WTF Is Going on With the Mysterious Connection Between UFOs and Water?

Encounters is now streaming on Netflix.

Legends of underwater civilizations have existed for centuries, and many have speculated that they are connected to extraterrestrials. The link between aliens and the ocean even has some real-life basis: The Pentagon announced in 2022 that its UFO investigation department will study “transmedium objects”—unknown entities that can travel seamlessly between space, air, and underwater.

Theories of underwater aliens have proliferated especially in the last fifty years. In 1977, the town of Broad Haven on the Atlantic ocean coast of Wales was the location of a string of strange sightings that is considered the largest in U.K. history, roughly 450 people in total, according to government records. It began with a sighting by 16 children in February on a schoolyard of what they called a “cigar”-shaped object. A few of the kids claimed to have seen faceless beings near the supposed spacecraft. Other locals began claiming to have also seen unexplainable things around the town, including the creatures without faces. A farming family reported multiple sightings in April and May, and even claimed that 120 of its cows mysteriously appeared on a neighbor’s field a mile and half away.

But the rumor of extraterrestrials in Broad Haven truly began when multiple people said they saw a silver disc descend into the sea, with some alleging it entered via a small island just off the coast called Stack Rocks. Could it be, people wondered, that these seemingly faceless beings were using the island as a gateway to their secret underwater base?

The third episode of VICE Studio’s Netflix docuseries Encounters, “The Broad Haven Triangle”, investigates the local legend of Stack Islands and the rural Welsh community’s experience in the late 70s. But Kevin Knuth, an astrophysicist and a former NASA researcher, said that the connection between UFOs and bodies of water “isn’t anything new.”

“Ships logs have information about UFOs coming out of the water, hovering next to the ships and then taking off going back into the 1800s. This has been going on a long time,” said Knuth. “They are very often associated with water. They're very often seen coming out of water, seen going into water, and sometimes seen underwater.”

Knuth referenced how planets in the “habitable zone”, the region where you can potentially have liquid water on the surface, are relatively common. One in five stars has a planet in the habitable zone, he said.

“Oceans are great places to live, especially if you're going to go from planet to planet. Atmospheres are not very stable with respect to temperature. So you go to Venus and you're looking at 800 degrees Fahrenheit and 100 times the atmospheric pressure on Earth. However, if you're on Mars, you're looking at something like 100 degrees below zero with 1/100 of the atmospheric pressure on Earth. Living on surfaces with atmospheres is really pretty horrible,” said Dr. Knuth. “If you live in an ocean, the temperatures are always going to be within the range of having liquid water, which is not a very large range…it would be very easy to just hang out in our oceans. It wouldn't be that different than somebody else's ocean water on another planet.”

The theory of water-dwelling extraterrestrials isn’t isolated to Wales. Many communities close to certain bodies of water around the planet have legends and rumors about underwater civilizations, alien Atlantises, many of which are known for their UFO activity. Legends of alien neighbors abound from Bolivia’s famed Lake Titicaca to the Solomon Islands in Oceania northeast of Australia, where locals constantly speak of odd objects entering and leaving its waters, dating back to Indigenous lore and continuing until today.

Residents in the cities surrounding Mexico’s Miramar Beach believe that there is an underground base known as Amupac. The tip of southern Tamaulipas state is especially known for a series of sightings since the 60s, according to locals. Now, stalls along the strip leading to the beach sell alien paraphernalia, coffee mugs, hats and T-shirts, along with all sorts of other drip, while a man known as El Marciano wanders around in a worn-down grey alien costume. Members of the UFO Scientific Investigation Association of Tamaulipas (AICOT for its Spanish acronym) even host a semi-government-approved holiday known as El Dia del Marciano (Martian Day) on October 25, where they host workshops, congregate, and hold meditation sessions in attempts to contact Amupac.

The theories surrounding aliens in the ocean intensified after the Pentagon announced last year that they were creating the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) to investigate UFO sightings across all America’s federal agencies, and mentioned the transmedium objects. The pentagon also confirmed that a leaked video shot by the U.S. Navy that appeared to show a UFO disappearing into the water, was authentic.

If the residents of Broad Haven are to be believed, investigators may want to bring the hunt for transmedium objects to the Stack Rocks.