The Aegean Sea USO Photograph
In 15 August 1990, near Saros Bay, northern Aegean Sea, off the Gallipoli peninsula, Turkey, on 15 August 1990, at about 14:00, two divers were working a deep wreck-discovery dive at roughly 57 meters in Saros Bay, the long gulf at the northeastern corner of the Aegean Sea, bounded by the Thracian coast to the north and the Gallipoli peninsula to the south. This case file covers what witnesses reported, the official narrative, and a two-pass assessment with its evidence tier.
What did witnesses see at Saros Bay?
On 15 August 1990, at about 14:00, two divers were working a deep wreck-discovery dive at roughly 57 meters in Saros Bay, the long gulf at the northeastern corner of the Aegean Sea, bounded by the Thracian coast to the north and the Gallipoli peninsula to the south. The named diver was Erol Erkmen. His companion was identified only as "Mr. Kemal," with the surname withheld at the witness's request.
By Erkmen's account, recorded by Turkish researcher Sefer Murat Aksoy, he first felt a strange sense of being watched. He looked ahead and saw a greenish light in the water. It disappeared almost at once. A short while later the same green object reappeared on his left-hand side, which made him think it was maneuvering around the two divers. He watched it for close to three minutes, then decided to photograph it with an older underwater Kodak camera. The moment he took the shot, by his telling, the object's light went out. The pair then had to surface because their air was nearly spent.
The detail that defines this case is what happened to the film. Erkmen said that when he studied the negative very carefully he saw nothing at all. It was only on the printed photochrome that he located a mysterious greenish point. He then had the print enlarged 300 times, and at that extreme magnification he reported a disc-shaped object surrounding the green light. The single surviving image shows exactly that: a wash of blue water, a dark oblong smudge, and a small intense green dot at its center, with the caption "EROL ERKMEN 1990." There is no second photograph, no negative reproduced for inspection, no film footage, and no third witness named beyond Kemal. The frequently recirculated claim that Erkmen also shot fifteen seconds of video, that the water temperature dropped, that other divers saw the same thing, and that energy ripples moved through the water, does not appear anywhere in the original 1999-2000 account and surfaced only in anonymous social-media retellings around 2025. Those embellishments are not part of the primary record and contradict it; the primary record is one still frame, taken by one man, that showed nothing on the negative.
What is the official explanation?
There is no official narrative for this case, because no official body ever handled it. No Turkish navy statement, no coast guard report, no government inquiry, and no contemporary newspaper account has ever been produced. The dive was private, the wreck unnamed, and the only documentation is the witness's own later recollection. That absence is itself a finding: a case this thinly sourced never reached any apparatus that would normally generate an official paper trail.
The case entered the record through civilian UFO literature, not through any authority. The author of record is Sefer Murat Aksoy, who describes himself as "B.A. & M.S., Independent UFO Researcher of Turkey." Aksoy published it as part of a body of work he titled "Turkiye USO Gozlemleri / Turkey USO Sightings," dated 1999-2000, originally hosted on a GeoCities page at geocities.com/Area51/Aurora/3459/0021.html, a link that the database record preserves but which died with the GeoCities shutdown. Aksoy framed the photograph as, in his words, "the most interesting USO case of all Turkish UFO literature," and claimed it as "the first example of its kind," meaning the first photograph in which the witness and the submerged object were supposedly both underwater at depth.
The entry that keeps the case alive is in Carl Feindt's waterufo.net, the standing reference database for water-related UFO and USO reports. Feindt logged it as report number 642, reproducing Aksoy's text verbatim and tagging the source lineage to MUFON. The waterufo.net record fixes the catalogued location as Saros Bay at latitude 40-3-00 N, longitude 26-19-60 E, citing a dive-site reference page (diveargos.com) for the geography, and lists the UFOCAT cross-reference number as NONE, meaning the case was never assigned a formal UFOCAT identifier. From waterufo.net the account passed into UFO Casebook and later content mills. At no point in that chain did any photographic laboratory, image analyst, or investigative body examine the original negative or print. The "300 times" enlargement was performed by Erkmen himself, and the result was never independently checked.
What did the witnesses think it was?
Erkmen believed he had photographed something real and anomalous, a self-luminous green object that behaved as if it were aware of the divers, circling them and then extinguishing its own light the instant the shutter fired. Aksoy presented him as "a very reliable and sincere person," which is the only character reference in the file and comes from the same researcher who published the claim, so it carries the weight of an advocate rather than an investigator.
What is striking is that Aksoy did not push a single conclusion. In the original text he laid out three competing readings and refused to pick one. His exact framing was: "Was it a conventional submarine or a secret man-made vehicle? Was it a kind of phosphorescent underwater organism? Or was it an advanced submersible craft of alien beings? Who knows? Every alternative view has its own pros and cons." That even-handedness matters, because the mundane explanation that skeptics would later reach for, bioluminescence, is right there in the primary source, raised by the case's own champion.
Corroboration is essentially absent. The second diver, Kemal, is never quoted, never interviewed, and his surname is withheld, so there is no independent witness statement, only Erkmen's report that a companion was present. No other diver, fisherman, or boat crew is named in the primary account as having seen the light. Erkmen has been associated in later commentary with Turkish UFO and paranormal interest circles, which is relevant to weighing motive but does not by itself discredit him; a witness who is interested in the subject is still a witness. The honest position is that the case rests on one man's memory of one dive, one photograph that showed nothing on the negative, and a green dot that only became a "disc" after he enlarged the print 300 times.
The dispute
The dispute here is not a contest between an official agency and civilian witnesses, because no official body ever touched this case. As the page documents, there was no Turkish navy statement, no coast guard report, and no government inquiry; the case exists only in civilian UFO literature, surfacing through researcher Sefer Murat Aksoy's 1999 to 2000 work. The counter-explanation is therefore a conventional photographic and optical reading of the single artifact, and tellingly, the original researcher advanced part of it himself: Aksoy listed a "phosphorescent underwater organism" as one of his own three candidate explanations for the greenish light.
The method behind the debunk is physical optics rather than mere assertion. At roughly 57 meters depth, seawater has already absorbed almost all the red and most of the yellow, leaving an ambient spectrum that is overwhelmingly blue-green, so any point source or a patch of bioluminescent plankton at that depth would photograph as exactly the greenish glow Erol Erkmen reported. This gives the image a clean, demonstrable conventional explanation grounded in how deep water filters light, not in a guess about what the object "must" have been.
The decisive evidentiary problem is what closes the gap toward an ordinary explanation. The negative showed nothing. A genuine self-luminous object would register on the original film, yet the glow appears only on a paper print and only after extreme enlargement, and that "300 times" enlargement was performed by Erkmen himself and never independently checked. At no point did any photographic laboratory, image analyst, or investigative body examine the original negative or print. So the only evidence is a blank negative plus a witness-produced, unverified blow-up.
Taken together, these are the conditions under which the case largely fails rather than stands. There is a named, method-shown conventional account (deep-water optics and bioluminescence), the artifact is invisible on the negative, it appears only after an unchecked self-enlargement, and the object was never independently examined. By this archive's standard a strong debunk requires a shown method, and here the optical mechanism is demonstrated and the chain of custody for the "anomaly" collapses, which is why the page itself concludes the case cannot stand as unexplained.
Is the Aegean Sea USO Photograph real? The two-pass assessment
Pass one, the ordinary reading. Almost everything about this image points toward a photographic or optical artifact rather than a recorded object. The decisive fact is that the negative showed nothing. A real luminous object three minutes in front of a camera leaves a latent image on the film emulsion; it does not appear for the first time only on a paper print, and it does not require a 300-times enlargement to be seen. An anomaly that is invisible on the negative and emerges only in a heavily blown-up print is the textbook signature of a dye cloud, a grain clump, a dust speck, a processing stain, or a flare, not of a submerged craft. On top of that, the physics of light at 57 meters does the rest of the work. At that depth seawater has already absorbed almost all the red and most of the yellow, so the surviving ambient spectrum is overwhelmingly blue-green. Any point source down there, a dive torch beam, a glow stick, the divers' own camera flash scattering off suspended particles, or a patch of bioluminescent plankton, will photograph as a greenish glow, and backscatter off the particle field will smear it into exactly the kind of soft dark halo seen around the green dot in the picture. Aksoy himself listed a "phosphorescent underwater organism" as one of his three candidates, and Saros Bay, fed by the mixed, plankton-rich waters near the Dardanelles, is a plausible place for bioluminescence. A single, uncorroborated, low-resolution still with no negative for inspection and no independent analysis is the weakest possible class of photographic evidence.
Pass two, if it is genuinely what the witness described. Then a self-luminous, roughly disc-shaped object hovered and maneuvered at 57 meters in the Aegean in 1990, watched two divers, circled them, and shut off its light at the precise moment it was photographed, behavior with no propeller wash, no engine noise, and no wake reported. Nothing in the conventional inventory of 1990, submarines, ROVs, or diver equipment, both glows green of its own accord and reacts to a camera shutter. If real, it would belong to the small set of close-range underwater encounters that imply a craft able to operate submerged without any visible drive system, which is the genuinely interesting end of the USO literature.
The two passes do not balance. There is no official debunk to log here, because no apparatus ever touched the case; the only "debunk-shaped" material is the ordinary physics of underwater light and film, plus the witness's own admission that the negative was blank. That is not an institutional attempt to close a real event, so it does not get filed as evidence the case was real. It is simply a strong mundane explanation standing against a very weak piece of evidence. No independent analyst has published a method-shown demonstration that the photo is a deliberate hoax, so this is not a proposed discredit, and the second diver and the witness are not wholesale dismissed. But the case cannot stand as unexplained when its single artifact is invisible on the negative, appears only after extreme enlargement, has a clean conventional explanation in the optics of deep water, and has never been independently examined. The tier is Disputed: a credible ordinary explanation exists and the evidence is too thin to overcome it, while no one has formally proven fabrication either.
Sources
- web.archive.org/web/20191010100111/http://www.waterufo.net/item.php?id=642
- thinkaboutitdocs.com/1990-uso-photographed-aegean-sea/
- www.ufocasebook.com/aegeansea1990.html
- thinkaboutitdocs.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/aegeansea1990.jpg
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