Flying at nearly 19,000 feet, Smith’s Halifax arrived over the target to find heavy antiaircraft fire being unleashed by the German defenders below. As he was preparing for his bombing run, and with AA fire exploding all around him, Smith suddenly noticed a strange object flying off to his left. It was huge! Long and cylindrical, and much bigger than his Halifax, the silver and gold object was moving through the flak-filled sky at the same speed and about the same altitude as the bomber.
Smith called out to his crew, and five of them spotted the object, too. Incredibly, they could all see portholes ringing the entity, rounded apertures evenly spaced along its length.
The astonished crewmembers watched the object for almost a minute before it abruptly sped away. Climbing at an impossibly high speed of 4,000 miles per hour, it disappeared into the stars overhead.
Smith managed to complete his bombing run and then turn for home. Landing safely at their base, the Halifax crew was debriefed by their squadron’s intelligence officers. But whereas the crew was certain the intel men would be astonished by what had transpired, they were met with the opposite reaction. The intelligence officers seemed unimpressed by their fantastic story and steered the conversation toward other topics, like the amount of flak the bomber had encountered or how many enemy fighters the crew had seen. Smith and the others were left with the impression that the intelligence officers were intentionally downplaying the strange sighting.
This was no surprise. Evidence suggests that as early as 1943, Allied intelligence officers were sending somewhat sanitized details of “aerial phenomena” up to the higher authorities, while at the same time trying to keep the whole idea of these unknowns out of the minds of their aircrews, so they could concentrate on the matter at hand: beating the Nazis.
In other words, when it came to reporting these mysterious flying objects over Europe, a system of benign deception was already in place.
The German city of Stuttgart was one of the most heavily defended targets of the European war.
Located in southwest Germany, the city housed factories capable of building engines for Hitler’s combat aircraft and troop vehicles. Several key military bases were also located near the city. Most important, though, Stuttgart was one of the major hubs for Nazi Germany’s railway system. For these reasons, the city was bombed more than fifty times during the war; as many as 850 bombers took part in some of these bombing raids, raining down tons of explosives on the place. Still, the Germans defended it almost to the end.
On September 6, 1943, more than 350 U.S. B-17s set out to attack the city. Though many had to turn back for various reasons, of those that actually made it over the target, 45 were shot down, catastrophic losses for the American Eighth Air Force.
The air battle over the city was chaotic and bloody as Messerschmitt and Focke-Wulf fighters relentlessly shot up the incoming B-17s and hundreds of AA guns fired up at them once they were over the target.
But in the midst of all this, something else had happened.
Just as the B-17s arrived over the city, two crews reported seeing hundreds of silver disks, the size of half-dollars, floating down from the sky above them. The witnesses said the objects descended in a tight cluster that moved unusually slowly. This cluster was reported to be as big as 75 feet long and 20 feet wide.
In the heat of the battle some witnesses thought they saw some of the mysterious disks land on the wing of one B-17 and start it burning. But that plane didn’t return from the disastrous raid, so this was impossible to verify.
What was for certain, at the time the strange disks appeared, was that there were no enemy aircraft above or anywhere near the American bombers.
So if the disks weren’t dropped on the B-17s, where did they come from?
On the night of January 2, 1944, an RAF Mosquito night fighter operating over Germany had a strange encounter with an unidentified aerial object.
An extraordinarily fast airplane because it was made mostly of wood, this particular Mosquito was flying over the German town of Halberstadt when the pilot and his navigator saw what would be later described as a “rocket” following them. They reported the extraordinarily fast “rocket” overtook them, at one point turning 90 degrees to reach a course parallel with them. The crew watched this “rocket” for about a minute, until it finally disappeared.
This report was just one of many from Allied aircrews who’d spotted “rockets” while flying through Europe’s war-ravaged skies. And for a time, “rockets” became one of the catchall phrases used by Allied intelligence to categorize all the mysterious flying objects being seen during combat. It was a safe word used in an attempt to “de-sci-fi” their reports to higher-ups.
But what this particular Mosquito crew encountered was no “rocket,” at least not in the 1944 sense of the word. The same was true for all those other “rockets” Allied aircrews were reporting.
Just what they were, beyond simply another type of foo fighter, still remains a mystery. But how foo fighters became labeled as “rockets” at least for a while is an interesting story.
The Germans were working with rocket technology throughout the war; this was evidenced by the V-1 and V-2 vengeance weapons that would make their presence known by mid-1944.
But at no point did the Nazi war machine ever have a rocket that could find an aerial target in the night sky, fly up to it, get on a parallel course with it and make turns to stay with it, as many of these “rockets” were seen to do.
That kind of technology would require at the very least an elaborate guidance system (either internal or ground- or air-based), complex steering mechanisms built into the rocket fins and a massive fuel tank to allow such a “smart” object to stay airborne for long periods of time. Plus, if it had been some kind of German weapon, why didn’t these “rockets” fulfill their missions and destroy Allied warplanes instead of just riding alongside them?
The Nazis did have an unusual rocketlike weapon called the Hs-293. It was basically a small, unmanned airplane powered by a liquid fuel motor with a warhead in its nose and a crude radio receiver as its guidance system. The weapon would be dropped from a specially adapted Heinkel He-111 bomber. By using a radio-control joystick, a weapons operator aboard the Heinkel would guide the Hs-293 to its target, usually Allied shipping.
The Allies were aware of this weapon, so when aircrews started seeing “rockets” approach their aircraft, turning to get on their tails or taking up positions alongside, for a while Allied intelligence considered they might be Hs-293s, or something similar.
But there was a problem with this theory. Just because the Hs-293 was a new technology, that didn’t mean it was a workable technology. In fact, the weapon was difficult to handle, difficult to fire, and especially difficult to steer, and so it was essentially a case of eyeballing it several thousand feet down to its target.
And the Hs-293 couldn’t fly on the level, turn sharply, fly in formation with another aircraft — or speed away at fantastic velocities, which was exactly what Allied aircrews encountering “rockets” were reporting.
But again, in the military-think of the time, these mystery objects had to be explained in some way. So one British intelligence group decided that what allied aircrews were seeing were indeed Hs-293-type devices either launched from an aircraft or dropped by parachute.