UFOs in Wartime: What They Didn't Want You To Know by Mack Maloney

Author:Mack Maloney
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group
Published: 2011-08-15T04:00:00+00:00

15

Tales From the Cold War

One Spaceman’s Journey…

In 1951, the U.S. Air Force’s 525th Fighter-Bomber Squadron was based at Neubiberg, West Germany.

Located near Munich, the vast onetime Luftwaffe airfield was a short flight from the border of what was then communist-controlled Czechoslovakia. The 525th was there to patrol that hostile front line of the Cold War.

Tensions were high both in Europe and around the world in 1951. Germany was split in two, communist East staring down the democratic West. Russia now had atomic weapons. Its client state, North Korea, had invaded U.S. ally South Korea the year before, and no sooner had the United States gotten the upper hand in that war than a half million Red Chinese troops entered the fray, making the conflict even more bloody while threatening to turn Asia into a nuclear wasteland. In the early 1950s, all-out war with the Communist Bloc seemed inevitable.

The pilots of the 525th flew the F-86 Sabre jet; its communist adversaries just over the border were equipped with the MiG-15. These same two aircraft were battling each other on a daily basis high above Korea, half a world away.

Always on combat alert, the 525th was frequently scrambled whenever Soviet or Soviet-allied aircraft were detected too close to the border of West Germany.

So it was one particular day when a call came in that a virtual armada of unidentified aircraft had been spotted heading toward West Germany. The 525th was quickly airborne, its fighters climbing to meet what they were sure was an aerial onslaught of Russian MiGs.

But when the 525th Sabres reached their maximum altitude of 45,000 feet, their pilots discovered that the horde of bogeys were not Russian fighters. This air fleet was made up of metallic objects, shaped like saucers. And there were lots of them.

The objects were flying far too high for the Sabres to challenge them. So the 525th’s pilots could do little more than watch as the swarm of UFOs passed over.

Flying one of those Sabres that day was a young second lieutenant named Gordon Cooper. As he would later tell it, streams of UFOs went over the 525th’s base regularly for the next three days. Sometimes they were in groups of four; other times, in groups of as many as sixteen. They were almost always flying from east to west.

Again, Cooper and his colleagues could do little to stop them. Besides flying so high, the UFOs displayed high degrees of maneuverability. They would sometimes move at very high speed; other times they would hover motionless as the fighters of the 525th simply flew beneath them, helpless.

Finally, everyone realized that the 525th was wasting its time chasing the saucers; they eventually gave up trying to intercept them. Instead, the pilots would stay on the ground and use binoculars to watch the UFOs fly overhead.

The worst-case scenario — that the high-flying, incredibly maneuverable aircraft were of Soviet design — quickly faded. After a while it became the opinion of Cooper and just about anyone who’d seen them that these objects were not made in Russia, or China, or anywhere else on earth.

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