# The Sphere at the Waterline [View on uap.fun]() CASE FILE 018 · 2019 Published: September 17, 2026 Inside USS Omaha’s darkened combat center one July night in 2019, sailors watched a round infrared signature sink toward a rough black sea. “If it splashes you get a bearing and range,” an officer said. It splashed. A leaked radar clip then widened the mystery into a swarm of tracks hitting 138 knots, the destroyers nearby logged drones for weeks, and Omaha’s own deck logs for those nights do not exist. ![Authentic low-resolution infrared display frame recorded by U.S. Navy personnel during the USS Omaha event, showing a bright round signature above the ocean horizon with sensor symbology around it.]() Authentic U.S. Navy infrared-video frame; the side bars preserve the complete low-resolution source image in the archive’s wide format. ## AT A GLANCE - **DATE:** July 15, 2019, within a wider series of Southern California naval incursions that month - **LOCATION:** A Navy warning area off Southern California, near San Clemente and San Nicolas islands - **REPORT TYPE:** Military encounter - **RESOLUTION:** [Partly explained]() - **RECORD STATUS:** Sphere unresolved; wider incursions assessed as drones ## The story ### A new warship in crowded waters USS Omaha was in its second year of service in July 2019: a 418-foot aluminum trimaran of the Independence class, built for speed and shallow water, commissioned at San Diego in February 2018. That month it was working the Navy’s Southern California ranges alongside a cluster of destroyers, in the sea west of San Diego where the fleet keeps its most instrumented training areas and where, on the night of July 14, something began paying the ships visits. Sources: [Multiple destroyers were swarmed by mysterious ‘drones’ off California over numerous nights]() · [Drone swarms that harassed Navy ships off California demystified in new documents]() ### The first night belongs to the destroyers At about 10 p.m. on July 14 the destroyer USS Kidd logged two unmanned aerial vehicles, went to a restricted-communications condition called “River City,” and called out its SNOOPIE team—the Ship Nautical Or Otherwise Photographic Interpretation and Exploitation team, sailors with cameras whose job is to document exactly this. USS Rafael Peralta, running at sixteen knots in visibility of less than a nautical mile, logged a white light hovering above its flight deck. USS John Finn saw a possible UAV and switched off its automatic identification transponder. The visitors stayed for more than ninety minutes. These were not deck-log entries about lights in the sky. They were entries about aircraft over warships. Sources: [Multiple destroyers were swarmed by mysterious ‘drones’ off California over numerous nights]() · [Navy releases timeline for 2019 ‘UAS swarm’ involving warships off California]() ### July 15: lights gather around the ships The next evening they came back. Rafael Peralta had its photographic team on deck at 8:39 p.m.; by 9:20 Kidd’s log read “Multiple UAVs around ship,” with an earlier “above” crossed out, and at 9:37 came the order to man Mark 87 stations—most likely, The War Zone reasoned, the electro-optical director above the bridge, which can track targets over long distances. USS Russell recorded objects dropping in elevation and moving forward, backward, left, and right. The cruise ship Carnival Imagination, passing through, was asked over the radio whether the drones were hers. They were not, she said, and she could count five or six of them. The destroyers’ records run for nearly three hours that night without an identification. Sources: [Multiple destroyers were swarmed by mysterious ‘drones’ off California over numerous nights]() · [Navy releases timeline for 2019 ‘UAS swarm’ involving warships off California]() ### Omaha’s round light enters the story The most famous fragment comes from inside Omaha’s Combat Information Center that same night, and it is a recording of a screen, not the screen’s own file. On it a compact bright blob hangs above a darker horizontal band—the sea—drifts across the frame, and settles lower. There is no hull, no wing, no rotor, no scale, and a readout that Metabunk’s frame-counters noticed reads “LRF no return”: the laser rangefinder had nothing to bounce off. What the clip does have is the room. Someone announces that Omaha, Pinckney, Kidd, and Rafael Peralta may launch a helicopter. Someone says it is “windy as fuck out there.” “Got a lotta white water out there. Six foot swells.” “We have, uh, 31 knots sustained wind topside, gust of 40.” Then, as the blob nears the band: “Whoa, it’s getting close.” Sources: [The U.S. Navy filmed ‘spherical’ shaped UFOs in 2019]() · [USS Omaha “transmedium” sphere descending to the sea]() · [USS Omaha UFO video — July 2019: authentic Navy infrared frame]() ### “If it splashes, you get a bearing and range” Twenty-eight seconds in, an officer gives the order that turns the clip into a story: “If it splashes you get a bearing and range.” “Yes sir.” The blob reaches the band and is gone. “Whoa, it splashed!” “Splashed!” “Mark bearing and range.” It is the language of a crew fixing the position of something that has gone into the water, and it is why the Omaha sphere is remembered as a transmedium object rather than a light that dipped below a horizon. One sailor who was there later summed up his own view for the man who released the footage: “In the end I’m 50/50 that it is man made tech from somewhere.” Sources: [The U.S. Navy filmed ‘spherical’ shaped UFOs in 2019]() · [U.S.S. Omaha UFO lights video]() ### How a disappearance became a transmedium event Filmmaker Jeremy Corbell published the clip on May 14, 2021, with a caption and a set of claims from unnamed Navy sources. The object, they said, was one of a “minimum 14 targets,” a “solid mass” at least six feet across, self-illuminated, tracked on more than two types of radar at speeds of 40 to 138 knots, aloft for more than an hour, and recorded at 11 p.m. at 32°29′N, 119°21′W. “A submarine was used in the search—and recovered nothing.” Intelligence reports, Corbell wrote, called the spherical craft “transmedium capable,” and stills from the video had gone into a May 1, 2020, briefing for the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force. In a later interview with George Knapp he said it was not he who had filmed the screen but the ship’s own visual-intelligence team. The claims are Corbell’s sources’, not the Navy’s. What the clip itself shows is a light going behind a line. Sources: [The U.S. Navy filmed ‘spherical’ shaped UFOs in 2019]() · [U.S.S. Omaha UFO lights video]() · [Pentagon Confirms Leaked Video Showing “Transmedium” UFO Is Authentic]() ### The radar room widens the sky Thirteen days later Corbell released four excerpts of a shipboard radar display he attributed to the same night. “OOD, if you can write a general lat/long of where we’re at,” someone says. “We do have some X-band radar tracks.” The tactical action officer comes over the intercom: “Maintain track, maintain track as best you can.” Then: “Track 781 just sped up to 46 knots. 50 knots. Closing in.” And, at thirty-three seconds: “138 knots. Holy shit. They’re going fast. Oh, it’s turning around.” A sailor’s remark to Corbell has stuck to the case ever since: “The most impressive evidence we witnessed was their endurance.” The screen, analysts at Metabunk worked out, is a Sperry Marine navigation radar of the kind found on any large ship, displaying surface tracks without altitude; one of the labeled contacts is a bulk carrier called Swan Ace. At the moment of the “138 knots” call, no three-digit speed is legible anywhere on the display. Sources: [Navy UFO radar data and footage]() · [USS Omaha radar video: technical identification and open analysis]() · [Pentagon confirmation of the leaked Omaha radar recording]() ### The Pentagon confirms only the camera operators John Greenewald of The Black Vault sent the radar clip to the Pentagon and had an answer from spokesperson Susan Gough in three and a half hours: “I can confirm that the video you sent was taken by Navy personnel, and that the UAPTF included it in their ongoing examinations. I have no further information on it for you.” Pressed, she drew the line exactly: “We’re only confirming two things—that they were taken by Navy personnel, that the UAPTF included them in the ongoing examinations. That’s it. Nothing else.” The only videos ever authorized for release, she added, were the three the department had posted in April 2020. Everything else—the fourteen objects, the six feet, the submarine, the word transmedium—remained in the space between a leaked recording and an official silence. Sources: [Pentagon confirmation of the leaked Omaha radar recording]() · [Pentagon Confirms Leaked Video Showing “Transmedium” UFO Is Authentic]() · [Leaked Navy video appears to show UFO off California]() ### The missing logbook When Greenewald asked the Navy for Omaha’s deck logs and bridge voice recordings for the encounter, he got fifty-three pages beginning on July 19. The logs for the nights that mattered, and all the voice recordings, could not be located. When The War Zone later reviewed the Navy’s records for that week, Omaha was the notable absence: it had not submitted deck logs for the period at all. Littoral combat ships also keep a digital voyage management system, the Navy said, but those records “are now beyond the retention period.” No explanation was offered for why the paper logs were never created. Every neighboring destroyer has a chronological spine for that week. Omaha, the ship whose video started it all, has a gap. Sources: [USS Omaha deck logs and voice recordings missing during encounter timeframe]() · [Navy releases timeline for 2019 ‘UAS swarm’ involving warships off California]() ### The swarm becomes a counterintelligence case The destroyers’ paperwork shows how seriously the fleet took its visitors. A Coast Guard liaison noted on July 18 that the matter had “higher-level visibility.” Naval Criminal Investigative Service counterintelligence staff at Third Fleet, the FBI’s Los Angeles office, Pacific Fleet, and the Chief of Naval Operations all appear in the emails. Investigators checked a research vessel whose small drone could stay up only twenty-eight minutes, confirmed no Navy drone operations on the first night, and circulated a classified drone briefing on July 25. Kidd was visited again in the small hours of July 25 and July 30. Later in the month ships began deploying DRAKE, a radio-frequency counter-drone system, and on one occasion logged RF data from the intruders. The question had changed from what shape was on the screen to who was flying at the fleet. Sources: [Multiple destroyers were swarmed by mysterious ‘drones’ off California over numerous nights]() · [Drone swarms that harassed Navy ships off California demystified in new documents]() · [Navy releases timeline for 2019 ‘UAS swarm’ involving warships off California]() ### From pyramid UFOs to quadcopters Corbell’s first release, in April 2021, had been a night-vision clip from USS Russell of flashing lights shaped like pyramids. At a House hearing in May 2022 the deputy director of naval intelligence, Scott Bray, put it up on screen and took it apart: “the video was taken through night vision goggles with a single-lens reflex camera,” and the Navy was now “reasonably confident that these triangles correlate to unmanned aerial systems in the area. The triangular appearance is a result of light passing through the night vision goggles and then being recorded by an SLR camera.” Navy slides released that June date the Russell footage to July 17 and describe the wider series in prosaic terms: “Quadcopter style UAS,” valid radar tracks up to 21,000 feet, a swarm of up to eleven around the cruiser Bunker Hill, drones off Paul Hamilton assessed as “local fisherman operating personal quadcopters,” and a Hong Kong-flagged bulk carrier, Bass Strait, assessed as likely conducting surveillance of a destroyer for nearly four hours. At least eight distinct encounters off California in 2019, the documents say. The specific operators were never identified. Bray showed one more clip that day—a sphere passing an F/A-18 on a training range—and said of it, “I do not have an explanation for what this specific object is.” He did not mention Omaha at all. Sources: [The U.S. Navy filmed ‘pyramid’ shaped UFOs]() · [Unidentified Aerial Phenomena: open hearing transcript]() · [Drone swarms that harassed Navy ships off California demystified in new documents]() · [Navy releases videos from mysterious drone swarms around warships off California]() ### A legend caught between two true stories Omaha endures because two well-documented stories overlap without joining. In one, a crew in a dark room watches a round light meet the sea and marks the spot. In the other, drones spend a month probing warships, hovering over flight decks, sending crews to their stations, and provoking counterintelligence investigations and a fleet-wide briefing. The second story is almost certainly about human machines of unknown ownership. The first is thirty seconds of a screen with no range to the target and no log of the night. What was the blob that Omaha’s laser could not touch? Why did a ship that keeps records for a living keep none for those nights? And if one track in a real drone swarm was something else, how would anyone have known? Sources: [The U.S. Navy filmed ‘spherical’ shaped UFOs in 2019]() · [Drone swarms that harassed Navy ships off California demystified in new documents]() · [USS Omaha deck logs and voice recordings missing during encounter timeframe]() ## The evidence ### What the public record securely establishes Navy personnel recorded the infrared and radar-display videos, and the UAP Task Force examined them; the Pentagon confirmed both facts in writing and nothing else. Several Navy ships in the same waters documented unidentified aerial systems in July 2019, often for hours and sometimes directly overhead, and the Navy has since released deck logs, briefing slides, and videos about that series. The 2021 intelligence assessment noted that most UAP in government reports “probably do represent physical objects” because they registered on multiple sensors, and sorted them into clutter, natural phenomena, U.S. programs, foreign systems, and “other.” Sources: [Pentagon confirmation of the leaked Omaha radar recording]() · [Drone swarms that harassed Navy ships off California demystified in new documents]() · [Navy releases videos from mysterious drone swarms around warships off California]() · [Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena]() ### The water entry is visually ambiguous The infrared clip has no verified range, altitude, size, or original metadata, and its own rangefinder registered no return. A bright spot fading at the apparent horizon is what a drone or balloon settling into the sea would look like; it is also what a more distant object dropping below the horizon would look like. The crew’s “splash” is good evidence of what trained observers believed in the moment, not of what happened. Sources: [USS Omaha “transmedium” sphere descending to the sea]() · [The U.S. Navy filmed ‘spherical’ shaped UFOs in 2019]() · [USS Omaha UFO video — July 2019: authentic Navy infrared frame]() ### The numbers belong to the source, not the record Fourteen objects, six feet, 138 knots, more than an hour aloft, a submarine search: all come from Corbell’s unnamed sources, and Corbell himself later marked the count and the size as estimates. The radar clip shows a navigation radar with surface symbology and a commercial ship in frame, and does not show the speed the voice calls out. Later retellings by Corbell and Knapp expanded the episode to nine warships and as many as a hundred objects. Sources: [The U.S. Navy filmed ‘spherical’ shaped UFOs in 2019]() · [Navy UFO radar data and footage]() · [USS Omaha radar video: technical identification and open analysis]() · [Pentagon confirmation of the leaked Omaha radar recording]() ### The swarm evidence points toward drones The deck logs say UAV, UAS, and drone throughout; the Navy’s slides say quadcopter, swarm, surveillance, and counter-UAS. Some incidents were attributed to fishermen’s quadcopters, one to a foreign-flagged cargo ship. No document names a state operator. That is the strongest explanation for the month, and it says nothing in particular about the one light Omaha filmed. Sources: [Drone swarms that harassed Navy ships off California demystified in new documents]() · [Multiple destroyers were swarmed by mysterious ‘drones’ off California over numerous nights]() · [Unidentified Aerial Phenomena: open hearing transcript]() ### Classification This file is classified as an authentic military-recording case embedded in a documented drone-incursion series. The wider swarm is best understood as unmanned aircraft of uncertain ownership. The round target is unresolved because its disappearance cannot be reconstructed from the released excerpt, and the ship’s own records for the night do not exist. “Transmedium” is a source’s interpretation of a light going behind a line. Sources: [Unidentified Aerial Phenomena: open hearing transcript]() · [Drone swarms that harassed Navy ships off California demystified in new documents]() · [USS Omaha deck logs and voice recordings missing during encounter timeframe]() · [Pentagon confirmation of the leaked Omaha radar recording]() ## Timeline - **14 JUL 2019 · ABOUT 10 PM:** USS Kidd logs two UAVs and calls out its SNOOPIE camera team; Rafael Peralta logs a white light over its flight deck; the visitors stay more than ninety minutes. - **15 JUL 2019 · 8:39 PM ONWARD:** Several destroyers again track drones for nearly three hours; Kidd orders its Mark 87 stations manned; the cruise ship Carnival Imagination counts five or six. - **15 JUL 2019 · ABOUT 11 PM:** Aboard USS Omaha, sailors record a round infrared signature descending toward the horizon. “Whoa, it splashed!” “Mark bearing and range.” - **17–25 JUL 2019:** Coast Guard, NCIS, FBI, and Third Fleet personnel investigate; USS Russell films the flashing “pyramids” on July 17; a classified drone briefing circulates on July 25. - **25 & 30 JUL 2019:** Kidd and Russell are visited again; counter-drone teams are activated and radio-frequency data is logged. - **1 MAY 2020:** According to Corbell, stills from the Omaha video are included in an Office of Naval Intelligence briefing for the UAP Task Force. - **8 APR 2021:** Corbell releases the Russell night-vision footage and an Omaha still; the Pentagon confirms Navy personnel took them. - **14 & 27 MAY 2021:** Corbell releases the “splash” clip and the radar excerpts. Susan Gough confirms only that Navy personnel recorded them and the task force examined them. - **25 JUN 2021:** ODNI’s preliminary assessment describes 144 reports, 80 involving multiple sensors, and five explanatory bins, without naming Omaha. - **FEB 2022:** The Navy tells The Black Vault that Omaha’s deck logs and voice recordings for the encounter dates cannot be located; released logs begin July 19. - **17 MAY 2022:** Scott Bray tells a House hearing the Russell “pyramids” were drones seen through night-vision goggles; he offers no explanation for a separate sphere video and does not mention Omaha. - **JUN 2022:** Navy briefing slides and five videos obtained under FOIA describe at least eight 2019 drone encounters off California, quadcopters, and a suspected surveillance ship; operators remain unidentified. ## Sources & interviews - [USS Omaha UFO video — July 2019: authentic Navy infrared frame]() — U.S. Navy · July 15, 2019 · Wikimedia Commons · Public-domain federal work - [Multiple destroyers were swarmed by mysterious ‘drones’ off California over numerous nights]() — Adam Kehoe and Marc Cecotti · The War Zone · March 23, 2021 · FOIA deck logs, emails, and AIS reconstruction - [The U.S. Navy filmed ‘pyramid’ shaped UFOs]() — Jeremy Corbell · Extraordinary Beliefs · April 8, 2021 · First release of the Russell night-vision footage and an Omaha still - [USS Omaha “transmedium” sphere descending to the sea]() — Metabunk contributors · April 2021 onward · Frame analysis of the infrared display - [The U.S. Navy filmed ‘spherical’ shaped UFOs in 2019]() — Jeremy Corbell · Extraordinary Beliefs · May 14, 2021 · Original public release, transcription, and source claims (video) - [Pentagon Confirms Leaked Video Showing “Transmedium” UFO Is Authentic]() — Micah Hanks · The Debrief · May 14, 2021 - [Leaked Navy video appears to show UFO off California]() — Gadi Schwartz and Tim Stelloh · NBC News · May 17, 2021 · Includes Defense Department confirmation (video) - [Navy UFO radar data and footage]() — Jeremy Corbell · Extraordinary Beliefs · May 27, 2021 · Original public release and transcription (video) - [Pentagon confirmation of the leaked Omaha radar recording]() — John Greenewald Jr. · The Black Vault · May 28, 2021 · Includes correspondence from DoD spokesperson Susan Gough - [USS Omaha radar video: technical identification and open analysis]() — Metabunk contributors · May 2021 onward · Navigational-radar and track-display discussion - [Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena]() — Office of the Director of National Intelligence · June 25, 2021 · FOIA-released version - [U.S.S. Omaha UFO lights video]() — George Knapp · Mystery Wire · July 6, 2021 · Interview with Jeremy Corbell on the recordings’ origin - [USS Omaha deck logs and voice recordings missing during encounter timeframe]() — John Greenewald Jr. · The Black Vault · February 3, 2022 · Navy FOIA response and released logs - [Navy releases timeline for 2019 ‘UAS swarm’ involving warships off California]() — Adam Kehoe and Marc Cecotti · The War Zone · February 10, 2022 - [Unidentified Aerial Phenomena: open hearing transcript]() — U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence · May 17, 2022 - [Drone swarms that harassed Navy ships off California demystified in new documents]() — Adam Kehoe and Marc Cecotti · The War Zone · June 10, 2022 · Navy FOIA briefing materials - [Navy releases videos from mysterious drone swarms around warships off California]() — The War Zone · June 15, 2022 Spotted an error, or know a better source? Write to hello@uap.fun. ## Connected files - [The Nimitz Encounter]() — Fifteen years earlier in the same waters: a white object over disturbed water and the question of what was beneath it. - [The Fleet Behind the Gimbal]() — The East Coast counterpart: a thirty-second clip standing in for a much larger, mostly unreleased sensor story. - [The Heat Signature over Aguadilla]() — The other government infrared clip in which an object seemed to enter the sea—until the geometry was redone. - [Jeremy Corbell]() — The filmmaker who released the Omaha clips and supplied the claims that surround them. - [George Knapp]() — Corbell’s partner in the releases, and the interviewer who asked who had really filmed the screen. ## A NOTE ON EVIDENCE Unidentified describes a limit of the available information. It doesn’t identify an origin. [NEXT CASE FILE: The Lights over Stephenville]()