Joel Was Right
Gold Member
The Earth has the surface area of approximately 197 million miles of which at least two thirds of it (or around 71%) is covered by water and yet only 5-10% has been explored. In fact we know more about the surface of Mars than we do our own oceans. Unidentified Flying Objects are often attributed to misidentified weather phenomena, celestial bodies, military aircraft or weather balloons. But what if these objects were also flying into and out of water? Less known, these are called Unidentified Submerged Objects.
This is the Santa Catalina channel, a 26 mile wide stretch of the Pacific Ocean separating the city of Los Angeles between the Catalina Island. The Island’s association with unidentified flying objects goes back to the late 1960s when footage of an unknown object in the sky caught the attention of Lehman Hansen’s video camcorder and was broadcast on national television, heralded as genuine footage. The fascination was both a combination of what was seen as well the location; the Island and its surrounding waters would become entangled with the remarkable. Decades past but reports of strange sightings of UFO’s going into and out of the channel escalated. Patrick Dennett has been investigating these reports for almost twenty years for his magazine UFOs Over California.
"The whole area here is just a huge hotbed of UFO activity. I’ve covered probably 2 to 300 cases of these things flying over the mountains and water here. Actually there was a huge wave of sightings over the Santa Monica mountain range on June 14th 1992. Witnesses counted in total around two hundred objects, but whats interesting about this case was that the objects came from below [the water] and not above"
On 10:24pm on June 14th, for almost two minutes, the waters of the Pacific explode with light as hundreds of bright disc-like craft are witnessed flying out of the water together in complete silence, often a characteristic of these objects. Reports of this incident were called in as places as far away as Malibu. The following is an actual recording of a telephone call made to the police that night.
Audio of call to police
According to Dennett, the incident was also reported to the US Coast Guard’s sector on Long Beach which ultimately declined a search request. This event was only the second in Los Angeles in three years. On the morning of February 7th, 1989, scuba-divers, boat sonar systems and people on the shore witness a long dark unidentified craft emerge out of the Pacific. For about ninety seconds, the unidentified object rests on the surface before a dozen fast moving smaller objects break off it and depart vertically separating from the larger object. About a minute later, it submerges back into the water - its last sonar contact saw it move south towards the Catalina channel.
What is immediately unique to reports of these submerged objects is the ability to ‘break apart’ from one object to several individual ones. One case that best demonstrates this occurred on February 8th 1960. The Argentinian Navy were tracking two ‘submarines’, thought to be American, when sonar suddenly showed them to break apart and fly out of the water. Arthur Paul Stonehill recounts that “two gigantic submarines sighted by the Argentinians inexplicably multiplied into six other objects. Nikita Khrushchev [the Soviet leader at the time] was so intrigued by this he sent delegates to Buenos Aires to investigate these claims”. Whilst some have contended that this was no more than military submarines test firing torpedoes, others argue that submarines were not able to launch six or more objects simultaneously in 1960.
Another extraordinary incident was reported in the international press on November 11th, 1972. Again, what is described as a fast moving 'submarine', is detected off the west coast of Norway in the Sognefjord, the world's second longest fjord, and pursued for two weeks. A fleet of surface ships and specifically equipped 'sub-hunter' helicopters are assembled to find the object but it is only nine days later when the unidentified submerged object is seen visually; a massive cigar shaped object emerging from the waters. A navy ship was reported to have fired at it leading to the craft to again submerge before depth charges were dropped. The navy devised a blockade to trap the USO but they never found it again. Bjarne Grimstvedt, inspector general of the Royal Norwegian Navy, who led the hunt, claimed in 2005 that no foreign submarine was ever identified.
Carl Feindt has been researching USO phenomena for almost a decade, compiling at least nine hundred reported incidents for his website. One of the earliest accounts of the 20th century was reported in detail in the Philadelphia Inquirer on August 1st, 1904. A British cargo ship, the Mohican, en route to Philadelphia was, according to the paper, "enshrouded in a strange metallic vapour which glowed like phosphorous". Feindt claims subsequent reports confirmed both the captain and crew later an object, originally what looked like a cloud, came across the ocean and approached the Mohican glowing. The captain, seeing the fear in his crew, tried to distract their attention away from the strange object to get them back to work. Interestingly, the ship's compass was described as rotating around like "an electric motor"; a characteristic often present in similar sightings. The crew, in the mean time, were unable to move metallic objects from the deck of the ship suggesting a magnetic field was involved.
The 1947 crash of what the US Air Force initially declared a ‘flying saucer’ heralded the beginning of the popularisation and intrigue surrounding strange flying objects in the sky up till this day. Despite the lack of media and public awareness, the most referenced case involving USO's occurred in 1967 in Shag Harbour, Canada. On the night of October 4, 1967, at about 11:20 p.m. Atlantic Daylight Time, it was reported that something had crashed into the waters of the Gulf of Maine near Shag Harbour. At least eleven people saw a low-flying lit object head towards the harbour. Multiple witnesses reported hearing a whistling sound "like a bomb," then a "whoosh," and finally a loud bang. The object was never officially identified, and was therefore referred to as an unidentified flying object (UFO) in Government of Canada documents. The Canadian military became involved in a subsequent rescue/recovery effort. The initial report was made by local resident Laurie Wickens and four of his friends. Driving through Shag Harbour on Highway 3, they spotted a large object descending into the waters off the harbour. Attaining a better vantage point, Wickens and his friends saw an object floating 250 m (820 ft) to 300 m (980 ft) offshore in the Gulf of Maine. Wickens contacted the RCMP detachment in Barrington Passage and reported he had seen a large airplane or small airliner crash into the Gulf of Maine.
Assuming an aircraft had crashed, within about 15 minutes, 10 RCMP officers arrived at the scene. Concerned for survivors, the RCMP detachment contacted the Rescue Coordination Centre (RCC) in Halifax to advise them of the situation, and ask if any aircraft were missing. Before any attempt at rescue could be made, the object started to sink and disappeared from view. A rescue mission was quickly assembled. Within half an hour of the crash, local fishing boats went out to the crash site in the waters of the Gulf of Maine off Shag Harbour to look for survivors. No survivors, bodies or debris were taken, either by the fishermen or by a Canadian Coast Guard search and rescue cutter, which arrived about an hour later from nearby Clark's Harbour.
By the next morning, RCC Halifax had determined that no aircraft were missing. While still tasked with the search, the captain of the Canadian Coast Guard cutter received a radio message from RCC Halifax that all commercial, private and military aircraft were accounted for along the eastern seaboard, in both Atlantic Canada and New England. The same morning, RCC Halifax also sent a priority telex to the "Air Desk" at Royal Canadian Air Force headquarters in Ottawa, which handled all civilian and military UFO sightings, informing them of the crash and that all conventional explanations such as aircraft, flares, etc. had been dismissed. Therefore this was labeled a "UFO Report." The head of the Air Desk then sent another priority telex to the Royal Canadian Navy headquarters concerning the "UFO Report" and recommended an underwater search be mounted. The RCN in turn sent another priority telex tasking Fleet Diving Unit Atlantic with carrying out the search.
Two days after the incident had been observed, a detachment of RCN divers from Fleet Diving Unit Atlantic was assembled and for the next three days they combed the seafloor of the Gulf of Maine off Shag Harbor looking for an object. The final report said no trace of an object was found. While the official story of the incident ends here, further evidence attributed to various military and civilian witnesses might imply a highly secretive military search involving a small flotilla of Royal Canadian Navy and United States Navy ships about 50 km (31 mi) northeast of Shag Harbour near Shelburne (see map above), site of HMCS Shelburne, a top secret submarine detection base jointly operated by both navies as part of the Integrated Undersea Surveillance System (IUSS).
According to one military witness, he was allegedly briefed that the object had originally been picked up on radar coming out of Siberia. After crashing in Shag Harbour, it traveled underwater up the coast and came to rest on top of a submarine magnetic detection grid reportedly located off Shelburne, where it was supposedly joined by a second vehicle. Navy ships were allegedly anchored off HMCS Shelburne's facilities at Government Point for a week, according to the witnesses, in an attempt to recover the object. A barge was said to have been brought in from the United States to assist in the recovery, as reported by another military witness. Regional newspaper stories did mention a barge with "atomic furnaces" being brought to the government wharf at Shelburne Harbour on October 6 for emergency repair, theorized by some as a cover story to explain its presence there.
One American diver, known only as "Harry" in the book Dark Object by Styles and Ledger, stated that the object wasn't from planet Earth. "Harry" claimed photographs were taken by the divers and some foam-like debris brought up. Another military witness claimed that there were actually two objects, one perhaps trying to assist the other. The naval search was suddenly called off on October 11. That night, a seemingly identical UFO was reported departing the area by witnesses near the original Shag Harbour crash site.
The most recent History Channel documentary about the incident, which aired on August 10, 2006, also reported that one of the divers involved in the Shag Harbour search did come forward during the mid-1990s, refusing to allow his identity to become known publicly. Once the researchers verified that the man in fact had served as a diver during that search, he recounted his version of what had happened at Shag Harbour.
In this recounting, by the time the divers reached Shag Harbour, they already knew that nothing would be found there, because the target had already been located off the coast at Shelburne. He went on to further say that the Royal Canadian Navy and Royal Canadian Air Force as well as the United States Air Force and United States Navy monitored the "unknown objects" by radar and sonar, and that the objects were underwater. This monitoring continued for at least three days, until a Soviet Navy submarine was detected entering Canadian waters northeast of Nova Scotia. With that, the navy ships departed to intercept the submarine, and by the time they had returned, the "unknown objects" had evidently departed.
However, unlike the event at Shag Harbour, no official documentation or confirmation has yet emerged to support witness stories of a second search near Shelburne. There has been nothing to substantiate the diver's claims, with the exception of archived records that indicate a substantial amount of search and monitor activity in the Shelburne area during that 10 day period.
Discussion point: Whilst UFOs can be explained as weather phenomena, military aircraft or cosmic bodies, what suggestions are there for explaining when these go in and out of water?
This is the Santa Catalina channel, a 26 mile wide stretch of the Pacific Ocean separating the city of Los Angeles between the Catalina Island. The Island’s association with unidentified flying objects goes back to the late 1960s when footage of an unknown object in the sky caught the attention of Lehman Hansen’s video camcorder and was broadcast on national television, heralded as genuine footage. The fascination was both a combination of what was seen as well the location; the Island and its surrounding waters would become entangled with the remarkable. Decades past but reports of strange sightings of UFO’s going into and out of the channel escalated. Patrick Dennett has been investigating these reports for almost twenty years for his magazine UFOs Over California.
"The whole area here is just a huge hotbed of UFO activity. I’ve covered probably 2 to 300 cases of these things flying over the mountains and water here. Actually there was a huge wave of sightings over the Santa Monica mountain range on June 14th 1992. Witnesses counted in total around two hundred objects, but whats interesting about this case was that the objects came from below [the water] and not above"
On 10:24pm on June 14th, for almost two minutes, the waters of the Pacific explode with light as hundreds of bright disc-like craft are witnessed flying out of the water together in complete silence, often a characteristic of these objects. Reports of this incident were called in as places as far away as Malibu. The following is an actual recording of a telephone call made to the police that night.
Audio of call to police
According to Dennett, the incident was also reported to the US Coast Guard’s sector on Long Beach which ultimately declined a search request. This event was only the second in Los Angeles in three years. On the morning of February 7th, 1989, scuba-divers, boat sonar systems and people on the shore witness a long dark unidentified craft emerge out of the Pacific. For about ninety seconds, the unidentified object rests on the surface before a dozen fast moving smaller objects break off it and depart vertically separating from the larger object. About a minute later, it submerges back into the water - its last sonar contact saw it move south towards the Catalina channel.
What is immediately unique to reports of these submerged objects is the ability to ‘break apart’ from one object to several individual ones. One case that best demonstrates this occurred on February 8th 1960. The Argentinian Navy were tracking two ‘submarines’, thought to be American, when sonar suddenly showed them to break apart and fly out of the water. Arthur Paul Stonehill recounts that “two gigantic submarines sighted by the Argentinians inexplicably multiplied into six other objects. Nikita Khrushchev [the Soviet leader at the time] was so intrigued by this he sent delegates to Buenos Aires to investigate these claims”. Whilst some have contended that this was no more than military submarines test firing torpedoes, others argue that submarines were not able to launch six or more objects simultaneously in 1960.
Another extraordinary incident was reported in the international press on November 11th, 1972. Again, what is described as a fast moving 'submarine', is detected off the west coast of Norway in the Sognefjord, the world's second longest fjord, and pursued for two weeks. A fleet of surface ships and specifically equipped 'sub-hunter' helicopters are assembled to find the object but it is only nine days later when the unidentified submerged object is seen visually; a massive cigar shaped object emerging from the waters. A navy ship was reported to have fired at it leading to the craft to again submerge before depth charges were dropped. The navy devised a blockade to trap the USO but they never found it again. Bjarne Grimstvedt, inspector general of the Royal Norwegian Navy, who led the hunt, claimed in 2005 that no foreign submarine was ever identified.
Carl Feindt has been researching USO phenomena for almost a decade, compiling at least nine hundred reported incidents for his website. One of the earliest accounts of the 20th century was reported in detail in the Philadelphia Inquirer on August 1st, 1904. A British cargo ship, the Mohican, en route to Philadelphia was, according to the paper, "enshrouded in a strange metallic vapour which glowed like phosphorous". Feindt claims subsequent reports confirmed both the captain and crew later an object, originally what looked like a cloud, came across the ocean and approached the Mohican glowing. The captain, seeing the fear in his crew, tried to distract their attention away from the strange object to get them back to work. Interestingly, the ship's compass was described as rotating around like "an electric motor"; a characteristic often present in similar sightings. The crew, in the mean time, were unable to move metallic objects from the deck of the ship suggesting a magnetic field was involved.
The 1947 crash of what the US Air Force initially declared a ‘flying saucer’ heralded the beginning of the popularisation and intrigue surrounding strange flying objects in the sky up till this day. Despite the lack of media and public awareness, the most referenced case involving USO's occurred in 1967 in Shag Harbour, Canada. On the night of October 4, 1967, at about 11:20 p.m. Atlantic Daylight Time, it was reported that something had crashed into the waters of the Gulf of Maine near Shag Harbour. At least eleven people saw a low-flying lit object head towards the harbour. Multiple witnesses reported hearing a whistling sound "like a bomb," then a "whoosh," and finally a loud bang. The object was never officially identified, and was therefore referred to as an unidentified flying object (UFO) in Government of Canada documents. The Canadian military became involved in a subsequent rescue/recovery effort. The initial report was made by local resident Laurie Wickens and four of his friends. Driving through Shag Harbour on Highway 3, they spotted a large object descending into the waters off the harbour. Attaining a better vantage point, Wickens and his friends saw an object floating 250 m (820 ft) to 300 m (980 ft) offshore in the Gulf of Maine. Wickens contacted the RCMP detachment in Barrington Passage and reported he had seen a large airplane or small airliner crash into the Gulf of Maine.
Assuming an aircraft had crashed, within about 15 minutes, 10 RCMP officers arrived at the scene. Concerned for survivors, the RCMP detachment contacted the Rescue Coordination Centre (RCC) in Halifax to advise them of the situation, and ask if any aircraft were missing. Before any attempt at rescue could be made, the object started to sink and disappeared from view. A rescue mission was quickly assembled. Within half an hour of the crash, local fishing boats went out to the crash site in the waters of the Gulf of Maine off Shag Harbour to look for survivors. No survivors, bodies or debris were taken, either by the fishermen or by a Canadian Coast Guard search and rescue cutter, which arrived about an hour later from nearby Clark's Harbour.
By the next morning, RCC Halifax had determined that no aircraft were missing. While still tasked with the search, the captain of the Canadian Coast Guard cutter received a radio message from RCC Halifax that all commercial, private and military aircraft were accounted for along the eastern seaboard, in both Atlantic Canada and New England. The same morning, RCC Halifax also sent a priority telex to the "Air Desk" at Royal Canadian Air Force headquarters in Ottawa, which handled all civilian and military UFO sightings, informing them of the crash and that all conventional explanations such as aircraft, flares, etc. had been dismissed. Therefore this was labeled a "UFO Report." The head of the Air Desk then sent another priority telex to the Royal Canadian Navy headquarters concerning the "UFO Report" and recommended an underwater search be mounted. The RCN in turn sent another priority telex tasking Fleet Diving Unit Atlantic with carrying out the search.
Two days after the incident had been observed, a detachment of RCN divers from Fleet Diving Unit Atlantic was assembled and for the next three days they combed the seafloor of the Gulf of Maine off Shag Harbor looking for an object. The final report said no trace of an object was found. While the official story of the incident ends here, further evidence attributed to various military and civilian witnesses might imply a highly secretive military search involving a small flotilla of Royal Canadian Navy and United States Navy ships about 50 km (31 mi) northeast of Shag Harbour near Shelburne (see map above), site of HMCS Shelburne, a top secret submarine detection base jointly operated by both navies as part of the Integrated Undersea Surveillance System (IUSS).
According to one military witness, he was allegedly briefed that the object had originally been picked up on radar coming out of Siberia. After crashing in Shag Harbour, it traveled underwater up the coast and came to rest on top of a submarine magnetic detection grid reportedly located off Shelburne, where it was supposedly joined by a second vehicle. Navy ships were allegedly anchored off HMCS Shelburne's facilities at Government Point for a week, according to the witnesses, in an attempt to recover the object. A barge was said to have been brought in from the United States to assist in the recovery, as reported by another military witness. Regional newspaper stories did mention a barge with "atomic furnaces" being brought to the government wharf at Shelburne Harbour on October 6 for emergency repair, theorized by some as a cover story to explain its presence there.
One American diver, known only as "Harry" in the book Dark Object by Styles and Ledger, stated that the object wasn't from planet Earth. "Harry" claimed photographs were taken by the divers and some foam-like debris brought up. Another military witness claimed that there were actually two objects, one perhaps trying to assist the other. The naval search was suddenly called off on October 11. That night, a seemingly identical UFO was reported departing the area by witnesses near the original Shag Harbour crash site.
The most recent History Channel documentary about the incident, which aired on August 10, 2006, also reported that one of the divers involved in the Shag Harbour search did come forward during the mid-1990s, refusing to allow his identity to become known publicly. Once the researchers verified that the man in fact had served as a diver during that search, he recounted his version of what had happened at Shag Harbour.
In this recounting, by the time the divers reached Shag Harbour, they already knew that nothing would be found there, because the target had already been located off the coast at Shelburne. He went on to further say that the Royal Canadian Navy and Royal Canadian Air Force as well as the United States Air Force and United States Navy monitored the "unknown objects" by radar and sonar, and that the objects were underwater. This monitoring continued for at least three days, until a Soviet Navy submarine was detected entering Canadian waters northeast of Nova Scotia. With that, the navy ships departed to intercept the submarine, and by the time they had returned, the "unknown objects" had evidently departed.
However, unlike the event at Shag Harbour, no official documentation or confirmation has yet emerged to support witness stories of a second search near Shelburne. There has been nothing to substantiate the diver's claims, with the exception of archived records that indicate a substantial amount of search and monitor activity in the Shelburne area during that 10 day period.
Discussion point: Whilst UFOs can be explained as weather phenomena, military aircraft or cosmic bodies, what suggestions are there for explaining when these go in and out of water?
