Important Sightings, 1939–45
Military pilots active during these years witnessed a variety of unidentified aircraft, and chased (or were chased by) some of them. Fliers attributed some incidents to foo fighters. Civilian sightings of the period are no less puzzling. 1939: During a professional visit to Washington, D.C., a Greenwich, Ohio, minister named Turner Hamilton Holt is taken to a Capitol Building sub- basement by his cousin, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and shown large, chemical-filled glass “jars” containing the preserved corpses of four humanoids.
The secret room also stores silver-metallic wreckage of a “vehicle.” Note: When he related the story to his daughters, Reverend Holt described the humanoids as “creatures.” At the scene, Hull explained to Holt that the creatures remained hidden in order to prevent panic. When invited by Hull to “lift” the wreckage, Holt was startled by the metal’s unusually light weight. Around 2000, MUFON/CUFOS official William E. Jones contacted the Capitol Building’s curator, who confirmed the 1939 existence of a sub-basement (since removed).
But neither Hull’s desk diary, memoirs, nor voluminous papers suggest the creatures’ existence.
June 1940: The crew of an antiaircraft gun at Hoy Island, the Orkneys, Scotland, locks onto a flying sphere and tracks its course for ten seconds. Note: Calculations made from the gun’s range-finder revealed that the object flew at thirty-eight thousand feet.
April 1941: Rev. William Huffman hurries to a plane crash outside Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and discovers three deceased humanoids near a badly damaged, seamless metallic disc. The bodies are about four feet tall and dressed in metallic coveralls. Reverend Huffman notes the creatures’ gray skin tone and unusually long fingers. Local military removes bodies and craft.
February 24–25, 1942: Antiaircraft guns open up on a formation of discs flying high above war-nerved L.A., kicking off the noisiest portion of the Battle of Los Angeles. Note: Read the full story earlier in this chapter.
July 1942: In rural Kannaanpaa, Finland, a dark-haired woman leads a nine- year-old girl into a forest and to a metallic craft that sits on tripod landing gear.
Outside the craft, two men hold tightly to a frightened thirteen-year-old boy. As the group prepares to enter the craft, the girl “hears” boarding instructions in her head, without audible sound. The woman asks the girl questions about Jesus, explains that there is no such thing as time, and suggests that the group is going to take a journey. Meanwhile, the boy sits on the floor, screaming. Note: The girl returned home safely but suffered stomach upset and seriously swollen eyes.
She recovered after a month, but the boy was institutionalized at age seventeen.
October 28, 1943: A test of an American cloaking device at the Philadelphia Naval Yard goes awry, pushing some crewmen of the destroyer USS Eldridge into madness, and physically harming others. Note: One persistent rumor about this controversial event is that the cloaking technology had been acquired from extraterrestrials, or that UFOs above the Yard caused the mental and physical damage. For more on the so-called “Philadelphia Experiment,” see chapter fifteen.
June 18, 1944: On an Oahu, Hawaii, beach near Kaneohe, U.S. Navy engineer Edward Langer sees a spherical craft on the sand and then encounters seven aggressive “dwarfs,” about 4½ feet tall and dressed in green coveralls. Langer struggles with one of the little creatures and manages to snatch a belt with an attached black box. Note: Langer claimed later that the OSS confiscated the belt device. Then there is the “seven dwarfs” aspect of this story, which sounds too ripe to be true. Then again, the initial encounter is chronicled in Ted Bloecher and David Webb’s useful Humanoid Catalog (HumCat) projects.
Summer 1944: While on his backyard swing in Meriden, Connecticut, five- year-old Bobby Luca sees a hovering, domed disc crewed by small, gray humanoids with oversized heads and eyes. The visitors temporarily paralyze the boy’s body, and communicate with him telepathically. Note: The grown-up Bob Luca was abducted by aliens in 1967 and again in 1978, the second time with his wife, Betty. Like Bob, Betty had a 1944 childhood encounter with aliens.
September 10, 1944: Five hundred German troops at Epinal, France, are startled by a white disc hovering over railroad tracks. German small-arms fire is directed at the disc, to no apparent effect.
Mid-March 1945: The battleship USS New York is followed by a high-flying silver disc in the skies above the Admiralty Islands, Bismarck Archipelago (north of New Guinea). After thirty minutes the captain gives the order to fire, but the shells burst well below the disc, suggesting that the object is at twenty thousand feet or higher. Unharmed, the disc rapidly ascends and disappears. The incident is witnessed by sailors and Marines.
Mid-July 1945: Six Hellcat fighters assigned to the USS Cowpens are scrambled to pursue a fast-moving disc, tracked on radar as flying above the top- secret Hanford Ordnance Works at Hanford, Washington. The Hellcats chase the craft well above the planes’ thirty-seven-thousand-foot ceiling, only to turn back when the object continues to ascend.
Note: Mysterious flight activity above Hanford Ordnance caused grave concern because the site developed deadly plutonium necessary to the Manhattan Project. Hellcat pilot Rolan Powell later recalled the UFO’s vaporous discharge, suggestive to him of a purposeful smoke screen. Hanford was home to Reactor B, the world’s first full-scale plutonium- production reactor. The reactor became fully operational in February 1945, five months before the encounter described here. The Hanford facility expanded during the Cold War, and continued to produce weapons-grade plutonium. It attracted UFOs until 1987, when the final nuclear reactor was decommissioned.