Invisible Residents: The Reality of Underwater UFOs

by Ivan T. Sanderson, David Hatcher Childress (foreword)

s/t: A disquisition upon certain matters maritime & the possibility of intelligent life under the waters of this earth
A unique contribution to the study of the UFOs, originally published over 30 years ago, this updated edition includes new photographs, illustrations & an extensive Foreword by David Hatcher Childress discussing more recent Underwater UFOs--now called USOs--Unidentified Submersible Objects. In the last 30 years, new sightings have occurred & new information on old sightings has come forth through the Freedom of Information Acts in the USA, UK & Australia. These curious incidents during official military maneuvers raise many questions: Do the British & Americans have underwater military bases capable of launching UFOs? Could the ultimate docking stations for some of the UFOs seen constantly around the world be deep in our oceans? Could these still-operational underwater docking bases have been built in our distant past by extraterrestrials? Sanderson chronicles hundreds of curious unidentified underwater object incidents, many which emerge from the water to fly through the air, & draws some startling conclusions.

Genres: Nonfiction, Conspiracy Theories, Paranormal

248 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Scottish biologist, mostly known for his writings on cryptozoology and the paranormal.

Sanderson published three classics of nature writing: Animal Treasure, a report of an expedition to the jungles of then-British West Africa; Caribbean Treasure, an account of an expedition to Trinidad, Haiti, and Surinam, begun in late 1936 and ending in late 1938; and Living Treasure, an account of an expedition to Jamaica, British Honduras (now Belize) and the Yucatan.

Reviews

[Shawn · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was looking forward to taking another look at this book from my credulous, paranormal, IN SEARCH OF-fueled youth of the 1970s, because the central idea of it always stuck in the back of my head as particularly intriguing (this from a kid who read his way through dozens of UFO books in grade school). In truth, most UFO books back then were boring, or grew stale very quickly ("X saw 3 lights on this specific date moving from the east to the southeast. They were observed for x number of minutes, at height of x" or, alternatively, "a silvery disc was spotted moving from x to x on this exact date and time" - in retrospect, from a pure publishing POV, one can see why "third kind" encounters were a godsend - or had to be invented) and I quickly discovered that the late 60s/early 70s "High Weirdness" period (as typified by works from John Keel or Loren Coleman) were a lot more fun to read. But this particular book, as I said, always stuck with me...

So, in finally perusing it during some recent pre-slumber reading sessions, I was disappointed to find that it's really a mixed bag. I should point out that my enthusiasm for this book (and, in fact, most if not all fortean and paranormal books) has nothing to do with "the truth" or "good arguments/theories", as they might have when I was a kid. Instead, I can look at these texts now more as entertainments that opened my young mind to strange new possibilities (I don't imagine there were many other fourth graders in the mid 70s idly wondering whether the "lost planet" Vulcan, as recorded by and then lost by 19th century astronomers, ever existed) and, as I've said in reviews of similar books, I was a bit of a connoisseur of this kookery back then and am now very interested in going back and seeing how well-developed my critical faculties were at the time (when I was willing to believe, or at least entertain, a lot of this guff).

So, what do we have here? Sanderson starts the book off strongly by taking an interesting tack on an exhausted (even then) subject. UFOs and their like, by this time (1970), tended to be viewed through a number of standard lenses: debunked as mass hysteria & rationalized as misidentification (the "official" position), the "nuts & bolts" craft piloted or controlled by aliens (the standard "fringe" position), and then a smattering of odd outliers like Jacques Vallée's folkloric theory (Passport to Magonia: On UFOs, Folklore, and Parallel Worlds), varied new-agey "Space Brothers" or "Ascended Masters", Nazi super-weapons, etc. (Vallée's other-dimensional deceptive beings, John Keel's "ultraterrestrials", living ameobic sky creatures and varied greys, reptilians and U.S. Government conspiracy cohorts were still to come). But INVISIBLE RESIDENTS starts by summarizing just how often UFOS are seen near, over, entering, exiting and interacting with bodies of water. It's an interesting approach to the matter, and Sanderson spins it out in some intriguing ways...

...but then, sadly, seems to lose the plot (probably from a dearth of directly related reports) and pads the book out with chapter after chapter on anything strange that ever happened in the ocean. So we get the usual suspects (Bermuda Triangle and missing ships, Marie Celeste and other "ghost ships", light wheels) and strange tangents (maybe that little gold pendant often seen in CHARIOTS OF THE GODS-type books is really a submersible hydroplane and not a space ship! Time anomalies at sea!), interestingly choosing to opt out of sea-serpents entirely.

For example, Sanderson (in his strangely confusing and pedantic style, see below) moves from defining the limits of The Bermuda Triangle ("it's not a triangle, you fools!") into positing an absolutely loopy concept he comes up with called (in a painfully terrible case of bad naming) "Vile Vortices", ten evenly spaced lozenge-shaped areas ringing the globe, just above and just below the equator, where (in his suspect and cherry-picked data analysis) "weird things" happen. I was a total sucker for ideas like this when I was a kid (structuring concepts for the unexplained), but looking at this section now - boy, what a load of hooey Sanderson is pitching (he posits some malarkey about the areas, eight of which are over water, possibly being where vortexes of hot and cold air over water could effect the space-time continuum, or some such hogwash of hand waving). The funny thing is that this is surprisingly tatty for Sanderson, who, as a trained scientist (zoology - he invented the term "cryptozoology" in fact) tended not to be this airy-fairy with his suppositions (not that he was a hard-line rationalist or anything). But, how else are you gonna fill the pages, huh?

And so, what gets lost here is a pretty neat basic idea that the books starts with - what if UFOS/Flying saucers are actually vehicles piloted by an intelligent race that lives and has lived for millennia under the oceans of the Earth (either evolved here or based here from off-world)? Oh sure, there's all kinds of problems with the concept (no dead subocean beings ever found in history?, how do you start and then technologically advance a civilization without being able to use fire?) but to a kid, this was a really neat, mind-blowing angle on a hackneyed, overdone subject. And it still kind of is, even to an adult (one wonders, if even 95% of the reports that open the book are lies or mistakes or hooey, just what the hell those other 5% were).

But aside from only being about 1/3 of the book it promises to be, Sanderson's quirks as a writer are on full display here. Let me just lift a description of his style I came up with for another review: Sanderson is an odd writer - he is more on the rationalist science side of things than any paranormal/space brothers/new-agey (or for that matter, paperback hack) side, but he seems to be committed to envisioning himself as continuing the work of Charles Fort (as many writers in this area did). But Sanderson also seems to want to uphold Fort's cranky and obstreperous tone when writing on topics that science has ignored or "damned", and the problem with that is that Fort could get away with his huffy tone because he was of his time and part of a general "common sense"/Mencken-like zeitgeist of quasi-journalists who liked rattling the pompous proclamations of scientists, puncturing windbags with the needle of humor. Sanderson, meanwhile, is of the space age and not as funny and, honestly, strives too much to make the odd ideas he's investigating comport within scientific strictures with little actual support (he "theorizes" as if all data, most of it anectodal, were scientific, from which suppositions can be made).

So, there you go. Not a bad book, but not as cool as I remembered. Outside of the UFOS connections to water stuff it starts with, I would also say that I found his chapter on the oft-reported phenomena of suboceanic light wheels to be a good read - I've always been fascinated by this strange phenomena (which, as he points out, doesn't seem to make any sense whatsoever) and he does a good job collecting and summing up the information.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

i like his use of 'clowns' to describe skeptics.

[Lisa M. · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have always loved the paranormal. While reading another book about the paranormal last year, I came across this book and added it to my "to read" list. I had never heard of anything like UAOs (unidentified aquatic objects,) and found that the idea could be either very intriguing or very campy and entertaining. I had to read it! When I saw my university's library had it listed, I snagged it quickly. The fact that no one has taken this book out since 1993 (23 years now,) should have fared as a warning.

This author is not a trustworthy source. First, chapters are murky. He provides dozens of examples of UAO (Unidentified Aquatic Object) sightings. Most of these are historical reports that are very brief and tedious. I often skimmed these passages because they all ran together. He should have stuck with very interesting cases or the cases that had in-depth information. The book concludes with a list of such incidences, so I'm not sure why this text was necessary.

Further, he provides examples without giving us a lot of reasons why. After pages of lists, he may include a few sentences here and there to make his point. I assume this is because the author believes his points to be glaringly obvious (he does, after all, call those who disagree various names throughout the book, including 'idiots.')

This brings us to his tone. Idiots? Really? In a non-fiction book in which I assume the author would like to be taken seriously? Perhaps due to the topic at hand he suspected/knew he would not be, but still! It isn't a one-time occurrence either. He regularly states that people who disagree with his theories are idiots!

On to the non-fiction nature of this book. I read a lot, and I've read quite a few books on paranormal encounters, as I explained above. Admittedly, UFOS/aliens are not my favorite topic and I can't remember the last time I read a book that dealt with them (if ever.) But I have never read a paranormal book like this. The author has multiple sources in the navy and will not name them. He reassures the author that he understands how this sounds, but due to bureaucratic organization shifts and career changes, people leave the navy all the time so we can trust the author. He states that his publisher has all necessary information, and they wouldn't do anything unprofessional, right? UHHH.

Back to the author's arguments. He contradicts himself constantly and does not follow his own arguments at all. His inability to site sources for his information (while, funnily enough, siting sources from all other fields he quotes throughout the book), coupled with how he contradicts himself make this book hard to swallow.

One example lies in how he treats what others interpret as UFOs in ancient Indian texts. He ironically claims that those who see evidence of UFOs in these texts are ridiculous and that they are merely allegories (while he claims that these have existed since the dawn of human time.) Yet, he literally ends his book with an appendix that discusses these texts and how they could relate to UFOs, giving them weight. UHH.

I am not sure who his intended audience was, because he insults a majority of it (see above, as well as his demeaning of terms like UFOs and a large portion of the UFO subculture.) I am admittedly not very scientifically minded, but there were a few chapters that were too difficult for me to read due to the scientific content. (Or, perhaps I was so fed up with the book I wasn't willing to put the effort in.)

The arguments never fully evolve or flesh out, either. That is what was perhaps the most disappointing about the book. I walked away with it not getting a full, developed picture of what he believes is true. He spends a lot of time debating different possibilities, and implies he has his own ideas, but never blankly states them. He views his reader as someone who agrees that his contemporaries are idiots and who will understand his brilliant writing. Unfortunately, I did not.

The nature of the book is very unfortunate. Due to it I could not fully accept any of the author's claims as legitimate. However, some of them WERE thought provoking. I wouldn't have necessarily believed them outright if he wrote this more professionally, but they would have definitely been more intriguing had they come from a better source. If it's true that we have left a great span of our oceans (don't call them seas, the author will throw a fit,) are unexplored, who knows what's down there? I'd be willing to read more about UAOs or sea monsters due to this book. It intrigued me. But I would never read something by this man again!

[Hydra Star · Rating 2 out of 5]

Full disclosure: I didn't actually finish reading this book. I tried, twice, to finish it but I just couldn't.

The author obviously put a lot of time and research into this book, but I just don't think the evidence was there for the conclusions he was trying to reach.

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 1 out of 5]

Naturalist-crank Ivan T. Sanderson's Invisible Residents is that author's attempt to cash in on the Bermuda Triangle/Chariots of the Gods craze of the early '70s. The book is largely typical of the genre, with the usual compendium of familiar UFO sightings, disappearing ships and planes, magnetic anomalies and weird archaeological artifacts (that little gold plane, which obsessed Sanderson so much he wrote it about it in multiple books), much of it cribbed wholesale from Charles Fort, Vincent Gaddis and others. Besides his crabbiness towards skeptics, Sanderson studs much of this book with weird, self-invented terminology: UFOs are called UAOs (unidentified airborne objects); USOs (unidentified submarine objects) are "water babies"; extraterrestrials are OINTS (other intelligences), etc. What purpose these impenetrable semantic games serve is unclear: perhaps Sanderson is merely amusing himself, or trying to reinvent the flying light wheel by using terms that a Dick Winer or Erich von Daniken would have thought silly. The book's main contribution to paranormal discourse is Sanderson's silly vile vortices theme, a claim of parallel trouble spots (of which the Bermuda Triangle is most famous) across the world that cause disappearances and magnetic anomalies. Sanderson presents little evidence or research, merely claims that a plane disappeared here, or a ship there, and therefore here/there are as dangerous as the Bermuda Triangle or Japan's "Devil's Sea." This material was already getting old in 1970, so all that's left is Sanderson's sub-Mencken crabbiness and fondness for confounding his readers. At that, at least, he's likely to succeed.

[Dan Zarfati · Rating 4 out of 5]

That is a pioneering effort on the subject matter, also one of the first books to touch on the Bermuda Triangle mystery, four years before Charles Berlitz did it. The author catalogs many apparitions of submerged UFOs and throws very advanced theories in order to decode the subject, he also theorizes about a possible civilization or civilizations living under our huge oceans or our hydrosphere, The book is interesting though he loses track of the subject matter now and then, I found his other book "uninvited visitors" a more compelling effort, achieving more convincing hypothesis, but don't get me wrong, "Invisible Residents" is a very good book, a little bit obsolete but still fun to read.

[Joely · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author frequently bullies the reader into believing what he thinks is the truth. Sanderson constantly calls the reader an idiot, and claims one would have to be stupid to believe anything other than what he presents as evidence. The author both believes UFOs are real and and people are dumb for believing in them. This is actually a well researched UFO (UAO) book, and the early chapters are quite entertaining. You can skip from chapter 5 to chapter 12. The final chapters of the book are amazing because of the author's hilariously false logic to explain THE TRUTH.

[Littece · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading it is a little dry, but still entertaining. He does not draw conclusions for you- he only presents the evidence of the recorded incidents, and then leaves you to draw your own conclusions. Overall I enjoyed this book, and I would recommend it.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bizarre bit of fun...the Vile Vortices would make a great book on their own...hmmm...

Rating: 4 out of 5 Stars

[Philip J. Postiglione · Rating 5 out of 5]

Must Read

Way ahead of its time. Must read for those whom are interested in the unknown. A diamond in the rough!

[vincent alexis ☆ · Rating 3 out of 5]

i don’t think Ivan T. Sanderson was trying to be funny but I’m obsessed with how he writes just like a stereotypical old fogey conspiracy theorist.

[Mark Menzik · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting book but the author believes in evolution which skews the book to its final conclusion of an underwater civilization in today’s oceans

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the more interesting books about UFOs which is popularly available. The usual take on the phenomenon is that they are extraterrestrial craft. Other theories have explained UFOs hoaxes, as extra-dimensional or time-travelling devices, as originating from a hollow earth, as Nazi revenants, as bizarre animals, as secret governmental craft or as hallucinations based on propagated electro-magnetic fields or on the pizoelectric effects of tectonic movements or of just "normal" human craziness. Sanderson was the first, so far as I know, to propose that they were terrestrial and from under the waters of the planet. Indeed, he adduces quite a number of accounts lending themselves to such an hypothesis, all of which are quite well told. Like Keel and Barker, Sanderson is one of the better writers to have entered the field of, ugh!, "ufology".

[Jeffrey · Rating 2 out of 5]

I bought this book because I couldn't tell whether it was Science Fiction, or Non-fiction. Turns out it is Non-fiction, the guy is trying to show how there are intelligent people living underneath the world's oceans.

[Nik · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing insight into water related ufo cases that transpired mostly decades ago. A must for the ufo collection.

[Think-On-It]

If you'd like to know what I thought of this book, please contact me directly and I'd be happy to discuss it with you.

All the best,

- TB

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Instead of looking to the skies, take a peek underwater. That's where you find them!