10.06
West Coast Air Raid
In the “West Coast Air Raid” (aka. The Battle of Los Angeles) of early 1942, an enormous UFO was spotted over Los Angeles. Over 1400 rounds of AAA (Anti Aircraft Artillery) were expended and at least three people died from heart attacks due to the excitement. It was written off by the government as “wartime nerves” as a Japanese Sub was sighted off the coast days earlier, but later documents indicated the U.S. military was seriously worried about the incident.
Ghost rockets
In 1946 and 1947, numerous so-called ghost rockets appeared over Scandinavian countries, primarily Sweden, and then spread into other European countries. One USAF top secret document from 1948 stated that Swedish air intelligence informed them that some of their investigators felt that the objects were not only real but couldn’t be explained as having earthly origins. Similarly, 20 years later, Greek physicist Dr. Paul Santorini publicly stated that in 1947 he was put in charge of a Greek military investigation into the ghost rockets sighted over Greece. Again, they quickly concluded the objects were real and not of conventional origin. Santorini claimed their investigation was killed by U.S. scientists and high military officials who had already concluded the objects were extraterrestrial in origin and feared public panic because there was no defense.
Roswell Incident
Main article: Roswell UFO incident
In 1947, the United States Air Force issued a press release stating that a “flying disk” had been recovered near Roswell, New Mexico. This press release was quickly withdrawn, and officials stated that a weather balloon had been misidentified. The Roswell case quickly faded even from the attention of most UFOlogists until the 1970s. There has been continued speculation that an alien spacecraft did indeed crash near Roswell despite the official denial. For example, retired Brigadier General Arthur E. Exon, former commanding officer of Wright-Patterson AFB, told researchers Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt that a spacecraft had in fact crashed, alien bodies were recovered, and the event was covered up by the U.S. government. Exon further claimed he was aware of a very secretive UFO controlling committee made up primarily of very high-ranking military officers and intelligence people. His nickname for this group was “The Unholy Thirteen.”
Mantell Incident
The 1948 death of Air Force pilot Thomas Mantell (the so-called Mantell Incident) may have contributed to a distrust of governmental UFO studies. Mantell’s airplane crashed and he was killed following the pursuit of an aerial artifact he described as “a metallic object…of tremendous size.” (Clark, 352) Project Sign personnel investigated the case and determined that Mantell had been chasing the planet Venus, a conclusion which met with incredulity. Later this theory was changed to include a Skyhook balloon instead of Venus, an explanation which continues to be debated to this day.
Project Sign
The U.S. Air Force may have planted the seeds of UFO conspiracy theories with Project Sign (established 1947) (which became Project Grudge and Project Blue Book). Edward J. Ruppelt, the first director of Blue Book, characterized the Air Force’s public behavior regarding UFOs as “schizophrenic”: alternately open and transparent, then secretive and dismissive. Ruppelt also revealed that in the summer of 1948, Project Sign issued a top secret Estimate of the Situation concluding that the flying saucers were not only real but probably extraterrestrial in origin. According to Ruppelt, the Estimate was ordered destroyed by Air Force Chief of Staff Hoyt Vandenberg.