Whereas many people might imagine a scene over a quiet country road, or possibly from the balcony of a high-rise apartment building in a metropolis-like city, or even from a moving aircraft, the fact is there are many sightings on record that occur over the seas, oceans, and other vast water networks of our planet. Although actual statistics differ, it is widely agreed that more than half of all UFO sightings occur over or near water. With this in mind, we might imagine that many of the ships and submarines, particularly military ones, would have encountered these otherworldly vehicles – and we would be right.
As usual, we will not have the time to explore every case; in fact, we only have time and space to scratch the surface of such encounters here, which could fill up entire volumes in their own right, and those are just the sightings from the modern UFO age. We will, though, explore some of the most interesting and detailed UFO encounters that have involved naval vessels in various stretches of water around the planet.
Without a doubt, one of the strangest and thought-provoking of these marine encounters was relayed in the book Military Encounters with Extraterrestrials: The Real War of the Worlds by Frank Joseph, and occurred in the late 1980s when the Cold War, albeit reduced in tensions, was still very much unfolding. According to the report, which came through an anonymous crew member of the US Navy submarine, the USS Memphis, the incident occurred ahead of a NASA space shuttle launch, with the submarine patrolling the waters around the launch site ahead of the mission.
On this particular night – October 24th going into October 25th, 1989 – the USS Memphis was around 150 miles off the coast of Florida, cruising at a depth of around 500 feet. While the mission had been completely textbook so far, on this particular evening, they were experiencing all manner of problems with their electronics. As the witness recalled, the crew quickly realized the “ship was malfunctioning…the tanks were blowing” and the “navigations ability and communication (were) totally lost!” Eventually, an order was given to bring the submarine to a stop so the crew could assess what was happening. However, moments later, the controls in the reactor began to malfunction, and orders were issued to shut it down, switch to diesel engines, and surface immediately.
As soon as the vessel broke the surface of the water, the witness made his way to his watch station. He looked out and could see that the night sky was now glowing “red like a neon sign” as heavy rain came down from above. Then, only moments after first looking out, he noticed a “large, inverted V-shaped” object moving on the port (left-hand) side of the submarine. The witness turned to the executive officer who was with him, who told him to remain at his post while he informed the captain. Several moments later, the captain arrived at the watch station.
By this point, using a laser range finder, they had determined that their vessel was around 600 feet from the nearest point of the strange craft, which was approximately 650 feet from their location. Moreover, they estimated that the furthest point of the object was around 3500 feet from them, suggesting that it was, in total, around half a mile wide.
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