"It is possible," Twining wrote, "within the present U.S. knowledge — provided extensive detailed development is undertaken— to construct a piloted aircraft which has the general description of the object above which would be capable of an approximate range of 7,000 miles at subsonic speeds."
As head of Air Materiel Command, the branch of the USAAF that assumed responsibility for all USAAF aircraft development, Twining— who would have written the memo under the best advice from his subordinates — should have known what he was talking about. The problem was that 50 years this side of Twining's memo, at the end of the 20th century, I still knew of no combat aircraft capable of the performance characteristics Twining had elucidated. Even the Lockheed
U-2 spyplane (which first flew in 1955, but is still in service), a single engined aircraft intended for ultra-long endurance missions (and hardly, therefore, a maneuvering type like the discs reported to Twining), had a maximum unrefueled range in excess of 3,000 miles—3,500, perhaps, on a good day.
And, needless to say, no one had ever owned up to building a flying saucer.
To construct the "aircraft" that Twining had in mind, he told General Schulgen: "Any developments in this country along the lines indicated would be extremely expensive, time-consuming and at the considerable expense of other projects and therefore, if directed, should be set up independently of existing projects."
Placing such a project outside the mainstream of aerospace science brought to mind the effort that had resulted in the development of the first atomic bomb. In 1956, George Trimble had also cited the Manhattan Project as the inspiration for his proposed antigravity program. Brown, too, had offered a highly unusual development model for Winterhaven, his Mach 3 antigravity program, one that only peripherally involved the U.S. aerospace industry.
I tried to keep my mind on the facts. The essential point of Twining's memo was that the development of an aircraft exhibiting the characteristics of the saucers that people were seeing in 1947 was "within the present U.S. knowledge," but that the craft themselves were nothing to do with the USAAF. Then whose were they?
Twining himself offered two possibilities. First, that they were of "domestic origin — the product of some high security project not known to AC/AS-2 (air force technical intelligence) or this Command." And second, "that some foreign nation has a form of propulsion, possibly nuclear, which is outside of our domestic knowledge."
The first part I actually found a little scary. Twining was entertaining the possibility that these craft had been developed and fielded by another branch of the U.S. armed forces — the Navy, perhaps — without the knowledge of the USAAF.
The second explanation was, at least, a little more conventional. The discs, Twining offered, were the result of another country's secret development effort.
I had been sucked into a story that seemed to have had its origins in 1956. Reluctantly, I now had to concede that if I was to do this thing any justice at all, I needed to cast the net back even further.
Chapter 4
History doesn't relate the mood of the crewmembers of the Northrop P-61 Black Widow patrolling the sky above the Rhineland that night, but the available clues suggest that they were none too happy. A night-fighter crew was about as close-knit a unit as you could find among the frontline squadrons ranged against Germany in late 1944. Success — their very survival when it came down to it — depended on a high level of trust, intense training, the reliability of a piece of hardware then still in its infancy — radar — and undiluted concentration.
The last thing U.S. Army Air Forces Lieutenant Ed Schlueter would have needed that night was a passenger. Worse, Ringwald wasn't even aircrew, but an intelligence officer.
Lieutenant Fred Ringwald was sitting behind and above Schlueter, the P-61's pilot, in the position normally occupied by the gunner. Schlueter's unit, the 415th Night Fighter Squadron of the U.S. 9th Army Air Force, had recently upgraded from their British-made Bristol Beaufighters to the Black Widow. They had also just transferred from the Italian theater of operations to England and from there across the Channel, deploying eastward in short hops across northwest France as the Allies pushed the Nazis toward the Rhine and back into Germany itself.
Schlueter flew his aircraft south along the Rhine, looking for "trade." The Black Widow was a heavy fighter; bigger than the Beaufighter and considerably more menacing in appearance. While its primary targets were the German night fighters sent up to intercept British bomber streams heading to and from Germany, there was always the chance, provided Schlueter was sharp-eyed enough, of hitting a Nazi train or a vehicle convoy, especially as the Germans were moving men and materiel under cover of darkness due to the Allies' overwhelming daytime air superiority. This had been pretty much indisputable since the D-Day landings five months earlier.
But night strafing operations brought their own hazards. Over the uncertain territory of the Rhineland, sandwiched between the bluffs of the wide and winding river and the rugged uplands of the Black Forest, there was a better than even chance you could follow your own cannon fire into the ground.
There was no official record as to why the intelligence officer Ringwald was along for the ride, but knowing something of the way in which spooks had a habit of ring-fencing intelligence from the people who needed it most, I had a feeling that Schlueter and his radar operator would have been left just as much in the dark.
In the black skies above the Rhineland, after a long period of routine activity, it was Ringwald who broke the silence. "What the hell are those lights over there?" he asked over the RT. "Probably stars," Schlueter said, concentrating on his instruments. "I don't think so," Ringwald replied. "They're coming straight for us." Now, Schlueter looked up and out of the cockpit. In the pitch-black of his surroundings, the formation of aircraft off his starboard wing stood out like a constellation of tiny brilliant suns. Instinctively, he twisted the control column, bringing the Black Widow's four cannon and four .50 cal machine guns into line with them. At the same time, he called ground radar.
The ground station was supposed to be Schlueter's eyes and ears at all times, but if each pulsating point of light represented the exhaust plumes of a German night fighter, there were anything up to ten aircraft closing on him and he hadn't heard a whisper out of them. Somebody had screwed up. Later, he would be angry. Now, he was simply frightened and confused. He urgently requested information.
"Negative," the reply came back. "There are no bogies in your sector. You're on your own."
Schlueter's radar operator, Lieutenant Don Meiers, who was crouched over the scope of the SCR540 airborne intercept (AI) radar in a well behind Ringwald, told him the same thing. The sky ahead of them was empty of any air activity.
But the lights were still there and they kept coming. Instead of running, Schlueter boosted the throttles and pointed the nose of the Black Widow at the lead aircraft of the formation.
As the twin air-cooled radiais powered up either side of him, the glow from his opponents' exhausts dimmed; and then they winked out. Puzzled and alarmed at having lost the contacts, and with no help from Meiers on the Black Widow's own radar, Schlueter held the aircraft steady and the crew braced themselves for the engagement.
Schlueter eased the night fighter into the blacked-out bowl of sky where he had last seen the contacts. He craned his neck for a glimpse of something — anything — that signaled the presence of another aircraft, jinking the plane left and right to check his blind spots. Still nothing. It was only when he started to execute a turn back to base that