Aviation During World War I
During the European war of 1914–18, German zeppelins sent over London to drop bombs did damage but were no match for winged British aircraft fitted with Lewis machine guns, which chewed the bags of gas to pieces. Allied aerial- photographic reconnaissance that upended a great deal of German ground strategy impressed the public—and planted the idea that aircraft flying at an incredible twenty thousand feet could observe you without you even knowing.
Aviation advancements on both sides of the conflict spurred development of increasingly specialized aircraft; while the ground war seemed stalled during 1917–18, airplanes were undertaking air-to-air combat, recon, close air support, strategic bombing, tactical bombing, night bombing, and other dedicated tasks.
At war’s end, aviation showed promise as a carrier of mail and supplies, but because it lacked practical passenger capability, lay observers regarded the science of flight as a primarily aggressive one.
Aviation During the Interwar Years
The seeming equivalency of death and aircraft grew stronger during the 1920s and ’30s, when Great Britain turned the RAF against various British colonies in Africa and the Middle East; and in 1935, when Italian dictator Mussolini’s Regina Aeronautica fielded nearly four hundred modern aircraft against an Ethiopian air defense consisting of four pilots responsible for about a dozen outmoded planes. To further drive home the aerial superiority issue, Italian planes dropped mustard gas onto hapless Ethiopian troops. During 1936–39, Germany’s Luftwaffe sent a “volunteer” Condor Legion to strafe and bomb loyalist troops and civilians during the Spanish Civil War. So great was the horror that Spanish painter Pablo Picasso felt moved to create one of his most vivid and disturbing works, Guernica.
Aerial war in Asia unfolded in a similarly one-sided manner: when Japan began its fourteen-year war with China in 1931, it utilized airplanes in reconnaissance, ground support, and spotting for Japanese artillery. Chinese pilots were unskilled, and Russian aircraft and “volunteer” pilots did little to help. On December 12, 1937, Japanese bombers and fighters attacked and sank the USS Panay, a shallow-draft gunboat carrying American diplomats and other civilians up the Yangtze and away from Japanese mayhem in Nanking. Three people on board the Panay died, and Americans were both vexed and frightened.
Japan claimed the attack was a mistake and paid reparations to Washington, but to people around the world, aircraft had become a synonym for “death from above.” Beginning hardly more than ten years later, an evolution of that psychology caused witnesses to react with great alarm to UFOs.
Eyes Only: Selected UFO Sightings, 1914–1938
August 23, 1914: The retreat of British troops during the Battle of Mons (Belgium) is aided by glowing “angels” that send arrows at the pursuing German forces.
Note: At the end of September, supernaturalist author Arthur Machen published “The Bowmen,” a fictionalized version of the tale, based on survivor accounts.
Summer 1915: A six-year-old boy observes humanoids following the landing of a bell-shaped craft at Sulitjelma, Norway. The beings are about three feet tall and wear coveralls. They have long hair, gray skin, and oversized heads.
February 29, 1916: Three dockworkers witness the passage of an unidentified flying craft carrying three occupants at Superior, Wisconsin.
May 13 and October 13, 1916: Three small children and, later, thousands of adults see the Virgin Mary at Fatima, Lisboa e Vale do Tejo, Portugal. The Virgin’s presence is announced in October by brilliant light, blue beams from the sun, and other skyborne phenomena. Note: Sources approach this famed event from various points of view: as a clear Christian-Catholic visitation; as an extraterrestrial visit mistaken for a religious apparition; as a natural event explainable by sunlight viewed through a layer of stratospheric dust, refraction of ice crystals in clouds (so-called sun dogs), or the distorting effects of direct sunlight on the human eye; and (somewhat less convincingly) as a prolonged instance of mass suggestion or mass hysteria.
Spring 1917: During aerial combat over Belgium, German pilot Peter Waitzrik witnesses fellow flier Baron von Richthofen shoot down a flying object covered in coruscating orange light. Both pilots observe the craft execute a shaky landing before disgorging two occupants, who dash into nearby woods. Note: Waitzrik waited until he was 105 years old to share this story with the press.
June 3, 1920: While fishing near Mount Pleasant, Iowa, a man named Clark Linch watches a translucent blue, egg-shaped object descend from the sky and silently settle just fifteen feet away.
Note: Linch later doubted that the craft was inhabited, as it stood only as tall as a “five-gallon cream can.” February 22, 1922: A man living in Lincoln, Nebraska, is startled when a spherical object lands near his house and releases a humanoid standing almost eight feet tall.
Note: UFOlogist Patrick Gross reports that this event has been conflated with another, less credible report made in Hubbell, Nebraska, some thirty-five years later. That account, also invoking the tall creature, came from a man named William Lamb, who claimed at other times to have seen God on photographs of the stars.
August 1922: Two silver hemispheres divided by a rotating ring are seen above Warsaw, Poland. The object releases a beam of light and then rapidly ascends out of sight.
July 1925: Before dashing off in alarm, a pair of men in Moora, Australia, get a good look at a silver, saucer-shaped object resting on four legs in a pasture.
January 1926: The plane of a stunt pilot performing above Wichita, Kansas, is surrounded by six “flying manhole covers”; each disc is about five feet in diameter.
August 5, 1926: While in mountains near Kukunor, Tibet, a party led by explorer Nicholas Roerich uses binoculars to track a silver, oblong UFO. Note: The year of this sighting is noted in some sources as 1927. 1927: Near Tamalpais, California, noted Irish poet and folklorist Ella Young observes a cigar-shaped craft make its way through the sky “by alternately contracting and elongating its body.” Note: In 1946, Young and a friend witnessed a black, bat-like craft at Morro Bay, California.
April 1927: A delivery boy in West Frankfort, Illinois, sees a revolving, metallic sphere approach and then hover above a house about a hundred feet away. The sphere is some forty feet in diameter, with a gondola-like structure on its belly. After a minute or two, a wire-like filament is extended from the sphere toward the house, as if probing the structure. The gondola’s windows close before the sphere ascends and disappears.
Mid-1929: A man is briefly abducted by occupants of a UFO near Spring Valley, New York. The witness describes the occupants as short, “very distorted” humanoids wearing outfits that resemble “a diving suit.” June 12, 1929: While on horseback near Fermeneuve, Quebec, a young man named Levis Brosseau is startled by something on the ground, a dark object about fifty feet in diameter and about sixteen feet high. The object has a yellow light that illuminates four or five minuscule figures standing nearby. After a few moments, the craft lifts from the ground and flies off. Note: Accounts do not make clear whether the craft left the tiny humanoids behind. 1930: A “little pink creature” about two feet tall walks into a rough-hewn camp shelter in Mandurah, Western Australia, and alarms a fifteen-year-old girl.
Hairless and supporting an oversized head, the humanoid has a “slit of a mouth” and oversized eyes. The skin appears wet or oily. The girl’s father scoops the creature in a net and puts it outside. Note: The unidentified witness related this story in 1982, after looking at a picture of Steven Spielberg’s E.T.
Summer 1932: A snapshot of a man taken in St. Paris, Ohio, includes a domed saucer aloft in the background. Note: Apparently, neither the subject, George Sutton, nor the photographer noticed the object.
Summer 1933: After puzzling over odd lights occurring over a period of weeks, two men and a woman from Nipawin, Saskatchewan, Canada, observe a domed, saucer-shaped craft on the ground, attended to by small humanoids wearing silver clothes and helmets or caps. The witnesses, who secretly watch for about thirty minutes, get the impression that the humanoids are repairing the craft.
Note: When the witnesses returned two days later, they found imprints of landing gear. Some sources date this incident to 1935. Also, some accounts misspell Nipawin as Nipawan.
July 5, 1933: A large flying sphere intrudes upon a nighttime formation of RAF fighters over Sussex, England. Sudden engine failure causes two planes to land. The pilot of another flies close to the sphere and suffers burns to his hands and face.
December 1933–spring 1934: Residents of Sweden report unidentified, luminous planes. The craft are never seen taking off or landing, and they fly even in the worst weather. Reports of planes are joined by accounts of unexplainable engine noise and searchlight beams. Note: These “phantom planes” may have resulted from war jitters; Hitler had taken charge of Germany in January 1933, and indulged in bellicose talk that made all of Europe nervous.
Further, Germany and Russia were interested in Swedish and Finnish iron ore deposits, and may have conducted secret overflights. An official report issued by the Swedish government in April 1934 identified about 10 percent of the reports as credible, and admitted that “unauthorized air traffic has occurred.” A similar scare, dubbed “ghost rockets,” alarmed Sweden in 1946.
October 1, 1934: An elderly woman at Garganta la Olla, Spain, stumbles upon a short humanoid in shiny coveralls. Before the creature dashes off, it sends the woman a telepathic message about the impending birth of a grandson. Note: The woman later attested to the message’s accuracy.
April 1935: A silver disc flying over Antwerp, Belgium, hovers so that “robots” in square helmets can exit the craft to examine it. The witness is a man named Aerts.
October 1936: Two men hitchhiking from Eklutna, Alaska, to Anchorage are buzzed by a UFO, and must dive into a snowbank to protect themselves.
January 1937: A private pilot flying over Van Buren, Missouri, chases an unidentified flying object.
Summer 1938: A Somerville, Massachusetts, man named Malcolm Perry observes a silent, blimp-like object dressed with portholes. Perry discerns moving silhouettes inside the craft, and feels he is being watched.
July 25, 1938: Two Spanish soldiers at Guadalajara observe a dark disc, about thirty-five feet in diameter, hovering six feet above a pasture. The object’s upper and lower halves spin in opposite directions. A transparent column lowered from the belly of the object contains at least two moving figures. A blue beam is briefly aimed at the soldiers before the column retracts and the craft lifts off and disappears.
October 30, 1938: Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds radio broadcast, a news-style account of an invasion from Mars, causes concern across the country and encourages small pockets of panic in New Jersey and New York. For more on the broadcast, see chapter fifteen.