How could a cash-strapped, resource-poor Germany afford to maintain such a program, especially in the last year or so of the war? Where would they get the materials to build these superweapons when toward the end they were building their Me-262 cockpits out of wood?
Most importantly, and asked here again, when these fantastic weapons were able to get so close to Allied bombers, why did they never shoot at them? And why weren’t they knocking down Allied fighters or immolating ground troops for that matter? What kind of “weapons” were they?
And lastly, if the Nazis had such sophisticated, stunning technology at their disposal from 1939 through 1945, why did they lose the war?
PART FOUR
The Postwar and the Mystery in America’s Skies
10
The Ghost Rockets
What could it be about the northern reaches of Scandinavia that attracts unexplained aerial phenomena? Perhaps this is one of the biggest UFO mysteries of all.
No sooner had World War II ended, taking with it the baffling episode of the foo fighters, than once again unidentified aerial objects began showing up over the Scandinavian Arctic.
The unexplained intruders weren’t ghostly airplanes this time, but strange rockets seen streaking across the skies of Sweden, Norway and Finland. As with the ghost fliers of 1934, many people saw them, including military pilots this time. They appeared almost always in the daytime, and on some days, literally hundreds were reported.
These strange flying objects were coined the “ghost rockets,” and unlike back in the early 1930s when media coverage of the ghost fliers was somewhat muted and provincial, news of the ghost rockets went around the world in a flash.
They were so puzzling, in fact, that for the first time, high-level military officials went on record as saying the mysterious flying objects might not be of this earth.
The first sightings were reported in Swedish newspapers in February 1946. As with the ghost fliers thirteen years before, once word was out, sighting reports began to cascade. People reported seeing the strange projectiles all over Sweden that spring and into the summer.
The peak came between August 9 and 11, 1946. Coincidentally, this is the height of the annual Perseid meteor showers, and there’s no doubt that within that time frame a large number of the sightings were, in fact, meteors.
But not all of them.
Almost from the beginning, there were differing descriptions of the ghost rockets. Early examples were depicted as fireballs or unknown light phenomena, not unlike some foo fighters. But two images eventually became predominant: a fast-moving missile-shaped object 12 to 15 feet long with wings, and a similarly sized object without wings. Sometimes a hissing or humming sound was heard coming from them, but mostly these mystery missiles were silent.
Most intriguing, though, was that not only did many people see the ghost rockets flying horizontally — belying the meteor theory — and doing maneuvers, including pulling 180-degree turns, but some witnesses actually saw two or more flying in formation!
The ghost rockets displayed another bizarre trait: a tendency to crash into lakes. The topography of upper Scandinavia is pockmarked with lakes, many of which are long and deep, and in the summer, mostly free of ice. But the landscape is also thick with tall mountains, yawning valleys and thousands of square miles of empty tundra. Yet dozens of witnesses saw ghost rockets falling into lakes, almost as if directed there.
One famous case happened on July 19, 1946. Witnesses saw a rocket-shaped object fall into Lake Kölmjärv, in far northeast Sweden. The military quickly cordoned off the area and did an extensive search of the lake’s bottom. Yet nothing was ever found.
The Swedish government became so concerned about the ghost rockets that they violated their country’s famous neutrality and secretly implored Great Britain to send them some modern radar systems. Once these were in place, the Swedish military began searching for the mysterious flying objects electronically. The result: An astounding 200 of the ghost rockets were eventually tracked on radar.
The Swedish reached out for help a second time during the crisis, this time to the United States. On August 20, 1946, two prominent Americans arrived in Stockholm. One was General David Sarnoff, the man who went on to found RCA and the NBC network. Ostensibly Sarnoff was in Sweden to study the market for broadcast equipment. But Sarnoff, a member of Dwight Eisenhower’s war staff, was actually there to be briefed on the ghost rockets by the Swedish military.
The second man was none other than Jimmy Doolittle, the hero of the famous “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo” raid. Doolittle was a VP of the Shell oil company at the time, and his cover story was that he was supposedly inspecting Shell facilities in Sweden. But like Sarnoff, he, too, was there to investigate the ghost rocket situation firsthand.
Both men met with officers high in the Swedish military and were briefed on the mysterious objects, specifically those cases that had been picked up on radar. On returning to the United States, Doolittle and Sarnoff reported their findings to the Central Intelligence Group (CIG), a precursor to the CIA. Shortly afterward, the CIG delivered a top secret report to President Truman on the subject. And at first, this report seemed to have solved the mystery.
In fact, it pointed to a likely launching point for the ghost rockets.
A place called Peenemünde.
Located on Germany’s Baltic coast, Peenemünde was the world’s first rocket base, the place where the Nazis developed and flew their V-1 and V-2 rocket-powered wonder weapons.
The theory conjured up by U.S. and Swedish intelligence services was that the ghost rockets were actually Russian updates of captured V-1 and V-2 rockets and that the Soviets were using the former German base to launch them.
The Swedes were so sure this was the case, they installed a press embargo on the nation’s newspapers, ordering them not to print the locations of ghost rocket crash sites, believing this would give the Russians valuable information on how far their new missiles were traveling.
The theory sounded good, especially in light of rising tensions between the West and their soon-to-be former ally, the Soviet Union.
But it was all wrong.
True, Peenemünde had been overrun by the Russian army near the end of World War II, and by 1946, it was part of Soviet-controlled East Germany.
But the advancing Soviet troops had found most of the rocket facility in ruins, the result of both intensive Allied bombing and the retreating Germans not wanting to leave anything of value behind. Rebuilding the base would have been a huge undertaking for the Russians and something they would have had to do in complete secrecy.
Moreover, even in the best of times, the Germans could barely launch fifteen V-1 buzz bombs in a day. There were more than two hundred ghost rocket sightings reported on July 9 alone. And on August 11, more than three hundred of the strange objects were seen just around Stockholm.
Launching this many V-1-type rockets on a daily basis would require a huge facility, equipped with launch pads, fuel storage and transport, command and control buildings and hundreds if not thousands of support personnel, all in a day when rocket technology was still in its infancy.