Somewhere in the Skies - Richard Dolan: A History of USOs (Unidentified Submerged Objects)

Episode Date: April 6, 2025

On episode 403, we welcome back UFO researcher and historian, Richard Dolan, to talk all about his new book, A History of USOs: Unidentified Submerged Objects. This meticulously researched book delves into the earliest reported sightings of mysterious objects observed in oceans, lakes, and rivers, spanning centuries and covering 178 carefully documented cases up to 1969. Dolan shares some of his favourite USO cases, how he compiled his research, theories and observations on the phenomena, and what to expect in the next two volumes of his book series. He also answers your listener questions and so much more. Order the book: https://a.co/d/1CHQzOh Follow Richard Dolan's work: https://richarddolanmembers.com/  Please take a moment to rate and review us on Spotify and Apple Book Ryan on CAMEO at: https://bit.ly/3kwz3DO Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/somewhereskies ByMeACoffee: http://www.buymeacoffee.com/UFxzyzHOaQ PayPal: [e-mail] Discord: https://discord.gg/NTkmuwyB4F Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/ryansprague.bsky.social Twitter: https://twitter.com/SomewhereSkies Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/somewhereskiespod/ Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ryansprague51 Order Ryan’s new book: https://a.co/d/4KNQnM4 Order Ryan’s older book: https://amzn.to/3PmydYC Store: http://tee.pub/lic/ULZAy7IY12U Read Ryan’s articles at: https://medium.com/@ryan-sprague51 Opening Theme Song by Septembryo Copyright © 2025 Ryan Sprague. All rights reserved Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/somewhere-in-the-skies. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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your host, Ryan Spray. All right, guys, and he is back. It has been a while, but we have a very good reason because he just came out with a brand new book, A History of U.S.O's Unidentified, Submerged Objects, Volume 1. So welcome back to the show. Once again, Richard Dolan. Hi, Ryan. It's a pleasure.

Very always happy to be a guest on your program. You've got a great podcast, and we've known each other for a long time, so it's always fun. Yes, we have. We've had some fun experiences at conferences, and, and, you know, I always bring this up when you come on. You were the first one to really give me a chance in this field, man. And you published my very first book. So I will forever be indebted to you for that. A fine book, too. Really great book. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Well, hey, it has led to this podcast that you're on today, and we're going to talk all about the brand new book on a topic.

that, you know, has come a little bit more to the forefront, but it might be a sub-topic of uphology that a lot of people aren't quite familiar with. So, of course, the first, easiest, most softball question for you. What is a U.S.O? Let's go. UFO's 101. Well, the thing about this field of ours, UFO to UAP and USO, we've gone through a lot of different acronyms over the many, many years. So USO today means unidentified submerged objects. So, you know, pretty straightforward. And think of a UFO under the water.

It's submerged in the water. In earlier times, U.S.O was used, and it had actually meant unidentified submersible object, unidentified submarine object. And there were even other types of acronyms used for UFO and U.S.O in earlier years. And I think it's really because we ourselves were not quite solid with what we thought we were dealing with. So the phenomenon of U.S.Os has always been kind of noted by researchers over many years. We've known that there's something going on in the waters of this planet, at least from time to time when they've been noted. And I think researchers really wondered, is this a formal distinction?

Or is this just a case of sometimes these UFOs go into the water? And then they come out. Like how much of a big thing is it? So we didn't really even have our first book that dealt with this subject at all until the year 1970. I guess for some folks, that seems like a long time ago. But actually, it's not that long ago. There was one book, a very fine book, but then after that in the English language, nothing for about 40 years until the 2010s. We had another very good book on the subject by the late Carl Feint. He did a nice job on it.

And a couple of books or studies in other languages, Russian, the Italian UFO research group over there has done some work on the water-based aspect. But the fact is there has been very little. So it hasn't really been treated until very recently as a well-defined subset of what we call UO's or UAP. And so when I got into this about three years ago, and I'll do a lot of different projects from my website. I have a site Richardola members and a very active community there. And I'll get asked questions of all types. and one dealt with a USO case in the 1940s. And I did a like a video presentation on that back in 2022.

And I got interested. I thought, you know, this is really quite fascinating. I've always been interested in this subset of the greater mystery. And I just asked myself, how many cases actually are there of these? Like, and where are they? How do I find them? How do you collect them? And so I remember all through the summer of 2022, I just went on a wild goose chase

looking for these cases. Are there any digital databases that I could look online? Turns out there were a couple. Were there like books or old out-of-print magazine from the 1980s or 70s? Yes, a lot of those. Some of them are quite expensive to acquire, by the way. But I really hunted them all down and then sifted through. I went through literally thousands of potential cases for inclusion

and ended up with just a little under 700. for my three-volume study here. And it was a real adventure. It was a great. I call it a labor of love. It truly was one of the most fascinating research endeavors I've ever done or I think could ever do. It's right up there.

That's amazing. And, you know, like you said, three volumes. Now, that is... Here's volume one. And it's massive, I know. Yeah, yeah, I love the cover, by the way. Love, love, love the cover. Well, that's Tracy, my wife, and organizing.

She was a project manager on the cover. And yes, I love the great cover for that. Oh, awesome. Shout out. Yeah, two more good ones coming, too. Awesome. Well, okay. So, you know, I've probably brought this up to you in the past.

My interest in the topic of UFOs really began with a personal sighting that I had over a body of water, the St. Lawrence River in New York. I saw a black triangle over the water. coasted over, went over towards Canada. So, you know, this topic of USOs clearly is special to me. And to see a book finally come out covering the extensive history of these things is it's not only exciting, but it's essential. This is a huge part of the phenomenon and the data that hasn't been looked at. So to start with that data, Rich, I'd love to know, like, how did you even begin to compile the data on this? and like, how do you differentiate these things?

Were there patterns? Like, how did you go about the research process? Yeah, this is a core part of what this project ended up becoming. And it didn't start out like that. I just started it in 2022 with the idea of finding cases that I personally felt were compelling, that I felt needed to be resuscitated because they had been forgotten. And this was just a forgotten part of our history. I wasn't thinking in terms of data analysis or data extraction.

After I had compiled all of the cases for all three volumes and written them all out, this is again, I have to credit and blame my wife. She said, you know, it would be great is if at the beginning of each of these narratives for these cases, wouldn't it be nice to have like just a quick reference of categories, like what color was the object, how close was the witness to the object? What was the shape of the object? What did it do? Was it below the water?

Did it emerge from the water? Did it go into the water? And any other relevant things? And I thought, I had mixed feelings because it was obviously it was the right thing to do. It was the great advice, but I didn't want it because it was just a lot more work. But I thought I will do this because the book, it absolutely needed it. And my goodness, it was, you know, my wife actually has provided a lot of excellent advice along the way. And it's hard for me to judge which was the best bit of advice, but maybe that was.

That might be number one because it transformed the whole nature of this project. So I went back through all of the cases, everyone. This took several months. And I extracted about 15 data points from each case. And I tried to be very methodical, very objective. And then once that was done, then I just thought these should be in a spreadsheet. And so I ended up creating. a very, very, very large spreadsheet, which is a free download. Anyone can read it.

But and then once the spreadsheet was there, I was able to see all kinds of patterns that I would never ever have noticed otherwise. And I'll, you know, and I can discuss some of those patterns. But the first thing I would want to say is when when I started seeing a whole array of unique and logical patterns. It made me feel a lot more confident, frankly, over the integrity of the data itself, because it seemed like there are consistencies here that are fascinating. So I'll give you a couple of examples. I made kind of a big thing of these in the book itself, because I did have a whole section where I discussed the data. I do a very extended data analysis in this book here. One is a simple one. It's a simple one.

day versus night. One of the, I tracked, was the object seen in daylight or at night? It's a simple distinction. And what I found was really quite remarkable. So all of the cases, up until the late 1960s, pardon me, specifically the end of 1967, it's 51% of all of my cases collected occurred in the daytime. So almost 50-50, slight edge to daytime, but it's, almost exactly even. After 1967, three quarters of them, almost immediately all started going at night. And that has been the case to this day. So it's quite a significant change. And on top of that, military versus civilian cases, it's even more extreme. So military cases, even in the early years, were much more likely to occur at night. In the early years up to the late 60s, about two-thirds of all military

USO encounters were at night, whereas a significant majority of civilian ones were in the daytime. After the late 60s, nearly 90% of military cases ever since have occurred at night in regarding USOs. So it's really very remarkable. And when I look at that, it seems to me this is not a random outcome. This is a deliberate, distinct behavior that these objects are, are engaging in, A, a behavioral adaptation or change over time, specifically during the late 60s, so that's interesting. And then B, they seem to have the ability to distinguish between military and non-military vessels, which shouldn't surprise us, but it's interesting to see that you get this in the data itself,

that there's distinction in behaviors. So that's one thing. And I'll mention one other off the top of my head, which is also equally fascinated to me. which is instances of electromagnetic interference. This is one thing that I tracked. Was there EM interference? Like, did compasses go crazy? Did electrical systems go down?

Did communications or weapons systems, in the case of navies, go down, things like this? So I tracked all of that. And from the 19 early 50s onward, and I say early 50s, because that was my first recorded instance of a USO engaging in EM interference that I was able to determine. So from that point onward, a lot of cases, I had almost 10% of all USO cases had EM interference, 9.5%. It's quite a lot. One out of 10. Yeah.

However, it gets even more interesting when you distinguish military to non-military. So military instances are 20% EM interference, like communications going down on an aircraft carrier for like a half hour, for example, things like this, weapon systems going down. So it's double for military. And then even crazier is in the few instances of alleged missing time connecting to a USO or sightings of an alleged being in connection with the USO. So when you add those two together, it's still a minority. It's like 6% of all of my cases. However, those instances showed a likelihood of four times.

the average of having electromagnetic interference instead of two times as in military cases. So that's an interesting pattern. I would never have bought about such a pattern. And I didn't think about it even when I was going through all of these cases and writing them down. I didn't see that pattern until I saw it in the spreadsheet. And it was kind of a shocking moment to me. It was like, you know, you can go through these cases and cases and cases and not see the patterns until you see them in a certain format with the data right there in front of you. Right. Right. And the EM interference for missing time. Like it kind of makes sense when you think about it. It's like, and the last thing I'll just say here, it tells me, it indicates to me that

electromagnetic interference isn't simply or always some random after effect of the craft themselves. It seems to me that there are instances where it is intentional or it seems to be. because it follows specific patterns. Starting a business can seem like a daunting task, unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website to marketing to selling and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need.

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You can look at the aftermath and that can be a set of data, whereas then you have the craft itself and the patterns related to the technology behind that craft. So, yeah, yeah, the more you zoom out, the more patterns you can obviously. make with a lot of these things. It's fascinating. There are a lot of these patterns, but those are two good ones that I love to discuss. That's cool. Because it's amazing. Right, right.

Well, I want to rewind a bit. You mentioned like 1950s and everything. But I mean, your book goes way further back than the 1950s. So what would you say would be some of the most like the earliest accounts that you came across and that you work? Yeah. I really tried to determine this. This is a very, very important part of my research. So, you know, because when you're when you're looking at a phenomenon like this, you want to, you want to try to be as objective as you can, obviously, because we're trying to understand what is the truth. And the truth is if there is a presence here, one of the important things we really must get a handle on, in my opinion, is how long have they been here? We hear all the time people saying, oh, they've been here forever. and to the point where I feel it's almost become a cliche. And I'm not saying there hasn't been a longstanding presence, because I personally think there has been.

But that is not to say that that presence has been consistent necessarily over many centuries. My take on this phenomenon, whether we're talking aerial or water-based, is that there probably was a long-standing presence, but it seems to me much more low-key, much, much more low-key than it. is today. And I think everything did explode in terms of quality and quantity of reports immediately after World War II. That is what it looks like to me. But prior, yes, there are some good cases, including U.S.O cases, but very few. I just have to stress this. So I looked at some really potential early cases. I looked at the Christopher Columbus citing, for example. And that's a

good one. That's not a sure shot U.S.O, though. It's interesting. upon approaching the New World, he was actually a day out from landfall in the Dominican Republic, Hispaniola. They saw Columbus and another crew member saw a very distinct light. And a lot's been talked about regarding that, and it is interesting. But I don't include that as an official case either. And that is because as good as reliable as the witnesses were, and I think they're quite reliable. We don't really know what they were. They were close to land.

Did they see a torch on like an elevated part of the shore? It's possible. I don't really know what that was. It is not obvious that that was a U.S.O. So I leave it as I discuss it, but it's not an official case. There are some other early cases like this, whether in Europe or in China, China had a lot of recorded cases that are interesting. but the problem is with these earliest cases, unfortunately, they're so threadbare that is very difficult to know what you're actually dealing with. And many of them are quite vague, to be perfectly honest, and it's just hard to know.

And some of them just don't make sense to me. I'll just be perfectly blunt about it. And some are clearly social commentary. For example, there is one from England from the 17th century, the 16th 60s, we're told. Object supposedly comes out of the River Severn. near Bristol described as looking like one of those kites that the young boys fly. This is in 1661. Very interesting. But then when you read it, the kite or the object took the form of a stern-looking man in the sky,

pacing back and forth, and then took the image of a gallant man on horseback, got riding back and forth, and then took the image of a beautiful woman in a gown. And you read that and you realize England had just gone through their own civil war, very severe one. They had killed their king not long ago. Oliver Cromwell had just died by this point. And so it's clearly, to my reading, an interpretation of the politics of the time. The grim man was a Puritan, was Cromwell, perhaps. The man on horseback was the new King Charles II, who was a gallant cavalier, as a matter of fact,

the good horse horseman. And then the woman I interpret as, you know, peace, justice, tranquility, whatever. It's clearly symbolic to me, and I can't take it seriously as a USO account. Because the fact is many of these societies, we need to understand the social and political and the customs of the time to really understand them, which I think is not, we don't do this enough in the UFO field. having said all that, the first really great case that I'm confident of takes place in 1717. So it's kind of late in the day.

I don't include any from a thousand years ago, Roman times or whatever. I just didn't find them. If someone else finds one, please let me know. I will absolutely consider it. But in 1717, there was a French ship off the coast of Martinique and the Caribbean. French captain of the ship wrote about it in his log. It was at about 2.30 in the morning. So dead of night.

There was half moon out. So light was somewhat there. Visibility was terrible. And he sees off the side of the boat and a vertical shaft above the water. Like maybe, you know, maybe less than a meter tall. And it's going alongside the ship. Like he described it as like a masthead, but it was out of the water. And I have that.

Not the slightest idea of what that could be conventionally. It was a very, it's not the most incredible detailed siding, but it was matter of fact enough. He clearly wasn't trying to make a point here. He was just noting a very strange thing that you read about it 300 years later still doesn't make any sense. Yeah. It strikes me as some kind of, could it be a monitoring device?

Who knows? Something checking you know. Right, right. Well, that's interesting, the whole monitoring thing. Like, I know. there's obviously cases that modern euphology can look to when it comes to Usos, such as obviously the Tic Tac event that everyone's been talking about for the best seven, eight years now at this point. However, were there any cases, Rich, let's start, I guess, with military, Navy vessels or anything

like that that really stand out to you, like maybe a favorite or two military-wise, yeah. Yeah. Military cases comprised about 20% of all of the U.S.O. cases I have. That's a lot. Of course, that means 80% are not military. So there's a lot for civilians, of course, but a lot of military cases, many U.S. Navy, quite a few Soviet Navy cases that are fascinating. And navies of other nations, the Royal Navy, Argentine Navy, France has a couple of cases, their Navy, and Australia, quite a few. So several U.S. Navy cases are extraordinary. I mean, just mind-blowingly extraordinary. Most of these cases, not all, but most will come from a retired Navy guy who like 20, 30 years after the fact, writes to some blog site and says, wasn't supposed to talk about this, but I'm getting late in the game. And I just have to get this off my chest.

And they will sometimes anonymously, sometimes they'll give their name. You know, it depends. And they will tell their story. and they're very consistent. These stories are very consistent. But one that has blown my mind. This will go in the second volume, although I do a little write-up in the intro to this first volume,

happened in 1971. In the, I think just north of the Caribbean, possibly Bermuda Triangle, a lot of Bermuda Triangle cases. Anyway, this was the USS John F. Kennedy aircraft carrier. It was July 2nd, 1971 at 8 p.m. We have got the exact date time. We have the name of the man who reported it as well.

And he was running communications on the JFK. So we're talking major U.S. aircraft carrier. They had just done a long series of carrier qualifications, basically tests, detailed tests, to check out all of the systems and their response to emergencies and so forth. And they were now north of the Caribbean headed toward port. and eight o'clock and the witness is at this comm station where he hears on the intercom

someone freaking out on the ship screaming it's god it's the end of the world that's what he heard so it's like screaming so he leaves his station he goes out to the deck to look and now it's eight o'clock at night so it's dark but he sees a glowing orb spherical object that's like orange, red, yellow colors glowing. He said with about half the strength of daylight. So pretty intense. And he's just watching it. He said it was the size of a beach ball held at arm's length. So fairly large. Yeah. And everyone's just going crazy on the ship. He's watching it for about half a minute before the ship goes to battle stations, general quarters. So he has to go back down to his communication station. And he doesn't see it ever again. The ship stays on.

on general quarters for about roughly a half an hour, during which time all communications were gibberish. So nothing was going in or out of the ship in terms of communication. So the ship was isolated and was not able to communicate. He implied that weapon systems were also inoperable during this. So they perhaps attempted to launch an aircraft or fire weapon or who knows. That did not happen. There's a little bit of an aftermath to this where the ship's captain a few days later got on the loudspeaker and said, before we debaubored, I just want to remind you all that certain things that happened aboard a U.S. Navy warship are not to be disseminated elsewhere.

He wasn't specific, but the man writing it in said, we all knew what he was talking about. Yeah. So that's 1971. And these glowing orbs, there's quite a few of them. those in the U.S.O. collection, as there are in aerial encounters. You get a lot of these orbs. But that was one that completely disabled a major United States aircraft carrier. And there are other such stories that were U.S. aircraft carriers and also Soviet warships

were equally disabled by these things. Yeah, yeah. I remember reading a few of those in the book. How about a civilian case, you know, for some. someone like me, I spend all my time interviewing civilians about their UFO sightings. And oftentimes, they can be much weirder than a lot of the military ones for many different reasons. But does one really stick out to you in terms of like a very humanistic response to it? Yeah, yeah. Well, there's one I keep coming back to, but I've mentioned it in a couple of other interviews and I don't want to keep repeating the same one. But there is, how about this one?

From the 50s, I just love this case. and I have mentioned it once or twice, so forgive me. But this was in 1952 in an utterly remote region, the Aleutian Islands. One of them is known as Shemya Island. It's closer to Russia than it is to mainland Alaska. So it's way out there. This is right on the Bering Sea there. It's very inhospitable remote.

If you look for it on a map, you will definitely realize this is not a tourist destination at all. It's very difficult to be there. In the wintertime, when this occurred, never gets above freezing. The winds are intense, everything. So there was a guy who was a civilian working there. He was not military. He was a rigor. He described himself, I guess, in oil.

And he had this day off. I've often wondered, what do you do on your day off in Shemma Island? Probably not much. So he was outside. It was daytime. And he's just looking out of the ocean. He's like, what else are you going to do? It's January 1952. He's looking at, and then he says, I heard this noise above me. I looked up, it was a whirring, whining noise, and he saw this craft. It was very similar to the way Kenneth Arnold described the flying saucers in 1947. It's kind of a wing, like a flying wing design. He said it was shaped like a bat. It had these two wings that came back. No fuselage. There was a dome in the center that was glowing red.

and there were two greenish lights on either wing, you could say. And it was just there. And he's watching it going down like a leaf, he said, like this. And then it stopped about 75 feet above his head. It's pretty low. Certainly close enough to get a very good look at this thing. And it stopped silent and dead motionless, which he wasn't describing the winds,

but I know the winds there are always intense. So this thing is just there. And then he said it tilted to go down and it just slid into the water. And he gasped, he said. And then he stood there for as long as he could waiting for this thing to come out of the water. But it never did. So to me, that's amazing. I've often thought like it had to be that moment when he's standing on a rock looking out at this thing,

had to be probably the most memorable experience of his entire life. Like whatever else, his name was Eldon White. and it was until 14 years later that he wrote this handwritten letter to NICAP, the UFO organization. And Jesse said, look, you know, this is what happened to me 14 years ago. Back in 1952 when this occurred, who would you report this to? There were no easy places to do that. So he writes it out years later. No one knows who this guy is.

He was totally forgotten by history and his sighting was forgotten. but my God, you got to wonder, like, what, what is this? So you could this have been experimental technology launched from where? Like there's no place nearby that you could practically have done something like this. It makes no sense. It doesn't seem like natural phenomenon in any way. The way you described it was extremely technological. So that's, to me, that's a genuine USO for sure.

Absolutely. Man, you had me a handwritten letter, first of all. I'm just imagining him, like, putting it in a message in a bottle and sending it across the ocean. I found that case from the late Carl Fynt, who Carl really did a lot of major legwork on this, and he deserves and receives a lot of credit in my book. He went through a lot of the archives. So that letter went from NYCAP to the organization Kufo, the Center for UFO Studies, and they had the letter.

And Carl just was in the Kufos archives and found. it and put it on his now defunct website, but was where I found it. So that's how we get these cases. You know, there's, it's a, it's a major team effort. I'm not, I'm not going in and just doing all 100% of this myself. Many, many other people over the years have laid the groundwork for this book. Absolutely, man. It takes an army. I mean, I wouldn't have a podcast if people didn't report their UFO sightings to me. So, and working with colleagues like yourself, Peter Robbins, and people who, bring things to me. So yes, it truly does take, take an army for sure. So I'm recently, in the past couple years, I've been traveling to and from Nova Scotia, you know, at least twice,

sometimes three times a year now. I live in old Scotia. I go to New Scotia. And one of the big things there, obviously, is the Shag Harbor UFO incident. Exactly. I have recently, I have recently, spoken at their conference out there. And I just finished filming a feature documentary about the Shag Harbor UFO incident where I got this. That's fantastic. Oh my gosh, man. Intervie the prime witnesses. You'll be the first, I promise. But you do touch on this case in the book, among many others. So what do you think? I'd love to know your personal thoughts at the Shag Harbor event. Where does it lay in the pantheon of U.S.Os? And yeah, it's extremely important. You know, 99% of the cases that I found for this study were utterly unknown,

even to experience research, as I would hazard to say, most of the cases I found were just utterly forgotten. But Shag Harbor, 1967, is certainly not one of those cases. It is truly like the Roswell of U.S.Os in many ways. It's got that level. I would say Shag Harbor, and now we could include the Tick-Tack Nimitz encounter of 2004. which has a U.S.O. component. But really, Shag Harbor, it's incredible. So Shag Harbor is, as you point out, it's Nova Scotia, which is right off the coast there of Canada. It's kind of northeast

of Maine. And it's sitting out there in the water. It's a fisherman's, you know, that's, oh, yeah, that's the history there. They fish, they go whaling and all of it. It's lots of, lots of water. So on October 4th, 1967, late at night, getting close to midnight, you had multiple people at this location. They see four basically bright orange lights. They're kind of in a 45-degree angle, and they descend into the water right off the shore there. And there was a single white light that was visible on the surface for a little while as well before that also disappeared. They have guys going out in the boats. They see this weird yellow foam on the water. We talked about that a lot.

Basically, the RCMP responds, and they wondered that an aircraft crash. There was no aircraft. They checked with aviation authorities. There was nothing. No planes were missing. No planes were operating. They send Canadian divers out there. They didn't find anything initially.

But what makes this case extraordinary is what investigators later uncovered. Basically, you're talking Chris Stiles and Don Ledger were the two who really dug into this. they were local there. And Chris is still doing this, of course. So the object, according to numerous witnesses, moved underwater toward a secret submarine detection station in the water there. And you had a situation where the naval vessels were observing

not one but two underwater objects that were engaged in some kind of repair operations. This went on for about a week. In fact, during that period, a Soviet vessel appeared as well, but was escorted away. This became, you had Canadian, U.S., Soviet, all converging here. Obviously, everyone realized this was something important. And then, shortly after this, this is just remarkable,

off a little bit off the coast, out getting out into the water, into the open water, two both underwater objects emerged from the sea and just rapidly took off. So they, according to at least the witnesses that Chris and Don Leisure found, they did that. By the way, there was an interesting case in that exact same area less than a year later in May of 1968,

about 30 miles southwest of Shag Harbor, same area there. You had a captain of a fishing boat and then another captain of another fishing boat all in the area. They see this bright red light that came, I can't recall if it came out of the water. It was low over the water, went right over their boat at night, radiating this intense heat. Actually, at the point of burning them, the captain goes into his cabin to escape from it, and he still feels the heat inside his cabin. He's on the radio with another ship as this object moved over him

and then over this other boat. And yeah, it was seen going on the water, times and lifting up off the water until it was gone. So you had two fishing boats in the exact same area catching some very bizarre globular spherical object that they could only identify as an intense light. Who knows what it really was. It was later seen, I think it was just floating. That's right, on the water along the Nova Scotia coast. Just a little known after. Yeah. Yeah. Right. If there's something about the water there, man, I'm telling you. It's pretty crazy. That region?

Yeah. Boy, I'm just going here, aren't I? But there are various hotspots for this activity. We all talk about Catalina Island. We all talk about Puerto Rico. Yes, and yes to both. But another one is that whole Atlantic Coast region. As you go up from like the mid-Atlantic, actually Florida, very intense.

But then as you go up the U.S. coast there from like Virginia onward, all the way up to Nova Scotia and in fact beyond, that's very heavy activity of U.S.Os, that whole area there. I love it. It's so interesting. Well, another sort of, I guess, subtopic within U.S.Os could be alien abductions. Is this something you tackle in the book at all? I mean, you've got like the Alagash one that happened out on the water. Obviously, Pascagoula is the more visible one that's out there. Yeah, I feel...

Yeah, absolutely. So the Alagash, those are both from the 1970s, and if I were to include them, they would go in the second volume. They're not official cases for me. But actually, I may add something about them in one of my chapter introductions because they are noteworthy. The reason they're not official cases is because in neither of those instances, was the object definitively seen touching the water that I'm aware of.

Even past Agula, that's 1973, Mississippi, the object, according to the two witnesses, Calvin Parker, and, oh, crap, man, I'm drawing a blank here. Anyway, I know this case so well, too. But they saw the object, I think, directly above the water, not on the water. So I'm like, I could. And the same with the Alagash case from 76, the four guys. guys, they were fishing. They were abducted out of their fishing boat, so that's definitely noteworthy. But there are missing time cases that I found in my research, both back in the

40s and 50s and right up until into the 21st century. I've got a number of cases where it does seem likely that something very strange happened where you've got missing time. one of them is quite fascinating from like around 1980, 82, right by Catalina Island off the coast of L.A. there. And there is a man who was a very experienced boatman experienced scuba diver as well. So he's doing a late night boat from the mainland to Catalina Island. So he arrives at the island close to midnight. This is the summer of 82. And he realizes he's actually several miles too far east of where he needs to go to a place called two harbors,

which is on the western side of the island. And he didn't arrive there. So he's like, okay, well, I'll just go along the coast, a few miles, and I'll get there. And that was when he ran into this bright yellow square under the water. It had absolutely sharp corners and it extended about one football field in either side of his boat. It's very large. So think of an extremely large, yellow, glowing, bright, perfect square beneath your boat at midnight off the coast there of Catalina Island. He said it was visible for 15 seconds like a light.

It turned on and then turned off. So it's very well defined. He finally gets to two harbors and it's still. two hours later. So he, he, it should not have taken anything like that. He lost time for sure. And he wrote, he said, look, he wrote this to Mufon some years later. He said at the time, I wasn't really thinking about U.S.Os. What, what did I know about that? But then I learned about USOs and I thought, is that what I encountered? Because he, and as you know, from your research and many listeners, I'm sure, are aware.

When people have a strange encounter like this and they're missing time or some strange thing happens, they often don't think about it for years and years and years. It's like you just have this weird thing happen and you just chalk it off, you shrug it off, and you forget about it. You put it away in this little corner of your mind because what do you do with it? You don't have any sense of it. It's a defense mechanism, yeah. Yeah.

So that's what happened to him. And that was definitely missing time case. There was another one where a woman, this is in, I think, 2010, 2011. This will be in volume three. She was, I think, in Alabama, Mississippi, down in the American South there. She was at the beach at night alone, enjoying the weather, enjoying the scenery. And she also had a very strange visual. from an object that I think had come out of the water.

My memory is a little fuzzy on this one, but it came toward her. Things got kind of crazy. The next thing she knows, she goes to a diner to make sense of what she had, and she realized that she'd lost a couple of hours of time. And it was, you know, there's a lot of fuzziness to some of these cases.

Like you have something weird happen in connection to a siting. And we don't always know how to process it because I think there's definitely a level of cognitive manipulation that goes on with many of these cases, where there is missing time and the likelihood or possibility that someone was taken or messed with in some way. Right. Wow. Okay. I want to, if it's okay, Rich, I want to circle back to this yellow square thing under the water. That imagery is just sticking with me. But it brings me to a question, I'm sure a lot of people are wondering.

bases. Do you cover this at all? I mean, we've heard for years that there's these underwater bases. You know, Atec is a big one that I did a lot of research on early in my UFO research. Yeah. I don't remember exactly where it is. But in the Caribbean, I believe, if I'm not mistaken, might lose my euphologist badge, if I'm wrong. No, no.

But yeah, is that a thing? Did you come up with this in your work? Like, are these things coming out of and going into like a base of some sort? Yeah, I think the answer to that is probably yes. So absolutely, this is something that has to be addressed in any study of this. And I quite, I know that I have even more that I'll be saying about this in volumes two and three. It'll come up. But yeah, the idea of the base.

So there are definite hotspots, as I know, mentioned, probably in my opinion, the number one hotspot would go to Puerto Rico in the area just around that. Catalina Islands up there, Nova Scotia is up there, and other parts of the world as well. So then you ask yourself, like, what is there evidence that some of these are bases? And I think yes. But the fact is no one, I mean, can say this for certain, right? No one actually absolutely knows this. But there's been a lot of suspicion for many years about a base, just north of Puerto Rico and around Puerto Rico, actually multiple bases. My first guess for a base might be near or around the Puerto Rico trench, which is just north

of that island. That trench goes extremely deep. U.S. vessels can, we cannot go down there. It's far too difficult. And yet we have U.S. O cases where objects have been tracked by the Navy going into that trench. Certainly they would. We can't, we can't chase them there. We can't get down there.

There's talk, Timothy Good, and a couple of his books covered this unearthly disclosure and alien base. Both of those are very fine books. He talked about how Puerto Rican researchers believe there was a base off the west coast of the island from like Cabo Rojo in the southwest, going out to a little island called Mona Island there. And there's a lot of activity for sure. So I think probably, yes, it makes sense to me. Catalina Island, I wouldn't be shocked in the least if there's some kind of base down there. And when I say a base, I can't say that I know exactly how it operates, but I would suspect it would it be below the ocean floor. That would be the most logical thing.

Like if you have the ability to excavate below the seabed and that can be done. I mean, it's involved. It takes a lot of technology and science and dedication. but it's not an impossibility. That would be a secure environment for you. There could be very good motivations, especially if you're a non-human intelligence, you are here.

Let us say you are interested in observing these human beings and this amazing world that we have. There'd be a lot of reasons you'd want to be observing, monitoring, and maybe engaging with it to some extent. Where would you go? Well, these human beings, they look and they see everything. We're very observant. We're very nosy.

We get our sensors and our eyes and ears everywhere. And particularly in the last century, we have really gone kind of crazy with that. Yeah, down in the ocean would be a very reasonable place. If you could set up operations, you might do that. It would be quite secure and also secure from environmental disturbances as well. Yeah. Very good points. Right.

I never really thought about that. Like we look at the UFO phenomenon. as a extraterrestrial thing coming from space often. You know, maybe that was the case at one point. And because we started realizing it and acknowledging it and capturing it on these crazy things called video cameras and now cell phones, they were like, oh, boy, we got to hide somewhere else. Like, let's go down where they aren't looking and where we should be looking for things like that. This might be why, you know, I have very, very.

very few convincing USO cases from ancient times where there are actually some pretty good aerial UFO or UAP sightings from ancient times. Not a lot, not as many as some people think, but there's some, but the water base ones are hard to find. And maybe it's just because they didn't need to go to the hassle of setting up an under ocean base back then. It was easy enough to set up something above the ground because we weren't spread out as much. We weren't as invasive as we have become. So it's possible that the USO phenomenon is itself an adaptation to our own continual technological and scientific advancement. The Summer in the Sky's podcast is free to listen to every week. But if you would like to

help support the show, we have a very active Patreon page where you give what you think the show is worth. In return, you'll get early access to the main show, bonus episodes, and priority to ask our guests your listener questions. Your support truly makes the show continue and grow. So to learn more and to join, visit patreon.com slash somewhere skies. Advancement. My last question for you, Rich, and then I have some awesome listener questions if you're willing to stick around. Thank you.

advancement. Now, the cases, like you said, stretch far, far back. Have you seen an evolution at all of the technology being displayed by USOs from like, let's say, Columbus up to like the Tic Tac of today? Or are we seeing like the same sort of phenomena happening, like this term transmedium? That's kind of the buzzword right now. And are, um, are, Do you think we're dealing with the same phenomenon we dealt with back during Columbus times, then, you know, and now, I guess? I would say from the 18th and 19th centuries onward, yes, it's the same phenomenon. I can comment, and maybe earlier, but definitely. So, for example, there is an amazing case from 1825.

It's pretty early, right, 200 years ago. and it was involving a British ship in the Pacific Ocean there. And in an orange, just like with the 1971 JFK aircraft carrier case, you get this orange spherical thing that comes out of the water twice, according to the ship's log 3.30 in the morning. I can't explain that in any naturalistic way. And that's an orange sphere very much, that could have been described in any 20th or 21st century case.

So that's quite consistent. And that's transmitting. And there are a couple of other decent transmedium cases, at least in my opinion, from the 19th century. In fact, there are a couple. Not many, but there's a few. And there are a few cases from that period of time that I can't prove that they were transmitting,

but they were very low over a large body of water. And I included some of those cases. And some of them are described like kind of like a craft. There's one of 1870 over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. There was a ship and they said this is not a technical USO, but I included it. It was an aerial object. Again, they're like dead center between Brazil and North Africa. Like you've got a thousand miles of water wherever you look.

And this low object under the clouds was just casually. casually going over their ship, which they got, they saw it for, I think, 20, 30 minutes. It was a while until it just drifted out of sight. And look, there's nothing. There's no aerial object that's supposed to be there. And it was described in a very mechanical manner by the captain of the ship. So I think we're talking objects here. These are not all looking like naturalistic amorphous blobs.

certainly through the 20th century there's a number of these things where they're described as disc-shaped cigar-shaped pretty consistently so what I think changes is their behavior like I noted the behavioral change of going from mostly daytime to mostly nighttime but in terms of their appearance. No, I've got to say the appearance is quite consistent over a long period of time. Barely consistent. That's interesting. Yeah. Okay. Cool. All right. Well, I'd love to move to these listener questions if that's cool. You bet. Yeah. Oh, boy. Yeah. I put a call out for these, and I have not received this many questions in a while. So I did what any entrepreneur does, Rich. I went to Patreon first.

Those who support my efforts, they get put at the front of the line to ask questions. So I'm going to go with our Patreon subscribers here. Our first one comes from Ifa, pronounced Ifa. She's from Ireland, actually. She wanted

to make it clear how to pronounce her name. So thank you, IFA. The famous Nellis Air Force-based radar tracking case supposedly detected an object emerging from the ocean. Do you cover this in your book at all? Okay, so that's a little confusing to me, to be honest, because when you think of the famous Nellis case,

I'm thinking of the 1994 tracking of perhaps an ARV over there, over a dry lake, not an actual lake or not a body of water. I mean, Nellis Air Force base is in the middle of just dry, flat ground. That's what I thought. So there's no ocean in that region that I can think of unless, If this person is thinking of something totally different that I can't imagine. But Nellis Air Force Base is in the driest of the dry. So I'm not really sure.

But the case that I'm thinking of is from 1994. That was leaked to the TV show Hardcopy a year or two later. And that's a heck of a case. I mean, that's a fascinating event that describes an object that to this day is very difficult to explain conventionally. Yeah. But I don't know about the water connection. there. I'm sorry. Right, unless it traveled really, really far. Yeah, yeah, which is definitely

possible. Cool. But we have no information about that being near body of water, the one I'm aware of. Very good. Yeah. Well, okay, to kind of play off of that question then, any really fascinating videos of USOs in your research? Only very recently. Yeah. One of these actually was on one of George Knapp's episodes on his Netflix series. I forget the name of it. I watched it. It's really good. And that one's off of the West Coast near the Channel Islands, near Catalina Island,

where on his video, and I think this looks very compelling. You see this light in the distance coming down to the water and going into the water, and you see the glow of the water after this light submerged into the water. It's quite interesting. And we have, you know, we've got some, the very, video that Jeremy Corbell was able to get out. I think it was a USS Omaha case from 2019. Those aren't U.S.Os, but they, one of them is, where there's one where the object is seen entering water there. So we have a few. That's on thermal cam, I believe. But in terms of

earlier ones, no, not a lot of video. A couple of alleged photographs, which was difficult for me in most cases to display my book for copyright, reasons, which is why I had a very good illustrator to do a lot of these for me. Oh, right. We should mention that. The illustrations in the book, too. Alan Levine did really excellent, excellent work. Fantastic.

Equally great for the next two volumes. It got really good depictions of some of these cases. But as far as video, no, it's tough. You know, it's tough. I mean, first of all, USO cases are actually rare compared to aerial cases. Yeah. We have to understand it. It's out of, it's less than 1% of all of the cases.

And I think probably a lot less than 1%. Just because we're not allowed in the water. We're just not there. Yeah, we're land base. We're land creatures. And so you get a lot of these USO cases that attract near ashore, which is where we are. And it really begs the question, how much is being missed farther out at sea, and I'm sure quite a bit. Absolutely. Very good point. Well, to play off of the photograph thing, Joshua R on Patreon

asks, the 1971 USS Trapang photos have always intrigued me and other people. Do you have any information to corroborate or dismiss these photos? I mean, you Google UFO water and these trampang photos are going to be like the first thing that pops up. Yeah, no, they're striking. Yeah. Actually, I cover this in the second volume, which will be out. soon. So for people who don't know, so this is 1971, the Tripang was a submarine in the Arctic Ocean at the time. This is in March of 1971. And the images first appeared about 10 years ago, I think in 2015 or around then. A researcher got them from some source in Europe, and they were then published in a French magazine, and they got out. So, I don't have them here to show, but they are dramatic. There's a lot of reasons. I'll throw them up here in post-production.

I'll put one of them up so people can see it. Yeah, I think, I mean, the short answer is I don't know what I think about these. So there are definitely reasons to be cautious about the Tricheng photos. You know, I mean, I guess to be expected admirals and other. Navy personnel who had contacted all said, no, we didn't see anything unusual there. We only saw ice. Okay, so you could expect that. But then you have claims of photo manipulation, at least that have been put forth.

I look at some of these claims, and I don't know how convinced I am of that, to be perfectly honest. I'm lucky because I still have a little bit of time before the second volume goes out. And I'm still actually, that is maybe one of a few cases that I'm probably going to go over one last time before I make a final decision. But then you have alternate explanations like maybe these objects were a naval target balloon that was used for weapons testing. That's probably the biggest conventional explanation that I've heard. there are historical photographs of 20th century naval balloon that have a resemblance to what you see in the Treypang images.

So that's a possible one that I didn't feel was believable. Someone talked about, what was it called the effect that I'd never heard of before, the Fatah Morgana effect. There's always like photos that might show natural phenomena looking different, like icebergs looking not like icebergs I found that bizarre apparently it's a real thing

I have a very difficult time thinking that's what we're looking at here so I don't think that these photos have been debunked in a conclusive way but I do think we don't have enough information about the context of what was going on there that I am confident knowing

what the heck we were dealing with here so it's in the book and it's one of those unknowns, in my opinion. All right. There you go, Joshua. It's in the book. I love it. Well, to piggyback off of that, Rich, you know, we just had like a former Navy Admiral, rear admiral testify before Congress about U.S.S. Did you talk to Tim Gallaudet at all in the work that you did?

Absolutely, yeah. No, Tim and I actually talked. on several occasions and quite a lot of detail in the course of my doing the research. He was able to provide commentary on my manuscript, and it was very useful going back and forth with him. So, yeah, Tim was a very valuable reader for me for this book. Cool. I don't know what else to say about that. I mean, he's interested in this, and I think he's definitely of the strong opinion that this is a real phenomenon for sure. Cool. Awesome. Well, I guess moving away from U.S.S. is a little bit. Melissa T on Patreon asks, what do you make of David Grush and his new appointment as a staffer for Representative Berluson's UAP work? Yeah, what do you make of this new development? I think it's great. Yeah, Eric Burleson, he's Republican out of Missouri, is one of the real leaders in Congress pushing for what we can call UAP.

transparency. I've spoken with him myself. I think Berluson's right on. He's like he's very, he's, I think he's very genuinely engaged in this subject in a, in a positive way. So I think it's good that Gresh is, he's a staffer now for Burleson. I think it's a temporary assignment, like a few months, four months, I believe. Four months, yeah. Yeah. And, and the reason I think Grush is, is very useful here is he, I think he will help, first of all, he knows a lot. Gresh knows much more about this than Burleson or any Burleson staffers do. So he can help, I think, to maybe navigate through, you know, the process of like, what are some good questions in areas of investigation that Burleson and Burleson's colleagues

can undergo and attempt to look, or the goods, the assets that Grush has said many times. Like, I know where these assets are located. Let's go get them. And so I think it's good. I'm hoping that this actually leads to some positive outcomes. I don't think it's impossible. Cool.

Yeah, Grush has an ability to ask good questions that Congress might otherwise overlook. So I think it's very good that he's part of that process. Right. Yeah, yeah, maybe it'll turn into something more full-time or whatnot. We'll see, we'll see. In your opinion, Rich, Anthony on Patreon asks, what do you think is the most credible USO case from the last decade? Also, what is the most laughable one that you look at for stress relief?

Do you have any that are just so bug nuts that you just are like, I don't know if I should put this in there? Well, there's a number of very good cases that I can think of that I would say are credible. One thing that I did for this project is to create an evidence rating system. This is one of the last things that I did, but I did it for every one of the cases. So in other words, I created a set of five criteria by which I would try to measure the strength of the evidence per se. not necessarily like determining if the case is true or not. That's a little different.

You know, a case that comes to you from your grandfather that he told you, you know, 20 times before he passed away, say, and then you tell a researcher, in terms of evidence, that might be considered weak, but are you going to not believe it? It's your grandfather. You're going to believe him. So a lot of these cases that are weak evidentiary in terms of evidence can be very, very true. and I've included some, a lot of those.

On the other hand, there are cases that are, in terms of the evidence, as rock solid as you can get. They are backed by declassified government documents, or they are backed by, let us say, in lieu of that very, very thorough outside investigations that confirm what happened. And we've got a number of those. So there's a number of those, even from the last 10 years.

One really, let me just do a weak case. I don't know if it's laughable. I don't think any of these are actually laughable. Right. There probably were, but they were so laughable that I didn't include them in the study, and I therefore can't probably remember them all that well. But there's one, this is not from 10 years ago. This is from like in 1970, but as I'm recall,

it happened around Idaho's Snake River. This one came to a guy who was at a barber shop. That's what it was. It was at a barber like in the 90s, I think. And the barber is doing his hair. And the barber's like, yeah, back in the early 70s, I was at the Snake River in Idaho. So it's one of these stories.

So it's really like ultra remote. And I just barely decided to include it, even though it's weak. But it was interesting enough. So the barber said, I was at the river and this huge object comes out of the snake River between two towns and I can't remember what the towns were. This will be in my, this will have to be in volume two. But anyway, the barber was a younger guy at the time.

He was like so unnerved that he, he said, I sank my boat, engine and all, like to destroy any evidence that I had been out there. Like, he was so freaked out. He said, I wanted nothing to do with this. I got rid of my boat. I sank my boat. And he said, I told my son this story. But then I said, if you ever share this with anyone, I will beat you until you're dead. Something like that.

So this is the guy. So he's older now. He's a barber. And he tells this customer in the course of their conversation. So, you know what it was? No. It was the barber was the son. who said my father, that's what it was.

My father had this happen, and he told me the story, and he said, if I repeat this to anyone, he'll beat me tell him dead. That's how it was. I was getting a little mixed up. But it came from this barber sometime in the 90s, about his dad in the 70s. And only after the father died, did this barber feel like he could tell the story. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's a wacky, I mean, it's a crazy story.

But like, you know, I think of it. And I don't know. I mean, who am I to say this is complete nonsense? Yeah. There are so many of these stories that are rattling around in our culture that people have had and hang on to. And I'm actually kind of glad that I didn't remember that perfectly at first because that's how a lot of these stories actually are in real life. Yep. Exactly.

People get a story from someone and then they're told the story and you misremember certain things. And we've always got to be careful. It doesn't mean that the core is untrue, but it could easily mean that a lot of the details are probably wrong. But still, I think, you know, there's a case to be made that some of them are interesting. As far as recent cases that are really good, there's quite a few, actually. One that I've always been taken by, I don't know if this is a rock solid case. It's just a good case in the National UFO Reporting Center that I happen to be drawn to. And it's from, I think, 2017, that's less than 10 years ago.

You had an oil rigging operation out in the Gulf of Mexico. Oh, I'm sorry, Gulf of America. Am I supposed to say Gulf of America now? I'm going to say Gulf of Mexico. Out in the Gulf of Mexico out there, you had rigging operations. We're talking about 80 miles southeast of New Orleans. So he's out there in the Gulf. So a guy writes into the National UFO Reporting Center.

He's like, I ran an oil rig out there, offshore rig. It was us. There was another rig that was about two miles away from us and a bunch of others in the area. And it was getting towards sunset. We're talking spring of 2017. And an enormous, he says like a humongous object comes out of the water. A disc-shaped, classic but gargantuan. flying saucer essentially comes out of the water he sees the water dripping off the sides he and his

three or four guys that he was with saw this crystal clear he said it was less than half a mile off of our position we all saw it it was absolutely immense and it hovered for a few seconds and then he said it shot off you know faster than a speeding bullet it was just gone he said the guys on the other rig two miles off had to see this, he said, my estimate is that you're probably looking at as many as 50 witnesses. So he wrote to the National UFO Reporting Center. This is fully online. Anyone can go find it.

Peter Davenport, who runs that website, frequently what you'll find with Peter is that he will have his own direct communication with these witnesses of some of these cases that he finds particularly noteworthy. And he had a very extended back and forth with this witness. And he just provided his own commentary saying, I spoke with this man. He is clearly of a high caliber. I have very high confidence in him, et cetera.

So I think I like that case. It's quite recent. It's quite extraordinary. It passes. It passed Peter Davenport's smell test. And it passes mine. I think it probably happened. Yeah.

That says a lot. That's awesome. It's good to hear a modern case, especially dis-shedged. You know? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I'm sure. The 2010.

of all of the decades, because I tracked the amount of sightings for each decade. The 2010s is the second busiest decade of all that I have. Oh, okay. The number one is the 1970s, believe it or not. All right. Pre-internet. We had cool sideburns and some bell bottoms and the striped, you know, the puffy shirts. We had the whole thing happening.

Plus we had the most number of U.S.O cases that I found. You crazy hippies. I love it. I love it, Rich. All right. Last listener question. And I'm actually going to tag team this one with Samantha because I have a book behind me. If you're watching this on YouTube, I.T. Sanderson, Ivan T. Sanderson.

Excuse me. Invisible resident. Yep, yep. And this whole theory of biological UFOs or US. Oh, you're thinking of his first book. Yes. That called Uninvited visitors. There we go.

Yep, I had to look back. That's a great book. I love it. Love it. Sanderson, he did, he did, he was into like Sasquatch and Yeti as well, crypto stuff, but he did two excellent, and I mean excellent UFO books. And they're both unique in their own way. So yeah, go on.

I don't interrupt you. I'm sorry. No, not at all. Well, in reading that book and, you know, one of my favorite UFO-themed movies that's come out recently was Nope, which kind of played off of that as well. Jordan Peel's movie. Nope. N-O-P-E.

Oh, yeah, I saw that. The comedian, Key, Jordan, Jordan Peel. Yeah, Jordan Peel. Yeah, yep. So he, his idea of the UFO, he played off of Ivan T. Sanderson. Like, these things are biological.

They're sentient. It did. That's right. Yeah, yeah, which I was like, wow, man, you did your research for this one. But Samantha and I both want to know, Rich. What do you think of that theory? And does it play into the U.S.O thing at all? I mean, we're talking water, something that has biology to it, that we as human beings need to thrive and survive.

Do you see the idea of a biological UFO or U.S.O playing into the theories of these U.S.Os at all? Are these things alive? I guess is our question. That's a great line of inquiry. And yeah, I think you have to consider it. There are cases where you really wonder about these things. So first of all, you've got these balls of light or these spheres. So now the question is, because we've talked about a few of them,

is whether or not there's an actual physical craft or object inside that glowing sphere. And it's hard to know. There are cases where those spherical objects are not illuminated, and the witnesses see basically a gunmetal gray reflective. ball those are seen so there are definitely some cases where there are spherical objects that are for all intents and purposes a metallic looking craft those exist but there are other cases where you really wonder are we just looking at an intelligent light phenomenon is this possible and I think maybe it's possible I mean some of them some of the cases strike me

as that that is a real possibility. So you have what looks like an intelligent light phenomenon, for lack of a better way of putting it. And so you wonder, are these artificially created life forms to use a phrase loosely? Are they naturally occurring life forms to use that phrase loosely? Are they naturally occurring non-living intelligences, if we can even imagine what such a thing would be? This is where Ivan Sanderson in his book, Uninvited Visitors, it's so great that you and, is it Stephanie? Samantha. I'm so sorry, brought this up because Sanderson writes out all of these different possibilities,

living, non-living, artificially created, naturally forming, and all of these different things. And he creates this very interesting flowchart of possibilities of what these UAP are. And I think you can definitely make a case that these craft themselves may have an intelligence of their own, independent of any operators. Like we tend to think, you know, I'm going to build a craft, and I'm the operator of the craft. The craft is just doing what I tell it. But could you create a craft that has its own volition, its own intelligence? Well, we're very advanced with artificial intelligence now today.

and where does consciousness actually begin when you're talking about AI? This is a very active question that we have in our world. So is it possible that you're dealing with an object that has highly advanced conscious AI to it? There's a possibility that's not quite the same as being alive, but could it be biological in some sense? Well, we're now at the point of creating cybernetic organisms that are biological plus some artificial component. So it's getting kind of fuzzy in terms of what's alive and what's not alive.

And I have a feeling as we move forward into our future, we're going to be bumping into that fuzziness more and more. And it wouldn't surprise me if some of these objects, whether USOs or aerial UAP, fit that pattern. Like there's a kind of biological living aspect to them, but a machine aspect. to them as well. And whether they're actual natural biological organisms, I couldn't say, I'm not inclined to see that, but I could not rule it out. Singularity, baby, it's upon us. It's going to happen. Yeah, yeah, it's an interesting theory. It's definitely a good thought experiment because we don't know what USOs are or aren't at this point. And, you know, with these next three volumes of your books, we will get closer.

And we now have data to work off of. So that's exciting, Rich. Well, yeah, to kind of wrap things up, Neil wants to know on Patreon, do you have a date for an audio book? I'm eagerly awaiting, and I hope Richard does the reading. Okay, two things. So I won't be doing the reading of this. People have to understand it's a lot of work.

I have done readings of one of my books. UFOs for the 21st century mind. That was a lot of work. And I am still trying to complete the reading of volume two of UFOs and the national security state. Wow. That's a 600-page book that already broke two other audiobook readers in the past. They actually had to give up. It's too long. So I have to do it myself. And it's just a lot of work. For me, it's brutal. So the USO books, I just cannot. I wish I could. But we have hired a very fine, a very fine, a very, excellent reader of this USO volume. I have been going back and forth with him,

and he is telling me, I've got many of the chapters back from him. They sound great. I think, I don't want to give an exact date. I'm hoping even within a week. It's not impossible. He has said to me,

I've got the goods. We're going to get it for you. He's worked pretty fast. We had a couple of bumps in the road. So, yes, the audiobook, there will be an audiobook for all, three of these volumes. And I had to decide, like, did I want to wait for the audiobook to be done before I published the other three versions? And I could have done that, but I opted to publish

the hardcover paperback and e-book, essentially all at once. And the audiobook will be out a little more than a month later. Okay. That's so. The audio book pretty soon. From when we're talking, I think it will, I could be out within a week. I'm very much hoping that it will be out within a week. All right. If it's not, then I apologize, but we're pushing as fast as we can. Awesome. Awesome. Well, speaking of volume two, I mean, people are still probably making their way through volume one now. I still am, too. But when can we expect volume two? Do you have a release? Yeah. I was actually hoping I'd space them two to three months apart. It might be three to four months apart between. But absolutely, like all of the cases for all three volumes have been written out,

all of the data analysis for all of them has been done. I may yet add a couple of cases to the third volume, which covers from 1990 to the present. When I stopped, we were not quite done with 2024, and I may pull up a few of those cases in 2025 as well. But really what I need to do with the other two books is simply organize them into proper chapters, write a proper introduction and conclusion for them, index them, you know, all of the little publishing things that are necessary to wrap it up. The content is all done, though, so we're not talking years, we're talking months. That is a massive undertaking. I don't even know how you could do that. That's amazing. It shocked me. Each of the volume is about 400 pages. So we're talking.

It's about 1,200 pages. Yeah. Hey. I mean, it's a lot. When you love what you do, it's not work. So, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's still.

But we don't want to make our dollar. I, you know, we all do. But really, if you're going to do a project, you have to do it either out of love or out of hate or both. And me, that's okay. So you, I love this subject. There are times that I hate it because it's just like it's difficult at times. But honestly, it's been an absolutely one of the most. rewarding projects I've ever engaged in.

Oh, good. That's really good to hear. Yes, and I can definitely empathize with the love, hate thing. Well, last question, what do you hope people will take away from USOs? I mean, this is, again, a topic that is probably going to be new to a lot of our listeners and viewers. What do you hope people take away from volume one and I guess the overall project of USOs? Yeah, there's so much involved. First of all, I want people to understand that this, This is a legitimate aspect of the greater UFO or UAP phenomenon. USOs are a real thing. They are around the world.

They are in every major body of water. Oceans, lakes, and rivers, all of them. There's not a place in this planet where they haven't been seen to appear. So there's that. Also, that the evidence for them are. are good, are very good. I would say in certain cases in terms of evidence, I would rank as absolutely certain, but there's no doubt whatsoever that these things happen. So that's one thing. The other thing that I try to do in this book, particularly in the introductions I write to each chapter and the introduction to the book itself is I'm very happy to speculate on these other beings themselves. One thing that I notice is that I think they are, they and we, we are doing a kind of dance in the ocean, as it were. They see us and we are seeing them now.

And we didn't see them immediately all the time. We learned about them through degrees mainly through the course of the 20th century as we spread ourselves out into the waters. And so one of the things that strikes me is the adaptations that they must have engaged in during the course of the 20th and 21st century. So, for example, we didn't have an ability even to have workable submarines in the water until around the year 1900, like a submarine that actually worked, like that actually was useful, was in near 1900.

So we were just taking baby steps. We developed sonar later in that century, mainly during the First World War. We started to develop an ability to have a little bit of ability to see, below the water, as it were. But those were baby steps. They would have been watching us through the 20th century. They would have seen us in World War II

engage in a global mass murder of our own species and also take over the oceans in the process. They would have seen us in the mid-50s develop nuclear submarines that can stay under the water basically forever. They would have noticed we would have been putting in underwater surveillance systems starting in the 1950s, by which we're detecting sonar acoustic signals and deciphering those, looking for Russian

subs, but also detecting other anomalies. They would have seen all of this. They would have seen that we would be putting satellites up in Earth orbit in the 50s and 60s. They would have noticed that these humans are going through a technological revolution that they would have to adapt to. This is what I believe. I tended to think in the past, I did not tend to think of in terms of alien adaptation. You know, because when you look at the UFO subject, you tend to think they're so far advanced. They don't have to worry about us. But I don't think that's true now.

I think, yes, they are advanced. But we have become much more advanced than we ever were. And we have developed a far greater ability to detect anomalies than ever before. So this actually, I think, has caused an adaptation on their part. So that's a takeaway that I think I want people to, uh, a grasp, which is that this is not a static phenomenon. It's a dynamic phenomenon where we are seeing each other. And yet the conversation is not yet out in the public realm where we're actively talking

about this to ourselves. It's more like you've got a classified portion of humanity that is very actively engaged in watching them. And they're in there in the water. They're in the atmosphere as well. And they know that a portion of. of us are well aware of them. So it's a very interesting dynamic, very interesting story.

I love that. A dance in the ocean. I love that phrase. I'm gonna carry that with me. Do it. Where can we find the book, Rich? Yeah, well, Amazon is available as an ebook, paperback, and hardcover on Amazon. I try to get the price down as much as I could for the hardcover, but it is pricey.

That's because the illustrations are full color. They are beautiful. And there was no way I could get around it. The e-books are nice $10,000, easy, cheap download. And it's got beautiful color illustrations, just like the books. But you can go on Amazon, just type in Dolan, USO, and you'll find it. Or go to my website, which is richardollummembers.com. That's got a nice big banner link for the books on Amazon.

And people can also see what I'm up to in other things that I do at that site. Yeah, absolutely. Go check it out, guys. We'll have links in the show notes for the book, for your website and everything. Again, the book is a history of USO's Unidentified, Submerged Objects, Volume 1 to be continued. Yeah, so Rich, I got to thank you, man. This has been a very insightful conversation. USOs, like I said, holds such a special place in my heart when it comes to why I got involved with this topic to begin with.

So thank you. Absolutely. And it's been a pleasure, Ryan. And I've enjoyed it very much. I'll happily come back anytime.