From the Navy’s infamous Tic-Tac encounter to thousands of recent reports, believers say some of the strangest UFOs may be hiding underwater.
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Since August 2025, a UFO-reporting app has recorded more than 9,000 sightings of mysterious unidentified objects close to U.S. coastlines and major bodies of water, according to Marine Technology News.
These reports are emblematic of a public fascination with Unidentified Submerged Objects, or USOs. Based on eyewitness accounts, some of the objects spotted in and around Earth’s waters seem to travel between air and water at shocking speeds of hundreds of miles per hour. UFO enthusiasts believe they may be alien spacecraft in and around Earth’s waters.
In what is arguably the latest era in a long history of such sightings all over land and sea, these strange objects have gone largely unexplained, if not denied. But a small group of UFO devotees, including government security and military officials, have believed for years that the U.S. should be seriously looking into potentially threatening anomalies in bodies of water, as well as on land and in the air. In a bipartisan effort, that group ultimately helped convince the U.S. government to legislate a name change for the term it uses to refer to UFOs today—from “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” to “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena,” or UAPs.
The Pentagon has been disclosing documents related to UFOs. In one recently released iPhone video, called “Orbs Over the Pond,” the Pentagon describes “a light source below the horizon, hovering above a pond at an estimated distance of 2,700 feet.” This object appeared as “a ‘plasma-like sphere’ intermittently changing shape and luminosity. At times, the primary light source appeared to separate into smaller luminous points,” the Pentagon said. The object disappeared after about 45 minutes.
An analysis attributed the sighting to “sunlight backscattering” from reflected snow illuminating the underside of low-altitude clouds. However, this description came with “low confidence,” and the case is considered unresolved.
Most of the thousands of USO sightings people have reported on the Enigma app come from California and Florida, according to the nonpartisan organization’s website.
It was off the coast of San Diego, California that perhaps the most infamous USO incident occurred—the “Tic-Tac” sighting. U.S. Navy Cmdr. David Fravor and his F/A-18F squadron spotted a radar anomaly about 100 miles off the coast on November 14, 2004. That afternoon, Fravor looked down from his fighter jet and noticed something white and oblong right above the whitewater. He saw an object onscreen, observed in both infrared and visible light, that was about 45 feet long without wings or other protrusions. It seemed to be eerily moving along with the plane, leaving no exhaust behind. But when Fravor made an attempt to intercept the strange craft, it took off at warp speed. It accelerated so fast that the sensor was unable to keep tracking it.
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