A new warship in crowded waters
USS Omaha was an Independence-variant littoral combat ship operating with other Navy vessels in the Southern California ranges during July 2019. The sea west of San Diego was busy with exercises, instrumented warning areas, commercial traffic, and some of the fleet’s most sensitive sensors. It was also becoming strangely crowded overhead. On July 14, destroyers began logging unidentified drones and lights that held station over moving ships in darkness and poor visibility.
Sources: Multiple destroyers were swarmed by mysterious ‘drones’ off California over numerous nightsDrone swarms that harassed Navy ships off California demystified in new documents
The first night belongs to the destroyers
USS Kidd’s deck log recorded two UAVs around 10 p.m., activated its rapid-response SNOOPIE photographic team, and entered a restricted-communications condition. USS Rafael Peralta soon logged a white light hovering above its flight deck while the destroyer moved at sixteen knots. The objects persisted for more than ninety minutes. Whatever their identity, sailors treated them not as folklore but as an operational intrusion unfolding over steel decks and dark water.
Sources: Multiple destroyers were swarmed by mysterious ‘drones’ off California over numerous nights
July 15: lights gather around the ships
The activity returned the next evening. Rafael Peralta deployed its SNOOPIE team at 8:39 p.m.; Kidd wrote “Multiple UAVs around ship” by 9:20. USS Russell logged objects changing elevation and moving forward, backward, left, and right. A passing cruise ship, Carnival Imagination, radioed that the lights were not its drones and counted five or six nearby. The destroyer records preserve almost three hours of activity without an identification.
Sources: Multiple destroyers were swarmed by mysterious ‘drones’ off California over numerous nights
Omaha’s round light enters the story
The most famous fragment comes from inside Omaha’s Combat Information Center later that night. The public clip is a recording of a sensor display rather than the sensor’s original digital file. On it, a compact bright signature hangs above a darker horizontal boundary, shifts across the frame, and then settles lower. The display never resolves a hull, wings, rotors, exhaust, or scale. It supplies a luminous circle, a restless horizon, and the voices of sailors trying to keep track of it.
Sources: USS Omaha UFO video — July 2019: authentic Navy infrared frameThe U.S. Navy filmed ‘spherical’ shaped UFOs in 2019Leaked Navy video appears to show UFO off California
“If it splashes, you get a bearing and range”
The source-release transcription catches the room anticipating the descent. One voice orders, “If it splashes, you get a bearing and range.” Another notes sustained winds of thirty-one knots, gusts to forty, white water, and six-foot swells. As the signature reaches the boundary and vanishes, the room erupts: “Whoa, it splashed!” “Splashed!” Then comes the practical command beneath the astonishment: “Mark bearing and range.” The language made the clip feel less like a distant light and more like an attempted recovery point being fixed in real time.
Sources: The U.S. Navy filmed ‘spherical’ shaped UFOs in 2019Leaked Navy video appears to show UFO off California
How a disappearance became a transmedium event
Filmmaker Jeremy Corbell, who published the leaked clip in May 2021, said it was recorded on July 15 at roughly 11 p.m. near 32°29′21.9″N, 119°21′53.0″W. His unnamed sources described a spherical object, a search that recovered no wreckage, and an intelligence assessment that it might have crossed into the water. That account created the case’s most durable image: a machine able to trade air for ocean without impact, debris, or hesitation. The public footage confirms the disappearance and the crew’s “splash” call; it does not show underwater travel.
Sources: The U.S. Navy filmed ‘spherical’ shaped UFOs in 2019Leaked Navy video appears to show UFO off CaliforniaPentagon confirmation of the leaked Omaha radar recording
The radar room widens the sky
Thirteen days after releasing the infrared sequence, Corbell published four excerpts of a shipboard radar display attributed to the same Omaha event. Operators call out tracks, bearings, ranges, and speeds: “Track 781 just sped up to 46 knots. 50 knots. Closing in.” Later a voice appears to call 138 knots and reacts in surprise. At one point the recording shows several symbols distributed around own-ship. In Corbell’s account, fourteen unknown contacts were present at the peak and some repeatedly dropped from radar.
Sources: Navy UFO radar data and footagePentagon confirmation of the leaked Omaha radar recordingUSS Omaha radar video: technical identification and open analysis
A screen full of symbols is not yet a fleet
The radar clip contains real watch-floor language and a recognizable Sperry Marine navigation display, but it does not publicly establish that every symbol represents the same kind of object—or that the round infrared signature is one of them. Analysts identified at least one named commercial vessel on the screen and noted that the system displayed surface-track symbology without altitude. The famous “138 knots” call is audible but its matching instrument value is obscured or absent in the excerpt. The clip is evidence of a busy tracking problem, not a complete sensor reconstruction.
Sources: USS Omaha radar video: technical identification and open analysisNavy UFO radar data and footagePentagon confirmation of the leaked Omaha radar recording
The Pentagon confirms only the camera operators
The Defense Department’s public confirmation was narrow by design. Spokesperson Susan Gough said the infrared and radar videos were taken by Navy personnel and included in the UAP Task Force’s ongoing examinations. She explicitly declined to confirm the surrounding date, ship, object count, performance, or transmedium interpretation. That distinction is central to the file: the recordings have military provenance, while most of the dramatic connective tissue came from Corbell’s sources and captions rather than an official Omaha case report.
Sources: Pentagon confirmation of the leaked Omaha radar recordingLeaked Navy video appears to show UFO off California
The missing logbook
A Freedom of Information Act request sought Omaha’s deck logs, photographs, videos, and bridge voice recordings for the encounter period. The Navy produced logs beginning July 19 but reported that the relevant earlier Omaha deck logs and voice recordings could not be located. Littoral combat ships kept digital voyage records, and later reporting said those records had passed their retention period. The gap leaves the leaked snippets without the ordinary chronological spine that surviving destroyer logs provide for neighboring incidents.
Sources: USS Omaha deck logs and voice recordings missing during encounter timeframeDrone swarms that harassed Navy ships off California demystified in new documents
The swarm becomes a counterintelligence case
Other ships’ records show that this was bigger than one round light. Navy and Coast Guard investigators, NCIS, the FBI’s Los Angeles office, Third Fleet intelligence, Pacific Fleet, and the Chief of Naval Operations all entered the paper trail. Investigators checked civilian vessels and tried to deconflict scheduled Navy drone flights. Later in July, some ships deployed DRAKE radio-frequency counter-drone equipment; records from another incident say RF data was captured. The mystery was becoming less “What shape was in the video?” than “Who was testing the fleet’s reactions?”
Sources: Multiple destroyers were swarmed by mysterious ‘drones’ off California over numerous nightsDrone swarms that harassed Navy ships off California demystified in new documents
From pyramid UFOs to quadcopters
The 2019 cluster acquired another icon when lights filmed through night vision over USS Russell appeared triangular or pyramidal. At a 2022 House hearing, Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray explained that the triangle was an optical effect created when a light passed through night-vision goggles and was recorded by a single-lens-reflex camera. Comparison with a later swarm led the Navy to reasonable confidence that those triangular lights correlated with unmanned aerial systems. That resolution applies to the Russell imagery and wider drone environment; Bray did not publicly resolve Omaha’s round infrared target.
Sources: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena: open hearing transcriptDrone swarms that harassed Navy ships off California demystified in new documents
A legend caught between two true stories
Omaha endures because two well-supported narratives overlap without perfectly joining. One is the intimate clip: sailors watch a round signature meet the horizon and call “splash.” The other is a documented month of drones probing warships, lingering for hours, crossing flight decks, producing RF emissions, and prompting countermeasures. The first lacks the full geometry needed to prove water entry. The second strongly favors human technology but still leaves operators and intentions uncertain. Between them sits the irresistible possibility that one track in a real drone swarm was something stranger.
Sources: The U.S. Navy filmed ‘spherical’ shaped UFOs in 2019Drone swarms that harassed Navy ships off California demystified in new documentsUnidentified Aerial Phenomena: open hearing transcript