Navy Officer Says Underwater UFOs Are Legitimate Threats. The Evidence Is Hard to Ignore.
In mid-2014, during training flights off the coast of Virginia Beach, Virginia, F/A-18 pilot and U.S. Navy Lieutenant Ryan Graves began to notice something strange. The radar returns looked off—phantom blips moving with unfathomable speed and precision. At first he dismissed it as a glitch. But then the anomalies returned, recorded by the fighter jets’ sophisticated sensors. They would hover in place—and then dart away at supersonic speeds. They were recorded from the ocean’s surface to 40,000 feet.
“Sometimes stationary—0.0 Mach. Other times 250 to 350 knots . . .. Sometimes even supersonic—1.1 to 1.2 Mach. All altitudes. And always over the ocean,” Graves says.
After appearing only as glitches on the jets’ radar, the objects on one occasion finally came into view. Graves reported seeing a dark gray or black cube inside a clear sphere, between five and 15 feet in diameter, coming within 50 feet of their jets. “That was the turning point,” Graves says. “We started treating it as a safety issue.”
Over the next year, Graves’s squadron recorded sightings of unidentified objects almost daily. Sometimes the objects flew in loose formations. Other times they traveled alone. They had no exhaust, no visible propulsion, no wings. Sometimes the object would rotate in place; others vanished when approached. As it turned out, pilots stationed off the West Coast—on missions aboard the USS Nimitz, the USS Princeton, and other carriers—had been experiencing similar things for years.
Some of these craft—now classified as UAPs (unidentified anomalous phenomena)—appeared to be capable of transmedium travel, meaning they are able to move from air to sea without slowing, splashing, or emitting heat. They challenged every assumption held by aerospace engineers and radar operators.
Graves doesn’t claim to know what the objects were. But one thing was clear. “This wasn’t business as usual,” he says. “There was a serious issue at play. It wasn’t just one rogue object. It wasn’t just us on the East Coast. It wasn’t just my squadron. It was a pattern. This was global.”
Since at least the 1950s, military sources have reported strange objects plunging into the ocean—what they call USOs (unidentified submerged objects). These phenomena exhibit characteristics that conflict with our understanding of physics and maritime navigation. As radar and similar technologies have advanced, so have the number of sightings.
Today Graves is one of the most vocal advocates for UAP transparency. Now retired from the military, he’s the founder of Americans for Safe Aerospace, the largest UAP-focused pilot safety initiative in the world, and works with former Pentagon and naval officials to push for greater transparency. He doesn’t claim that these craft are alien, but he’s certain that they aren’t using known human tech. “Where that leaves us opens up options—extraterrestrial visitors, time travelers, breakaway civilizations . . . things that challenge the status quo and aren’t easily accepted at face value,” he says.
Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, PhD, an oceanographer, was one of the first to view footage from the UAP incidents in 2015 involving fighter jets attached to the USS Theodore Roosevelt, which at the time was conducting training exercises off the coast of Florida. Two videos captured by Navy fighter jets that were made public in 2020 show strange craft flying at incredible speeds with no visible means of propulsion, sometimes rotating in midair. “I knew then that what I saw was not our technology. We don’t test experimental aircraft in training ranges—it’s too dangerous—and I had access to everything classified. No nation has craft that can move like that,” he says.
Gallaudet, now retired from the Navy and currently the CEO of Ocean STL Consulting, is pushing for the U.S. government to treat these phenomena as a “national research priority.” Despite some public disclosures, many records remain classified, buried within defense contractor vaults or shielded by national security exemptions. If even part of what’s been reported is true, then the encounters off Virginia, California, and elsewhere could be the opening chapter in a much deeper mystery—one that spans oceans, navies, and continents.
This spring, Graves and Gallaudet briefed officials in Washington, D.C., on unidentified submerged objects. “We’re at a unique moment in history,” Graves says. “People have access to tools that can reveal things. The momentum is building.”
That momentum has already begun reshaping policy. In 2023, Congress passed the UAP Disclosure Act, legislation requiring federal agencies to collect, catalog, and disclose records related to recovered nonhuman craft and biologics. For the first time, U.S. law openly acknowledged the potential existence of off-world or nonhuman intelligence, and even hinted at craft retrieval and reverse engineering programs.