Recently released Catalina Island UAP files have prompted renewed questions about whether important evidence in the search for alien life could lie beneath the sea rather than in the skies. UFO researcher and filmmaker Mark Christopher Lee says the documents, covering reports from 1949 to 1955, add to a long-running pattern of unexplained activity off the California coast.
The files form part of PURSUE Release 07 and include Air Intelligence Information Reports and unresolved case files concerning sightings over Catalina Island.
One report describes silver objects seen by Boy Scouts near Camp Fox in 1952. They were said to have travelled faster than a conventional jet before climbing and apparently disintegrating.
A separate 1953 account recorded a round, purplish-white object that remained stationary before moving north-west towards Los Angeles. The report listed Jupiter as a possible explanation. An earlier 1949 file detailed several objects seen individually over the island, but concluded there was insufficient information for evaluation.
None of the cases has been resolved. Lee, who has made documentaries including The Rendlesham UFO: The British Roswell and The King of UFOs, believes the reports should be considered alongside longstanding accounts of unidentified submerged objects, or USOs, in the waters off California.
“These Catalina files aren’t isolated curiosities. They sit in one of the most active stretches of water for USO reports on the planet,” he said. “While the public focuses on the recent silent black triangle sightings, the older Catalina material points to something that has been operating in and around the ocean for decades. We’ve spent seventy years looking up. The real answers may be under the waves.”
Questions over transmedium craft
Lee also linked the Catalina reports to the work of retired US Navy Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, a former acting NOAA Administrator and Oceanographer of the Navy.
Gallaudet has argued publicly that some UAP activity may involve transmedium craft capable of operating in both air and water. He has also testified about the seriousness of the phenomenon.
He has described proprietary high-resolution bathymetric surveys in the Atlantic which a research team believes show features corresponding to Plato’s account of Atlantis. The location and underlying data have not been released, however, and there has been no independent confirmation that the features are connected to Atlantis.
“Gallaudet brings institutional credibility to what many of us have argued for years: the ocean is not a side note in the UAP question – it may be central,” Lee said.
“If his team is mapping sites that align with ancient descriptions while the government is releasing decades-old Catalina reports that never got properly investigated, the two threads are pointing in the same direction. Disclosure might not arrive as a press conference about the sky. It might arrive when we finally start looking seriously at what’s under the water.”
Lee acknowledged that the cases remain uncertain. A 2024 historical review by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office found no confirmed evidence that any US government investigation or official review had established a UAP sighting represented extraterrestrial technology, while noting that many reports remained unresolved.
He has called for independent oceanographic and archival examination of the Catalina Island UAP files, greater scrutiny of USO data and transparency over government or private surveys of anomalous underwater features.
