by Mack Maloney
Another incident that Sonderburo 13 investigated was said to have occurred on February 12, 1944, at the Kum-mersdorf rocket test center. A group of the Nazi hierarchy, including SS leader Heinrich Himmler and Nazi propaganda chief Josef Goebbels, were on hand to watch an experimental rocket being launched.
The launch was filmed, and as the story goes, when the film was processed, “a spherical body” was seen following the experimental rocket as it rose into the heavens. The Nazi leadership was convinced the unknown object was an Allied secret weapon. But then Himmler was supposed to have been told that similarly strange objects had been plaguing the Allies as well, and that the British in particular were convinced they were new German weapons.
The third major case that Sonderburo 13 was said to investigate happened in September 1944. A German test pilot, aloft in a Me-262 jet fighter, suddenly became aware of a pair of bright lights off his starboard wing. He hit the throttles and turned toward the lights only to find a huge cylindrical object, more than 300 feet long with an antenna on top, flying away from him.
The German jet pilot tried to draw closer, but the object was moving at the then-unheard-of speed of 1,200 miles per hour and quickly left him behind.
If true, the story of Sonderburo 13 would have answered a lot of questions about the foo fighters.
But there’s a chance that the whole story of Sonderburo 13 is a fake.
Some years later, Henry Durrant, the man who first reported the events of Sonderburo 13 in his 1970 work, The Black Book of Flying Saucers, claimed he’d invented it all just to catch UFO researchers who weren’t checking their facts adequately. To this day, though, the story of Sonderburo 13 still perpetuates in UFO books and online sites.
This underscores just how difficult it is to get to the bottom of the foo fighter mystery.
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There are some concrete facts about the foo fighters, though; truths that cannot be disputed.
It is no secret that the Germans did design and field “wonder weapons” during the war, the aforementioned V-1 and V-2 vengeance weapons, the He-193 guided bomb, the Me-163 rocket plane and the Me-262 jet fighter among them.
But postwar investigations of the defeated German war machine, including both document searches and searches of war material research facilities, revealed the Nazis had nothing even remotely close to matching the foo fighters’ otherworldly abilities. So bring on the straitjackets for the 415th Night Fighter Squadron: The foo fighters were not German superweapons.
Furthermore, the myriad objects that came to be known as foo fighters — the balls of fire, the perfectly round spheres, the highly maneuverable “rockets” and the cigar-shaped objects with portholes — were seen in both European and Asian war zones. And, in fact, they are being seen still, in all parts of the world.
This really begs a question of anyone who doubts the existence of unidentified aerial phenomenon: There’s always the possibility that someone claiming to see a cigar-shaped object with rows of windows on a darkened night outside his home might be accused of a leap of imagination or a downright hoax. But why would a crewman aboard a warplane in the midst of mortal combat make such a claim?
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More questions: With all the evidence concerning foo fighters presented them during the war, why didn’t the Allies do more to look into what was happening?
Two reasons. First, it seems many in the upper echelons of Allied authority were convinced, to the very end, that no matter how crazy the reports were, the things being seen by their aircrews had to be secret enemy weapons. But more important, those same upper echelons of Allied authority were not in the business of studying strange aerial phenomenon. They were concerned about only one thing: winning the war. Unless these strange flying things turned aggressive and started blasting Allied bombers out of the sky, they just couldn’t be a big concern.
But what were the foo fighters doing? Chasing aircraft, pacing aircraft, appearing and disappearing at will? Obviously no one knows for sure — but maybe a more earthbound example could offer a theory. Israel and the Arab nations have fought several wars over the past sixty years. To varying degrees during all of them, the U.S. military kept tabs on the combatants and monitored major battles and troop movements and so on, collecting intelligence on both sides through the use of spy ships, satellites and high-flying spy planes like the U-2 and the SR-71 Blackbird. Is that what the foo fighters were doing during World War II? Acting as third-party witnesses to a war? Studying us as one might study two gladiators locked in combat?
It doesn’t seem unreasonable — but it brings up another question: If these strange flying objects had such fantastic abilities, to fly the way they did, to move at such incredible speeds and to vanish at will, why would they come here to earth to do something so pedestrian as “reconning” our worldwide conflict? We can see billions of miles into space courtesy of the Hubble Space Telescope; why would an intelligence so advanced that it could build the foo fighters choose to use its magnificent technology to watch us so up close and personal and in such mundane ways?
As many researchers have found out, when it comes to the foo fighters, the more questions that are answered, the more questions that need to be asked.
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There is emerging proof, though, that not everyone high up in the World War II Allied command structure believed that foo fighters were of earthly manufacture.
Subsequently released documents claim that in fact Winston Churchill himself was aware of the phenomenon and even sought to cover it up.
The story goes that the grandson of one of Churchill’s personal bodyguards wrote to the British Ministry of Defence in 1999 looking for further details of an incident his grandfather had told him about.
It was claimed Churchill had been briefed during the war on a foo fighter episode involving an RAF reconnaissance plane that had been followed by a mysterious metallic object during a flight along the English coast. Photos were even taken of the object. At some point after the briefing, and after a British weapons expert explained to him that whatever the object was, it was totally beyond any imagined capabilities of the time, Churchill ordered all news of the incident be kept secret for at least fifty years.
Why? Because the wartime prime minister didn’t want to cause worldwide alarm.
As quoted in the British newspaper, The Telegraph (on August 5, 2010) Churchill said: “This event should be immediately classified since it would create mass panic among the general population and destroy one’s belief in the Church.”
But while Churchill seemed to pick his words carefully, one of his top military men chose to be more blunt: “More than 10,000 sightings have been reported [during the war], the majority of which cannot be accounted for by any scientific explanation, e.g., that they are hallucinations, the effects of light refraction, meteors, wheels falling from aeroplanes, and the like. They have been tracked on radar screens and the observed speeds have been as great as 9,000 miles per hour. I am convinced that these objects do exist and they are not manufactured by any nation on earth. I can therefore see no alternative to accepting the theory that they come from an extraterrestrial source.”
That quote was given to the British newspaper, the Sunday Dispatch, on July 11, 1954. The man speaking? No less than Air Chief Marshall Lord Dowding, the commanding officer of RAF during the Battle of Britain.
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Maybe the most interesting quote on the topic of foo fighters, though, came from someone who unintentionally found himself very close to the phenomenon.
Again, as author Keith Chester points out, just like many people in Allied command, members of the 415th Night Fighter Squadron at the time believed that once the war was over, it would be revealed the foo fighters were secret German weapons. Yet again, nothing like that was ever found.
And while none of 415th members ever wound up getting those Section 8s, more than fifty years later, none other than Major Harold Augspurger, the commanding officer for the 415th Night
Fighter Squadron, confided to Chester that he now believes foo fighters were indeed extraterrestrial.
“I think they [were] something from outer space,” he told the author in an interview. “… Probably came down to Earth to see what the heck was going on.”
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Yet, claims that the foo fighters were of German origin, along with many other fantastic yet unseen Nazi weapons, still persist. Some ufologists consider this just another way to continue the myth that the Nazis were technological gods, and thus just another way of perpetuating the vile policies of the Third Reich.
But, for any die-hard believers in the Nazi superman theory, the same questions asked regarding the ghost fliers of ten years before must be asked again. If the Nazis were responsible for the foo fighters and the wide array of aerial superweapons still credited to them by some, where was the massive support system that would be required to build and launch such sophisticated vehicles? Where were the resources for the people running such a huge, extremely secret operation? Why was nothing ever found after the war detailing what would have had to have been a colossal venture, something that would have dwarfed America’s Manhattan Project many times over? Why did no former Reich scientists come forward after the war to confess their involvement in designing or manufacturing such mind-boggling Nazi superweapons? Many of those same scientists emigrated to the United States in 1945 and helped NASA put an American on the moon. Why would all of them keep the secrets of such advanced technology from their new employers?
How could a cash-strapped, resource-poor Germany afford to maintain such a program, especially in the last year or so of the war? Where would they get the materials to build these superweapons when toward the end they were building their Me-262 cockpits out of wood?
Most importantly, and asked here again, when these fantastic weapons were able to get so close to Allied bombers, why did they never shoot at them? And why weren’t they knocking down Allied fighters or immolating ground troops for that matter? What kind of “weapons” were they?
And lastly, if the Nazis had such sophisticated, stunning technology at their disposal from 1939 through 1945, why did they lose the war?
PART FOUR
The Postwar and the Mystery in America’s Skies
10
The Ghost Rockets
What could it be about the northern reaches of Scandinavia that attracts unexplained aerial phenomena? Perhaps this is one of the biggest UFO mysteries of all.
No sooner had World War II ended, taking with it the baffling episode of the foo fighters, than once again unidentified aerial objects began showing up over the Scandinavian Arctic.
The unexplained intruders weren’t ghostly airplanes this time, but strange rockets seen streaking across the skies of Sweden, Norway and Finland. As with the ghost fliers of 1934, many people saw them, including military pilots this time. They appeared almost always in the daytime, and on some days, literally hundreds were reported.
These strange flying objects were coined the “ghost rockets,” and unlike back in the early 1930s when media coverage of the ghost fliers was somewhat muted and provincial, news of the ghost rockets went around the world in a flash.
They were so puzzling, in fact, that for the first time, high-level military officials went on record as saying the mysterious flying objects might not be of this earth.
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The first sightings were reported in Swedish newspapers in February 1946. As with the ghost fliers thirteen years before, once word was out, sighting reports began to cascade. People reported seeing the strange projectiles all over Sweden that spring and into the summer.
The peak came between August 9 and 11, 1946. Coincidentally, this is the height of the annual Perseid meteor showers, and there’s no doubt that within that time frame a large number of the sightings were, in fact, meteors.
But not all of them.
Almost from the beginning, there were differing descriptions of the ghost rockets. Early examples were depicted as fireballs or unknown light phenomena, not unlike some foo fighters. But two images eventually became predominant: a fast-moving missile-shaped object 12 to 15 feet long with wings, and a similarly sized object without wings. Sometimes a hissing or humming sound was heard coming from them, but mostly these mystery missiles were silent.
Most intriguing, though, was that not only did many people see the ghost rockets flying horizontally — belying the meteor theory — and doing maneuvers, including pulling 180-degree turns, but some witnesses actually saw two or more flying in formation!
The ghost rockets displayed another bizarre trait: a tendency to crash into lakes. The topography of upper Scandinavia is pockmarked with lakes, many of which are long and deep, and in the summer, mostly free of ice. But the landscape is also thick with tall mountains, yawning valleys and thousands of square miles of empty tundra. Yet dozens of witnesses saw ghost rockets falling into lakes, almost as if directed there.
One famous case happened on July 19, 1946. Witnesses saw a rocket-shaped object fall into Lake Kölmjärv, in far northeast Sweden. The military quickly cordoned off the area and did an extensive search of the lake’s bottom. Yet nothing was ever found.
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The Swedish government became so concerned about the ghost rockets that they violated their country’s famous neutrality and secretly implored Great Britain to send them some modern radar systems. Once these were in place, the Swedish military began searching for the mysterious flying objects electronically. The result: An astounding 200 of the ghost rockets were eventually tracked on radar.
The Swedish reached out for help a second time during the crisis, this time to the United States. On August 20, 1946, two prominent Americans arrived in Stockholm. One was General David Sarnoff, the man who went on to found RCA and the NBC network. Ostensibly Sarnoff was in Sweden to study the market for broadcast equipment. But Sarnoff, a member of Dwight Eisenhower’s war staff, was actually there to be briefed on the ghost rockets by the Swedish military.
The second man was none other than Jimmy Doolittle, the hero of the famous “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo” raid. Doolittle was a VP of the Shell oil company at the time, and his cover story was that he was supposedly inspecting Shell facilities in Sweden. But like Sarnoff, he, too, was there to investigate the ghost rocket situation firsthand.
Both men met with officers high in the Swedish military and were briefed on the mysterious objects, specifically those cases that had been picked up on radar. On returning to the United States, Doolittle and Sarnoff reported their findings to the Central Intelligence Group (CIG), a precursor to the CIA. Shortly afterward, the CIG delivered a top secret report to President Truman on the subject. And at first, this report seemed to have solved the mystery.
In fact, it pointed to a likely launching point for the ghost rockets.
A place called Peenemünde.
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Located on Germany’s Baltic coast, Peenemünde was the world’s first rocket base, the place where the Nazis developed and flew their V-1 and V-2 rocket-powered wonder weapons.
The theory conjured up by U.S. and Swedish intelligence services was that the ghost rockets were actually Russian updates of captured V-1 and V-2 rockets and that the Soviets were using the former German base to launch them.
The Swedes were so sure this was the case, they installed a press embargo on the nation’s newspapers, ordering them not to print the locations of ghost rocket crash sites, believing this would give the Russians valuable information on how far their new missiles were traveling.
The theory sounded good, especially in light of rising tensions between the West and their soon-to-be former ally, the Soviet Union.
But it was all wrong.
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True, Peenemünde had been overrun by the Russian army near the end of World War II, and by 1946, it was part of Soviet-controlled East Germany.
But the advancing Soviet troops had found most of the rocket facility in ruins, the result
of both intensive Allied bombing and the retreating Germans not wanting to leave anything of value behind. Rebuilding the base would have been a huge undertaking for the Russians and something they would have had to do in complete secrecy.
Moreover, even in the best of times, the Germans could barely launch fifteen V-1 buzz bombs in a day. There were more than two hundred ghost rocket sightings reported on July 9 alone. And on August 11, more than three hundred of the strange objects were seen just around Stockholm.
Launching this many V-1-type rockets on a daily basis would require a huge facility, equipped with launch pads, fuel storage and transport, command and control buildings and hundreds if not thousands of support personnel, all in a day when rocket technology was still in its infancy.
If not at Peenemünde, then where were these missile-launching bases? Who was manning them? Where were they getting their supplies, their core materials? Their fuel?
And what would be the reason to launch hundreds of missiles that all seemed to land in lakes and then, quite literally, disappear? Why would the war-ravaged Russians publicly fire hundreds of rockets into a neighboring neutral country?
Finally, how would a Russian secret missile program up near the Baltics account for further ghost rocket sightings reported over Greece, France and even the United States?
It was only later that the West’s intelligence services confirmed that there was no renewed activity at Peenemünde. Whatever remained of the German rocket base had been moved to Poland by the Russians.
In other words, the official explanation of what the ghost rockets were was not an explanation at all.
* * *
Ghost rocket sightings lasted throughout 1946. In all, about two thousand were sighted from May to December that year. Then just like the ghost fliers, the ghost rockets eventually faded away.