A wave propagating in a medium having random fluctuations in refractive index will suffer phase and amplitude perturbations. In the receiving plane, a random interference pattern will appear and this so‐called scintillation pattern will vary in time for two reasons: (1) the decay of the refractive‐index fluctuations producing the amplitude perturbation (eddy decay) and (2) advection of the eddies by the flow. In the case where eddy lifetimes are long compared with the scintillation period, we can derive estimates of flow from a statistical analysis of the scintillation pattern. In this paper, we discuss the propagation theory and report measurements of oceanic flows by analysis of the acoustic scintillation pattern produced by the density fluctuations in the ocean. By mounting a 214‐kHz source and two receivers on opposite sides of a barge such that the axis of propagation is perpendicular to the direction of travel, we induce a known flow rate equal to the barge velocity. We compute the slope of the time‐lagged covariance function of the logarithm of the amplitude at the two detectors. The slope is proportional to the path‐averaged flow transverse to the propagation path. Simultaneous measurements with a current meter provide sea truth. We have shown that such a technique will measure flow velocity with reasonable accuracy. An interesting result of the measurements is the demonstration that sound speed fluctuations in the spatial window 15–30 cm satisfy the Kolmogorov spectral slope for an inertial subrange, at the shallow depth (2.1 m) of the observation.