What do we know about UFOs operating underwater? Stay tuned. You can now download a free PDF copy of issue number 8 of the New Thinking Allowed magazine, or order a beautiful printed copy. Go to newthinkingallowed.org. New Thinking Allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body, and spirit, the topics that we cover here. (0:00:41)

We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit their website at cihs.edu. Book three in the new Thinking Allowed dialogue series is UFOs and UAP, Are We Really Alone? Now available on Amazon. Thinking Allowed. Conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove. Hello, and welcome. (0:01:28)

I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. We'll be exploring the subject of unidentified submerged objects today. And my guest, Richard Dolan, is the author of UFOs in the National Security State, two volumes covering 1941 to 1991. Also, A.D., After Disclosure, When the Government Finally Reveals the Truth About Alien Contact. The Secret Space Program and Breakaway Civilization. The Alien Agendas, A Speculative Analysis of Those Visiting Earth. UFOs for the 21st Century Mind, and his newest book, the first in a three-volume series, is A History of USOs, Unidentified Submerged Objects, Volume One, From the Beginning to 1969. Richard is based in the eastern United States, and now I'll switch over to the internet video. (0:02:37)

Welcome, Richard. It is a pleasure to be with you once again. Hi, Jeffrey. I very much enjoyed our last encounter, and I'm looking forward to this one. Well, this is going to be a different one because we're going to have a narrow focus on Unidentified Submerged Objects, USOs, which is basically the title of your newest book. It's a very thoroughly researched project. (0:03:10)

You've actually enumerated over 600 sightings of unidentified objects. Sometimes maybe phenomena might be a better word even than objects, but it's interesting because there's sort of a folklore going on that so many UFOs are actually based underwater. I believe you even mentioned the figure of 50%, but then you go on to say that's a myth. It's not true. I think it's an overstated number for sure. (0:03:42)

I don't remember where I first heard this, but I've heard it many times. People would say, oh yes, roughly half of all the UFO sightings take place either in water or over water or around water. So it's actually kind of very nebulously defined initially. It's like how close is close. But when I would go through the accounts looking for good, credible encounters of people with objects in the water in some form or another, it's very small percentage. (0:04:17)

Realistically, when I go through raw sightings, maybe 1% or fewer are actually cases where an object is seen in the water or coming out of the water or operating in the depths. Now the actual percentage may be higher than 1%, but we are typically landlubbers. We're not out on the water a lot of the time, most of us. (0:04:43)

And so it wouldn't be surprising necessarily. But yeah, they're kind of rare, at least in terms of the overall sightings. However, I would just emphasize rare though they might be, they are a very distinctive and fascinating subset of the overall phenomenon. And I really got into it. I went into this for three years and tried to scour out all of the really good sightings that I could. (0:05:10)

So it was a fascinating project. I think it's fair to say that some of those sightings, even though the percentage is small, are very well known, like the recent Tic Tac sightings off the coast of Southern California, where apparently pilots witnessed some of these devices actually submerging. (0:05:29)

Yes. What I found is that, first of all, there's many military instances where pilots or Navy personnel on ships noted these objects that were in the water behaving in ways that just made no sense. And also many, many just ordinary people would notice these types of things as well. (0:05:59)

They were always shocking. I think to me, the most shocking thing to see would, at least currently, would be to watch some object that looks a little bit like a flying saucer emerge from the ocean depths and then just take off into the air. And that has been seen, surprisingly, many times. (0:06:19)

Many times. I was shocked at how many cases I was able to uncover where exactly that was noted, an object emerging from the water. But there are many instances where, with military personnel, and you mentioned the Tic Tac case of 2004, and this is disputed by some officials, but there have been other witnesses for that event who have stated on the record that, yes, there was a large submerged object. (0:06:46)

In addition to the Tic Tac that everyone's talked about, there was something else in the water by the USS Nimitz carrier group that was quite substantial and apparently had incredible maneuverability. Well, I recently saw a news article. It referred to a congressman, Tim Burchett, who apparently was being interviewed on a right-wing talk show hosted by Matt Gaetz, of all people. (0:07:13)

But Burchett said that he had it on good authority from Navy officials that they had trapped an object the size of a football field moving underwater at several hundred miles an hour. Yeah, I just recently learned about that as well. That's not in my book of my studies yet, but I'll sneak it into Volume 3 when that comes out because it's really quite remarkable. (0:07:44)

There are definitely sightings, both aerial and water-based, in which you have sometimes absolutely enormous objects being described. There was one fairly recently from 2017, one of the cases I just fascinated by. This was submitted to the National UFO Reporting Center. It was less than 10 years ago as we are speaking. And it was a man operating an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, about 80 miles southeast of New Orleans. He was with three or four other guys on his rig. (0:08:17)

He said there was another rig about two miles further out in the ocean. And between those two rigs, he said, this was in the spring of 2017, a gargantuan object, disc-shaped object, easily the size of a football field or more, emerged from the water. He said, we saw the water dripping off the sides. It hovered and then it took off like faster than a speeding bullet. (0:08:49)

He said, we saw this. He said, I'm certain the guys on the other rig saw it, but no one else has come forward. But that man did have a long interview with Peter Davenport, who runs the National UFO Reporting Center. And Peter simply remarked that he thought this man was very upstanding, honest, and so forth. So it's just, what are these huge things coming out? They look like the size of a couple of city blocks at times, and then just doing what they do. A lot of them are out there, a lot of these reports. (0:09:20)

Well, you've done an excellent job of cataloging sightings, going back even to ancient times. (0:09:28)

It seems to be fair to say that the older they are, the less reliable they are. Pretty much true. I tried really hard to go as far back into the past as possible to find USO cases. Again, that's Unidentified Submerged Objects, so water-based anomalous objects, to see when was the earliest good, reliable sighting that I could kind of get behind and believe. And there are a few candidates, for sure. (0:10:04)

Many people are aware that Christopher Columbus and a member of his crew saw something unusual as they approached the New World, and that is true. Columbus wrote about it in his log. But when you look at that particular one, it's hard to know what he saw. And I'm not trying to debunk it as necessarily prosaic, but it could have been a torch on the island. They were not far from Hispaniola at that time. (0:10:30)

It's not impossible. I don't really know. There's a Chinese case from the 11th century that is interesting, but it's a bit threadbare. There are even earlier cases from Europe that are at least alleged. But when you look at them, at least when I look at them, I mean, there were no MUFON investigators back then to investigate a case. None of that. You basically are just left with some stories that some of them are suggestive. (0:11:00)

I think there are better aerial accounts back then than there are water-based accounts, in my own opinion. So the first really solid one that I recorded for my collection was in 1717 in the Caribbean off the coast of Martinique. And that's a pretty good one. And then there are many, many reliable ones after that. (0:11:24)

One of the things that you focus on would seem to be very different from the bulk of the cases. The bulk of the cases, at least according to your description, would appear to be craft of some sort that are being manned or piloted by some intelligence. However, there's a category of sightings that are very different. They are lights. And the lights take the form of spokes coming out of a wheel. (0:11:54)

And sometimes the spokes are curved. And it would appear, I think you claim, this is very different. It's not a craft. Yeah, it's hard to know what these things are. They were recorded quite a bit in the 19th century and for a good portion of the 20th century. In fact, the last such case that I noted was one in the 1960s and I think one possibly in the 70s. But most of them were really in the 19th century, the 1880s and 90s and early 1900s. The researcher Charles Fort, a century ago, collected a lot of them, old newspaper accounts and the like. (0:12:40)

And they're very unusual. So what you would have is a ship's captain out, usually in the eastern seas, like the Arabian Sea or the Malacca Strait or the South China Sea. And they would note this phenomenon of these luminous spokes without a rim. There was no rim, but you would have these spokes and going out for often hundreds of yards. And they would be revolving around a central hub. (0:13:09)

Under the water, these were not on top of the water. None of the ship's captains who noted them seemed to think that they were normal phosphorescence, which of course does happen in the waters. This is different. These were below the water. They seemed like they were coming from below and they usually looked artificial. They did not look like natural phenomenon. (0:13:32)

But in no case did anyone notice like an object or a craft in connection to that. So it is a mystery. I know some ocean experts will argue that these were some kind of natural phosphorescence, but I can tell you the truth. I've looked at some of the academic studies on this and I'm no expert, but it's very difficult for me to understand how these could be natural. (0:13:59)

And they have not really been reproduced. I mean, there were attempts to do so, but I don't think that they succeeded, frankly. And certainly not on the scale that these things are. So it's a mystery. Charles Fort, looking into it, believed that they were a non-human intelligence writing a hundred years ago. And I can't really argue against that, but we haven't seen a craft. (0:14:21)

In one case in the 1960s, there was electromagnetic effects associated with this phenomenon. So that gives me a little more confidence to think that there might've been an actual object down there, but we've never really seen what it could be. Well, I wonder if you're familiar with the recent book by Robert Temple called The New Science of Heaven. He looks into the idea of plasma physics and suggests that many phenomenon associated with UFOs could be plasma, which would mean some form of matter that is not based on atoms or molecules, but actually ionic. (0:15:04)

That's an interesting idea. And Robert Temple's a very interesting man. I've often wondered if, this is certainly not my expertise, so I have to be careful here, but is it at all possible that a plasma or some kind of light phenomena can act with intelligence? It doesn't have an organic brain the way that we do, but can it be possible that there is intelligent action in something like a plasma or a ball of light? From my complete amateuristic background, I'm inclined to think it is possible just because of the behavior of some of these things, but I don't know how that would operate. (0:15:53)

Robert Temple is convinced that that is in fact the case, and he cites research from Russian plasma physicists who talk about autopolysis and how plasma clouds have the ability to organize themselves in a manner which is, according to Temple, much more complex and sophisticated than the human body, for example. Well, that's fascinating and definitely worth pursuing. Actually, before I publish, I'm actively finishing the second volume of this study right now. I was working on it this morning, and I may try to incorporate some of those concepts into one of my last two books on this. (0:16:35)

It may well be that there are things out there that are so strange that the human brain is just not capable of comprehending what's going on. I agree with you fully on that matter. There are a number of the USO cases that I have looked at, most of them, in which it does appear that there's some kind of object or craft or some solid, you know, you could knock on it and make a noise. (0:17:06)

That's the most of them. But I would have to agree that, you know, there are a couple of other possibilities out there, and they are important and they need to be looked into. And this plasma connection is certainly one. (0:17:14)

Some of the things you describe are really strange, like pillars of fire erupting from bodies of water, or I think in one case, a mountain. Yes, so there are some real outliers. There's a mountain. This one happened in 1963, just north of Puerto Rico. Now, Puerto Rico, many people might be aware, is a genuine hot spot of USO and UFO or UAP activity. (0:17:47)

It's been for many years. Talk to any islander from that area and they will almost invariably tell you that. Lots of sightings. This one was seen by a commercial air crew. They were flying, I think, from San Juan to New York. They were above, near, I think, the Puerto Rico trench, which is a massively deep oceanic trench. (0:18:18)

And they saw, essentially, this is crazy, I mean, but they saw the ocean rise by something like half a mile. And there's this massive bulge out of the ocean. Something like that should have caused a kind of tsunami, you would think, on the island itself. And yet there was nothing reported. It would seem to be just too large, like there was no seismic activity recorded along with this. So that's a bizarre mystery. (0:18:43)

I wouldn't have included it except that that specific area is an absolute USO hot spot. And in fact, in that year, 1963, for whatever reason, was a particularly active year for military USO sightings in that exact region. So I think something important was going on. I don't know. But that oceanic mountain, as they described it, was just one of the many things that happened there. (0:19:21)

I think probably the most exciting finding that you report in your book, and I'm pretty sure I would have to attribute the discovery to you yourself, is that the phenomenon seems to be adapting to us. It appears to be modifying its own behavior in response to technological developments within human civilization. That is what it looks like to me, yes. (0:19:51)

And I think that was something that was my own conclusion. I have not read that anywhere else. And it's interesting when I think back on my own history with the subject. I've studied UFOs for decades. And I hadn't really given a lot of thought about, you know, to what extent these beings or the technology that they control, how that might have adapted to us. (0:20:14)

But when we look back over our 20th century, that, you know, just we finished not long ago, I mean, what an unbelievable amount of change we went through. And it really hit home to me when I was looking at this in terms of the water. We didn't build our first practical submarine until the year 1900. We just started. We developed sonar a little bit after that. (0:20:39)

Then we developed these massive sonar arrays under the ocean, where we could listen for Soviet submarines thousands of miles away and pick up who knows what else. We developed nuclear submarines in the 50s that could stay under the water for months at a time. And all of the other things that we developed, satellite technology. We really put our eyes and ears throughout the planet through the 20th century. (0:21:00)

And if you think of it that way, if there was a presence at the beginning of the century, they're dealing with us on one level. (0:21:05)

By the end of the 20th century, I mean, it's unrecognizable. And no matter how advanced any visitors might be, it would have to be the case, I think, that they would need to adapt if they wanted to do what they were doing in solitude or privacy, without us interrupting them. And I do believe that's what they want. (0:21:30)

I don't think they want us interrupting what they do. It doesn't look like it. But they are. The behaviors, particularly with military encounters, they seem to be very interested in military technology. That is how it looks to me when I review these cases. They come in, they check us out for a while, shut down the comms, shut down the weapon systems when they need to, and then they move on their way. (0:21:53)

So, yes, I think the adaptation... I'll just finish that thought here. I didn't notice this until I began looking at statistics. And when I started this project, I wasn't even thinking of collecting data points like that. But it did happen where... actually, this is a suggestion of my wife who said, you know, it'd be great if you had like a number of little categories and data points for each case. (0:22:22)

How large was the craft? What color was it? What shape was it? What was it doing with the water? Was it under the water? Did it emerge? And so forth. And I thought, you know, it's a good idea. It took many more months to go back over each case, but I extracted roughly 15 data points for each of these nearly 700 cases. (0:22:39)

And I put them into a spreadsheet, and that was when I saw. For example, one data point I noted was, did this happen in the daytime or at night? Very simple. And up until the late 1960s, it was 50-50 day versus night. After the late 60s, almost immediately went to 75% at night. It was very noticeable. (0:23:08)

I would not have picked that out if I had just been reviewing the cases without looking at the spreadsheet. There are other patterns that I noticed as well, but the day versus night one was interesting because that seemed to me like adaptive behavior. And furthermore, the percentage of nighttime encounters becomes almost 90% when you're looking at military cases. (0:23:33)

So it seems to me that this is good evidence that they, A, can distinguish between civilian and military craft, but B, that they instituted some behavioral change by the late 1960s. Ironically, though, at the same time, the military has developed enormous capabilities for what we could call night vision. I recently have seen some UFO photos that were relatively distinct. (0:24:05)

It was a globe, a round object that was captured actually going right into the ocean, and it was filmed at night using special equipment. That's true. But when I think about something like this, first of all, I don't pretend that I have the exact answer as to why they seem to have gone dark, as it were. I can speculate that, yes, our capabilities had improved by the late 60s. We were developing all kinds of optical and electronic means of detection, satellites as well. (0:24:38)

You could imagine at least a solution to be, well, we'll come out at night, we'll shine a really bright light so they can't make anything else out, which is frequently what would happen, especially in the 1970s. So it is a form of camouflage, in a sense, or hiding in a way. (0:24:58)

No, not perfect. Certainly, you know, as the decades went on, we developed better and better night vision as well. So what you're saying is true, but it's just potentially one measure that they may have taken. But whatever the reason, it seems very clear to me that this switch to nighttime behavior became much more predominant by, say, the 1970s. Almost as if there were some sort of policy announced. (0:25:20)

Yeah, exactly. This is what I think. So there's... I liken our relationship to them, especially under the water, as a kind of dance. You know, they're seeing us. We weren't noticing them for a while, but then we started to notice them quietly. Certainly not talking about it with the general public. But the military guys, yes, they started noticing. (0:25:44)

Of course, they don't like to talk very much about it. But I've often thought, like, how dramatic this had to be. Like, you're a submarine captain. You're in the Atlantic. You're looking for the Russian subs. They're looking for you. (0:25:56)

But then there's this other presence, a wild card. What are they? They can literally circle around your submarine. They can appear and disappear almost at will. And you suspect and you probably know that they have the certain abilities to mess with your technology. They usually don't. That had to add a very, very dramatic element, I would say, to what's already a dramatic Cold War that was going on. And I think this makes it just another dimension of strange happening. (0:26:33)

You do report, I think, more than one case in which the sightings of these objects was correlated with complete electrical malfunction on naval warships. Indeed. We often hear in the UFO community how a UFO or an object will hover over a nuclear installation and shut off the nukes. We've also seen this in connection to United States aircraft carriers. (0:27:08)

The ultimate in U.S. power projection to the world, your aircraft carriers, maybe your nuclear submarines, those are important. And so in a number of instances, we had U.S. Navy personnel writing in after the fact. Sometimes they give their names, sometimes they don't, but would describe one of them, the most dramatic of all happens, it'll actually be covered in the second volume, in a lot of detail. (0:27:40)

1971, July 2nd, 1971, just north of Puerto Rico, the USS John F. Kennedy aircraft carrier. It was eight o'clock at night. And the guy running the communications on the ship, we have his name, he's written about this, it's all out in the open. He's running the comms and he says at eight o'clock, nothing but gibberish started coming in to the communications. (0:28:03)

He said, I didn't really understand why. And then he heard on the intercom, some sailor screaming, it's God, it's the end of the world. So that gets his attention. He goes out to the deck to see what is happening. And he said, I saw this glowing orange sphere. He said it was the size of a beach ball held at arm's length. (0:28:32)

It was just hovering over the ship. He said one sailor had to be sedated. He watched this for about 20 seconds and then the ship went to battle stations, general quarters. So we had to return to his communications station where for the next 20 minutes, he said, no communications were able to go in or out of the ship. He believed that the weapon systems were gone too, but certainly the communications were out. (0:28:54)

Now, he doesn't know how this object departed because he wasn't able to visually see it. However, we can assume it was there for the next 20 minutes until the ship went off battle stations or maybe, you know, sometime around then. Anything that's going to shut the communications of a United States aircraft carrier down for 20 minutes, you have to assume that even that goes to the president. That had to go, I think, to Richard Nixon, who was president at that time. (0:29:25)

And yet, you know, it's maybe shouldn't be surprising when we hear defense personnel these days talk about these UAP and saying things like, well, we're looking into it and we'll get back to you when we find something. You know, then you read cases like this, what happened in 1971, and you realize clearly they know or somebody knows, but just as clearly they do not want to talk about this publicly. This is how would you describe this to the public if you're in the Navy? (0:29:57)

This is not a fun place to be. And so they just, they keep it silent. (0:30:02)

Well, it's obviously a big embarrassment that the most powerful military in the world has no idea, presumably, how to address this situation. It makes us look weak, and I can imagine they would prefer not to do that. I have to think the same. There's no, they don't really have an answer to this. I think there's a pretty good idea of what they are dealing with, because they have been dealing with this for a long time now. (0:30:41)

So I can't imagine that they don't have a clue. But I also cannot imagine that they really know effectively how to deal with these on a regular basis, because I mean, even through into the 21st century, I don't have as many military accounts that I've collected from this century as from the past. And I think mainly that's an effect of freedom of information. (0:31:05)

So we were able to get a number of these from the past. And it's also a factor having to do with just military people. It takes them many years before they write their accounts. And this is really the case. So a lot of these from the 1970s and 1960s. Inevitably, it's from some Navy guy 30 years after he leaves the service, who finally decides, I'm going to tell my story. (0:31:33)

And we don't have that many of them yet from the 21st century, I suspect, as the years go by, they'll start coming in. Well, I do know that with regard to aerial phenomena, there is a concern that UFOs are actually a threat to commercial aviation and military aviation. But the same thing would be true for the Navy. Yeah, no question about this. (0:32:01)

There's been an organization for many years by the acronym NARCAP, and they focus on aviation issues with these UAP and have talked for years about the risks to commercial and private aviation due to this. And it's a real issue. There's not really a lot of confirmed cases of genuine collisions, although there's a few suspected ones that I can think of. (0:32:29)

But certainly with the military, we might remember a few years ago when the Navy pilot Ryan Graves first spoke to the New York Times, I think this was in 2019. He stated, you know, back in 2014 and 2015, he was with the USS Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Group off the east coast of the Atlantic coast there in the US. And he said for many, many days in a row, we would have these objects, we're doing all kinds of operations, exercises, and these things would fly between our aircraft. And that's a very provocative thing to do. (0:33:02)

And it really angered the Navy pilots. They're thinking who's testing these technologies. But there's, as far as anyone can tell, these aren't weren't anyone's tests. These were genuine UAP. So it is, it's a danger. Absolutely. Another correlation that you uncovered, I'm pretty sure this goes back to the phenomenon we discussed earlier of the giant spokes circling around a wheel. (0:33:39)

If I recall correctly, you indicated that this phenomenon is associated with shallow waters. Yeah, that's what I believe I noted. I don't know if anyone else has determined this. But one thing I did with every single USO incident that I recorded, I tried to be absolutely precise to find out where exactly this was. And what I ended up doing was on my Google Earth, I put a little yellow pin on every single USO case. And it's pretty nicely organized. (0:34:10)

I'm proud of this. I've got them broken down by decades and all different other things. (0:34:14)

But when you look at them on Google Earth, just those luminous spokes, those pinwheels, all of them, it seems to me all of them in which we have a definite location ascribed to them occurred off of shelves, not in the deep waters. So as a lot of people realize the ocean isn't all the same. (0:34:42)

You know, about 10% of all the world's oceans are on top of shelves that are shallower, maybe a few hundred feet deep. And then you then you go off the shelf and now you go three miles down or more. So these pinwheels, these luminous wheels, as far as I can see, seem to occur in shallow waters. (0:35:02)

And I tried to understand, could this be, could this indicate a naturalistic explanation? And I can't pretend that I got to the bottom of it. But what it looked to me is that there isn't a shallow water phenomenon that produces this type of effect. So but it does seem that they occurred in shallow waters and predominantly in from the Persian Gulf eastward, basically to the South China Sea, for the most part. (0:35:30)

It does suggest the possibility of some sort of a biological phenomenon that is located within a specific geographical area. I couldn't say no to that. What's frustrating is that the last such case that I have found occurred more than 50 years ago. So there hasn't, I'm not aware. I spoke to Admiral Tim Gallaudet, who's become pretty well known these days. (0:36:04)

And Tim's great. And he's talked about this subject quite a bit. And he apparently saw something that might be like that in the Persian Gulf during the 1990s. When I get his description of it, though, it doesn't strike me as well defined as these pinwheels are. So I don't know what to make of it. It would be nice to have some more contemporary examples of this so we could really look into it better. (0:36:30)

Well, people have speculated that there are underwater bases, that that's why we see them, that it's a perfect place if some sort of alien presence wanted to have an outpost on our planet and be relatively undetected underwater would be a logical place if they had that capability. But at the same time, if we can spot a submarine, a Soviet submarine or Russian submarine at a great distance, you'd think we would have also by now figured out where those bases are if they exist. (0:37:16)

Yes, I think probably the Navy has figured out a lot of that. But that doesn't mean that they can get to them. You know, even an effective submarine can only go down 1,000, 2,000 feet as far as we can tell. The ocean floor goes down much deeper than that. There are instances where the U.S. Navy encountered these objects. (0:37:36)

Again, I'm looking at the area just north of Puerto Rico here, including the Bermuda Triangle, by the way. But you've got the Puerto Rico Trench there, and that goes down almost six miles. It's very, very deep. We cannot get a submarine down there. I mean, you could put a diving belt, perhaps attached to a long cable, but that's not easy to do. (0:38:02)

But these things have gone down into that area. We can't chase them. So if there is an alien base in the Puerto Rico Trench, I think they're quite secure. My guess is that there are a number of centers of operations that other intelligences probably have in the oceans. I also think they probably have them in various mountain ranges above the ground here on Earth. But as far as the oceans, yes, I do think that there are probably a couple of good candidates. I can't say that I know for sure. (0:38:34)

Certainly, I suspect near Puerto Rico. I could suspect near Catalina Island, near Los Angeles there. A lot of activity. But a lot of other places in the world, too. I wouldn't be shocked if there was one up by the Bering Sea, you know, the remote regions north of the Aleutian Islands or around there. Also, in some of the waters near Asia. Yeah, I could see... and off to South America. I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere near Buenos Aires there was a base. I think there's a number of places where this is possible. (0:39:08)

But I only think that because there are a number of areas where these objects have been seen emerging from the water. And that doesn't mean there's necessarily a base there, but you'd have to wonder. You see a craft coming out of the water in a particular part of the ocean, you might wonder, maybe there's a base there. (0:39:35)

Yeah, what are they doing? And the interesting thing is that it's not just the ocean, they've been seen coming out of rivers and lakes as well. (0:39:41)

Yes, indeed. Fewer, but absolutely, yes. The oceans account for... I have ran this number, I think about three quarters of all of the USO sightings are from an oceanic body of water. But about 15 to 20% are from lakes. The Great Lakes here in North America are an active area, among other places. And then maybe a little more than 5% are rivers that have been noted. (0:40:10)

So I'm not sure what to make of that. But freshwater bodies are a scene of this. Lake Michigan in particular of the Great Lakes has a lot of reports. But there's a number of lakes in Italy and in other regions where activity has been reported as well. And on some rare occasions, I gather there are also beings, creatures associated with these sightings. Beings and sometimes allegations of missing time. (0:40:49)

But as far as with the beings, yeah, this is a small minority. I think three or 4% of the cases where someone will, in addition to reporting USO, will say, I saw or I believe I saw silhouettes or an actual being associated with the craft. Usually they are humanoid and body plan. They look kind of like humans. Some people will say they've looked on a few occasions. (0:41:15)

I'm sure they were aliens. They look like aliens. There's not always the most clear description that someone will give. But typically they're short if they're seen in any way. And sometimes they're seen outside of the craft. There's one South American case I'm thinking of where a large family and a bunch of friends, they've got this perfect visibility. They're up on a balcony. They're looking out at the ocean. (0:41:42)

And they see this craft on the water. It's an unusual craft. And they see these two or three short little guys with a hose and they seem to be sucking up water. And they eventually get back into the craft and then it just, it takes off and zips off going who knows where. So are they interested in taking our water? I think sometimes they seem to be, yeah. And what are they doing? (0:42:07)

And again, it's come back again and again. What are they doing? What's their mission? You report one sighting. I thought it was really quite amazing where there were these beings. They were on the outside of a craft doing something. And when the craft took off, one of the beings was still hanging on to the outside of the craft. (0:42:34)

Okay. So that is a report. We are told from 1914 up in Canada. What was the lake? It's one of the lakes that connects to Lake Huron, Georgian Bay. So it's a large body of freshwater up there. So this man wrote 50 years later to the UFO organization, APRO, run by Coral and James Lorenzen. And they were very, very active, of course, for many years, took a lot of reports. (0:43:06)

And sometimes you'd get something like this. An older person would write and say, well, when I was a young man, this crazy thing happened. And that was this story. So this man wrote, they have his name. I can't remember his name. He said, yeah, I was a young guy in 1914 with a bunch of my American buddies. We're up by Georgian Bay. We developed... they somehow were stranded up there and they found this Canadian family, these nice, polite Canadians, and said, yeah, so we'll help you, yanks. (0:43:38)

And so they're on the shore of Georgian Bay and they all look out on the water and they see this craft with these little guys on the craft. And they're sucking out the water. They're doing this water extraction. (0:43:53)

And apparently, according to the way the guy told the story, he said, it seems like they noticed us and they thought we have to get out of here. And they took off. And the last guy, as you pointed out, was somehow hanging on to this craft in the air as the craft was taking off. I've never, ever encountered a UFO story where that was described, except that one instance. (0:44:18)

It seems almost too crazy to believe. Then on the other hand, I can say to myself, are these beings flawless? Do they never make a mistake? Do they never screw up? Could something crazy happen? All I can say is maybe, I don't know. In that case, I did write it up. And I did try to emphasize that, you know, you got to take these for what they are. (0:44:44)

It's not, they're not a sure thing. This is one man's story. Seems interesting. And so I thought I would include it. Well, you have attempted to judge each case in terms of its evidential strength. Yes. And I gather, to be fair, you're not coming to any hard conclusions at this point. You're basically saying we've got to collect all the data and evaluate it carefully. (0:45:13)

And then perhaps we'll be able to draw some conclusions. But it seems unmistakable to me that there's an obvious connection of some sort with UFOs, with aerial phenomenon. I do. You know, one thing that I look at is what are the shapes of these objects being reported, these USOs. And when you go through them, they are the exact same shapes that people report with aerial UAP or UFOs. Disc-shaped, cigar-shaped sometimes. (0:45:46)

Occasionally triangles are reported. Spherical objects. And then, you know, just as with UFOs, sometimes things are described only as a light or a brilliant, intense light and they can't figure it out. These are the exact same things that you get with standard UFO reports, including a few of the unusual ones. Box, cube-shaped. There's a few of those. (0:46:11)

Square and diamond-shaped and so forth. So in that sense, they seem indistinguishable, as far as I can tell, to aerial objects. And the manner of behavior, the kind of way that they will approach and go away, this curiosity, seems very similar to many of the aerial encounters that we see. So I can't really see that there is... the only thing that's different about these USOs is that they are basically aerial UFOs that go into the water, is really what it looks like to me. I don't think there's a difference there. (0:46:45)

I'll mention one thing about the standards of evidence, if you don't mind, Jeff, since you brought it up. I did decide that I would want to gauge some of these cases on the basis of how strong I personally thought the evidence was. So I created five separate criteria that I explained in the book. (0:47:09)

It's as good as I knew how to do, and I tried to be very consistent with measuring them out. So you could get a score from 2 to 12, 2 being the weakest, 12 being the strongest. And so I did that for every one of the cases. I will point out though that there are cases that might seem weak in terms of evidence, but are probably true nonetheless. (0:47:28)

You know, one that will be included in the third volume comes from a very close friend of my wife's and mine, a woman, she's an experienced doctor. Her father told this story to her and to her mother countless times before he died. There's no doubt in her mind that this happened, but in terms of evidence, it would have to be considered weak. (0:47:57)

But does that mean it didn't happen? No, I think it probably did happen. So we want the cases that are bulletproof in terms of evidence, but I try to emphasize, you know, it's good to use as much common sense here as we can, because we have to realize we don't have freedom of information declassified documents for most of these. (0:48:22)

That's just the way it is. How do you think the disclosure process in general is coming along? That's a good question. And I'm certainly not expecting a major breakthrough in terms of government transparency on this. You know, the Biden and the Trump people are, in so many ways, they hate each other, they're very different. But when it comes to this subject, I don't know how much of a difference there really has been. (0:48:49)

You know, I heard the statement by Trump's new press secretary when she talked about the recent drone swarm, as it's called. (0:48:57)

And it sounded like it could have come right out of the Biden White House. There was really no difference there. Now, we do have currently a movement in Congress to try to get to the bottom of some of these. Ana Paulina Luna is leading a kind of a task force on this. They're looking at not just UFOs and UAP and USOs, but JFK assassination and COVID and 9-11. Hey, I'm a conspiracy guy. I'm all for this. I want to see the government dive into these things. (0:49:32)

My fear is that they may be set up for failure. Just to be digging into so many difficult subjects that have been, in my view, have been subject to so much obfuscation and deception and lies. I think this is a very big ask to think that they're going to be able to get satisfaction on these. (0:49:55)

As far as the UFO part of it goes, I continue to expect that we are in an era where we are getting new whistleblowers. They are coming out. They do make something of an impact, but we're not having game changers. One would have thought two years ago that David Grush could be a game changer. I mean, here was a guy with high-level security clearances, speaks to Congress in a live session for the whole world and says, yes, this is real. (0:50:29)

There are non-human biologics. We have them. Good grief. You would think that would cause the walls to come crumbling down, and they haven't, because I think the other side plays very, very effective defense. They're very good, and they're not giving this up. So I could expect that we will see some revelations this year. It's entirely possible, but I don't know that that's really going to move the needle significantly, to be honest. (0:50:52)

So I'm not expecting a breakthrough this year. One of the things you speculate about is the possibility that the government has attempted to retrieve some of these undersea vehicles. It looks like that. It looks like that to me, yes. And in part of the book, particularly in one of the cases toward the end, I give a fairly extended discourse on how I think that might work and so on. (0:51:21)

One former Navy guy wrote to me and told me of a conversation he had with another ex-Navy guy, and so you all just scuttlebutt, you know, it all filters around there, and eventually it comes to someone like myself. And what he stated was that this guy knew that one particular U.S. nuclear submarine was refitted in the 1960s to have a side hatch that would enable it to retrieve smaller USOs that were on the, you know, maybe on the bottom of an ocean shelf or this type of thing, because it can't go to the bottom of the ocean floor, but a shelf it could do. (0:52:03)

And according to this guy, there were like 10 or a dozen such retrievals that were made. (0:52:09)

It's quite a lot. Now, is it true? I spoke to another Navy guy who said, I don't believe that that particular submarine was well suited for this type of retrieval. Maybe that's true. But I do think, you know, there are... we certainly know of land-based retrievals of these objects. We've had many, many claims of that, not just Roswell. I think, yeah, ocean-based retrievals are definitely in the mix. They're more challenging. (0:52:43)

Something on the bottom of the ocean floor is not going to be easy to get, but something on an ocean shelf, which again is 10 to 15 percent of the ocean. If you're the United States Navy or the Russian Navy, I think it would be in your interest to set up a retrieval program, if nothing else, to retrieve those, the low-hanging fruit that's on a shallow shelf, so to speak, that you might be able to retrieve. And I suspect this has happened. (0:53:08)

You do write about an instance in which it appears the U.S. Navy was able to recover a sunken Russian submarine. Yes, this happened. Absolutely. This happened actually in the 1970s, so I'll write about it more extensively in the next volume, but it's true. So Hughes Aircraft developed something called the Glomar Explorer. It's basically a big claw attached to three miles of cable that can go right down to the bottom of the ocean. (0:53:41)

And there was a downed Russian sub. Everyone perished tragically on that, but the United States actually recovered it. And in fact, they returned the bodies of the Russian sailors to the Soviet government for proper... Actually, I think the U.S. gave them military honors, if I'm not mistaken, which was a decent thing to do. But the Glomar Explorer pulled up this Soviet submarine, which actually partially broke, as I understand when they're bringing it up, but they did get it up off the bottom of the ocean floor. (0:54:17)

It's an unbelievable achievement. So you could imagine if they were to pinpoint the location of a downed flying saucer, let's say, the means would exist to retrieve it. And they might even be able to do it with a certain amount of privacy. Certainly other nations with satellites would be able to pick up, you know, figure out what's going on, but you might be able to keep it out of the news. (0:54:40)

And then, of course, if there is something in more shallow waters, and there's a lot of activity in the shallow waters, you know, a few hundred feet, that is well within the capability of a Navy submarine to at least participate in some kind of retrieval. You might even be able to get some divers down there. (0:55:05)

And given that there's so much talk, and I have no reason at the moment to disbelieve it, other than just my normal suspicious nature of anything one hears these days, because there's so much disinformation out there. But there's so much talk about the government endeavoring to retrieve craft and to retrieve bodies on land, it would make perfect sense that if they know about undersea crashes, or maybe not even crashes, but locations where they might find something interesting, they would attempt to do it as they did with the Russian submarine. Yes, entirely possible, but I would suspect they would want to be careful. (0:55:47)

These objects, these beings, I think that they are operating on a far more sophisticated level than what our militaries can do, whether American or Russian or any. And I would think that the US Navy would still be very cautious in dealing with these beings and technologies. But yeah, I do think if you see a dead craft lying at the bottom of some location, yeah, you'd want to pick it up. And I think that there are probably protocols for this. I'm sure there are. (0:56:24)

We hear so much talk these days about biologics, and another term I've heard recently is the idea of biological robots, that these beings associated with these craft are, in a sense, dispensable, that they don't mind if we occasionally capture one. I think that's probably accurate. You know, we're still new into this world of, I mean, full-on genetic manipulation, CRISPR technology, gene editing, and so forth, along with things like cybernetics, where increasingly we're seeing Elon Musk talking about the Neuralink, and there's countless other types of that technology that are now out there. (0:57:19)

So the line between man and machine is maybe becoming a little more blurry, and as far as genetically modified organisms, certainly. (0:57:24)

So I don't think it's difficult at all for me to imagine that a species that is far more capable in gene manipulation and cybernetics, yeah, why don't they just, instead of giving birth to these creatures, they grow them, and they use them, and maybe they don't have any compunction about, you know, throwing away this creature, that being, or that, because that's what they're designed for. (0:57:53)

They may not have the morality that we like to think we have on a good day. So I could imagine that they might create a group of, let's say, highly capable, telepathic, brilliant androids. I could imagine that. And it's certainly been suggested by people who claim to have more direct knowledge of these things. When we look at, for example, alleged abduction reports, and I'll just say alleged for safety here, but there are many of these where abductees will describe what seemed like a group of aliens that are almost interchangeable with each other, and they don't even know if they have sex organs. (0:58:41)

So it's not really clear what they are dealing with. And certainly the body plan of a typical gray alien that we see, it's not really a, doesn't strike me as a biologically functional body plan. First of all, how would you, a female gray alien, even give birth to something with a head that large? Honestly, like you couldn't fit it through. (0:59:03)

So it seems to me that there's a definite artificiality to those creatures, if we are to take the abduction accounts at face value. It's so hard to know these days what to take at face value and whatnot. I tend to generally trust people, but at the same time, people are vulnerable to all sorts of perceptual distortions. That is totally true. And this is something that I tried to be sensitive to in reviewing cases. (0:59:34)

I can just say off hand, for every case that I included, there were at least five or more that I just discarded. Five or more potential USO cases that I thought, I don't like it. There's not enough for me to work with. So I threw out a lot. But one thing that gives me confidence in the encounters that I have collected is, again, when I talked about this statistical analysis, I would notice patterns in the data that would crop up. (1:00:13)

I mentioned the day versus night pattern earlier, but there are other patterns that are in this data that when I look at it, it gives me reason to think that this data is probably authentic. For example, I mentioned cases of missing time with USOs, and there aren't many of them, but there are a few. Well, in those cases, electromagnetic interference was reported at a rate four times higher than the norm in cases where someone reported missing time. (1:00:47)

That's a bizarre thing, and I would not have thought to predict that in advance. But when I see that number there, well, it makes perfect sense to me. It makes perfect sense to me. (1:00:59)

And there are other patterns as well that come up, which I write about in this book. So when I see patterns like these, it makes me think that there's probably something genuine going on here. And I'm sure there's fuzziness in that data, there's noise in that data, but I think there's a lot of signal in that data. (1:01:25)

So you're saying there's a connection between electromagnetic disturbances and missing time? Yes, in cases of USO sightings, yes. What would be the connection? I don't see it. Well, for example, electromagnetic interference might be, you know, the compass spins wild, or your phone dies, or the lights go out, or your ship's engine dies. In some cases, that would happen. Something like this. Communications go out. (1:01:58)

So yeah, missing time. So in all of the cases where EM affects, I noted those, the first EM interference case for USOs that I noted was in 1951. So from that point onward, EM interference occurred in 9.6% of all my USO cases. But in cases where there was missing time reported, it was in just about 40%. So significantly higher. In fact, military encounters were twice as likely as the norm. (1:02:30)

So military encounters had a 20% likelihood of electromagnetic interference. And that, to me, is also seems not random. So whenever I get a result that strikes me as non-random, I tend to think that there's probably something going on there. In other words, if these aliens, assuming they are aliens, are intending to, in effect, kidnap some humans and hold them for a period of time, so they experience missing time, if they're willing to go that far, they're probably also willing to interfere with their electronics. (1:03:05)

Exactly, exactly. This is what I think. And also, I would make the additional conclusion, therefore, which is that these EM effects are not just a random or a natural byproduct of the craft, but actually directed, almost, you could say, as a weapon or as a tool for their purpose to temporarily disable, you know, those people. (1:03:34)

Now, you don't get EM reported in every single case of missing time, but it's a pretty high percentage compared to the average. So I have to think something's going on there. Well, Richard, this has been a journey into a world that few people have dared to look into. I've never heard anyone else before in my exposure to this field go so deeply into this particular arcane phenomenon. (1:04:02)

I have to congratulate you both for delving into it, but also, more importantly, for doing it in such a thorough, methodical manner. Thank you so much, Jeff. I'm very grateful for that coming from you. And I can just say this was a true labor of love for me. I worked on this for three years, and there are certainly times with any project like this where you have your frustrating moments and days, but overall, truthfully, it was a nonstop fascination for me. (1:04:34)

The whole process of even hunting these cases down, we didn't even get into that, that was fascinating. A lot of out-of-print old magazines that I had to pay a lot of money for, as well as online datasets. All of that was interesting. But then going into the cases and really assessing them. And then the real reason I wanted to do this was to breathe some life into these cases, which have been completely forgotten. And they're extraordinary moments in a person's life, or really in the history of our society. I think they're quite extraordinary. (1:05:08)

And I just didn't want them to die. I think they deserve to be polished off, written in a compelling way, and made for other people to appreciate. (1:05:16)

That was my goal, and I was so grateful that I've been working on this. And the second and third volumes are coming out this year. The second volume, I think, within maybe another month or two. And then the third volume, a couple of months after that. The cases are all written, but there's still other things I want to do to polish them up and make them ready for publication. (1:05:37)

Well, it's a real contribution. And also, I have to say, a very selfless one, because the fruit of all of the labor will probably be realized in decades ahead of us, probably long after you and I are both gone. Yeah, I think that's true. But, you know, I feel like I'm one of the lucky ones. (1:06:04)

I get to spend my time researching something that is utterly fascinating, and that's good enough for me. I'm quite content with that. I feel the same way about the interests that I have. So I commend you. I'm very grateful you're willing to take the time to share your discoveries with me and with the New Thinking Allowed audience. Richard, thank you. Jeffrey, thank you. (1:06:31)

To me, you're just a gem for our culture and our society. And I know that people who follow you closely know this is the case. So it's an honor for me to be part of your program. Thank you. You're very welcome. And for those of you watching or listening, thank you for being with us, because you are the reason that we are here. (1:06:47)

Book three in the New Thinking Allowed dialogue series is UFOs and UAP. Are We Really Alone? Now available on Amazon. New Thinking Allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body, and spirit. The topics that we cover here, we are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. (1:07:49)

Visit their website at cihs.edu. You can now download a free PDF copy of issue number eight of the New Thinking Allowed magazine or order a beautiful printed copy. Go to newthinkingallowed.org. (1:08:04)