If not at Peenemünde, then where were these missile-launching bases? Who was manning them? Where were they getting their supplies, their core materials? Their fuel?
And what would be the reason to launch hundreds of missiles that all seemed to land in lakes and then, quite literally, disappear? Why would the war-ravaged Russians publicly fire hundreds of rockets into a neighboring neutral country?
Finally, how would a Russian secret missile program up near the Baltics account for further ghost rocket sightings reported over Greece, France and even the United States?
It was only later that the West’s intelligence services confirmed that there was no renewed activity at Peenemünde. Whatever remained of the German rocket base had been moved to Poland by the Russians.
In other words, the official explanation of what the ghost rockets were was not an explanation at all.
Ghost rocket sightings lasted throughout 1946. In all, about two thousand were sighted from May to December that year. Then just like the ghost fliers, the ghost rockets eventually faded away.
So what were they?
Sherlock Holmes is famous for saying: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
Thus the Swedes were forced to look at other explanations.
As recorded in Jerome Clark’s The UFO Encyclopedia (Second Edition): The Phenomenon from the Beginning on October 10, the Swedish Defence Staff released this statement on the subject: “Most observations are vague and must be treated very skeptically. In some cases, however, clear, unambiguous observations have been made that cannot be explained as natural phenomena, Swedish aircraft, or imagination on the part of the observer.”
Apparently the U.S. military didn’t disagree. A top secret U.S. Air Force document from November 1948 hinted that some military investigators believed the ghost rockets had extraterrestrial origins.
Declassified nearly five decades later, the document states:
“When [our] officers recently visited the Swedish Air Intelligence Service, the question [of the ghost rockets’ origin] was put to the Swedes. Their answer was that some reliable and fully technically qualified people had reached the conclusion that these phenomena are obviously the result of a high technical skill which cannot be credited to any presently known culture on Earth. They are therefore assuming that these objects originate from some previously unknown or unidentified technology, possibly outside the Earth.”
As unlikely as it might seem, Laurance S. Rockefeller, of the American billionaire Rockefellers, had a serious interest in the UFO question. Through his auspices in 1995, a sober, well-documented paper called “The Best Available Evidence” was produced (see: UFOScience.org).
The report contains this story: On the morning of August 14, 1946, a Swedish air force pilot was flying over central Sweden when he saw an object soaring along slightly above him and about a mile away. It was one of the ghost rockets. He estimated it was traveling about 400 miles per hour.
The pilot reported that not only was the object maintaining a stable horizontal altitude over the ground, it was basically following the terrain, meaning, if a mountain loomed up before it, it simply climbed enough to get over the mountain before returning to its previous altitude. But terrain-following technology is something that wasn’t even attempted until the 1960s and not really perfected until the 1980s.
Eric Malmberg was secretary of Sweden’s Defence Staff committee during the time of the ghost rockets. He was interviewed on the topic forty years later by UFO researchers Anders Liljegren and Clas Svahn. Contained in their paper “Ghost Rockets and Phantom Aircraft” from the anthology Phenomenon — Forty Years of Flying Saucers, Malmberg told them something both perplexing and chilling.
Talking about what was seen over Sweden that strange summer, he said: “If the observations were correct, many details suggest that it was some kind of a cruise missile. But nobody had that kind of sophisticated technology in 1946.”
11
America vs. the Flying Saucers
The “Era of Flying Saucers” began on June 24, 1947.
That day, Idaho businessman Kenneth Arnold was flying his private plane over the Cascade Mountains in Washington State when he spotted nine brightly shining objects streaking across the afternoon sky.
In Arnold’s own words, the conditions were clear that day and the air was calm. He was on course to Yakima, Washington, as part of a business trip, when suddenly he was startled by a flash of light to his left. At first Arnold thought he’d strayed into the path of another airplane. But on seeing that the sky immediately around him was empty, his eyes were drawn to Mount Rainier about 20 miles off his left wing. There he saw the line of shiny objects flying at about 9,500 feet, heading south. It was these objects reflecting the sun that had attracted Arnold attention in the first place.
As recounted in Jerome Clark’s The UFO Encyclopedia, Arnold said that he was unable to make out their shapes for the first few seconds. But once they passed Mount Rainier, he saw their outlines against the snow and realized they were flat and tailless. Like a “half a pie plate,” was his initial description.
Arnold’s sighting was no quick event. He had the flying objects in view for more than two and a half minutes. In that time, he saw the strange craft perform some incredible maneuvers, such as all turning as one as they wound their way between the mountaintops.
The obj ects were also moving very fast. As Arnold watched them fly between Mount Rainier and Mount Adams, he calculated the objects had traveled almost 50 miles in a minute and forty-five seconds. That works out to 1,700 miles per hour, nearly three times the speed of sound, faster by far than any known airplane of the day.
All this led Arnold to assume the objects were some kind of secret military aircraft.
Only after he left Yakima and flew on to Pendleton, Oregon, and spoke to some fellow pilots did Arnold begin to think what he’d seen might not belong to the U.S. military — or anyone else’s.
No tails, flying near Mach 3, being able to maneuver themselves between mountaintops with ease? At the time, nothing on earth could fly that way. Nothing man-made, anyway.
Word of Arnold’s sighting spread quickly, and by the next day, he was telling his story to a local Washington newspaper. And although he had indeed previously described the objects as looking like half a pie plate, Arnold was later quoted as saying they moved like saucers skipping across the water. Thus, the term “flying saucer” was born.
No sooner had the story hit the newswires, though, than something strange happened: Suddenly people all over the United States began seeing flying saucers.
Just on June 28 alone, an army pilot flying an F-51 Mustang near Lake Mead, Nevada, spotted five circular objects go by his fighter’s right wing; two farmers in Wisconsin saw ten saucer-shaped objects fly over them at high speed; and four army officers at Maxwell airfield in Montgomery, Alabama, watched an unusual circular object perform inconceivable midair maneuvers for more than twenty minutes.
The next day, June 29, a bus driver in Des Moines saw four circular objects flash through the sky at high speed; in Jacksonville, Oregon, a chevron formation of saucers was seen by people leaving a church; and in New Mexico, a car full of rocket scientists traveling near the White Sands Proving Ground spotted a silvery disk traveling at an astonishing velocity.