across oceans, plunging beneath the surface and in some cases jumping between air and water at speeds witnesses estimate in the hundreds of miles per hour.

UFO enthusiasts say the pattern hints at alien craft using the world's oceans as convenient cover. Officials, at least in public, continue to sit on the fence.

How Underwater UFOs Became a National Security Concern

The news came after a slow but noticeable shift in the way the US government talks about unexplained sightings. For years, anything odd in the sky was bundled under 'Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.'

A small bipartisan group of lawmakers, backed by current and former military and security officials, pushed to widen that lens to include strange goings-on in water and even in space. The result was a quiet but telling change in statute, renaming the category 'Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena.' or UAPs.

That might sound like bureaucratic stuff, yet it matters. By definition, a UAP can now be something that appears in the sea, on the surface or in the air above it. On the Enigma app, most of the thousands of USO reports come from California and Florida, two states with huge naval footprints and long coastlines where odd lights and shapes have become almost routine chatter.

The Pentagon has been releasing more material too, including iPhone footage and case files that used to disappear into secure vaults. One recent clip, labelled 'Orbs Over the Pond', describes 'a light source below the horizon, hovering above a pond at an estimated distance of 2,700 feet.'

The object shows up as what officials call a 'plasma-like sphere' that shifts shape and brightness. At times, according to the Pentagon's own description, the primary light appears to splinter into smaller luminous points before the whole thing vanishes after roughly 45 minutes.

Analysts later offered a prosaic explanation, blaming sunlight bouncing off snow and lighting up low cloud from beneath. But that assessment was marked 'low confidence' and the case remains unresolved. In other words, even the people paid to debunk this stuff are not entirely sold on their own answer.

From the 'Tic-Tac' to 'Go Fast': The USO Evidence Pile

The modern USO story really took off about 100 miles off San Diego on 14 November 2004. That was when US Navy Commander David Fravor and his F/A‑18F squadron were directed to check out a radar anomaly over the Pacific.

Fravor later told how he looked down and saw a white, oblong object just above the churning whitewater. On his aircraft's sensors, in both infrared and visible light, it measured around 45 feet long with no wings, no obvious propulsion, no exhaust trail. It appeared to mirror his manoeuvres. When he tried to intercept, the object shot away so quickly the sensor simply lost it. The crew nicknamed it the 'Tic-Tac.'

That incident sat classified for more than a decade. A leaked video bounced around online largely unnoticed until The New York Times put Fravor's account on its front page in 2017. The furore that followed helped push the Pentagon to set up its UAP Task Force, the unit now supposed to make sense of all this.

Gallaudet, a former Navy chief meteorologist who rose to rear admiral, eventually found himself pulled into that same orbit. He appeared at a 2023 hearing of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee's subcommittee on national security, sitting alongside Fravor and other witnesses.

Later, he gave detailed testimony at a separate congressional session about another piece of Navy footage, the so‑called 'Go Fast' video captured in 2015 by an F/A‑18's infrared sensor during an exercise on the US East Coast.

In that clip, the object looks like a simple white dash tearing across the ocean surface. To Gallaudet, who has spent much of his career investigating odd atmospheric and ocean phenomena, it is anything but simple.

'So far, we have not built anything that can go that fast in the water and does not change speed from water to air,' he said. 'Many have had super-fast acceleration and made right-angle turns. We have not yet been able to engineer vehicles that can do that.'

His conclusion is blunt. 'We are pretty convinced these craft are operated by higher-order intelligence that is not human,' he told lawmakers. 'I don't believe they're of the natural world as we know it. They may come from Earth, but I don't believe they belong to the plant and animal kingdoms as we know them.'

Are Undersea UFOs a Real Threat or Just Strange Data?

Gallaudet is not claiming to know who or what is behind these underwater UFOs. He sketches two possibilities. One is that they are extraterrestrial visitors who have chosen Earth's oceans as a discreet base of operations.

The other is that they represent some undiscovered intelligent species that has lived alongside humanity for millennia. Both ideas sound like science fiction, and he knows it, but his point is narrower and more uncomfortable.

If objects exist that can move through water and air at impossible speeds, make sharp right-angle turns and shrug off the usual rules of drag and propulsion, and no one can reliably explain or predict them, then by definition there is a security gap. 'Not knowing what their intent or full capabilities are is a potential security risk,' he warned.

Not everyone in Washington is ready to go there. In a subsequent hearing, the director of the Pentagon's UAP office, Jon Kosloski, said that no extraterrestrial technology or activity could be verified. That is about as clear an official pushback as you are likely to hear.

Nothing is confirmed yet so everything should be taken with a grain of salt. There are unresolved videos, thousands of civilian reports, a handful of highly trained military witnesses and a growing pile of theories that sprint far ahead of the hard evidence.

For now, the only thing everyone seems to agree on is that something odd is happening in and over the water, and no one in authority can quite say what it is without hedging their bets.