So, while the actual number may never be known, there’s no doubt whatever was happening in the skies a half a world away in Europe was also happening above Asia and the Pacific.
February 1942, just two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the entire South Pacific was engulfed in war.
William Methorst was a crewmember of the Dutch cruiser RNN Tromp. The ship was sailing in the Timor Sea, close to New Guinea. Methorst was on watch.
As Methorst later told UFO writer Peter Norris in an interview, he was on the lookout for Japanese aircraft when he saw a huge saucer-shaped object about a mile high approaching his ship. It was moving at tremendous speed. As Methorst watched the object through binoculars, it abruptly slowed down and then began to circle the cruiser.
Methorst immediately informed the ship’s bridge, but no one could identify the object, other than to say it was not any known aircraft.
Incredibly, the object circled the RNN Tromp for almost four hours, keeping pace with it and always maintaining the same altitude.
Then, unexpectedly, the object broke its orbit, accelerated to almost Mach 5 and was gone.
A few months later, in the summer of 1942, a pilot for the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) was flying over Tasmania when he had an encounter with a mysterious object.
The RAAF pilot reported that the object was shaped like a large airfoil, about 150 feet long and 50 feet wide. The airfoil tapered to a fin at its rear, and the RAAF pilot could see sporadic green blue flashes emanating from this area.
The object was a bronze color, and on top there was a dome that seemed to be reflecting flashes of sunlight. The pilot theorized something might have been inside this dome wearing a helmet and that this was causing the reflections.
The object kept pace with the Australian plane for a few minutes before suddenly turning away. From this angle, the RAAF pilot could see four fins on the object’s underside.
At this point, the object suddenly accelerated to tremendous speed and, according to the RAAF pilot, dove straight into the ocean. Buffeted by the Pacific waves, it created a massive whirlpool as it quickly disappeared below.
On August 12, 1942, Sergeant Stephen Brickner of the U.S. Marines was sitting in a foxhole on the island of Tulagi in the Solomon Islands.
Located close to Guadalcanal, Tulagi had been firmly in Japanese hands until just a few days before. But a Marine landing on August 7 had lit off a battle for control of the island, a clash the Marines would eventually win. Later on, a U.S. Navy PT boat base would be built there, and among the PT boats assigned to it would be the famous PT 109, commanded by John F. Kennedy, who went on to be the thirty-fifth president of the United States.
But on this day, the fighting for control of the island was still going on. It was midmorning, and the Marines were cleaning their equipment in anticipation of more combat. Suddenly their unit’s air raid siren began blaring.
Brickner slid deeper into his foxhole, ready for what the Marines were sure would be a Japanese air raid. Looking straight up into the bright tropical sky, Brickner recalled hearing the aerial formation before he could see it.
The sound was like a mighty roar echoing in the heavens, Brickner would say later. But this didn’t seem right, because he’d heard Japanese planes before and this was definitely not the distinctive droning sound they usually made.
Then Brickner saw the formation — and was astonished.
Instead of the typical V shape that Japanese planes always flew in, what Brickner saw were waves of bright silvery objects flying very high overhead. Each wave was made up of at least a dozen objects, and there were lots of them — maybe 150 in all.
Brickner could detect no wings or tails on these objects, and they were going faster than any Japanese airplanes he’d ever seen. Though new to combat, and weary from battling the Japanese for the past five days, the scene still gave Brickner pause.
As quoted in Keith Chester’s Strange Company, Brickner said: “All in all, it was the most awe-inspiring and yet frightening spectacle I’ve seen in my life.”
One of the bloodiest battles fought in America’s war against Japan was for a tiny stretch of rock and sand called the Tarawa atoll.
Located in the central Pacific, Tarawa is part of the Gilbert chain, a string of islands strategically crucial to anyone wanting to control the thousands of square miles of ocean in that part of the war zone. Actually a couple dozen smaller islands grouped together, the Japanese had bombed Tarawa the day after Pearl Harbor and then occupied it a few months later.
Needing to secure bases to continue its island-hopping campaign toward Japan, the U.S. Marines carried out an amphibious landing on Tarawa on November 20, 1943. Eight brutal days later, 1,000 Americans and 5,000 Japanese lay dead, but the island was in U.S. hands.
By early 1944, a series of U.S. Navy radar stations had been built on Tarawa, allowing American forces to watch for any Japanese aircraft in the area.
In an incident related to UFO investigator Major Donald Keyhoe, one day in April of that year, a Navy radar man detected an unknown aircraft on his radar screen. The bogey was moving north to south at 700 miles per hour, a tremendous speed for 1944, and twice as fast as most of the U.S. fighter aircraft.
The news quickly brought a number of senior navy officers to the radar station. The first things they checked were the radar sets themselves, making sure they were working properly and that this wasn’t some aberration. But the station’s radar operators assured the brass everything was running correctly.
Then, almost as if to confirm this, a second bogey popped onto the screen. Moving just like the first, north to south, it was flying at the same incredible speed of 700 miles per hour.
At this point, there were only two possible explanations. Either the Japanese had suddenly invented a plane that had broken the sound barrier — highly unlikely — or it was “something else.”
The two blips eventually left the radar screens, and their origin continued to be a mystery.
But the ending for this particular foo fighter episode was still about a year and a half away.
One night in late June 1944, a Coast Guard vessel sailing about 800 miles southeast of Hawaii received an urgent radio message. A U.S. Navy patrol plane had crashed into the sea close to its location. The Coast Guard ship was asked to search for survivors.
Immediately changing course, the Coast Guard vessel rushed to the suspected crash area and used its searchlights to look for any wreckage or survivors. But they found nothing.
A day later, the ship was anchored at the nearby island of Palmyra. The ship’s executive officer was on the bridge, standing watch, when he spotted a bright light over the island around midnight.
The light began to grow, even as he was watching it, coming closer with every second. For a moment, the XO thought this might be the lost patrol plane, inexplicably returning home. But on looking at the light through binoculars, the XO realized it was no typical aircraft, lost or otherwise.
It was a sphere, perfectly round, and very bright. It went into a hover above the Coast Guard ship, moving so slow that at times it appeared to be stopped in midair.
This went on for more than thirty minutes until the sphere finally picked up speed and moved off to the north, in the same direction as where the patrol plane had been lost.
The XO later had a conversation with a navy lieutenant concerning the missing plane and the otherworldly sphere.