American supermodel Christie Brinkley has described a bizarre and unsettling encounter with what she believes was a UFO during a vacation on the Greek island of Crete, an experience that left her convinced unidentified craft may operate from beneath the ocean. The account appears in her new memoir, Uptown Girl.
Brinkley, now 71, recounts being in Heraklion, the island’s capital, when the normally noisy square fell into an eerie silence. Everyone present looked skyward. Four intense lights, as bright as the sun, appeared in broad daylight, arranged in a square formation and flashing continuously. She compared the spectacle to “an ancient god performing in the sky.”
In the surrounding murmur of Greek, she distinctly heard the English letters “U,” “F,” “O.” The four lights then converged and vanished behind the mountains. The reaction was immediate and shared: elderly Greek women in black, camera-toting tourists, and children all stood open-mouthed in astonishment. Brinkley turned to her companions and exclaimed, “Oh my God, we just saw a UFO!”
The incident did not end there. Later, near their lodging, Brinkley and her group encountered villagers who claimed UFOs “hide under the ocean.” A distant shout drew their attention to a man racing down a mountainside, kicking up clouds of dust “as if he were a long-distance bird flapping its wings.” He was yelling the same sequence of letters—U-F-O—mixed with frantic Greek.
They met him at the harbor. Through a friend’s translation, the man announced: “Spaceships! I just saw four spaceships sliding into the ocean!” He insisted they had not crashed but appeared to be slipping into the water to conceal themselves. Another man interjected that the objects hide beneath the sea when they are on the surface.
What made the claim particularly striking, Brinkley notes, was the man’s identity. He was a well-known hermit who lived in a seaside cave without electricity, telephone, or any means of communication. There was no plausible way he could have learned of the Heraklion sighting that had occurred less than two hours earlier on the opposite side of the island. In her view, he had independently witnessed the same phenomenon.
Brinkley rose to global fame in part through her appearance in Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl” music video; Joel is one of her four former husbands and the father of one of her three children. Her memoir presents the Crete episode as a pivotal personal experience that shifted her perspective on the possibility of unexplained aerial—and potentially underwater—activity.
The account joins a long list of reported mass sightings and coastal encounters, yet it stands out for the combination of multiple independent witnesses, the midday timing, the geometric formation of lights, and the subsequent claim of craft entering the sea. Brinkley’s narrative stops short of claiming definitive proof, but she leaves little doubt about what she and those around her observed that day on Crete.