In August 2022, the US Naval Institute’s Naval History Magazine published an article by Scot Christenson that made a pointed argument: while the US Navy was drawing attention to unexplained aerial phenomena, the actual documented physical threats to naval vessels had always come from beneath the surface, not above it. Three incidents anchor the argument.
The USS Stein Incident — 1978
The USS Stein (DE-1065) was a destroyer escort that began experiencing elevated sonar noise that interfered with operations. When the vessel was inspected, the protective NOFOUL coating on its sonar dome had sustained multiple cuts and gouges. Embedded in the cuts were claw remnants — the type found in the suction cups of giant squid tentacles. The problem: the claws recovered from the Stein were substantially larger than any claw previously collected from any documented giant squid specimen. If the attacker was a giant squid, it was of a size that had never been scientifically confirmed. Old seafarers would have called it the Kraken. The USNI article notes the implication directly.
The First Megamouth Shark — 1976
In 1976, a US Navy torpedo recovery boat was conducting oceanographic research with a cargo parachute deployed as a sea anchor. The parachute snagged something. The crew could not identify what was entangled, but it fought the ship’s winch with considerable force. The creature eventually suffocated after apparently swallowing part of the parachute. When pulled aboard, it was 15 feet long and weighed 750 pounds. The crew had no idea what they had caught. Marine biologists later confirmed it was a megamouth shark — a species entirely unknown to science. The USS Stein incident and the megamouth capture both occurred within two years of each other, both in US Navy operational contexts, both involving organisms larger than anything science had documented.
The USS Hale Report — April 1955
Commander Vining A. Sherman wrote in the April 1955 issue of Proceedings magazine about being called to the bridge of the USS Hale (DD-642) to examine something caught on the destroyer’s ramming stem. What he found he described as a creature “of such gigantic size” that it defied ready classification. The encounter was formal enough to warrant a published account in the Naval Institute’s own flagship journal, from a serving commander, in 1955.
The USNI Argument
Christenson’s argument is methodologically careful: to date, there is no documented instance of a UAP causing physical damage to an aircraft. There are multiple documented instances of unknown underwater organisms causing physical damage to naval vessels. The ocean contains unknown animals large enough to attack warships. AARO’s all-domain framework — which formally classifies undersea anomalies as UAP — means the US government now officially acknowledges that naval USOs require the same analytical infrastructure that aerial UAP does. The USNI article preceded that formal classification but anticipated its logic.
Source: Scot Christenson, “USOs Not UFOs Have Been the Greatest Threat to the Navy,” Naval History Magazine, August 2022, Volume 36 Number 4. usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2022/august/usos-not-ufos-have-been-greatest-threat-navy