Electromagnetic Beam Weapon

Taking the opportunity to again mention my latest book, The Government UFO Files, (for those who want to know about such things) I can use it to add something more to the discussion of EM effects and an Earth-based technology that is of interest to us. Please note, so that I’m not forced to explain this time and again, I am not offering this as a solution to those UFO reports that mention EM effects and stalled car engines, only that this is a somewhat interesting side discussion.

During World War II, as the allies attempted to learn something about the Foo Fighters, they sent a fellow, Dr. David Griggs to Europe. He was there to assist with radar and to investigate the Foo Fighters. When the war ended in Europe, he went to the Pacific Theater, to continue the investigation. He was part of the Compton Scientific Intelligence Committee, and he wanted, specifically to track down Japanese military technology with an eye to finding more about their electromagnetic beam experiments. There had been some discussion that these beam weapons could interrupt the smooth functioning of engines, as had been reported in some of the European Foo Fighter cases and, of course, was what Len Stringfield would report about his own sighting near Iwo Jima at the very end of the war in the Pacific.

Griggs did find some information about this electromagnetic “ray” technology. The ray was something primitive, but “[They could] stop the engines at short range… and one massive device could kill a rabbit…” The document is somewhat difficult to decipher, but it might have suggested that the ray killed the rabbit at a distance of about three feet. Apparently the device was discovered and captured, complete with its thirty-four foot dish. According to Michael Swords, the dish and its equipment were shipped to the US, but there is no record of it arriving and there seems to be no follow up into what happened to it.

So, apparently, the Japanese had invented a weapon that could stop the operation of an engine, and I would imagine that it was some sort of electromagnetic field that suppressed the flow of electrons. I would suspect that once the engine stalled under this scenario, it would not restart without some sort of action by the operator, meaning the driver or pilot. But the range was extremely limited so as a weapon it was a novelty but not effective.

For those interested in learning more about Griggs and his investigation into the Foo Fighters I would suggest:

UFOs and Government: A Histoical Enquiry by Michael Swords, Robert Powell, et.al, Anomalist Books, pp. 5 – 10

Or

Strange Company by Keith Chester, Anomalist Books, pp. 194 – 198 (as well as many other references to him throughout the book.)

Foo Fighters and the USS New York

Well, it’s happened again. Got an email about a Foo Fighter sighting at the end of World War II which was radar confirmed. The ship, the USS New York apparently fired on the object without results which meant that they neither hit it nor drove it away. This all happened in the middle of March, 1945, sometime after the invasion of Iwo Jima and before the invasion of Okinawa.

USS New York in 1945.

According to the story, as told in several sources, it was about one o’clock in the afternoon when the captain of the New York sounded general quarters. While the crew searched the sky for the attack, down in the ship’s CIC the radar seemed to show a single object. It was then that the crew, including the captain sighted a bright, silver object overhead, seeming to follow the ship. According to Keith Chester’s Strange Company, the captain ordered his anti-aircraft batteries to open fire but there were no results. When it was clear that they were unable to engage the light, the captain ordered a cease-fire. “Within seconds,” according to Chester which, of course, means the witness, “… the object climbed up at fantastic speed until it was out of sight and off the radar scope.”

Not exactly a disk-shaped object but it happened more than two years before Arnold, and there was the hint of radar confirmation. The witness, eventually identified as Donald Pratt, said that he also had seen the report in a magazine (he thought it was “The Times” meaning Time, I suppose, but it was The New Yorker for October 27, 1945 but more on that later).

I haven’t done a very good job of describing this sighting, but only because it was a non-event. Oh the sighting happened and the New York opened fire, but the target was a bright light in the sky without a distinct shape and was way out of range of any of the anti-aircraft artillery on the ship.

According to the NICAP website, there is another side to this event, which does not negate what Pratt told researchers, only that the identity of the object was realized by the ship’s navigator sometime after the firing started. And it probably should be pointed out here that by this time, meaning March 1945, the US military, many in the civilian government and probably thousands of civilians knew of the Japanese Balloon Bombs. These were sort of “constant level balloons” designed to cross the Pacific Ocean, and then after a couple of cycles of rising and falling, would automatically release a cluster of bombs. The idea was to set fires in the Pacific Northwest and to cause other sorts of havoc on a really random game of hit or miss. The balloons did work, to a very limited extent, but the major fires were never started.

Anyway, it seems that the captain and crew thought they were looking at one of the balloon bombs or some other Japanese secret weapon. But, according to Arthur Criste, who wrote to Patrick Huyghe who had published Chester’s book, he had been on the ship during the incident and he had a different perspective (pun intended) of the sighting.

He wrote, “The object we were firing at that day was the planet Venus. It was thought to have been a Japanese balloon…”

Okay…

He continued, “The reason the radar failed to detect a target was due to the fact of its maximum which was 20,000 yards, well beyond the range of our anti-aircraft guns (which means in its somewhat convoluted way that the radar didn’t have the range to detect the object… Venus).”

He said that when the guns began firing, it woke up the navigator who thought they were being attacked. He ran topside and looked up. He recognized the object immediately. He said, “What the hell are you shooting at? That’s Venus…”

Okay…

But a letter from another sailor does not a solution make. According to The New Yorker, on pages 39 – 40, in a short article by William McGuire and Mark Murphy, they reported on what a young sailor had told them. It is essentially the same story but there was no mention of radar being involved. Sure, it mentioned that it seemed that this luminous object was following the ship, and the captain asked the gunnery officer for the range. That man said the object was about eight thousand, eight hundred yards from the ship. They opened fire but the rounds fell short, so they kept increasing the size of the weapons brought to bear. The rounds continued to fall short. Eventually they signaled to one of the destroyers to use their five-inch guns, but still had no effect on the object.

Finally, the navigator arrived topside and mentioned that they were firing at Venus. At that point the shooting stopped… and I wonder what the captain said to the young officer who told him the object was eight thousand, eight hundred yards away…but I digress

For those keeping score at home, Pratt was correct in almost everything he said, except for the object being first seen on radar and that it seemed to leave the area when the shooting stopped. The incident was mentioned in a magazine, though it is clear he had not read the magazine in a long time. Anyway, this solution seems quite logical to me and there is no reason to argue with it. The NICAP site contains all the information about this:

http://www.nicap.org/reports/4503XXsouthpacific_rep.htm

This is just one more example of getting to the final and original sources. Pratt told his tale which opened the door. Others went through it, but in the end, once the trail was followed, the logical solution was found. Chester, in his footnote about the object did mention that there was no documentation for the sighting (and in fairness to Keith, there are many new resources available today that he did not have when he put together his book).

Historical UFO Research

After reading the article about the research into the June 23, 1947 Cedar Rapids UFO sighting, a few suggested that maybe we should do that for all these older sightings. I think that the idea might be more trouble than it is worth. Here’s why.

The Cedar Rapids case was important because it was alleged the sighting of a disc took place prior to Arnold and more importantly, it was documented prior to Arnold. Granted, the documentation was in a newspaper, but if the witness said that he had seen a disc-shaped object and it was reported before Arnold, it became important. It would suggest that the Arnold description didn’t have the influence that some have since claimed.

Now, as I explained, I looked at several sources, including Dick Hall’s The UFO Evidence. Some sources suggested the sighting was published in newspapers but I could only find a single footnote and it didn’t reference a newspaper article as the source. Instead, it cited Frank Edwards in a 1956 speech.

So I began the search which eventually revealed the sighting was not made on June 23, but on the 24^th, it didn’t happen in Cedar Rapids or Iowa, and it wasn’t published until sometime after Arnold. It became just another single witness sighting of something in the sky that did nothing to advance our knowledge of UFOs.

Many of these early sightings have nothing in them to help us. Many of the 1947 sightings that preceded Arnold were reported after Arnold. If there is no documentation to support the date, meaning something dated before the Arnold sighting hit the streets (meaning when it was published), then it does nothing for us. There are many of these, but in every case I have looked at, they were noted after Arnold.

I went back through Keith Chester’s marvelous Strange Company, looking for sightings of Foo Fighters that were described as disc shaped. The trouble was all of the sightings he collected were told to him long after Arnold had told his tale. That doesn’t mean that they were no good or were confabulations; it just means that they couldn’t be documented prior to Arnold.

This all came about simply because I wanted to document disc-shaped craft before Arnold… and there is very little to do that. Yes, I know that John Martin used the term in the late 19^th century but it was a description of size rather than shape.

Yes, I know that we can track through sighting reports from the early 20^th century and find some. But these are all prior to 1940. What I wanted to find was some disc-shaped craft reported between 1940 and Arnold in June 1947.

All this is a long-winded way to suggest that looking into the sightings that were reported after Arnold but claimed to have been made before Arnold isn’t going to help in what I wanted to do. Some of these sightings are of no real scientific value no matter when they were published. They were single witness and any evidential value they had has long eroded.

There is one thing that could be done. Everyone can do what I did with the Cedar Rapids sighting. Chase it down. If you live in a town with one of these old sightings, you might want to see if you can get to the original story and not the one that is currently being reported. If you find the information is accurate, so much the better… but I’ll bet that it has been skewed somehow. I don’t know how many times I have tried to chase a sighting to the original source only to find it is significantly different or even worse, was never reported. Someone made it up long after the fact.

The point is that some sightings are just of no real importance… others should be taken to the original source and see how that stacks up with what we see today… and finally there are some very important sightings that should be stripped of the rumors so that we can concentrate on the facts.

Anecdotal Testimony and Scientific Observation

Here is a question that will become increasingly important in the coming years. When does anecdotal testimony become scientific observation? Or conversely, when does scientific observation deteriorate into anecdotal testimony?

We have been gathering data in the UFO field for decades (I’m not sure when a real effort began because we have divided everything into periods... The Great Airship of 1897, the Foo Fighters of WW II and the Ghost Rockets in Europe in 1946.) During some of those periods serious scientific investigations were attempted. The Foo Fighters were of intelligence interest during the war and were taken quite seriously by the military according to the good work done by Keith Chester. The Ghost Rockets were investigated by Lieutenant General Jimmy Doolittle in 1946, and the Air Force began a serious look at UFOs in 1948.

We have seen, in scientific enquiry where what would be considered in our world as anecdotal testimony has become scientific observation. Back in 1803, French naturalist, Jean-Bastiste Biot undertook a study of rocks that had fallen from the sky. The French Academy of Sciences, just the year before, had suggested that there were no rocks in the sky.

Here’s what is significant today. He talked to the witnesses of the falling rocks. These were untrained and unschooled people who had been on the scene when the rocks fell. He didn’t reject what they had to say because he knew that rocks couldn’t fall from the sky. He listened to them and recorded, carefully, what they had seen. He was careful to separate interpretation from the facts. This anecdotal testimony became scientific observation because it had been properly recorded even though the witnesses themselves were not scientists, and often had no formal schooling at all.

In today’s world, when we have witnesses to a UFO event, we are quick to dismiss their observations because they are anecdotal. They are not trained witnesses, even when we can talk to them within days of their sighting, even when they have written down what they have seen, and even if there is some sort of independent observations by instrumentality or photography. We argue about the validity of what they have seen because they are not reporting what we wish them to say.

A couple of years ago two young skeptics decided to perform an experiment to prove that eyewitnesses were unreliable and that UFO investigators were incompetent. They launched flares attached to balloons and waited for the UFO reports to come in...

But what we saw was that the witnesses, if they didn’t identify the balloons and flares for what they were, described, accurately, what they had seen. They talked about the nature of the lights, meaning they were red and moving slowly. They didn’t, for the most part, talk about anything other than the lights moving through the sky, though one of the witnesses did talk about a strange formation.

UFO investigators, called in, immediately identified the lights as of terrestrial manufacture and one police officer even told reporters that the lights were flares on balloons.

The point was that the witness testimony, and a careful listening to what the witnesses said, proved that they had been accurate. Trouble emerges when everyone begins to speculate about the nature of the lights... and most of these were reporters who tried to turn the story into something alien. One reporter even asking a child about aliens, when none of the witnesses had said anything about spacecraft or aliens.

Yes, I understand that with UFOs we need more than witness testimony, but the real question is why do we reject that testimony by labeling it as anecdotal? At what point can we accept the testimony as something more than the unschooled observations of the rube?

And why is it that only that testimony that seems to suggest that the observation was mundane is accepted at face value while that which suggests something strange is rejected automatically?

In other words, when does anecdotal testimony become scientific observation?

Revising UFO History

I was reading a new book the other day, Strange Company by Keith Chester (seen here), and realized a couple of things. First, we’re going to have to change the history of the UFO phenomenon. Until this book came out, we all dated the "modern" era from the Kenneth Arnold sighting of June 24, 1947. It is now clear that the modern era began during the Second World War.

Let me explain that quickly. Chester’s book is about the foo fighters that we’ve all heard about. I believed that these were balls of light, maybe St. Elmo’s Fire or the like, that followed Allied aircraft on their missions during the war. I had thought of them as indistinct, small, glowing orbs of ionized air and that while some pilots thought of them as possible enemy weapons, there wasn’t much to them.

Chester, in his book details hundreds of sightings, many of them suggesting large, solid objects. Chester, using the style of the 1960s UFO books, gives us many sightings, but he includes the names of the witnesses and often the documents, once classified, but now housed in the National Archives that provide the details.

He also tells us of a coordinated effort on the part of Allied intelligence to identify the objects, believing them to be either new German weapons, or in the Pacific, new Japanese weapons. Our aircraft fired on them more than once, but there seems to have been no retaliation and while the capabilities of these objects worried the Allied powers at the highest levels, there seemed to be no actual indications that they were any sort of enemy technological break through.

There was a large intelligence effort to solve the riddle of the foo fighters with many believing that at the end of the war they would learn the truth. That didn’t happen, but with so many of the sightings classified, no one really talked about them. True, some of the high ranking officers or scientists on the other side were interviewed, but they were as confused as those on the Allied side. Only once in a great while would something appear about the foo fighters, but my impression, and I’m sure that of others was that, from a ufological point of view, there was nothing much to them.

The modern era, then, begins not in June, 1947, but during the war... and I haven’t even approached the idea of the Ghost Rockets seen in Europe in the summer of 1946. This was a series of sightings that mirrored those that would be reported here in 1947. We basically ignored it because the sightings were limited in scope and many believed them to be the result of hysteria that survived the war. (And yes, I know that US government sent Jimmy Doolittle to investigate, but that really is a subject for another posting).

Now, all of this is very interesting, but there are a couple of names that surface in Chester’s book that I found just as interesting. One of them is Colonel Howard McCoy. Many inside the UFO field don’t know who he was, but in 1947 and later, he held an important intelligence post. He was the chief of T-2 of the Air Materiel Command’s intelligence division that included oversight of Project Sign, the original UFO investigation.

Given the interest in the flying saucers (a term in widespread use in 1947 contrary to the opinions of a few in the UFO field) the Air Force created a science advisory board chaired by rocket expert Theodore von Karman. They held their first important meeting in March, 1948 and in attendance was McCoy. The minutes of that meeting were declassified in 1996.

During that March meeting, as McCoy briefed the scientists about the intelligence mission, McCoy said, "We have a new project - Project Sign - which may surprise you as a development from the so-called mass hysteria of the past Summer when we had all the unidentified flying objects or discs. This can’t be laughed off... We are running down every report. I can’t tell you how much we would give to have one of those crash in an area so that we could recover whatever they are."

(Yes, I know this is an important statement for the skeptics of the Roswell case, but that’s not the point of this posting... we’ll look at it in a later report.)

McCoy, then, had been charged, indirectly, with the investigation of the flying saucers. If this was his first brush with that, we could make a number of arguments but those simply won’t fly when we examine the information that comes from Chester’s book (seen below).

We learn that in August, 1944, the Allies created the Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee (CIOS) which was charged, in part, with the problem of the foo fighters. They held their first meeting in London on September 6, 1944, and what is interesting is some of the representatives who are there... one, Commander Ian Fleming, I mention simply because he would write the James Bond novels, but two of the others are Howard Robertson of the 1953 Robertson Panel on UFOs and another is Colonel Howard McCoy.

That’s the same McCoy who would find himself charged with the first official investigation of UFOs in 1948 known as Project Sign (and called Project Saucer in the public arena for those who didn’t think they used the term then).

But what is interesting here is that we find that reports about the foo fighters have ended up like those of UFOs. Those in a position to know what was happening produced classified documents that have now disappeared. A great deal of data had been gathered and while it seems that many believed the foo fighters to be enemy weapons, that certainly wasn’t the case. Interrogations of high-ranking officers and captured scientists, after the war, showed that they knew no more about the foo fighters than did the Allies. All sides seemed to believe that the foo fighters belonged to the other.

When we reach 1947, McCoy found himself in the same place he had been during the war. Reports of strange objects in the sky, not just bright lights or balls of fire, but of solid, metallic craft coming from trained pilots. True, there were more reports from civilians and it’s probably true that the military didn’t care about those, but they were getting reports from both military and civilian pilots. Those couldn’t be ignored.

McCoy still had no answer. All he knew was that something that had appeared during the war that had seemed to be confined to the combat arenas in Europe and the South Pacific were now over the United States. He still didn’t know what they were, and that might have colored his thinking.

After the sightings over Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1952, the president wanted some answers. One of the things done was the creation of a scientific panel to study the UFOs, using the best of the cases from what was then known as Project Blue Book [which had superceded Project Grudge which had superceded Project Sign]. This panel was sponsored by the CIA and who chaired it? Howard Robertson, the same guy who had worked with McCoy during the war.

Other members of the panel was Luis Alverez and Samuel A. Goudsmit, who were both involved in the investigation of the foo fighters. About the only person missing from the list was Howard McCoy, but then, McCoy did have representatives there in the guise of the Project Blue Book officers whose role was to provide information for the panel.

Their conclusions, which were probably influenced by their investigations of the foo fighters, was that the flying saucers posed no threat to national security. If we count the foo fighters in the UFO mix, then these things had been around for more than a decade and there were no reports of flying saucers damaging our national security at that time.

The Second name that caught my attention was William Blanchard. In 1947 Blanchard was the commanding officer in Roswell but during the war he commanded the 40th Bomb Group. I wouldn’t mention this, except that during the October 25, 1944 mission, three of his B-29 crews reported high-altitude balloons on three separate occasions. About three years later, a high altitude balloon called Mogul would allegedly fool Blanchard’s intelligence officer and Blanchard himself. He would order then Lieutenant Walter Haut to issue a press release saying they had captured one of the flying saucers. Makes you wonder what it is about Blanchard and high altitude balloons that kept him, or members of his unit, from identifying them.

What this shows is that the all the early UFO phenomena is interconnected with the same names popping up in the early history. Those who investigated the foo fighters, those who saw and reported foo fighters were those who reported flying saucers and who investigated them.

The one common element in all of this is secrecy. First a secrecy borne in the necessity of the war and later a secrecy that is the natural outgrowth of high level military and scientific thinking. But it is a secrecy that has inhibited UFO research from the very beginning and it is a secrecy that is only now being lifted so that we can glimpse the truth.

For more information, see: