The USS New York - Update

Back on July 30, I posted a column dealing with an alleged radar sighting aboard the USS New York. The claim was that the ship had fired on a UFO. The story appeared in a magazine back in 1945, and it was suggested that the solution was Venus. Someone had seen Venus in the daytime, thought it was some sort of a Japanese attack and they opened fire. The ship’s navigator rushed up on deck and made the identification. To me, that ended the story. At best it was an IFO.

But as happens in the world of the UFO someone just didn’t like that solution and without much in the way of information started an argument. I said at the time I would look into it and have attempted to find out more. The National Archives responded with a request for money and suggested it would take three months to get what I needed. I hadn’t counted on the government shut down (what a boondoggle that was, but I digress), but I now have the information based on the deck logs of the ship.

These logs were reviewed from January 1, 1945 through April 30, 1945 and there was nothing to suggest any sort of UFO related event in that time frame. (And so that I don’t have to explain this further, I used the generic UFO as opposed to the more specific Foo Fighter which would be period appropriate.)

Here’s what I know. The USS New York was in dry dock from March 1 to March 19 and left Seeadler Harbor, Manus Island and arrived at Ulithi Harbor on March 22. During the remainder of the month, the ship was moved to Okinawa. The only entries that relate to firing the guns was target practice which happened sometime each month, meaning there was no regular schedule for it. There were notations for warfare engagements at Okinawa in March.

There were no entries referencing any unknown objects or Venus or anything that could have been taken as such. In other words, there is no corroboration for this tale from the official documentation available and even a loose interpretation of what has been written does not allow for this.

This, I believe, should resolve this. We have tales told by sailors which were reported in magazines, but there is nothing from the ship to support this. I suppose someone will say that the captain, embarrassed by his attack on Venus, left it out of the deck logs. But we were searching for anything that would match the facts and could find nothing. The logs should have provided a hint, had there been one. There was nothing.

The ball now resides with those who believe this to be a Foo Fighter or some sort of anomaly. They need to provide some new and better documentation. Unless that happens, I believe the case to be resolved.

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).