The USS Tiru Disc

A metal craft "larger than a football field" came up out of the ocean, tumbled on its axis as it climbed into the clouds, then dropped back and re-entered the sea. That is the scene Bill Cooper described from his post as port lookout on the surfaced submarine USS Tiru. He placed it in 1966 during the boat's passage from Pearl Harbor to Seattle. In his telling the craft rose and fell repeatedly for about ten minutes and the sea parted before it each time it came down. He said the chief quartermaster photographed it. Afterwards, Cooper said, the crew were debriefed one by one by naval intelligence and threatened with prison and fines if they ever spoke of it.

Cooper is the only source. He later wrote Behold a Pale Horse. In 1990 Don Ecker of UFO Magazine showed that Cooper's UFO claims had been plagiarised from the work of ufologists.

What is on the record

Five claimants are resolved: Bill Cooper, Ensign Ball, the captain, the chief quartermaster and the starboard lookout. That count is inflated. Every name on the list after Cooper's is a crew member who appears only inside Cooper's own story. None of them has ever given an account.

The archive's transcripts name the boat USS Tirew. The submarine was the USS Tiru. The tellings also describe the craft as the size of an aircraft carrier, while Cooper's 1989 account on the ParaNet network says larger than a football field. The archive's record had the transit near Portland and Seattle. Cooper put it on the cruise from Pearl Harbor to Seattle.

Every retelling goes back to that 1989 post. No Navy document has surfaced and the photographs Cooper said were taken have never appeared.

Why it sits where it does

This case grades L3 on a count of claimants drawn entirely from one man's narrative. No one else has ever placed the sighting on the record, and the teller's other UFO material did not survive scrutiny. What, if anything, rose from the Pacific is not resolved here.