UFOs and Water

About the Author

Carl William Feindt died on 21 April 2019 at the age of 81, which places his birth in 1937 or 1938. His life before ufology is worth setting out because it explains the shape of the book.

He was an aircraft enthusiast from boyhood, joined the Civil Air Patrol as a cadet, studied aeronautical engineering and served briefly in the U.S. Air Force before family circumstances returned him to civilian life. He then spent more than three decades in customer service for a major airline, Delta. He had been reading UFO literature since the early 1960s but did nothing with it professionally until he retired.

What he did on retirement is the part that matters. He went to the University of Delaware library and worked through microfilmed Delaware newspapers covering 1923 to 1967 — eight years of it — extracting roughly 750 UFO-related items. That is not a research method anyone adopts to reach a predetermined conclusion; it is the unglamorous archival labour that most of this field talks about and very few people actually perform.

Out of that work came a specific interest. Feindt noticed that aircraft cannot emerge from or submerge into water, and that reports describing objects doing exactly that formed a distinct and neglected category. He began assembling them, and the collection grew into a database and the website waterufo.net.

He presented a paper, “Physical Influences of a UFO on Water,” at a MUFON symposium in Denver in 2006, and it won that year's award; John Schuessler, MUFON's former International Director, commented publicly on it. He appeared in television documentary treatments of underwater UFO reports. The first edition of this book followed in 2010, the enlarged second edition in 2016, three years before his death.

One terminological point he was firm about, and it reflects the care he brought to the subject. He preferred “Water UFOs” to the more common “USO,” on the grounds that “submerged” should be reserved for objects actually observed underwater. Most of his cases are of objects at or near the surface, and he did not want a label that overstated what witnesses had seen.

A correction made while writing this article. This site's own key-figures card for Feindt previously gave his dates as 1962–2019. That is wrong — almost certainly a misreading of the fact that he began reading about UFOs in the early 1960s. Both his funeral-home obituary and the European UFO researchers' network EuroUFO give his death as 21 April 2019 at 81. The card has been corrected.

Historical Context & Origins

Water-associated UFO reports are as old as the modern phenomenon and were largely orphaned by it. The organisations that formed in the 1950s and 1960s built their case catalogues around aerial sightings, and cases involving the sea tended to be filed under whichever aerial category they superficially resembled.

The one serious earlier attempt to make a subject of them was Ivan T. Sanderson's Invisible Residents (1970), which argued for an intelligence resident in the oceans and coined the acronym OINTS — Other Intelligences. Sanderson was a trained zoologist and a genuinely original thinker, but his book was a thesis in search of a catalogue rather than the other way round, and its case base was thin and unevenly sourced.

Nothing comparable was attempted for four decades. The gap is a good illustration of a structural problem in this field: aerial cases attract investigators because they are numerous and quickly reported, while water cases are sparse, geographically scattered, and often reported by mariners or coastal residents outside the reach of any organisation's field network.

Feindt's timing was also fortunate in one respect. By the 2000s, digitised newspaper archives and searchable case databases made it possible for one determined person working alone to do collection work that would previously have required an institution. Much of his catalogue consists of cases that were never lost so much as never gathered.

The book arrived just before the subject acquired renewed official interest. The 2004 USS Nimitz encounter and the later Navy videos brought trans-medium behaviour — movement between air and water — into mainstream defence discussion, and it is now one of the five “observables” that framework treats as diagnostic. Feindt had spent twenty years assembling the historical case base for exactly that behaviour before anyone in an official capacity asked for one.

This site's USO Hypothesis file sets out the wider question the book belongs to, and A History of USOs covers the more recent attempt at a systematic catalogue.

Core Arguments & Key Concepts

Water cases are a real, distinguishable category. The book's foundational claim and its most durable one. Objects reported entering, leaving or physically affecting water constitute a class of report with recurring features, and treating them as a class reveals patterns that vanish when they are filed alongside ordinary aerial sightings.

The category is far larger than anyone assumed. Several hundred cases, from every kind of body of water, from puddles to open ocean — a range the publisher's own description of the book states explicitly.

The physical effects are consistent across cases. Feindt's central empirical argument: witnesses in different decades, countries and languages describe the same specific behaviours — water drawn upward toward a hovering object, a depression or “dimple” in the surface beneath it, steam or boiling, a dry or calm zone directly below.

Those effects point to an electrostatic mechanism. The theoretical core, developed in the book's early chapters. Water is a polar dielectric and responds measurably to strong non-uniform electric fields; Feindt argues that a craft surrounded by such a field would produce the observed surface effects as a matter of ordinary physics rather than exotic propulsion.

The mechanism has independent scientific support. He draws on published work by Dr. Richard Haines, a retired NASA research scientist and co-founder of NARCAP, and Larry Lemke, a NASA aerospace engineer. This is a real and checkable citation trail, and it is the strongest procedural feature of the argument.

“Water UFO” is the more accurate term than “USO.” A deliberate narrowing: most reports describe surface interaction, not confirmed submerged operation, and the label should not claim more than the witnesses did.

The catalogue should outlive the theory. Implicit in the book's structure, which devotes the great bulk of its 562 pages to cases rather than to argument. Feindt built something a later researcher can disagree with him about.

Key Cases & Evidence Discussed

A note on what follows. The Internet Archive's copy of this book sits in a restricted print-disabled collection, so this article has not audited Feindt's case list item by item and does not claim any specific incident appears in it. What is documented about the catalogue is its scope: cases from every kind of body of water, from puddles to oceans, and a classification organised by the effect observed rather than by the object's shape. The entries below describe those effect categories, which are the book's real organising unit, alongside the cases on this site that belong to the same class.

Water drawn upward from the surface. A recurring report type across decades: a column or spray of water rising toward a hovering object. This is the effect the electrostatic argument leans on hardest, because it is difficult to reconcile with any conventional aerial object and straightforward to reconcile with a strong field gradient acting on a polar liquid.

Surface depressions and dry zones. Reports of the water beneath a hovering object pushed down into a visible hollow, or flattened into unnatural calm — the same family of observation, with the field acting downward rather than upward.

Thermal effects. Steam, boiling and localised heating reported at the point of contact or immediately after departure. This is the class of effect most amenable to later physical checking and, historically, the least often checked at the time.

Entry and exit. Objects observed to descend into water and objects observed to emerge from it — the behaviour that gave Feindt his original question, since aircraft do neither. The canonical example on this site's own record is the 4 October 1967 Shag Harbour incident in Nova Scotia, where an object's descent into the water was followed by a real RCMP and Royal Canadian Navy search; see Dark Object.

Near-water close encounters. Reports in which the object's proximity to water is central to the account rather than incidental — the 11 October 1973 riverside encounter at Pascagoula, Mississippi, is the best-known American example; see UFO Contact at Pascagoula.

Regional maritime clusters. Recurring reports of objects entering and leaving the sea in one area over years, of which the Vieques and wider Puerto Rico reports are the most heavily documented; see Vieques.

Pre-aviation water cases. The category demonstrably predates powered flight. The 1663 Russian account of a fiery body over Lake Robozero, preserved in a monastery chronicle and describing the water beneath it reddening, is the oldest widely cited example.

Naval and maritime observations. Reports from crews at sea, which carry unusual evidentiary weight in this category because mariners are practised observers of the sea surface and possess a professional vocabulary for describing it. This site's Maritime UFO Files covers the same tradition.

Critical Reception & Controversies

This book has never been reviewed in a scientific venue, and its reception has been confined to the UFO research community, where it is treated as the standard reference on its subject. That status is deserved for the catalogue and needs qualifying for the theory.

The catalogue's limitations follow from the method Feindt himself described. His collection began in newspaper archives — eight years of Delaware microfilm — and grew through the same kind of documentary gathering rather than through his own field investigation of individual witnesses. Newspaper accounts of anomalous events are notoriously lossy: details are compressed, times and distances are approximated, and the reporter's own framing enters the record. A catalogue built substantially from them inherits every one of those problems, and no amount of volume corrects them.

The selection problem is real and structural. Feindt was collecting cases in which water was affected, so his catalogue by construction contains only reports in which a witness noticed and mentioned an effect on water. Nothing in the collection tells a reader what fraction of water-adjacent sightings produced no such effect, which is exactly the number the electrostatic argument would need.

The theoretical half faces a harder objection. Water is genuinely a dielectric and genuinely responds to strong field gradients — dielectrophoresis is ordinary, demonstrable physics, and the phenomenon of a water stream bending toward a charged rod is a school laboratory exercise. What does not follow is scale. The field strengths required to lift a column of seawater metres into the air, or to depress an ocean surface across a visible area, are enormous, and the book does not derive them or compare them against any independently measured quantity. The argument establishes that the observed effects are of the right kind for an electrostatic explanation without establishing that they are of the right magnitude.

The Haines and Lemke citations are real and honestly used, but they should not be read as endorsement of Feindt's specific conclusion. Both were writing about plausible physical frameworks for anomalous observations in general; neither published a finding that the water effects in Feindt's catalogue are electrostatic in origin.

There is also the matter of the conventional explanations the catalogue does not systematically address. Water spouts, ball lightning over water, seiches, bioluminescent blooms, misidentified marine flares, the wakes of submerged vessels and simple reflection of aerial lights on a moving surface all produce reports that would qualify for inclusion. A case-by-case elimination of these would have been an enormous undertaking, and Feindt largely did not attempt it — which means the catalogue's raw size cannot be read as a count of anomalies.

In fairness, and this matters: Feindt never claimed otherwise. The book presents itself as an attempt to open a door, in its own phrasing, by observing water's reaction and looking for similarities across cases. That is a description of exploratory work, not of a demonstrated result, and holding the book to a standard it never claimed would be unfair. Its real defect is not overclaiming but under-filtering.

Influence & Legacy

UFOs and Water is the reason the water-UFO category exists as a research object rather than as a scattering of anecdotes. Anyone working on trans-medium reports today begins, whether they know it or not, from a case base Feindt assembled.

Its most concrete legacy is the waterufo.net database, which made the collection searchable and which outlived the book's first edition. That combination — a catalogue in print and a database online — is what turned a personal preoccupation into infrastructure.

The book also did something quieter and more useful: it made a physical, testable framing respectable in a corner of the subject that had been dominated by speculation about undersea bases. Sanderson's OINTS thesis proposed inhabitants; Feindt proposed a field effect. The second is a claim that could in principle be checked, and shifting the conversation in that direction was a genuine service.

Its arguments have since been picked up in more technical settings. Recent work on plasma double-layers and high-voltage phenomena in UAP reports cites Feindt's case collection as its observational base — which is exactly the right use of a catalogue, and a vindication of his decision to spend most of his pages on cases rather than on theory.

The USO Hypothesis file on this site draws directly on it, and A History of USOs (2025) represents the next generation of the same effort — a standardised, attribute-tabulated catalogue of the kind Feindt's work made it obvious the field needed.

The Book

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