The ocean science community must put science before stigma with anomalous phenomena

While the Chinese spy balloon has captured worldwide attention, a former U.S. Navy fighter pilot named Ryan Graves quietly published an astonishing op-ed on a topic which should foster far greater interest. Graves described his repeated encounters with unidentified aerial or anomalous phenomena (UAP), previously known as UFOs, off the Eastern Seaboard between 2014-2015. The performance characteristics of these objects were impossible for modern aircraft to replicate. They resulted in numerous near mid-air collisions with the author’s fellow pilots, causing urgent safety of flight concerns by senior Navy leadership. The Navy seemed to all but ignore these incredible events until video data from the Navy aircraft involved was reported by The New York Times in 2017.

Since then, Congress has passed legislation directing the Department of Defense (DOD) to establish a dedicated office to investigate such anomalous phenomena. The newly minted All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office within the Office of the Secretary of Defense has begun to conduct these investigations, and the assignment of a highly accomplished physicist and intelligence officer Sean Kirkpatrick as its first director appears to indicate the Pentagon is taking the issue seriously.

Even more extraordinary, during a 2021 interview on CBS 60 Minutes, former Navy pilots David Fravor and Alex Dietrich provided a detailed description of their encounter with a UAP while conducting pre-deployment training with the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier strike group in 2004. While flying their F/A-18F Super Hornet aircraft, they initially observed an area of roiling whitewater on the ocean surface below them. Hovering just above that was a “white Tic Tac looking” UAP. The whitewater may have indicated the presence of a larger UAP below, or that the UAP they were observing had recently emerged from the sea below it, indicating the occurrence of unidentified undersea phenomena (UUP).

The implications of these observations are profound. Society may be on the verge of answering one of the greatest questions regarding our existence — are we alone? Yet, the vast majority of established scientists across the globe have shown little interest, and this remains the case with the ocean science community.

How is it that these anomalous observations have not risen to the level of other science priorities, such as climate change? Simply put, stigma. The attention given by many non-scientific, fringe enthusiasts to the UAP arena has tainted the topic, repulsing those who rightly seek to maintain their scientific integrity and professional reputation. Additionally, the U.S. government thwarted objective analysis of UAPs out of a concern that adversaries would use them as a psychological warfare tool to sow mass hysteria and panic.

Despite major progress in the investigation of UAP by DOD, NASA and scientific organizations like Harvard University’s Galileo Project and the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, there is no corresponding scientific effort to investigate similar anomalies that have been detected in the world’s oceans. Three immediate actions would remedy scientific neglect of similar anomalies in the vast and vital maritime domain:

1) The White House-led Ocean Policy Committee should amend the Opportunities and Actions for Ocean Science and Technology (2022-2028) to add UUP research as a seventh area for immediate opportunity. This document sets in motion the ocean science priorities of Executive Branch departments, as well as government funded academic and science institutions. This change will instantly create interest in UUP by the ocean science community in the U.S.

2) The Naval Studies Board of the National Academies should conduct a survey of anomalous undersea observations and make recommendations for a national research program regarding UUP.  The stigma that Graves, the Navy pilot, identified as a cause for suppressing reports of UAP by other pilots is likely having the same effect for UUP evidence in classified and unclassified ocean sensor data. A survey across federal, state, private and public ocean research institutions will provide a baseline for UUP occurrence, support the undersea aspect of AARO’s mission, and serve to shape the elements of a national research effort regarding them.

3) The United Nations (UN) Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development should endorse an Ocean Decade Action to create an international effort to research UUPs. This flagship international collaboration program for ocean science is driven by the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals, many of which might benefit from technology advances resulting from such research.

This spring, Harvard Professor Avi Loeb will lead an expedition to recover the fragments of the first interstellar meteor that impacted the Earth in the Bismarck Sea off Papua New Guinea. This search is an extension of his Galileo Project which seeks to scientifically study anomalous phenomena. The meteor’s estimated material strength is so much greater than those originating within the solar system that Loeb has speculated that it could be of artificial origin. As a career oceanographer, I find it a bit odd that such a potentially paradigm-shifting ocean expedition is being led by an astrophysicist. The ocean science community would do well to bring their expertise to bear on what might be the most significant undersea discoveries our species have ever seen.

Rear Admiral (ret.) Tim Gallaudet, Ph.D., is the CEO of Ocean STL Consulting, LLC and a research affiliate with Harvard University’s Galileo Project. He is a former acting and deputy administrator at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), acting undersecretary and assistant secretary of Commerce, and oceanographer in the Navy.

Christopher Mellon is a private equity investor and a research affiliate with Harvard University’s Galileo Project. He is a former minority staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee and former deputy assistant secretary of Defense for Intelligence.