In the renowned Tic Tac incident in 2004, US Navy pilots described an oblong craft shaped like the sweet hovering just above the water off the California coast.
Sonar has revealed an unusual trench on the seafloor as if an object has crashed into a ridge and then skidded to a halt.
Gallaudet is planning to send a remote-controlled submarine to the spot to see if there are signs of what caused the phenomena.
“I cannot explain this feature and therefore want to use a ROV (remotely operated underwater vehicle) to dive from a ship and capture video of it,” he told The Telegraph.
“That may allow us to identify its detailed characteristics and potentially determine what caused it.
“No one has agreed to provide a ship or ROV yet. A hypothesis is that it may have been formed by an interaction of an UAP (unidentified aerial phenomena) or USO with the seabed.”
Gallaudet believes that evidence for USOs may be present in the US Navy’s acoustic data, but it is currently classified.
“I have not seen signatures on such data, but I have spoken to one former submarine officer who has,” he added.
This week Gallaudet launched a report into the phenomenon alongside the Sol Foundation, a group of academics, military and government officials committed to researching UFOs.
The group is calling for investigations into USOs to be made a national ocean research priority for the US government and argue that the underwater anomalies threaten maritime security.
The report details an incident in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, where a thermal imaging system on a US Customs and Border Protection aircraft picked up a fast-moving craft which entered the Atlantic Ocean.
Speaking at a recent Sol Foundation symposium, Gallaudet said: “Just in the year-and-a-half or so now that I’ve become active and started interviewing people I have met dozens of people, commercial, military, Coast Guard, mariners and submariners who have had observations.
“I don’t have any data yet. That’s the next step. But this is several dozen people that have seen phenomena in our oceans, the tropical eastern and western Pacific, the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, Mediterranean, and the Indian Ocean, and the North Atlantic and eastern seaboard.
“So this is happening, and I am trying to get a better understanding of it.”
Last year the US Congress instructed the Department of Defence to investigate UFOs and established a new office called the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO).
Time to take the threat seriously
A report by the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence also uncovered 274 observations of UFOs by military personnel between August 2022 and April 2023.
Gallaudet said that when he was working as chief meteorologist for the US Navy in 2015 he received a classified email entitled “Urgent safety of flight issue” with the famous Go Fast video attached, which showed Hornet pilots narrowly avoiding mid-air collisions with UFOs.
But he claims after the initial email, the Navy refused to talk about it, leaving pilots forced to come up with evasive manoeuvres on their own without guidance.
Garry Nolan, professor in the Department of Pathology at Stanford University School of Medicine, who helped found the Sol Foundation said it was time to take the threat seriously.
He said: “As represented by multiple credible military personnel, objects have been recorded by sonar moving at speeds underwater that are far beyond our best submarines or other hardware.
“Similarly, objects close to the surface have been observed by pilots in multiple flyovers. Objects have been observed rising from the ocean as seen from the decks of military or commercial ships.
“The appropriate stance to take at first is to try to explain these observations as mistaken or electronic glitches. The problem is that some of these events involve multiple simultaneous observations or sensor system measurements.
“Therefore, the chance of multiple coincidental glitches is unlikely and therefore it opens the question of whether these represent some kind of non-human intelligence at work.”
