“So the company commander hauled us into our bunkers. We didn’t know what was going to happen. We were scared. These are underground dugouts where you have peepholes to look out to fire at the enemy. So, I’m in my bunker with another man. We’re peeping out at this thing. It hovered over us for a while, lit up the whole area with its light, and then I saw it shoot off at a 45-degree angle, that quick, just there and gone.”
Simply spotting a UFO is considered a close encounter of the first kind. Seeing a UFO and having some associated physical effects, like feeling heat from it, is considered a close encounter of the second kind. Third kind encounters involve observing beings with the UFO. Fourth kind encounters are when a human is abducted by those beings.
Private Wall’s experience was a close encounter of the fifth kind (CE5). This is when a sort of two-way communication is established between the UFO and the humans that have encountered it. In this case, Walls fired at the Chorwon UFO, and it began a series of gyrations in response. As alarming as it was, two-way “communication” was established.
Even more astounding, Haines found other CE5 incidents years later in which the UFO in question acted in a very similar manner to the UFO at Chorwon, once it was “signaled.” In at least one case this was accomplished by a hunter in the United States shooting at a UFO, just as Walls had done in Korea. Same means of “signaling,” same gyrating reaction from the UFO, years later and a half a world away?
What does that tell us?
When the Chorwon UFO disappeared that day, it was not the end of it for Private Walls and his colleagues. Three days later, Walls’s unit had to be evacuated from the battlefield. Roads were cut so the soldiers could be taken out by ambulance. Many were too weak to walk.
When army physicians examined them, they were all found to have extremely elevated white blood cell counts, a serious condition that doctors had no explanation for.
UFO sightings continued throughout the Korean War, but the U.S. Air Force never changed its stance in refusing to talk about them. One could say it was “adamant in its ignorance.”
When the Korean War eventually came to an end, it was not by any clear-cut victory or peace treaty, but instead by a shaky armistice that, technically at least, is still in force today.
One quote, given by an air force spokesman during the conflict, seemed to say it all when it came to the subject of UFOs and the Korean War: “To affirm or deny that U.S. pilots were seeing UFOs over Korea would put the Air Force in the position of discussing UFOs. And we just will not do that.”
15
Tales From the Cold War
In 1951, the U.S. Air Force’s 525th Fighter-Bomber Squadron was based at Neubiberg, West Germany.
Located near Munich, the vast onetime Luftwaffe airfield was a short flight from the border of what was then communist-controlled Czechoslovakia. The 525th was there to patrol that hostile front line of the Cold War.
Tensions were high both in Europe and around the world in 1951. Germany was split in two, communist East staring down the democratic West. Russia now had atomic weapons. Its client state, North Korea, had invaded U.S. ally South Korea the year before, and no sooner had the United States gotten the upper hand in that war than a half million Red Chinese troops entered the fray, making the conflict even more bloody while threatening to turn Asia into a nuclear wasteland. In the early 1950s, all-out war with the Communist Bloc seemed inevitable.
The pilots of the 525th flew the F-86 Sabre jet; its communist adversaries just over the border were equipped with the MiG-15. These same two aircraft were battling each other on a daily basis high above Korea, half a world away.
Always on combat alert, the 525th was frequently scrambled whenever Soviet or Soviet-allied aircraft were detected too close to the border of West Germany.
So it was one particular day when a call came in that a virtual armada of unidentified aircraft had been spotted heading toward West Germany. The 525th was quickly airborne, its fighters climbing to meet what they were sure was an aerial onslaught of Russian MiGs.
But when the 525th Sabres reached their maximum altitude of 45,000 feet, their pilots discovered that the horde of bogeys were not Russian fighters. This air fleet was made up of metallic objects, shaped like saucers. And there were lots of them.
The objects were flying far too high for the Sabres to challenge them. So the 525th’s pilots could do little more than watch as the swarm of UFOs passed over.
Flying one of those Sabres that day was a young second lieutenant named Gordon Cooper. As he would later tell it, streams of UFOs went over the 525th’s base regularly for the next three days. Sometimes they were in groups of four; other times, in groups of as many as sixteen. They were almost always flying from east to west.
Again, Cooper and his colleagues could do little to stop them. Besides flying so high, the UFOs displayed high degrees of maneuverability. They would sometimes move at very high speed; other times they would hover motionless as the fighters of the 525th simply flew beneath them, helpless.
Finally, everyone realized that the 525th was wasting its time chasing the saucers; they eventually gave up trying to intercept them. Instead, the pilots would stay on the ground and use binoculars to watch the UFOs fly overhead.
The worst-case scenario — that the high-flying, incredibly maneuverable aircraft were of Soviet design — quickly faded. After a while it became the opinion of Cooper and just about anyone who’d seen them that these objects were not made in Russia, or China, or anywhere else on earth.
But even though word of the daily parade of UFOs was passed up the ladder to the highest levels of the Pentagon, no official investigation was ever undertaken to determine what they were. Once again, the U.S. military had its head planted firmly in the ground — or some other dark place.
Gordon Cooper gradually rose up the ranks of the air force, becoming an outstanding fighter pilot and then a test pilot. He was such a talented aviator that eight years later he would be selected as one of America’s first astronauts. He would go on to hold the orbital record for the longest solo flight in a Mercury space capsule, circling the earth twenty-two times. A few years later, he was commander of an eight-day orbital mission in a Gemini capsule.
Cooper became a genuine American hero. Played by Dennis Quaid in the movie The Right Stuff, he went on to work for Disney and become a bestselling author.
But those strange days back at the beginning of the decade would not be his last experience with UFOs.
It’s a peculiarity of history that the 1950s were considered a “peaceful” decade.
True, once the fighting in Korea had ended, the United States was not at war, at least not in the usual sense.
But a certain kind of conflict was taking place. It was a war of shadows fought mostly on secret battlegrounds. Though it never made the headlines, U.S. cargo planes converted to spy platforms and sent to fly close to Russia’s borders were shot down with alarming frequency. Soviet spies were rife inside the United States, as evidenced by the Rudolph Abel atomic espionage ring and the execution of atomic spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. U.S. and Russian submarines stalked each other beneath the world’s oceans. Huge armies on both sides of divided Europe were poised to strike on a moment’s notice.
This was the “Cold War”—that state of affairs where East and West balanced themselves on the razor’s edge of nuclear annihilation, their fingers always just millimeters away from pressing the button.