Meanwhile the UFO continued acting peculiarly. It was moving back and forth above Tokyo Bay, sometimes hovering motionless, sometimes speeding up to more than 350 miles per hour. Throughout it all, while the radar men were watching the blip act this way on their screens, the tower personnel were watching the lighted object through their binoculars.
Shortly after midnight an F-94 interceptor scrambled from a nearby base arrived over Haneda. The tower controllers directed the jet fighter to get behind the UFO. Seconds later the F-94’s backseat radar man got a lock on the object. It was about three miles in front of the jet.
Now the tower personnel watched as both the F-94 and the UFO made a wide turn together. But the UFO got caught in the ground clutter — buildings and other obstructions that block radar beams — and the radar lock was broken.
At that point, the UFO started to accelerate away from the F-94; at the same moment, the tower operators lost sight of the object.
They called the F-94. Had they seen anything during the brief chase? The pilots responded they hadn’t, besides the radar indication.
The fighter stayed around for another few minutes but found nothing else. It had to return to its base for fuel. As soon as it departed, though, the UFO came back.
The tower personnel saw it, and it was picked up by the radar station again. This time they kept it in sight for about two minutes when suddenly the UFO broke into three separate pieces. The three pieces left the area at high speed, and that ended the episode.
In all, the UFO had been in sight or tracked on radar for more than thirty minutes.
The Haneda sighting was so detailed, both visually and on radar, that it fascinated Captain Ruppelt, that is, back when his office was still nominally looking for the truth behind UFOs.
Ruppelt consulted with a group of Pentagon officers about whether UFOs appeared to be under intelligent control or simply flew through the air in a random helter-skelter fashion. This was an important question. If it could be shown that UFO flight patterns were random, then the UFO mystery might be deeper, but maybe not as interesting.
However, if it could be shown they were under intelligent control…
Ruppelt and the Pentagon officers discussed doing a study that would determine what kind of motion was used most often by UFOs. Random motion would be similar to a swarm of flying insects, with no pattern or purpose to their flight paths. But in a case like a flock of birds, where there are defined patterns to their movements, there’s an ordered motion to them. The defined pattern indicates intelligent control.
In the Haneda incident, according to the witnesses, each turn the UFO took seemed deliberate, if unpredictable. As Ruppelt later studied the UFO’s flight path from that night, basically moving back and forth over Tokyo Bay, it reminded him of search patterns that were used during World War II when SAR units we were looking for crews of downed airplanes. In fact, the only time the Haneda UFO strayed from its pattern was when the F-94 showed up.
Ruppelt came to the conclusion that doing an extensive motion study on UFO maneuvers was a great way to advance research into the phenomenon. He was anxious to pursue it.
But as usual, his superiors in the air force had other ideas. Those people in the Pentagon who could have actually approved and funded such a study turned him down cold. The promising idea died a quick and quiet death.
Later on, the Colorado Project, a skeptical UFO study effort with ties to the U.S. Air Force, determined the Haneda sighting was nothing more than false radar echoes caused by a temperature inversion layer.
History tells many tales of haunted sailing ships. The Flying Dutchman. The Mary Celeste. Even, in her day, the Queen Mary was thought to have ghosts.
But many believe the U.S. Navy once had a haunted ship — an aircraft carrier, in fact. And this ship’s tormentors were not poltergeists. They were UFOs.
The USS Franklin D. Roosevelt was commissioned on October 27, 1945, shortly after the end of World War II. The following year, the ship was the first American aircraft carrier to launch and recover a jet aircraft. It also participated in what is still considered the longest flight ever from an aircraft carrier after a P2V Neptune naval bomber took off from its deck near Jacksonville, Florida, and landed in San Francisco the following day.
The FDR also took part in NATO’s first ever naval war games — and that’s when its bizarre connection to UFOs began.
The war games were called Operation Mainbrace; they took place over twelve days in September 1952. The U.S. Navy was the major contributor, but navies from the United Kingdom, Canada, Norway, Denmark, France, Belgium, Holland and Portugal also took part. The newly honed NATO fleet boasted more than 200 ships, 1,000 aircraft and 80,000 men.
The object of the war games was to repel an imaginary Soviet attack on Norway and Denmark; as such, the NATO armada was spread out over four large bodies of water: the Norwegian Sea, the Baltic Sea, the Barents Sea and the North Sea.
The centerpiece of this vast flotilla was the six participating U.S. Navy aircraft carriers, including the USS Wasp, the Midway, and the FDR.
The weirdness began on September 13, 1952. A Danish destroyer taking part in Mainbrace was sailing just south of Sweden when its commander and some of his crew spotted a triangular-shaped UFO streak overhead, traveling southeast. The witnesses said the object was moving at nearly 1,000 miles per hour.
On September 19, a British jet fighter returning to its home base in the UK arrived with a UFO on its tail. Witnesses on the ground described the object as a large rotating disk. Stopping in midair, the UFO lingered briefly over the airfield, then took off at tremendous speed, eventually disappearing to the southeast. The next day, three Danish Air Force officers spotted a shiny metallic disk streaking across the sky. They reported seeing it coming from the direction of the massive NATO fleet and then vanishing to the east.
That same day, September 20, a newspaper photographer who was on the FDR covering the war games at sea saw a group of crewmen looking at something overhead. It was a large spherical object moving extremely fast across the sky. The photographer quickly snapped off a few photos before the object disappeared.
On studying these photos, the carrier’s intelligence officers decided the large spherical object had to be either a weather balloon — or something else.
The FDR quickly sent a message to all the ships in the NATO fleet, asking if any had released a weather balloon. The answer that came back was unanimous — no. None of the ships had sent up a balloon.
The next day, September 21, six RAF pilots flying above the North Sea spotted a bright spherical object heading in the direction of the NATO fleet. The six jets started chasing it, but it quickly rocketed away.
The six planes returned to base, but just as they were landing, one pilot saw that the UFO was following him. He turned to chase it, but the UFO sped off.
On September 27 and 28, there were hundreds of UFO reports from West Germany, Denmark, and southern Sweden. Over Hamburg, a luminous object trailing a comet’s tail was seen by many people for a long period of time. Other witnesses elsewhere in Germany saw three small UFOs orbiting a much larger UFO.
Once the war games were over, though, the UFOs went away.
The following year, the FDR went on maneuvers in the Caribbean. Having just gone through a refit at the navy shipyard in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, it was on its shakedown cruise. One night it was anchored off the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the now infamous “Gitmo,” when a UFO appeared above it.