There've been multiple reports of pilots reporting that they saw some sort of movement and frothing beneath the surface of the ocean - as if there were some sort of vehicle there, they specified. They then reported seeing whatever was under the water seemingly suddenly shoot up at high velocity.

I wonder if those reports could potentially be consistent with a submersible craft launching drones. Maybe such a craft could even be... "catapulting"?... or otherwise giving the drones an initial boost, too, combined with self-propulsion, which could perhaps make them fly from the surface faster than they could with self-propulsion alone.

(Obviously this is all pure uninformed speculation on my part and could be total nonsense. And one would think one of these hypothetical submersible crafts would've likely been detected at least once, given the US Navy was operating in the vicinity on multiple occasions.)

I would be surprised if every player wasn't fielding unmanned submarines, themselves fitted with drone tech, powered by a plutonium battery that can loiter for months, surface, release the drones, and phone home with via satellite. Doing recon with them against an enemy is the surprising thing. This could just as well be a screw up between different branches of the US military[1] as it is a peekaboo between rivals.

[1]The Navy can't seem to avoid collisions at sea! And sea-faring navigation tech is hundreds of years old.

Finding stuff in the sea isn’t very easy. You need to be surprisingly close.

Is this also true with sonar and whatever other SIGINT capabilities the modern Navy would have? I could certainly buy it going undetected - in Commander Fravor's case, the tic tac incident occurred a pretty far distance away from their training area, I believe.

But I would also think the Navy would the best available technology and techniques to detect what would probably have to be a foreign submersible in their waters, and that if this were routinely happening they'd likely end up detecting it eventually through some means. Or if it were one of their own skunkworks crafts, they'd probably figure that out afterwards. (I know very little about this field, though.)

Or even if they did fail to ever detect it beyond a few eye witness reports from pilots, I'd think this would be at/near the top of their list of plausible theories.

If this is indeed an explanation for some of the incidents, I could believe that they have in fact identified it and are doing some kind of psyop/deception operation, perhaps to confuse or signal to a foreign power.

Cargo, fishing ships or submarines.