In 1945 the world emerged battered, bruised and suspicious of itself and its enemies after a war that had threatened its very existence. Each power had faced its own vulnerability and knew that such vulnerabilities could never again be allowed to threaten its way of life. But by 1946 the Cold War was setting in, communications were down and suspicions between east and west were running high. Another world war appeared increasingly inevitable, and military arsenals began to be built up for possible deployment.

Within months mysterious objects began to be seen above the sky of Scandinavia and the Baltic Sea. These objects were called ‘ghost rockets’ or ‘spook bombs’; some flashed across the sky (right) whilst others hardly moved. The West assumed that the Soviets were testing some new secret weapon, although the Kremlin flatly denied this was the case.

Then on 22^nd August 1946, the British Daily Telegraph stated "The discussion of the flight of rockets over Scandinavia has been dropped in the Norwegian newspapers since Wednesday. On that day the Norwegian General Staff issued a memorandum to the press asking it not to make any mention of the appearance of rockets over Norwegian territory but to pass on all reports to the Intelligence Department of the High Command … In Sweden the ban is limited to any mention of where the rockets have been seen to land or explode." (1)

Swedish military forces were placed on alert (2) and the US sent retired US Air Force General James H. Doolittle (left) to assist the Swedes in their investigation.

Doolittle had entered WWII as a Major in the US Air Force. Following a flight over Tokyo, he was promoted to a one-star general, awarded the Congressional Medal of Honour and sent to North Africa to take command. Later in the war, Doolittle commanded the Eighth Air Force, which played a large role in the defeat of Germany. He went on to undertake a major role in shaping the armed services and national aviation policy.

On arrival in Stockholm, the General met with Colonel C. R. Kempf, the Chief of Swedish Defence and General David Sarnoff, an intelligence expert in aerial warfare. Sarnoff was later quoted as stating that the objects reported were neither mythological nor meteorological but "real missiles." (3)

In October 1946 the Swedish Government announced the results of its inquiry:

"Swedish military authorities said today that they had been unable to discover after four months of investigation the origin or nature of the ghost rockets that have been flying over Sweden since May.

A special communiqué declared that 80 per cent of 1,000 reports on the rockets could be attributed to ‘celestial phenomena’ but that radar had detected some [200] objects "which cannot be the phenomena of nature or products of the imagination, nor can be referred to as Swedish airplanes."

Then the following summer an event occurred that was to become known all over the world and trigger the modern day UFO phenomena. On this occasion, businessman and experienced pilot, Kenneth Arnold (right) flew his private plane across the Cascade Mountains from Chehalis to Yakima in Washington. Arnold was particularly vigilant during this flight as he was aware of the offer of $5000 to anyone who could locate a missing C-46 transport aircraft belonging to the US Marine Corps that was believed to have crashed near Mount Rainier with thirty two men on board.

Arnold was 9200ft above the town of Mineral, 25 miles south-west of Mount Rainier, and making a 180q turn when he reported that a "tremendously bright flash lit up the surfaces of my aircraft." Although initially startled, Arnold quickly concluded that the light was simply a reflection from some other nearby plane. Then he saw another flash. "I observed far to my left and to the north, a formation of very bright objects coming from the vicinity of Mount Baker, flying very close to the mountain tops and travelling at tremendous speed."

Arnold calculated that the craft were travelling at over 1700mph. "They didn’t fly like any aircraft I had seen before … they flew in a definite formation, but erratically … their flight was like speed boats on rough water or similar to the tail of a Chinese kite." (4)

Arnold’s episode was confirmed by a little known letter sent on 20^th August of that year to the Air Force and found latterly in the files of Project Blue Book, the last official US investigation of the UFO phenomenon:

"Sir. Saw in the Portland paper a short time ago in regards to an article in regards to the so called flying disc having any basis in fact. I can say am a prospector and was in the Mt Adams district on June 24^th the day Kenneth Arnold of Boise Idaho claims he saw a formation of flying disc. And I saw the same flying objects at about the same time. Having a telescope with me at the time I can assure you they are real and noting like them I ever saw before they did not pass verry high over where I was standing at the the time. Plobly 1000ft. they were Round about 30 foot in diamater tapering sharply to a point in the head and in an oval shape. With a bright top surface. I did not hear any noise as you would from a plane. But there was an object in the tail end looked like a big hand of a clock shifting from sside to side like a big magenet. There speed as far as ii know seemed to be greater than anything I ever saw. Last view I got of the objects they were standing on edge Banking in a Cloud.

Your Respectfully,

(Fred Johnson.)

(Note: The Blue Book file page which contains this letter is labelled "A TRUE COPY" that was authenticated by Lt. Col. Donald Springer. The errors in the text are from the original letter. (5) See Appendix 1)

Arnold’s account augured a flurry of similar reports – in fact eight hundred and fifty similar sightings were reported to the US Authorities between June and July of 1947 alone. Arnold later published details of his experience and the term ‘flying saucer’ entered the public domain following a newspaper interview he gave shortly after his experience.

Of course at the time, the immediate governmental response wasn’t that there was an alien presence in the sky, but that more Earthly enemies had developed technologies that could pose a threat to the United States.

Then in July of that year, 1947, an event occurred that decades later is still a matter of intense speculation and controversy; an event that had fed decades of allegations of conspiracies, cover-ups, suppressed information and dissemination of disinformation. Hardly surprising, perhaps, when the event triggered a headline ‘RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region’ and was authorised by the American Airforce itself.

The report that generated this headline was released by Walter Haut, the Public Information Officer at the Roswell Army Airforce Base and was based on events that occurred during a violent thunderstorm during the first week of July 1947. During that storm something crashed on the J. B. Foster Ranch, some 75 miles north-west of Roswell.

The following morning, ranch manager William Brazel (left) discovered fragments of unusual debris scattered over the ranch. In no great hurry, Brazel waited a few days before driving in to Roswell where he advised Sheriff George Wilcox of the find. Wilcox duly informed the Roswell Army Air Field, home of the 509^th Bomb Group, the world’s first atomic bomb unit (6) and Brazel then spent the whole of 8^th July 1947 day at Roswell Army Air Field before being given a military escort to the offices of the Roswell daily Herald where he refuted the crashed saucer story, merely describing a small volume of debris of no more than five pounds in weight.

Major Jesse Marcel, the unit’s Intelligence Officer, together with Captain Sheridan Cavitt, a Counter Intelligence Corps officer, accompanied Brazel back to the site. Marcel stated in a 1979 interview "we found some … small bits of metal, but mostly we found some material that’s hard to describe… I’d never seen anything like that, and I still don’t know what it was … I lit a cigarette lighter to some of this stuff, and it didn’t burn."

There were also "small, solid members that you could not bend or break, but it didn’t look like metal. It looked more like wood. They varied in size … perhaps three-eighths of an inch by one quarter of an inch thick … None of them were very long." Marcel also stated that he had seen unusual two-colour ‘hieroglyphics’ on some of the pieces as well as parchment like material (7).

The area surrounding the crash was sealed off and all the remaining debris was collected and removed by the military.

William Haut, the press officer stated in an interview with Timothy Good that he "had a call from Colonel Blanchard [Commander of the 509^th Bomb Group], and he told me to report to his office … He gave me the basic facts that he wanted to put in a news release … that we had in our possession a flying saucer. A rancher had brought parts of it in to the Sheriff’s office, and the material was flown to General Ramey, who was Commanding General of the Eight Air Force." (8)

Marcel was then ordered to load the debris onto available aircraft and fly it Fort Bliss before it was moved to Wright Field (now Wright Patterson AFB - right) at Dayton, Ohio for examination.

During an intermediate stop, Ramey took charge of the operation and those involved were sworn to secrecy. (In a 1991 sworn affidavit, General Thomas Dubose, who was then a colonel and General Ramsey’s (of Roswell AFB) deputy claims that he and Ramey received orders directly from General McMullen in Washington to hide the real UFO debris and replace it with balloon debris.)

Sure enough, within 24 hours, the original story of the ‘Flying Saucer’ was retracted and a somewhat uncomfortable looking Jesse Marcel was photographed posing alongside General Ramey with a piece of the ‘debris’ and announcing that the object was not a flying saucer after all but merely debris from a crashed weather balloon.

Whether it was a flying disk or not, we do now know that this account was untrue for the Air Force have recently retracted that particular story and replaced it with another one that no-one believes either.

They now claim that the predecessor to the US Air Force, the US Army Air Forces recovered debris from an Army Air Forces balloon project code-named Project Mogul.

As for the ‘alien bodies’ allegedly found at the crash site; these were apparently anthropomorphic test dummies that were taken up into the skies by US Air Force high altitude balloons for scientific research (right) (9).

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