Flight 7 Is Missing

by Ken H. Fortenberry

  Interestingly, the first newspaper accounts of the missing airliner had mentioned that a Military Air Transport plane reported “mysterious blinking lights” in the vicinity of the last position report of Flight 7. The Navy Rescue Center at Pearl Harbor had confirmed the report and immediately dispatched Coast Guard and Air Force planes toward the area, about 900 miles northeast of Honolulu. They found nothing, but the report had been made, and it had been made by experienced pilots who were not prone to fantasy.

  Honolulu Star-Bulletin managing editor William Ewing, who was among the newspapermen who flew aboard search planes in the days following the disappearance of Romance of the Skies, wrote this in a November 13, 1957, dispatch:

  “Interestingly enough, there are men who fly who do not rule out the spaceship theory— that a strange craft able to knock out electrical circuits, as was reported in last week’s rash of flying saucer stories—could have been responsible.”

  During my research I was stunned to discover that on July 11, 1959, less than two years after Romance of the Skies disappeared in the mid-Pacific, veteran Pan Am pilot Captain George Wilson of Seattle and officers Richard Lorenzen and Bob Scott of Flight 865 encountered a mysterious object with a cluster of extremely bright lights as they flew a Stratocruiser from Honolulu to San Francisco. Wilson reported to Oakland Air Traffic Control shortly after 6 a.m. PDT that the object had flashed by his airplane “faster than anything I have ever seen. It was something I’ve never seen before.”

  Wilson said the lights had no color, but one appeared brighter and larger than the other three or four, which were off to the side and slightly behind the main one.

  “It was like looking at a piece of the sun,” he stated. “It was extremely hard to judge, but it all could have been part of the same vehicle. It was headed northeast and we were headed southeast. We saw it for about ten seconds. It made an abrupt ninety-degree turn away from us, and when it turned away the lights disappeared.”

  Wilson, a seventeen-year Pan American veteran, said he had previously disregarded reports of UFOS, but added, “I’m a believer now.”

  Wilson’s report was substantiated by other Pan Am and commercial pilots flying the same route that day. All of them reported seeing an unknown bright object 800 to 900 miles from Honolulu at an altitude of about 21,000 feet.

  Their reports were forwarded to officials at the North American Air Defense Command in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where they were predictably and quickly dismissed as “unexplained natural phenomenon” pending investigation.

  The strangest twist to the UFO angle in the story of the missing Romance of the Skies unfolded two days before the plane disappeared, when a Nebraska grain dealer claimed he had a close encounter with human-like creatures from outer space. Reinhold Schmidt, who became known as “The Man Who Contacted Space People,” said he had been inspecting fields of milo and corn near Kearney, Nebraska, on November 5, 1957, when an unusual event occurred:

  “I was driving near an old sand bed on the Platte River, and close by was an abandoned farmhouse,” he recalled in a self-published 1964 book, Edge of Tomorrow.

  “It seemed like a good place to turn my car around but, as I started to do so, there was a brilliant flash of light a short distance ahead. I drove on to investigate what I thought might be someone blasting trees, although I had heard no noise. Within a hundred feet of the river bank my car engine suddenly stopped. I turned the ignition off and on several times, thinking that perhaps the battery had gone dead or that maybe the rough road had jiggled some wiring loose. As I started to get out of the car to check the engine, I noticed something ahead that appeared to be a large, half-inflated balloon.

  “When I walked toward it, skirting a clump of willow trees and tall grass, it was obvious that it was not a balloon, but a great, silvery craft which seemed to be made of some kind of metal, such as polished steel or aluminum. It was resting on what I later found out to be four hydraulic rams serving as landing gear, but it looked like some sort of balloon more than anything else. As I came within about thirty feet of it, a thin stream of light, about as big around as a pencil, shot out from it and hit me across the chest. It seemed as if I were suddenly paralyzed; I could not move. Maybe I was only scared stiff but, before I could analyze my feelings, a door in the ship slid open and two men came out of it toward me. They asked if I were armed and, although I said no, they frisked me anyway, but they took nothing from me,” he claimed.

  “After regaining some of my composure and discovering that I could move again, I asked them what they were doing here, what kind of craft they had there, and where they were from. One of the men did the talking. He was evidently the leader and I shall refer to him hereafter as Mr. X. He spoke English with a German accent and said that they couldn’t answer those particular questions at that time. However, when I asked to come closer in order to see the ship, Mr. X invited me aboard since, he said, they couldn’t leave for a few minutes anyway. He said that I could look around inside but not to touch anything.”

  Schmidt said that when the flying saucer tour was completed, he was escorted outside, and the aliens told him they would see him again.

  The sixty-year-old Schmidt told his story to local authorities, was promptly locked in a mental ward, and then released two weeks later when medical and psychiatric experts could find nothing wrong with him.

  That wasn’t the end of the story, though. Schmidt claimed that three months to the day after the incident, on February 5, 1958, he was driving along another Nebraska road when he encountered the same spaceship and the same Mr. X, who invited him to climb aboard for a flight.

  “You can imagine how intrigued I was with the prospect of a ride in their craft! My mind was whirling with a dozen thoughts. They even knew my name. But how?

  “Immediately after that the ship rose straight up in the air. When we were about 150 to 200 feet in the air Mr. X said, ‘If any of your friends are watching now, they will not be able to see the ship.’ Yet, again, I could see the entire countryside through the walls.”

  Schmidt says the craft had flown for about a half-mile when Mr. X asked him to obtain the answers to three questions for the space visitors: 1) What would be the reaction of earthlings if a fleet of saucers landed for friendly visit? 2) How would Earth people like it if spacemen were to begin testing H- and A-bombs? 3) What besides passengers was the airplane carrying that crashed over the Pacific?

  That, Schmidt believed, was an obvious reference to Romance of the Skies, which had crashed just three days after his first “encounter” with the aliens. Flight 7 was publicly known to have been carrying radioactive cargo, something Schmidt thought might have intrigued the spacemen.

  Schmidt made headlines all around the world and went on the lecture circuit after his book was adapted into a short film. He maintained that the aliens were from Saturn and routinely took him on trips to the Antarctic and beyond. He once told an amused and skeptical audience in California that his friends from Saturn also monitored his brainwaves.

  Monitored brain waves or not, Schmidt was nothing more than a nutcase and a con man. He ended up in prison after being convicted in 1961 of bilking elderly women out of thousands of dollars.

  The Reinhold Schmidt case needed no further investigation.

  No relation to the Schmidt case: one of the most famous and best-documented UFO sightings in history involved the mysterious encounter of UFOs with a Pan American airliner that my father was copiloting.

  On the night of July 14, 1952, pilot William B. Nash and my father were ferrying cargo aboard the DC-4 Clipper Defiance at an altitude of 8,000 feet from New York to Miami when they spotted eight flying saucers in the sky over the Chesapeake Bay at an estimated speed of an astonishing 12,000 miles per hour. As soon as the UFOs were out of sight, near Newport News, Virginia, the former Navy aviators began documenting what they had seen.

  “How does it feel to see flying saucers? Like most people, we had never consciously expected to face that qu
estion, but now we have an answer. When you see ‘saucers’ from the angle and nearness that we did and watch them go through the astonishing maneuvers that we witnessed, you feel humbled,” they wrote in an article for True magazine.

  “Sitting in the complex cockpit of a fast four-engine airliner, we had the deflated feeling that we and our modern airplane were so far outclassed by somebody and something else that it wasn’t at all funny.”

  The pilots detailed what they saw that night:

  “The distant lights of the cities stood out plainly, undimmed by any haze. One of us pointed out to the other the city of Newport News, which lay forward and to our right. Suddenly a red brilliance appeared in the air beyond and somewhat eastward—that is, to our side of Newport News. We saw it together at practically the same moment. The remark of one of us was: ‘What the hell is that?’ It hadn’t grown gradually into view—it seemed simply to have appeared, all of a sudden, in place.

  “Almost immediately we perceived that it consisted of six bright objects streaking toward us at tremendous speed, and obviously well below us. They had the fiery aspect of hot coals, but of much greater glow—perhaps twenty times more brilliant than any of the scattered ground lights over which they passed or the city lights to the right. Their shape was clearly outlined and evidently circular; the edges were well defined, not phosphorescent or fuzzy in the least. The red-orange color was uniform over the upper surface of each craft.

  “Within the few seconds that it took the six objects to come half the distance from where we had first seen them, we could observe that they were holding a narrow echelon formation—a stepped-up line tilted slightly to our right, with the leader at the lowest point and each following craft slightly higher. At about the halfway point, the leader appeared to attempt a sudden slowing. We received this impression because the second and third wavered slightly and seemed almost to overrun the leader, so that for a brief moment during the remainder of their approach the positions of these three varied. It looked very much as if an element of ‘human’ or ‘intelligence’ error had been introduced, in so far as the following two did not react soon enough when the leader began to slow down and almost overran him.

  “We judged the objects’ diameter to be a little larger than a DC-3 wingspread would appear to be—about 100 feet—at their altitude which we estimated at slightly more than a mile below us, or about 2,000 feet above ground level.

  “When the procession was almost directly under and slightly in front of us . . . the objects performed a change of direction which was completely amazing. All together, they flipped on edge, the sides to the left of us going up and the glowing surface facing right. Though the bottom surfaces did not become clearly visible, we had the impression that they were unlighted. The exposed edges, also unlighted, appeared to be about 15 feet thick, and the top surface, at least, seemed flat. In shape and proportion, they were much like coins. While all were in the edgewise position, the last five slid over and past the leader so that the echelon was now tail-foremost, so to speak, the top or last craft now being nearest to our position. Then, without any arc or swerve at all, they all flipped back together to the flat altitude and darted off in a direction that formed a sharp angle with their first course, holding their new formation.

  “The change of direction was acute and abrupt. The only descriptive comparison we can offer is a ball ricocheting off a wall. Immediately after these six lined away, two more objects just like them darted out from behind and under our airplane at the same altitude as the others. The two newcomers seemed to be joining the first group on a closing heading.

  “Then suddenly the lights of all of the objects blinked out, and a moment later blinked on again with all eight in line speeding westward, north of Newport News, and climbing in a far, graceful arc that carried them above our altitude. There they disappeared, while still in view, by blinking out one by one—not in sequence, but in a scattered manner.

  “There seemed to be some connection between the lights and the speed. The original six had dimmed slightly before their angular turn and had brightened considerably after making it. Also, the two others were even brighter, as though applying power to catch up.

  “We stared after them, dumbfounded and probably open-mouthed. We looked around at the sky, half expecting something else to appear, though nothing did. There were flying saucers, and we had seen them. What we had witnessed was so stunning and incredible that we could readily believe that if either of us had seen it alone, he would have hesitated to report it. But here we were, face to face. We couldn’t both be mistaken about such a striking spectacle.”

  Upon landing in Miami, both men were interrogated for hours—first separately, then together—by eager Air Force investigators, including Major John H. Sharpe and special agents C. L. Hamilton, Rudolph McCollough, and Louis Johnagin from the Seventh District Office of Special Investigations at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. The investigators were impressed by the details the pilots provided about the sighting and the fact that their stories matched perfectly. One of the investigators confidentially told the pilots during a break in the questioning that seven reports of UFO sightings had been made in the same area the previous night.

  After hours of intense questioning, the veteran pilots were finally allowed to go home to their families.

  But their lives would forever be changed by what they saw that night.

  The lead story on page one in the Wednesday, July 16, edition of the Miami Herald highlighted the sighting and gave the pilots’ accounts of their bizarre encounter.

  “I know enough about natural phenomena and the universe to know that what Nash and I saw must have come from outside our own solar system,” stressed my father, a former member of the US Navy’s aviation research and development team, during World War II.

  “If there were men inside, they weren’t earthmen,” he observed.

  Santes Ceyanes, Pan Am’s acting operations manager in Miami, added these words of support, telling the newspaper, “What they saw obviously was not a figment of their imaginations.”

  Shaken by the sighting but resolute in their stories, both men concluded in their True magazine report that the UFOs had been under the control of something beyond our understanding and comprehension.

  “Though we don’t know what they were, what they were doing or where they came from, we are certain in our minds that they were intelligently-operated craft from somewhere other than this planet.

  “We are sure that no pilot, able to view them as we did, could conceive of any earthly aircraft capable of the speed, abrupt change of direction, and acceleration that we witnessed, or imagine any airplane metal that could withstand the heat that ought to have been created by friction in their passage through the dense atmosphere at 2,000 feet. Whether they were controlled from within or remotely, we can’t say, but it is impossible to think of human flesh and bone surviving the jolt of their course reversal.

  “We have the usual reasons, too, for not believing that they were secret guided missiles. It is not logical that our own armed services would experiment with such devices over large cities and across airways, and another nation would not risk them here. Nor could anybody’s science have reached such a stage of development without some of the intermediate steps having become public knowledge.

  “One thing we know: mankind has a lot of lessons to learn . . . from somebody.”

  In his official report to his superiors, Air Force Major Sharpe described the pilots as men of “high integrity and above-average intelligence.” He said the observers are “considered reliable and evidently saw what they described.”

  The detailed report about the sighting and the special agents’ investigation was forwarded to senior general Air Force officers at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio and Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. Two days later Lt. Col. James Lovenbury of the US Air Force Office of the Inspector General sent an internal memo stating that “no further action is contemplated by the office.”
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  Even though the Nash-Fortenberry event was the first UFO sighting on record in which the witnesses flew above UFOs, and was well-documented, the Air Force officially filed it away as just another of the unexplained sightings that occurred that week all across the United States, including in the Washington, D.C. area, where radar operators at Bolling Field and Andrews Field picked UFOs up on radar and the Air Force dispatched two F-94 jets to search for them. In the control tower of nearby Washington National Airport, seven unexplained blips were picked up on radar by four stunned air traffic controllers, one of whom reported the objects were flying at an incredible speed.

  The headline in the next day’s edition of the New York Daily News exclaimed:

  JETS CHASE D.C. SKY GHOSTS

  The Washington Post was a bit more subtle with its banner headline:

  Saucer Outran Jets, Pilot Reveals

  The Post story concluded with these questions:

  “Who, or what, is aboard? Where do they come from? Why are they here? What are the intentions of the beings who control them?”

  In private, President Harry S Truman demanded answers from the military about what became known as “The Invasion of Washington.”

  At the Pentagon, chief UFO analyst Major Dewey J. Fournet, a former skeptic, closely studied the details of the Nash-Fortenberry sighting and proclaimed to colleagues that it was the most detailed UFO sighting he had ever read. Fournet, known by officers and colleagues in the Pentagon as a no-nonsense investigator, later became one of the nation’s leading advocates of the notion that we are not alone in the universe.