North Americans by no means have a monopoly on UFO encounters, nor do land dwellers. In 2009 the Russian Navy declassified a vast amount of documents on encounters they have experienced with UFO activity. These encounters have been so prevalent that reports as far back as the Soviet era have been made on a weekly basis to Naval High Command. The department in charge of these reports was headed up by Deputy Commander Admiral Nikolai Smirnov.

According to Captain Vladimir Azhazha, former Deputy Section Chief of Exploration for the Oceanographic Commission of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, "50 percent of meetings with UFO related with the ocean, 15 percent - from lakes. So the UFO apparently gravitate to the water element. Therefore, the naval collection of data on UFOs has special value." While the first reported encounter with a UFO took place in the Atlantic Ocean, 44% of the Russian sightings have been in the Pacific, 16% in the Atlantic, 10% in the Mediterranean Sea, and the remaining 30% in various other bodies of water, including 15% in lakes, especially Lake Baikal in Siberia.

One report that stands out in the Russian Navy's UFO encounters involves a submarine of the Pacific Fleet. It had made sonar contact with six unknown objects that shadowed the vessel. Being unable to lose the pursuit the submarine's Commander ordered his ship to surface, a gross violation of standard combat rules of conduct. Upon reaching the surface, he reported the six objects not only surfaced with his vessel but also then launched themselves into the sky and disappeared.

Rear Admiral Yuri Beketov, a former nuclear submarine commander, also reported repeated encounters while stationed in the Bermuda Triangle. He said that often they recorded material (solid) objects traveling underwater at "unimaginable" speeds, sometimes reaching speeds of 230 knots (ca 400 KM per hour), which given the pressure resistance of water, he said was contrary to any known laws of physics. With the large number of objects detected, along with the depth (8,742 meters) of the Atlantic-Puerto Rican Rift, he stated that the possibility of an unknown, advanced civilization residing deep under the ocean was a distinct possibility which should be further examined. Veteran Intelligence Navy Captain Igor Barclay stated that such UFO activity often congregated around areas where the NATO fleets would be in operation.

Russia's Lake Baikal is the oldest and deepest lake on the planet at 25-30 million years old, and the second largest following the Caspian Sea. It has had its own share of water based UFO encounters. In 1982 Russian military divers were on a training mission in the Lake when they were confronted with a group of other beings. The alien divers were described as being humanoid but about nine feet (3 meters) tall, encased in tight silvery body suits with no apparent diving equipment other than spherical helmets. This was at the depth of 50 meters (over 160 feet). The Russian divers attempted to pursue the strange beings but ultimately gave up the attempt after three of their numbers were killed and the other four injured.

A few of their reports concerning unidentifiable craft were taken from clandestine surveillance reports of US Navy Fleet activities. During a training exercise off the coast of Puerto Rico, involving an aircraft carrier and five escort ships and submarines, one of the subs broke ranks to pursue an underwater sonar contact. It was traveling at 150 knots, nearly three times the greatest possible speed for a terrestrial submarine, the fastest of which have a top speed closer to 45 knots.

People have been spotting UFO's diving into and out of the oceans for centuries. Even the modern navies of this world can attest that one does not have to just keep their eyes to the sky to see strange and inexplicable craft moving about planet Earth, behaving as nothing we are capable of building can do.

Primary source material: Svobodnaya Pressa, http://svpressa.ru/issue/news.php?id=11385

The image of commercial aircraft pilots is one of conservative respectability. There individuals do have the huge task of keeping millions of dollars worth of equipment and the lives of their crew and passengers safe on a daily basis. To this end they are trained extensively. There is an area of their experience that is however not only sorely neglected, but also discouraged from even being talking about. This is the experience roughly one in five pilots has had to deal with at least once in their career; the close encounter with another craft of unidentified nature and origin interacting with the airplane he is flying.

These incidences include such dangerous activity as pacing the aircraft, approaching much too close for safety, and occasionally "buzzing" the aircraft at speed. A search of the NASA administered Aviation Safety Reporting System Database by Dr. Richard F. Haines, a retired scientist and engineer who worked for both the FAA and NASA, turned up over 5,000 "near miss" incident reports by what the pilots steadfastly refused to call "unidentified flying objects." Instead, the "safe" label for these objects has been "unknown aircraft" and "unidentified object." Nearly a thousand of these incident reports showed airplane problems developing from the crews' actions in avoiding collision and over a hundred of them listed system problems and malfunctions caused by the proximity of the "unknown aircraft." Only one report out of the database of 335,000 incidents used the actual term "UFO" to describe the near miss object.

As great as these numbers are in the ASRS Database, the number of actual incidents is greatly underreported. For very real reasons many commercial pilots do not make reports of their sightings in the sky. To begin with, there is no one willing to take such a report and nowhere on the incident forms they must fill out is there a place to report such unidentified aerial phenomena. There is the ingrained stigma against talking about these unusual events as such reporting has been known to cause the pilot to be ridiculed, taken off active flight duty for incompetence, and occasionally fired and blackballed from their career.

NARCAP, the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena has on record the report by one aviator who was subjected to two intense psychological evaluations for merely mentioning an interest in UFO related near misses to a skeptical supervisor. There is also the military angle that keeps commercial pilots from making UFO sighting reports. From 1947 to 1977 all such reports of unusual aerial activity were directed to Air Force investigations with the injunction that to talk publicly about them was a breech of national security and that they and only they were permitted to release an data on UFO sightings. According to Air Force Regulation 200-2 of August 12, 1954:

"Headquarters USAF will release summaries of evaluated data (of UFO), which will inform the public on this subject. In response to local inquiries, it is permissible to inform news media representatives on UFOB's when the object is positively identified as a familiar object. For those objects which are not explainable, only the fact that ATIC will analyze the data is worthy of release, due to the many unknowns involved."

What concerns pilots and to a degree the airline companies and their insurers is that information has always been a one-way street. Nothing comes back to the airlines about what these objects are even when they are often substantiated by radar contacts. Not only are the airlines left with no good strategy for dealing with unknown aerial phenomena, they are discouraged from studying the problem themselves or involving civilian investigative agencies.

So every day around the world pilots and their passengers take off into the sky without proper preparation or knowledge of what they may encounter. They fly with no safety precautions in place to deal with a near miss from an "unidentified object" or the system malfunctions that have been reported to happen sometimes when an airplane is "buzzed." With the emphasis on denying the reality of the event, aircraft pilots are left no better than their passengers as to how to handle an unexpected encounter with a UFO and air travel is just that much less safe because of it.