Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Richard Dolan, and I had heard this story about Christopher Columbus, you know, sailing the Ocean Blue in fourteen ninety two and having some sort of a UFO experience, and I always kind of mentally equated it with something kind of mythic or prophetic, like the wise men following a star to Bethlehem. So what did Columbus see UFO USO both neither.
He saw something for sure, and in fact he wrote about it in his journal. His son, who was very close to him in many ways, also wrote about it. He obviously got it directly from his dad. But what we know is that was in the night of October eleventh, fourteen ninety two. This is right before they made landfall at the New World, so they were just right about there. They had been sailing for weeks at this point, and Columbus and one member of his crew saw this light.
How he can describe it, He described it as a faint light that rose and fell. He said it was like a small wax candle, that's what it looked like. And it was right before they reached land and his son in a later entry just described it as moving like a candle being passed between people on shore. That is what it looked like it might have been. So so what was this thing? You have different speculations, and
we don't really have an answer to this day. The fact that he was fairly close to land makes you wonder was it an actual torch that was on land. I tried looking into this myself, and my strong impression that is that he was too far. The curvature of the earth was still enough that it would have been very difficult to see something at the shore, excuse me, unless it was elevated like a hill. So maybe you could have seen that. There's other theories. Some people thought
of bioluminescence. It doesn't really make much sense to me. There was the suggestion that Columbus might not have recognized a light from one of the ships that was ahead of him. I doubt it. That would be like a rookie mistake for someone like Columbus, who was an absolute expert sailor and navigator. So we don't really have a lot of good answers for this one, and it is a genuine mystery. It could be something on land if I really were to guess, that would be my guest.
But we just don't know, and I think we will never know.
You have an earlier another case, not quite that early, but this is eighteen ninety two hydrographic survey of the West Coast and haha, a young man named George Crossell.
Yep, we're talking. So now we're getting into some like this is a fascinating case. So George Crossell in eighteen ninety two, he was a twenty six year old young man, very smart guy, and he was part of a hydrographic survey team. So you know, basically they were there to check the de of the ocean and various areas and everything having to do with mapping a certain part of the water. And they were doing this right off of
Baja California. So he was out there with a bunch of other people and he wrote about one he wrote about his whole experience. He went back he lived in Atlanta, and he wrote a long letter describing his awesome, really cool experience doing all this hydrographic survey work on the other side of the country. It was all very like matter of fact. You get a lot of these types of accounts in newspapers back in those days. And in the middle of it, he says, and this one weird
thing happened, and it's crazy. So the weird thing is he's with another colleague of his whose name he mentions, I can't remember off the top of my head, and they're on land and they see this bright object coming in from the ocean. They're at, you know, they're facing the Pacific Ocean. They see this white globular. He said, it was almost like like a sack filled with gas, and it was taking all of these different shapes. It was roughly spherical, though so, and it was moving in.
It was very large, maybe forty fifty feet in diameter is fairly substantial. You don't miss something like that. And he said it was so bright that they could hardly look at it at times. So it just came in from the ocean and it's hanging around, darting around them for like something like fifteen minutes, and then it just moved off inland. And he had no explanation for this. You can read his account, which I've read, I've read it several times, and you can tell like this guy
was utterly mystified. He wasn't trying to explain it in any way or another. He was clearly a highly educated, intelligent young man who just did not know what thatck he had encountered. And you know, if you look out from where he was, I mean, it's only ocean. There's nothing there for hundreds, really thousands of miles, It's just water. So where did the thing come from? What was it? Totally bizarre? And am I right in thinking, I know why you asked me that question, George, Well.
Let me ask you this is it daylight? When this is it daylight? Yeah?
It was daylight. It was the middle of the day, sometime in the afternoon.
Yes, and it changed shapes, So it changed shapes it.
Yeah, it was roughly spherical, but he said it it was almost as if there was something inside it moving in different directions or whatever. But it was roughly spherical, but it bulged here and there and so forth. Yeah.
So yeah, you are right in guessing where I was headed this. But you know, I did this project with Netflix called Investigation Alien. We had a crew Rory Kremer, who was my guest on this show and talk to me and Jeremy and our podcast. We had him talk about it. His crew goes out into the channel towards the Channel islands. They drop anchor somewhere in the in
the middle of the ocean, they see this thing. While the crew are all awake, they see this object that comes pretty close to the ship and then zooms away. It's miles away suddenly in an instant. And then later when the whole crew goes to sleep, the cameras are still rolling, this thing comes back and it's a UFO. It's a big round orb glowing, comes down really slowly right, gets right to the just a really close to the ocean itself, and then descends almost teasingly into the water.
I mean it's a UFO that becomes a USO and sounds a heck of a lot like some of the cases that you're describing in this book.
Oh yeah, oh yeah, for sure. And the reason that I'm glad you mentioned this very much because you graciously showed me the video enhancement of that particular object, and when I looked at it, I thought, oh, I know exactly what case that sounds like. And it's the one that I just described. Because that object, that spherical let's call it a USO that you that was on your program. It reminded me very much of what George Crossell saw, you know, more than a century ago.
Yeah, we've heard about these things, just otherwise it's never seen video of it happening before. And this was real stuff, It really happened. But you got another case April eighth, eighteen thirteen. The crew of the Niagara see a large hump. How does that fit into this?
Yeah, that's that's an interesting one. It's not my favorite from that century, but it's a pretty interesting one. So in eighteen thirteen, the US was adding a war. You know, we had the War of eighteen twelve, which was still going in eighteen thirteen. So yet all of that activity happening, but there were also these merchant ships that were in the waters, American merchant ships that were out there and so off the coast of Nova Scotia in the eighteen
thirteen the crew saw this mass in the ocean. This is interesting because we have pretty decent coordinates as to where this thing took place. I mean, not exact, but they were good enough to map the latitude and longitude, so nowhere it took place. So what you have, though, is the crew of a ship was called the Niagara. They saw this large hump in the water a few miles from where they were, and they thought it was like the hull of a ship that was bottomed up,
like it turned upside down. But when they got close enough they realized this was not the case at all. So as they get to it, they thought, is this some giant fish, but this is way larger. It was about two hundred feet long, which is just too too large be any kind of marine creature. That's twice the length of a blue whale, so not a marine creature. It actually was the size of some of the largest
seafaring vessels of the period. But the problem with that is that it wasn't They said the object was covered with some kind of strange shell, and there was like something that was sticking out of the water. It wasn't. It wasn't. It wasn't a boat. I guess you know. The crew was like, this is not a boat, and we do not want to get any closer to it. So it is strange. We don't have a whole lot about it. They actually described it as like a monster, which you get a lot of that in that period
of time. But it's a weird weird unknown whatever it was. If I may, I would love to discuss a case that is from less than ten years away from that which has blown my mind. It was one of the first mind blowing ones of the nineteenth century. Mind. Yeah, And this one was in eighteen twenty five, so similar period of time. This is from a British vessel off
the coast of Hawaii. And in this one we have the ship's doctor who wrote in his log this always reminds me of Master and Commander because it's a similar period of time. And I remember in that movie that had a great ship's doctor. Really cool. I think of this type of a guy. We have the name of
this doctor in this case. His name was Andrew Bloxam, and he was a member of the crew of this particular British ship and they are a few about one hundred miles off the coast of Hawaii, and it's three point thirty in the morning, and an orange sphere rose out of the water, A very very intensely bright orange sphere comes out of the water so bright into the deckhands that you could pick a pin off the deck, and then it lowered itself back into the water, and
then did it a second time, so it rose out of the water second time and went back into the water. And you know, you read Andrew Bloxham's diary entry for this, and you just run out of conventional ideas of like what this thing could be like. Is this some kind of bio illuminescent phenomenon? No, is this some kind of ball lightning? How could this possibly be ball lightning? Doesn't emerge from the ocean and go back into the ocean
twice for that matter. They're just I'm not aware of any remotely conventional scientific explanation for this kind of thing. And when you read this man he's he was the ship's doctor of the Royal Navy at the height of its power and influence, And I just had no other explanation for it. So and he wrote it down like as it happened. And again he was another of these people, like he had no he wasn't even trying to explain it. He just said, this is really strange.
Here's part of what you wrote. It was the color of a red hot cannon shot appeared about the size of the sun. It gave so great a light that a pin could be picked up on the deck.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah, I just love that case, and I mean I think visually it's very arresting, and it's one of those cases where, like some of the other early cases, you can interpret one way or another and you can think, well, maybe they didn't see this very clearly, or they didn't get close enough to get a good view. But in this one, I don't really know how else I could try to explain it. And
it's a very well attested case. I mean, I'll take the documentation of a ship's doctor off of a British Royal Navy vessel any day. I think I'm not going to doubt that. And yet there's just nothing that I can think of. And what I'll say also is that this phenomenon of these orange, these red orange spherical orbs coming out of the water, that is not the last
time you hear of that. That would be identical to many cases that would be from one hundred and fifty or two centuries later, because there's a bunch of those that I have collected as well, very similar, very similar.
Do you have cases where there's physical interaction, I mean, seeing these things in the water coming out of the water, that's pretty dramatic. And the school information. But where there's physical interaction, some kind of physical trace or effect.
Yes, absolutely, Sometimes that physical interaction is mental apparent telepathic communication. And there have been a few instances where a diver like touched one of these objects or interacted with them in a very detailed way. There's one that I'm just thinking off off the top of my head from the late eighties off the coast Puerto Rico, off of Aguadilla.
As a matter of fact, of course, we know about the twenty thirteen Aguadilla video off the northwest coast of Puerto Rico there, which is very interesting and that of course gets its own treatment. But in nineteen I think in nineteen eighty nine, there is a fisherman off the coast there, a couple of miles off the coast who was also a accomplished diver. So he was near a dive and he was a fisherman as well, so he has some of his diving equipment in his fishing boat.
And this matters because he sees at a very short distance from his boat a glowing something under the water, and he's noticing it and he's like, okay, I'm very curious. So he throws his diving equipment on and he goes into the water towards this thing, and it's an underwater craft that is essentially like applying saucer to USO. He actually got close enough to touch it, in fact, in
two different places. On one side, he's feeling water being sucked through a kind of filtration system, is what it struck him as. And then on the other side he could feel that water coming out, so it seemed like it was filtering water or taking water in some way or another. So he's hanging around with this thing. He actually touched it, and I think at some point he realized, I don't know, I think I want to be too close from this object.
So he went back to his boat and he I can't remember exactly what the craft just it went away shortly after that. These things are there and then they just move off, So he did touch it. There's another one I'll just mention real quickly. A woman swimming in the Black Sea. So this is off the coast of Crimea. She is nineteen ninety. We have her name, I can't remember offhand. She's out in the water and she sees this still very egg shaped craft. It is directly over
the water, and she like, it's fascinating, it's beautiful. And she told researchers and she got back she said, I'm telling you, I heard this message in my mind. It came from the thing. The message is basically, it's okay, don't be afraid, we're not going to hurt you, something to that effect. But she's out there. She was a very very good swimmer, and she's just hanging out in
the water. Her head's above the water. She's looking at this thing, having this kind of strange mental interaction with it.
It's great. Cases we're going to broaden the conversation. We come back talk about maybe military encounters a little bit, and if there are USOS that are coming in out of the water, what are they doing while they're down there? Why are they there? Why at the concentration in some of these hotspots.
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at one am Eastern and go to Coast to Coast a m dot com for more