"Admiral of the Deep and the Sky" · b. 1960s
Rear Admiral Timothy Gallaudet (USN, Ret.) is a career naval oceanographer who rose to the rank of Rear Admiral (two-star) and served as Acting Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) from 2017 to 2019 under the Trump administration. He holds a PhD in oceanography from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and has published extensively in the scientific literature on ocean science, military meteorology, and environmental security.
Following his retirement, Gallaudet became one of the more scientifically credentialled advocates for serious official investigation of UAP — specifically what he describes as transmedium phenomena: objects that appear to operate seamlessly across air, water, and potentially space without the performance degradation that conventional physics would predict. He has written op-eds, given congressional briefings, and appeared in public forums calling for ocean surveillance assets to be directed toward UAP detection.
Gallaudet's specific contribution to the UAP discourse is his focus on the ocean as a UAP domain that has been systematically underinvestigated. Naval surveillance data — sonar tracks, oceanographic sensor readings, and naval incident reports — suggests that a significant subset of UAP encounters involve objects entering and exiting the ocean without apparent damage, operating at depths and speeds that are hydrodynamically impossible for any known vehicle, and transitioning between air and water at will.
He has argued publicly that NOAA's oceanographic sensor infrastructure — a vast global network of hydrophone arrays, ocean gliders, satellite altimeters, and buoy systems originally deployed for scientific research and submarine detection — could be repurposed or augmented to specifically track transmedium UAP. The fact that this has not been done, despite years of documented transmedium encounters, represents in his view a failure of institutional prioritisation.
Gallaudet's scientific credibility and flag-officer status give his advocacy unusual institutional weight. He is not a sensationalist or a fringe figure — he is a PhD oceanographer, a former senior government official, and a retired two-star admiral whose assessment that UAP warrant serious scientific attention cannot easily be dismissed.
Gallaudet has testified to or briefed congressional committees on UAP and the specific question of ocean-domain monitoring. He has called publicly for the declassification of underwater UAP tracking data held by the Navy, arguing that the scientific community needs access to this data to mount a serious investigation. He has worked with the Sol Foundation and other organisations to build the scientific coalition necessary to make UAP investigation a legitimate academic and governmental priority.