A rise in UFO sightings ahead of the up coming whale season have given rise to fears about whale beachings on the Central Coast of NSW.

Several trawlers and fishing boats have reported seeing unusual lights that may be UFOs at sea, which have coincided with sonar fishing equipment malfunctioning.


John Romano, a Central Coast fisherman, reported seeing a round bright light hovering over the ocean against a cloudy sky in the late afternoon last month.

"It was way too bright to be a plane and it didn't move like one. Every time it bobbed up and down our sonar equipment would short out and eventually it just totally malfunctioned," he said.

"I often see strange things out here. So do other fisherman."

According to well-known paranormal personality Michael Cohen "UFOs emit low frequency active sonar, similar to military submarines, which transmit sonar pulses so loud they can match the roar of a rocket launch."

"These interfere not only with fishing gear, but with whales' sonar as well," he noted.

Marine enthusiasts have also been expressing growing concern in recent years about the possible effects of sonar interference on marine mammals, which rely on their hearing perhaps more than their sight.

Sonar, an acronym derived from the expression, "sound navigation and ranging", refers to the method or equipment for determining by underwater sound techniques the presence, location or nature of objects in the water.

Current research by the Acoustic Research Laboratory, a collaboration between the National University of Singapore, and the University of Western Australia, is aiming to verify a process known as sonar termination.

"It may be that sonar termination is the main cause of dysfunction of cetacean echolocation during a mass stranding of apparently healthy whales," a spokesman for the universities has suggested.

Sonar termination occurs when a pod of whales emits an echolocation signal toward a coast with a gently sloping shoreline, and under certain meteorological conditions - or interruption of the signal by a military submarine or similar (UFO) - a reflection will not be detected. The reflection contains important information about the location and features of the shoreline. The lack of reflections received from the coast would appear to be a 'deaf spot' to the cetaceans, analogous to the human 'blind spot'. The coast may appear as thick 'fog' to the pod of cetaceans and may induce a navigational error.

"It is already know from preliminary research that's been done, that there are some problems with man-made noise in the marine environment," said Cohen.

"Those problems would be magnified tenfold with UFO noises."