Sanderson's 'Invisible Residents'
In 1970 the naturalist Ivan T. Sanderson published 'Invisible Residents', arguing that an intelligent civilisation might live beneath the oceans and that many UFOs are its underwater craft.
1970 CE · 40.92, -75.09 · status: claim
The account
Sanderson, a Cambridge-trained zoologist and television naturalist who founded a society to investigate the unexplained at his New Jersey home, collected naval and merchant reports of lights, wheels and objects entering or leaving the sea, including the Delarof case. He also proposed twelve 'vile vortices' around the globe, among them the Devil's Sea off Japan and the Bermuda Triangle, where ships and aircraft were said to vanish. The book gave the USO idea its classic form and is still reprinted. It is pinned at Columbia, New Jersey, where Sanderson lived.
The sceptical view
Larry Kusche and others traced many of his 'vortex' losses to exaggeration or ordinary wrecks; the book argues from accumulated anecdote rather than evidence that any craft is submarine.
Connections in the atlas
- The Delarof object, Aleutians
- Carl Feindt's catalogue of water UFOs
- Berlitz's 'The Dragon's Triangle'
- The Dragon's Triangle (Devil's Sea)
- The Bermuda Triangle