The oceans have always hidden secrets. But lately, the data is getting louder.
Between 2022 and 2025, a surge of underwater anomaly reports, commonly called USOs (read underwater UFOs), or Unidentified Submersible Objects, has rippled out from U.S. coastlines. These aren’t just the occasional blurry sighting. Thousands of reports. Green lights swirling below the surface. Objects rising from the ocean without a splash. Things that seem to descend into the sea and vanish completely, without sonar hits, without debris, without explanation.
It’s like the UFO phenomenon took a dive, literally.
The data comes from Enigma, a crowdsourced UAP-tracking app turned anomaly aggregator. Think Pokémon GO for high strangeness. With over 30,000 UAP/USO reports, roughly 9,000 are ocean-adjacent. Around 150 of them describe objects entering or leaving the sea without splashes, sonic booms, or any of the usual laws of physics getting in the way.
Most sightings cluster near California and Florida. Coincidentally, or not, these are also home to major naval installations, missile test ranges, and tangled webs of human maritime activity. But here’s where it gets freaky. In some cases, naval radar tracked objects hovering, diving into the sea, and then vanishing. Like the infamous 2019 USS Omaha incident. A sphere flies near the ship. No splash. No wreckage. No trace.
Explanations fall into three broad categories, but none satisfy. There’s the idea it’s all tech noise: Starlink flares, squid boat LEDs, jellyfish blooms, rocket reentries, and atmospheric mirages. A luminous squid boat can look like a submerged city. Bioluminescent algae can create glowing torpedoes. And a distant tanker can appear to hover due to light refraction.
Others argue it’s foreign activity. Russian spy ships like the Yantar have been loitering near undersea cables. Chinese underwater gliders, acoustically silent and undetectable, may already be patrolling our coasts. And drug cartels are now using electric-powered narco-subs that slip under sonar and radar with ease. If you spotted one surface at night, it might as well be an alien.
Then there’s the harder-to-digest option: some of this behavior simply doesn’t align with known tech. The USS Omaha incident didn’t just involve eyewitnesses, it involved multiple sensors. The object descended, vanished from radar and sonar alike. No heat bloom. No splash. No signature. Experimental drones like the Naviator can fly and swim, but they weigh less than a cinderblock. They don’t silently move at 200 knots. They don’t dive without displacing water.
The propulsion theories get murkier the deeper you go. Supercavitation exists, but it’s loud. I mean VERY loud. Magnetohydrodynamic drives, on the other hand, are whisper-quiet, but extremely power-hungry. Maybe too power-hungry to be practical without a nuclear battery no one admits exists. And that’s the recurring theme: what should be impossible, keeps showing up.
And if you’re wondering why the Navy doesn’t seem to be intercepting them, the answer might be simpler than you’d think. The ocean isn’t covered. Most of the U.S. coastline, within the Exclusive Economic Zone, is functionally unmonitored below the surface. Our sonar nets, built for tracking Soviet submarines, can’t detect small, silent drones. The gaps aren’t theoretical. They’re vast, and they’re being exploited.
Apps like Enigma fill some of the void with crowdsourced sightings. But they come with feedback loops and user bias. Tell people the ocean is full of USOs, and soon, everything becomes one. Meanwhile, the military maintains plausible deniability. Most encounters are dismissed as weather balloons, satellites, or bugs in the system.
Still, something is off. Because despite the hoaxes and misidentifications, a core dataset remains. Unresolved. Unexplained. Repeated. These are the objects tracked by radar, seen by pilots, logged by sonar, then gone.
So, are there thousands of alien craft off the U.S. coast? No. But are there thousands of unidentified contacts, objects whose behavior, speed, or disappearance don’t neatly map to known technologies? Absolutely. That’s not a theory. That’s in the data.
Whether those anomalies are adversarial drones, unknown tech, or just bioluminescent soup with bad camera angles, one thing is clear: we’re being outpaced not just by what’s in the water, but by what we don’t know is in the water.
And until we integrate air and sea surveillance, until we build systems that can tell a glowing shrimp from a magnetohydrodynamic drone, the ocean stays what it’s always been.
Unfathomable.