A treasure hunter has made an astonishing ‘unexplained’ discovery deep beneath the Bermuda Triangle that he believes could provide the first evidence of an extra-terrestrial visit to earth hundreds of years ago.

Explorer Darrell Miklos has been using secret maps created by his close friend and famed NASA astronaut Gordon Cooper to find shipwrecks in the Caribbean.

His amazing discoveries have featured over two seasons of hit Discovery Channel docuseries Cooper’s Treasure.

But in recent months his team stumbled on something that he believes will shock the world.

Using maps put together in the 1960s by Cooper to identify more than 100 magnetic ‘anomalies’ in the Caribbean, Miklos dived at an undisclosed location near the Bahamas to investigate what he thought could be an ancient shipwreck.

But instead the veteran treasure hunter found a bizarre structure like nothing he’s ever seen.

The huge unidentified submerged object (USO) has 15, 300ft long obtrusions jutting from its side.

In an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com Miklos, 55, described what he found while filming episode seven of Cooper’s Treasure and tells how he and his team want to bring the ‘alien spaceship’ to the surface.

Here, what he describes as the right jutting section of the USO. According to scientists on Darrell’s team, no coral anywhere in the world could grow in this formation naturally, there would have to be an underlying structure to support that type of growth

He recalls: ‘We were doing a scene where I was sitting in a two man submersible.

‘We were out in the Bahamas and we were on an English shipwreck trail, somehow related to Sir Francis Drake.

‘I was trying to identify shipwreck material based on one of the anomaly readings on Gordon’s charts when I noticed something that stuck out, that shocked me.

‘It was a formation unlike anything I’ve ever seen related to shipwreck material, it was too big for that.

‘It was also something that was completely different from anything that I’ve seen that was made by nature.

‘It’s almost like there are five arms coming out of a steep wall cliff and each one of these is the size of a gun on a battleship. They’re enormous and then there’s five over here and five over there, 15 in total.

‘There’s identical formations in three different areas and they don’t look nature made, they don’t look man made, certainly nothing I’ve ever seen based on my experience and I have years of experience at doing this, we’ve identified multiple different types of shipwreck material, this doesn’t match or look anything like that.’

Horizontal cylinder structures jut out from this large dome feature at the center of the site. Geophysicists on the team report that the coral covering these structures appears to be more than 5000 years old.

The deepest part of the site is 300 feet below the surface, divers had to use special breathing apparatus and a state of the art submarine to access it.

The explorer also found other bizarre and unexplained formations around the main object, all of which are covered in thick coral which he believes are hundreds if not thousands of years old.

Blown away by the discovery, when back on board his ship, Miklos decided to dig further into Cooper’s files to find further clues.

Significantly, the astronaut had written ‘unidentified object’ on the chart of the area rather than mentioning any historical shipwreck.

‘I investigated some of Gordon’s charts, I realized that there was something else on there that Gordon was referring to,’ he said.

‘Then it made sense to me why it wasn’t identified as a shipwreck… he had to mean it might be something from another world.

‘Gordon believed in aliens. He believed that we had visitors from other planets and he also believed that a lot of these things landed in this particular part of the world.’

Gordon Cooper successfully piloted the Mercury-Atlas 9 Faith 7 Spacecraft around the Earth 22 times in 1963 paving the way for men to reach the Moon.

He was a pioneer who became the first American to sleep in space and the first to fly twice.

He was also the first American televised from space.

But as well as researching the limits of human endurance he was also charged with a secret spy mission while in orbit.

Using special ‘long range detection equipment’ Cooper was asked by the US government to look for ‘nuclear threats’ – which likely meant Russian submarines or nuclear missile sites.

But Miklos says Cooper – an avid treasure hunter – also noted the positions of Caribbean shipwrecks while he conducted this spy mission, and created a map on his return to Earth.

The shipwreck hunter claims long time friend Cooper gave him the maps – which included detailed charts and exact coordinates – after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s and then died in 2004 aged 77.

In the first season of the show Miklos and his team used Cooper’s map to make a remarkable discovery in the Caribbean – a centuries-old anchor believed to be from one of Christopher Columbus’ ships.

Cooper’s maps led Miklos to dozens of other significant ship wrecks across the Caribbean worth millions of dollars.

But with this latest discovery the Californian is conscious of being labeled ‘crazy’ by coming out with wild claims that Cooper’s map might now have led him to an alien spaceship submerged under the ocean.

That’s why he says he wants to remain ‘neutral’ until he can investigate the mysterious site further.

Miklos and TV production company AMPLE Entertainment are now hoping the Discovery Channel will commission a third season of Cooper’s Treasure so they can do just that.

Miklos said: ‘I want to investigate it. I want to see what it is, because it may be nature made, just a freak of nature, but given its placement in this particular part of the Caribbean and given what Gordon has told me about visitors from another planet and the things that I’ve seen, I think it’s definitely worthwhile investigating.’

AMPLE Entertainment founders Ari Mark and Phil Lott, who are behind Cooper’s Treasure, are equally as excited.

Mark told DailyMail.com: ‘In the first two seasons we didn’t enter too far into Cooper’s UFO interests and what he had told Darrell about what he had seen.

‘I don’t feel like we’ve even scratched the surface of what’s in Cooper’s files, but that’s what we hope to do in a third season.

‘The bottom line is that Cooper spotted anomalies and it is his maps that led Darrell to this discovery.

‘Cooper was a reliable source for treasure, then based on his findings Darrell found something that does not appear to be a shipwreck or anything that anybody has ever seen.

‘We want to find out exactly what it is and establish whether it ties in with Cooper’s belief that we’re not alone.’

During his post-NASA career, former US Air Force Cooper became well known as an outspoken believer in UFOs and claimed the government was covering up its knowledge of extra-terrestrial activity.

‘I believe that these extra-terrestrial vehicles and their crews are visiting this planet from other planets, which obviously are a little more technically advanced than we are here on Earth,’ he told a United Nations panel in 1985.

‘I feel that we need to have a top-level, coordinated program to scientifically collect and analyze data from all over the Earth concerning any type of encounter, and to determine how best to interface with these visitors in a friendly fashion.’

He added: ‘For many years I have lived with a secret, in a secrecy imposed on all specialists and astronauts. I can now reveal that every day, in the USA, our radar instruments capture objects of form and composition unknown to us.’

Miklos said Cooper often told him stories of UFO sightings and believed a lot of the world’s technological advances had been passed on to governments by messengers from alien planets.

Cooper even designed his own miniature ‘UFO’ based on an alien design he claimed to have seen.

But as for Cooper being a UFO ‘nut job’, Miklos couldn’t disagree more.

He described him as a ‘close friend’ and ‘father figure’ who was of ‘sane mind’.

‘I can tell you one thing for sure, there was a lot of conspiracy theorists and UFO nut jobs that he wanted nothing to do with,’ said Miklos.

‘Just because he had actual encounters with something that he couldn’t explain and other encounters to which he did have an explanation for, but he wasn’t going to go and befriend all of these crazy different types of groups.

‘In the early days he wasn’t going to overstep the bounds of what he could reveal out of fear of getting killed (by the government) and what good would that do. So he kept a lid on it, he kept a lot of it quiet until later in his life.

‘So the man I knew wasn’t a whack job, he wasn’t hallucinating and he wasn’t making things up to gain attention, that wasn’t him.

‘He truly believed in what he saw and he tried to tell it in such a way to make people believe it and he knew because of his background in NASA as a rocket scientist that he was more credible than most.’

Nevertheless, Cooper was often discredited for expressing his beliefs on extra-terrestrial activity, but Miklos added: ‘As serious as I’m talking here right now with a clear mind to you, that’s who he was.

‘He was an honest, straight forward individual who only wanted to investigate and explore the possibilities of the unknown, even if it meant risking his professional career.’

By Ryan Parry, West Coast Correspondent for Dailymail.com