The Foo Fighters were not only witnessed by air crews. Hough and Randies cite a report from a former prisoner of war at the Heydebreck camp in Upper Silesia, Poland.
At 3 p.m. on 22 January 1945 a number of men were being paraded by the Germans before being marched away to evade the liberating Russian Army. A bomber appeared overhead, flying at about 18,000 feet, and the men gazed in horror at what seemed to be fire pouring from its rear end. Then they thought it might be a flare caught up in the slipstream of the aircraft. Finally, they realised it was neither of these things: the object was a silvery ball hugging the bomber, which was desperately trying to evade it. The foo fighter was still right on the tail of the aircraft as both passed into the distance. (11)
On 1 January 1945, Howard W. Blakeslee, science editor of the Associated Press, claimed that the mysterious Foo Fighters were nothing more than St Elmo’s Fire, spontaneous lights produced by an electrostatic discharge on the fuselages of the Allied aircraft. According to Blakeslee, this explanation also accounted for the fact that the Foo Fighters did not show up on radar. The pilots who actually encountered the objects were unimpressed with Blakeslee’s solution: most of them had been flying for a number of years, and knew St Elmo’s Fire when they saw it. The Foo Fighters were something entirely different: the light they produced went on and off at intervals that seemed to be related to their speed; their shape was often clearly discernible as either discoid or spherical; and they were frequently reported as spinning rapidly on their vertical axis. (12) No Allied aircraft were ever brought down by Foo Fighters (which seemed more content to pace them and interfere with their radar), and so it was considered likely that the objects were dangerous German secret weapons, perhaps a radical development of V- weapon technology. The V-ls were already causing carnage in London, and it was known that German scientists were desperately trying to develop a ballistic missile that could hit America.
According to Vesco and Childress, several Foo Fighter stories were leaked in December 1944 to the American Legion Magazine, which then published the personal opinions of several US Intelligence officers that the Foo Fighters were radio-controlled radar-jamming devices sent up by the Germans. (13) Vesco and Childress go on to cite the testimony of another (unnamed) B-17 pilot who decided to intercept a Foo Fighter and succeeded in getting within a few hundred yards of the shining sphere. He reported hearing ‘a strange sound, like the “backwash of invisible planes”’. (14) The last reported encounter with Foo Fighters occurred in early May 1945, near the eastern edge of the Pfalzerwald. A pilot, once again from the 415th Squadron, saw five orange balls of light flying in a ‘V formation in the distance. (15)
In the two years between the end of the Second World War and the Kenneth Arnold sighting, strange unidentified aerial objects invaded the skies over Finland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark (and were later reported as far afield as Morocco and India). Nicknamed ‘Ghost Rockets’ because of their long, thin profile and occasional fiery exhaust, these objects were reported to perform astonishing manoeuvres such as diving and climbing rapidly at enormous speeds. (16)
The British UFO investigator Timothy Good cites the following confidential Department of State telegram from the American Embassy in Stockholm, dated 11 July 1946:
For some weeks there have been numerous reports of strange rocket-like missiles being seen in Swedish and Finnish skies. During past few days reports of such objects being seen have greatly increased. Member of Legation saw one Tuesday afternoon. One landed on beach near Stockholm same afternoon without causing any damage and according to press fragments are now being studied by military authorities. Local scientist on first inspection stated it contained organic substance resembling carbide. Defense staff last night issued communique listing various places where missiles had been observed and urging public report all mysterious sound and light phenomena. Press this afternoon announces one such missile fell in Stockholm suburb 2:30 this afternoon. Missile observed by member Legation made no sound and seemed to be falling rapidly to earth when observed. No sound of explosion followed however.
Military Attache is investigating through Swedish channels and has been promised results Swedish observations. Swedes profess ignorance as to origin, character or purpose of missiles but state definitely they are not launched by Swedes. Eyewitness reports state missiles came in from southerly direction proceeding to northwest. Six units Atlantic Fleet under Admiral Hewitt arrived Stockholm this morning. If missiles are of Soviet origin as generally believed (some reports say they are launched from Estonia), purpose might be political to intimidate Swedes in connection with Soviet pressure on Sweden being built up in connection with current loan negotiations or to offset supposed increase in our military pressure on Sweden resulting from the naval visit and recent Bikini [atomic] tests or both. (17)
The suspicion voiced in this telegram that the Soviets might be responsible for the Ghost Rocket sightings was natural enough, given that the Cold War was then just getting under way. Both the Americans and Russians, of course, captured German weapons technology at the end of the war, and it was assumed by many in authority that the Russians were experimenting with V-l and V-2 rocket designs. (Actually, a German V-2 rocket had already crashed in Sweden in the summer of 1944.) The fact that both the United States and the Soviet Union carried out extensive experiments with captured Nazi technology will gain yet more significance as we examine the claims of the Nazi-UFO proponents.
A number of British scientists were sent to Sweden to examine the Ghost Rocket reports, among them Professor R. V. Jones, the then Director of Intelligence of Britain’s Air Staff and scientific advisor to Section IV of MI6. In Most Secret War, his account of his involvement with British Scientific Intelligence between 1939 and 1949, Professor Jones writes of the fears that the rockets were Russian:
The general interpretation … was that [the Ghost Rockets] were long-range flying bombs being flown by the Russians over Sweden as an act of intimidation. This interpretation was accepted by officers in our own Air Technical Intelligence, who worked out the performance of the bombs from the reported sightings in one of the incidents, where the object appeared to have dashed about at random over the whole of southern Sweden at speeds up to 2,000 mph. What the officers concerned failed to notice was that every observer, wherever he was, reported the object as well to the east. By far the most likely explanation was that it was a meteor, perhaps as far east as Finland, and the fantastic speeds that were reported were merely due to the fact that all observers had seen it more or less simultaneously, but that they had varying errors in their watches, so that any attempt to draw a track by linking up observations in a time sequence was unsound. (18)
Professor Jones considered it extremely unlikely that the Ghost Rockets could be Russian missiles based on German V-2 designs: he stated that the rockets seen over Scandinavia had more than twice the range of the V-2, an increase in performance that was too great given the short time since the capture of the German designs.
For myself, I simply asked two questions. First, what conceivable purpose could it serve the Russians, if they indeed had a controllable flying bomb, to fly it in great numbers over Sweden, without doing any more harm than to alert the West to the fact that they had such an impressive weapon? My second question followed from the first: how had the Russians succeeded in making a flying bomb of such fantastic reliability? The Germans had achieved no better than 90 per cent reliability in their flying bomb trials of 1944, at very much shorter range. Even if the Russians had achieved a reliability as high as 99 per cent over their much longer ranges, this still meant that one per cent of all sorties should have resulted in a bomb crashing on Swedish territory. Since there had been allegedly hundreds of sorties, there ought to be at least several crashed bombs already in Sweden, and yet nobody had ever picked up a fragment. I therefore said that I would not accept the theory that the apparitions were flying bombs from Russia until someone brought a piece into my office. (19)
Professor Jones goes on to relate an amusing incident that followed his challenge. When a substance that had allegedly fallen from a Ghost Rocket was collected and sent, via the Swedish General Staff and the British Air Staff, to the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) at Farnborough, the scientists who analysed the fragments claimed that over 98 per cent of their mass consisted of an unknown element. Jones had already seen the samples, and had quickly concluded that they were lumps of coke, ‘four or five irregularly shaped solid lumps, none of which looked as if it had ever been associated with a mechanical device’. (20) When he telephoned the head of chemistry at the RAE, enquiring whether they had thought to test for carbon, the chemist literally gasped. ‘No one had stopped to look at the material, in an effort to get the analysis made quickly, and they had failed to test for carbon. The other lumps had similarly innocent explanations.’ (21)
