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I have a friend who works at a shipbuilding company in Washington (the state) and sometimes he gets paid to sail ships to Alaska or Hawaii.
He says he enjoys the solitude and the never-ending ocean, but I feel like it sounds pretty terrifying to be in the middle of the ocean for days at a time with no land in sight.
And who knows what you might encounter out there…
AskReddit users opened up about the strange things they’ve seen out at sea.
1. Bad luck.
“From down in the engine room. The ship makes a lot of noise, even when it’s not moving. Sometimes those creaks, groans, and bangs can sound a lot like voices.
Another example that freaked us all out was when the whole engine team heard the same long, low moans all day. None of us knew where they were from until the deck officers told us we’d had some whales beside us most of the day (in Alaska).
For something genuinely creepy, every contract I’ve done since I was a cadet, at least one person has d**d on the boat. That’s 8 years, at least 2 people a year.”
2. It felt real.
“I was a sailor in the navy. While I was on lookout duty on the bridge at night, a dude walked and stood beside me, breathing hard.
I was looking out at sea and I was blocking the stairs going down, so I turned around to whisper “sorry”, and what do you know, there’s no one. I was tired so I chalked this up to hallucination, but it felt real.”
3. A black figure.
“I work security on different ships: one time during night shift on a cruise ship, my colleague and I were in the security office watching the CCTV cameras and just talking s**t to pass the time.
At the exact same time we both saw a black figure/shadow pass in front of the camera in the children’s play area. We both got super freaked out but kept watching the other cameras in the vicinity to see if whatever it was passed by those, as it was the only way it could go from where we saw it and there was no way it could leave the area without passing by in front of one of the cameras.
It never did, so we went to the area to check it out but obviously found nothing. Afterwards we went back to review the footage and didn’t see any shadow moving in that camera again. Even though we both saw it the first time in the live feed.
Needless to say we kinda started avoiding the kids area at night after that. A lot of death happens out at sea.”
4. Had to be a UFO.
“I got one for ya!
I was in the USN 2010-2014 and deployed twice on two different ships. The first ship I was on the USS Pearl Harbor LSD52 we were deployed doing a west pack. There was a span of time were we were just sailing around in open waters not near any land what so ever.
I was one of the topside watch standers meaning that I was responsible for reporting any other sea or air activity (ie other boats or airplanes). The area we were in was so incredibly remote that there was almost no activity anywhere, didn’t see a single boat or plane for days.
One night I was standing the midnight to 4am watch and had just switched to the forward lookout. So I’m standing at the bridge of the ship on the outer deck looking forward. It must have been about 3:45 am because my relief just came up to let me know he would take over from here. We talked for a few minutes when all of a sudden I got a call from the bridge. The officer on duty was asking me what ‘that’ was.
Me and my watch relief look forward and there is this giant light coming out of the ocean. This thing was huge probably the size of two mobile homes put side by side. It comes up from the ocean and then passes overhead maybe 70feet from the top of the ship and there was absolutely NO sound.
Everyone started freaking out. And the craziest thing is that none of our radars picked up any activity what so ever. We all were just in awe. And no one had any explanation, but we all agreed that we witnessed a UFO.”
5. Whoa.
“So that UFO that was buzzing around the USS Nimitz off the coast of San Diego in 2004. I was aboard the USS Princeton at that time.
I was a fire controlman, meaning I had access and knowledge to the ship’s radar systems. The Princeton was the air command/defense platform for the Nimitz strike group.
The whole phenomenon was 100% real, and I remember watching the exact same videos you’ve seen on CNN back then. Weird thing is the video was a regular MP4 video, or some kind of video file or another. The video made its way around the ships and within 48 hours it was completely gone.
Vanished, just like that off the ships LAN. It was all anyone could talk about for a full day then no one ever talked about it again. Weird.”
6. HUGE.
“I was on a ship that was hanging out above the Arctic Circle. The water was absolute glass and there was an intense fog just off in the distance like a wall. I made a joke with a few shipmates that we hit the edge of the map.
After a few minutes of enjoying the weirdness, I mentioned that hopping into the water for the Blue Nose line crossing event wouldn’t be too bad
Then I looked over the side and saw a jellyfish half the length of our ship. It had to be about 200ft long altogether. F**k the ocean, it’s weird.”
7. This is crazy.
“Was an AUV pilot on a ship mapping the Titanic debris field for the Titanic’s 100 year anniversary episode on the History Channel. It was a 3×5 mile survey, so a lot of area that hadn’t been mapped before.
The ROV on board was taking video footage of the larger hull section, and would bump into the Titanic when they got too close, and parts of the hull would get stuck to the ROV we called rusticles. I was 22 at the time, and thought “cool, part of the Titanic hull”, and took a big chunk of iron hull.
Wrote to my dad about it, very excited about my new artifact. He has been an ocean explorer for my whole life, and is very easy going pretty much all the time, but he became extremely serious after I told him. He said “let’s not tempt fate here. Don’t ever, ever take anything from a grave site. Ever. Throw it back in the ocean. Please.”
I guess he has friends that swore they had become “cursed” after taking artifacts from grave sites, like the strange curses of the archeologists who opened some of the pyramids of Egypt. So as any 22 yo would do, I kept it in my bunk room. Sure enough the next day I got this awful fever and felt terribly ill. Very off, and was bed ridden on a work trip.
No one else on the ship was sick, and of course naturally thought “I’m cursed.. I got the plague” so threw it back when we were back over the wreck site and sure enough got better that day. I mentioned it to some of our more senior team and they all had stories of people getting cursed after taking and keeping things from a grave site. And that things would mystery get better if they returned what they had taken.
Weird juju there. Respect the dead.”
8. That’s scary.
“On a yacht delivery from France to Greece, after a couple of nights of no sleep, on the third night we were in the Bonifacio straights.
All around in the sea I could see drowning people. Waving and shouting for help.
We moored up the following morning. Sleep deprivation is a hell of a thing”
9. Creeped out.
“I was sailing in the Gulf of Mexico, and suddenly the wind just completely died. I had no engine and just had to wait for hours for the wind to pick up.
After a couple hours of sitting there I see something float to the surface. About 25 feet off the bow I saw what I thought was a rotting human skull surface. It was yellowish and rotten looking. Then it did a quarter turn and I looked it right in the eye. Then it sunk back down.
I don’t think this was a hallucination, I vividly saw this, but the eye was way bigger than a humans. I’ve chalked this up to a massive loggerhead sea turtle.”
10. Balls of light.
“My dad was a navigator for a US Navy warship for several years, and its usual patrol routes were along the eastern seaboard and along through through the Caribbean. You know what that means – years spent traversing the Bermuda Triangle.
While he said it was never a dangerous place in his experience and that most trips were uneventful, he said that on a lot of trips some weird s**t happened. Sometimes instruments would stop working / start giving obviously inaccurate readings and my dad would have to navigate the ship by stars.
On these nights my dad said he would see balls of light flying around them, sometimes in slow arcs and sometimes in wild patterns, but the balls always ended up diving into the sea without a sound.”
11. What was that?
“I was in the US Navy and worked in communications. I was a supervisor on my watch and enjoyed working the night tours while on deployment, we stood 12 hour watches from 7pm – 7am.
Around 2am I hear some chatter over the 3MC, which is like our internal speaker system used between a few different stations on the ship. It’s the bridge asking combat if they see anything on surface or air radar, maybe 10 miles out to our west. Combat returns with a negative and I don’t think anything of it.
About fifteen minutes goes by and the bridge asks again, and asks are they sure there’s nothing there. Then they ask us if we have any message traffic about any ships in the area, aircraft or anomalous weather patterns. I ask one of the guys on watch to perform the request and now my interest is piqued. I walk out of the comm center and head up to the bridge. I was on a Frigate so the walk was quick, and I get up there and ask what’s going on.
One of my buddies points me over to the port side and we walk over. There’s about five or six circular shaped lights about 10-15 miles out in the clouds, pretty large. They aren’t moving or flying around but just looking stable.
These lights are also casting lights downward on the ocean, and you can see the light refracting back at the water, almost as if it were a spotlight or a beam. From what we could see, it didn’t appear to be lights shining up from the water because they wouldn’t pass through the clouds.
The clouds also weren’t super thick, it was lightly overcast, and it was the middle of the night with no other light pollution on the water.
There was nothing in message traffic about any ships, subs, or aircraft in the area. We were hundreds of miles from land and the last report of any unusual weather patterns was a water spout a few hundred miles away.
We tried to take pictures with our onboard digital camera, using a long exposure, but we couldn’t capture the phenomenon. After about 90 minutes the lights slowly faded, one by one, and within fifteen minutes they had completely disappeared.
I’m sure there’s some sort of weather or atmospheric condition for what we saw, but for all intents and purposes, it fit the description of a UFO. Unidentified Flying Object.”
Have you ever seen anything weird out at sea?
If so, please share with us in the comments.
Thanks in advance!
