Was There A Submarine In Myrtle Beach Today Investigating The Undersea Sightings

What Actually Happened Off Myrtle Beach

People in the Myrtle Beach area started reporting unusual underwater objects in the water around late 2023 and into 2024. You had surfers, kayakers, and captains on charter boats calling in things that didn't look like marine life. The Coast Guard showed up. Then Navy assets got involved. The chatter online never really stopped, and I can see why—this is the kind of thing that gets confusing fast when multiple agencies are operating in the same stretch of water. When people ask was there a submarine in Myrtle Beach today investigating the undersea sightings, they usually mean one of two different things. Sometimes they want to know if a specific vessel is currently operating near shore. Sometimes they want to understand what the government actually found. The answer to both depends on what time you're asking and which channel you're looking at. The Myrtle Beach area sits on the continental shelf drop-off, which makes it one of the more acoustically interesting spots along the Southeast coast. The shelf break creates natural noise focusing, and the water column has thermoclines that bend sound in ways that make passive sonar returns look strange. I worked a project off Charleston a few years back where we misidentified a school of fish and a thermal layer as what we thought was a non-nuclear sub for about forty-five minutes before the data clarified. That happened in shallower water closer to shore than Myrtle Beach. The same kind of confusion applies here.

What most people don't realize is that the U.S. Navy operates routinely in those waters. The East Coast test and training ranges extend well past the one hundred fathom line, and activity in that corridor isn't always broadcast in real time. When civilian observers see something submerged, it could be military. It could be a research vessel's towed array. It could be nothing more interesting than a glider or a REMUS vehicle being recovered. Without access to the NAVOCEANO schedules or the 1st Fleet operations board, you're guessing. The Coast Guard's role in this is mostly verification and safety. They responded to the reports because they have to. They run hull numbers and transponder checks, they talk to nearby commercial traffic, and they determine whether anything is posing a navigation hazard. If the object is on the bottom and not moving, their investigation is basically over unless something else takes over. Military assets have better sensors for that kind of thing. I've seen the same pattern repeat at least three times on coastal forums. Someone posts a blurry video. Everyone assumes hostile submarine. Comments section explodes. The real explanation turns out to be either a NOAA underwater drone or a naval training exercise that was announced in a Notice to Mariners two weeks earlier and nobody read. The Notice to Mariners is actually the first thing you should check. They publish these things at notices to mariners and the details are usually straightforward if you know how to read them.

There's also the commercial side. Subsea imaging companies operate out of ports along the Carolinas and they survey pipelines, fiber optic cables, and ocean floor infrastructure regularly. Their vehicles don't broadcast the same signals as military craft, and they operate at depths that make them nearly invisible from the surface. A couple of kayak anglers near Folly Field reported something that turned out to be a commercial ROV doing a cable inspection. The video looked nothing like the thing the Coast Guard was tracking that same week. If you're trying to figure out what was actually there on any given day, the practical approach is to check the Coast Guard's local sector website for any press releases, then cross-reference with the Navy's 1st Fleet social channels and the DoD's press release archive. It's not glamorous. Most of the time nothing comes of it officially, and that silence is itself data. When they do issue a statement, it's usually brief and deliberately vague about specifics. One thing I learned the hard way: don't trust amateur sonar interpretation. A lot of the posts claiming to have identified a submarine based on frequency readings are using consumer-grade fish finders or cheap hydrophone kits. Those devices aren't calibrated for open ocean classification, and the return signatures overlap enormously between biological and mechanical sources. I made that mistake early on and wasted two days chasing a contact that turned out to be a thermocline reflection of a cargo ship three miles out. The workaround was to wait for the Navy's own published sonobuoy drift models and see if the reported track aligned with any scheduled exercise. It rarely does on the first try, but it narrows the field fast.

Another counterintuitive point: the deeper the reported sighting, the less likely it's anything unusual. The Myrtle Beach approach shelf goes from about sixty feet down to over a thousand within a few miles offshore. Most civilian reports come from the shallow end where noise from boat traffic, construction, and weather creates constant background interference. Anything that looks suspicious at those ranges is far more likely to be shallow industrial activity or marine mammals than a submerged vessel. The real investigation happens offshore, where the signal-to-noise ratio is better and the military has established listening posts. The whole situation has a significant blind spot: classified operations don't announce themselves. If there was actual submarine activity that warranted a public response, you'd know about it through formal channels eventually. The fact that most answers remain ambiguous for months suggests the explanation is mundane. That doesn't make the reports any less real to the people who saw them. It just means the government isn't going to validate every piece of civilian underwater footage for you. So to actually answer the original question directly: there were investigations. Multiple of them. Some involved Coast Guard cutters, some involved Navy assets, and some involved nobody at all beyond the local harbormaster noting the reports. Whether a submarine was confirmed remains something you won't get a clean answer for, and honestly that's probably how it stays.