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16: Unidentified Aerial Podcast #3 - Strange lights in wartime skies
392 Plays3 years ago
Dave Partridge (Creator of Shadows of your Mind magazine) & Graeme Rendall (Author) are two of the UK's best when it comes to the history of UFOs.
In this episode Graeme goes into detail about the foo fighter phenomenon that was seen in the skies of wartime Europe, after all he did literally write a book on the subject!
We find out their peculiar characteristics, disdain for pilot abilities, and their penchant for befuddling air ministries on both sides of the conflict.
Dave tries to fit in as many song titles by the popular rock beat combo Foo Fighters into the conversation as he can. Why? All is revealed at the end of the show, so pay attention!
How to get in touch;
Email: UnidentifiedAerialPodcast@gmail.com
Twitter: @ShadowsMagazine (Dave) or @Borders750 (Graeme)
@AnomalousPodNet
Competition details;
WIN a signed copy of Graeme Rendall's book 'UFOs Before Roswell - European Foo Fighters 1940-45. To be in with a chance of winning this fantastic historical resource all you have to do is follow Anomalous Podcast Network on twitter and retweet our competition post with your answer to the following question: Dave had a pre-determined list of 52 song titles by the popular rock band Foo Fighters that he wanted to slip into the conversation with Graeme, how many did he actually manage to mention? Some were obvious, some a little more obscure, but it was still fun nonetheless!
Only one entry per person permitted. The closing date for entries is midnight on 31st March 2022. No purchase necessary. In the event of a tie, the earliest correct answer will be declared the winner and we'll be in touch privately for contact details."
This podcast is produced by the Anomalous Podcast Network, in association with That UFO Podcast (@ufouapam)
Audio Graeme mentions; https://archive.org/details/UFOLOGYAPrimerInAudio19391959Guide/004.mp3
In this episode Graeme goes into detail about the foo fighter phenomenon that was seen in the skies of wartime Europe, after all he did literally write a book on the subject!
We find out their peculiar characteristics, disdain for pilot abilities, and their penchant for befuddling air ministries on both sides of the conflict.
Dave tries to fit in as many song titles by the popular rock beat combo Foo Fighters into the conversation as he can. Why? All is revealed at the end of the show, so pay attention!
How to get in touch;
Email: UnidentifiedAerialPodcast@gmail.com
Twitter: @ShadowsMagazine (Dave) or @Borders750 (Graeme)
@AnomalousPodNet
Competition details;
WIN a signed copy of Graeme Rendall's book 'UFOs Before Roswell - European Foo Fighters 1940-45. To be in with a chance of winning this fantastic historical resource all you have to do is follow Anomalous Podcast Network on twitter and retweet our competition post with your answer to the following question: Dave had a pre-determined list of 52 song titles by the popular rock band Foo Fighters that he wanted to slip into the conversation with Graeme, how many did he actually manage to mention? Some were obvious, some a little more obscure, but it was still fun nonetheless!
Only one entry per person permitted. The closing date for entries is midnight on 31st March 2022. No purchase necessary. In the event of a tie, the earliest correct answer will be declared the winner and we'll be in touch privately for contact details."
This podcast is produced by the Anomalous Podcast Network, in association with That UFO Podcast (@ufouapam)
Audio Graeme mentions; https://archive.org/details/UFOLOGYAPrimerInAudio19391959Guide/004.mp3
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Transcript
Introduction to Anomalous Podcast Network
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Anomalous Podcast Network. Multiple voices, one phenomenon.
Flying Saucers and Radar Sightings in Washington
00:00:11
Speaker
I'm here to discuss the so-called flying saucer. In Washington, ghost-like objects dart across the radar screen at the CAA Traffic Control Center at National Airport for several hours.
00:00:29
Speaker
You are interested in the unknown, the mysterious, the unexplainable. That is why you are here. You are about to experience the awe and mystery.
Unidentified Aerial Podcast with Dave and Graham
00:00:50
Speaker
Hi, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Unidentified Aerial podcast on the anomalous podcast network.
00:00:59
Speaker
I'm Dave Partridge, editor of Shadows of Your Mind magazine and also part of UAP Media UK and joining me as ever is my friend and co-host and colleague Mr Graham Rendell. Hi Graham. Hello Dave, how are you tonight? Very well, thank you.
00:01:15
Speaker
Yeah, fine. It's wet, windy and awful in the thumbling tonight, but I'm in the safe and warm. We know there's a lot of other things going on in the world in this moment and we just want to throw out our support for those who are being abreast and we stick with Ukraine.
Recap of Maury Island Case
00:01:38
Speaker
Yeah, it's a horrible, horrible thing going on at the moment and everything is sorted out as quick as possible.
00:01:46
Speaker
As bad as things are elsewhere, we have to, well, we will get on with things. And I guess this episode, I mean, have you recovered from the bucket
Focus on Foo Fighter Phenomenon
00:02:00
Speaker
full of incredulacy that you had thrown at your last time, Graham, with the Maury Island case?
00:02:06
Speaker
Yes, people sort of noted upon the fact that I was getting more and more incredulous as the episode went on. And I think I plumbed new depths as to what you can't be serious. I sound like John McEnroe at the end. It was it was crazy. It was just more and more layers to the story and they're getting more and more preposterous as the episode went on. So hopefully this one's going to be a bit more straightforward.
00:02:31
Speaker
Yes definitely and I know it's definitely in your ballpark which you know I'm looking forward to as well because I kind of know about these things but then I don't know about them and you are the perfect person to give a slight layman's guide around what is affectionately known as the Foo Fighter phenomena. Hmm and not the band. Not the band although that was probably the first mention of the term Foo Fighters I ever heard back in 94.
00:02:59
Speaker
when the band rose from the ashes of Nirvana.
00:03:04
Speaker
I remember that phrase from books that I read in the 1970s although there were quite fleeting references with very little to back them up so I'd heard of it but obviously it's one of those things that you sort of forget a bit about over the mists of time and then the name comes back again as somebody makes a ban you know thinks of a ban name and oh yeah we'll use those. Yeah I mean it's good because it brings it into everybody's consciousness. What a few
Graham's Book Competition
00:03:30
Speaker
fighters. When you look at them up and they hear what my poor brain
00:03:34
Speaker
But anyway, we have a special announcement at the beginning of the show. We're going to run a competition and the prize will be a signed copy of Graham's book. You were faced before Roswell. You've been through fighters 1940 to 1945 as a subtitle. Yeah, I always forget the subtitle subtitles are everything, especially on the TV.
00:04:05
Speaker
You could have a book like UFOs before Roswell and you could talk about the Nuremberg wood cutting of the 1600s or the 1700s or Alexander the Great with these alleged fiery shields. So I had to have a kind of, you know, make sure that people were understanding what they were buying. Yeah, UFOs before Roswell, but you're only going to stick to five years. Yes, five or six years, 1940 and 1945, yeah.
00:04:30
Speaker
So yeah, the competition prize will be a signed copy of Graham's book. And we will tell you how to enter at the end of the show. Yeah, so you have to listen to the end.
WWII Foo Fighters Phenomenon
00:04:42
Speaker
No fast forwarding mind. No fast forwarding. No, I recommend that you pay attention to everything that I say. And the more so, that Graham says, because you're going to need that, I think. But anyway, we'll explain all in the end.
00:04:57
Speaker
So yeah, Foo Fighters. I mean, they are a phenomenon that
00:05:09
Speaker
propped up in World War Two, see lights flying around, the Allied fighters, the German fighters and some as you informed me a while ago in the Pacific theater as well. I mean, we kind of think of the few fighters as being rumored to be German secret weapons. And the Germans thought that they were Allied secret weapons.
00:05:34
Speaker
But when did the first actual site of the Foo Fighters begin, Graham? OK, so if you're talking about the Foo Fighters, as in what the American night fighter crews termed them as, these balls of light, as you mentioned, they were following aircraft, they were sitting on the wingtips, generally not doing anything hostile, but just following them, but scaring the hell out of the crews. Then the sighting started in about September, October 1944.
00:05:59
Speaker
The literature says that it started at the end of November 1944, but actually you can trace sightings through the official records of various American night fighter units that you'll see that they actually encountered them slightly earlier than what is generally accepted and has been generally accepted over the years.
00:06:19
Speaker
Right. So, I mean, could you walk us through how these things looked? I mean, was it like a halo? Was it an aurora? Or, you know, were they kind of like the Gorman site in 48, you know, just green?
00:06:37
Speaker
You might as well look at the Gorman kind of dog fighters, it was called. And that was effectively what was going on over the skies of Europe in late 1944, early 1945, with four particular US Army Air Force night fighter squadrons, two based in Western Europe and two based in Italy. So they were coming across these weird lights. They were mostly red, but they weren't always red. Sometimes they were orange, sometimes white, yellow,
00:07:05
Speaker
even blue and they were seen different places but the the common factor was that they would often follow the aircraft involved and despite the pilots best you know efforts to try and shake them off by violent evasive maneuvers
00:07:22
Speaker
These things just stuck on the tail like glue effectively. They wouldn't move. They just sat off the tail and didn't matter how the pilot threw the aircraft around the sky. They just stayed there until, of course, they disappeared off on their own volition. That was the only way they used to disappear. It wasn't as if the pilots could get rid of them. And they didn't open fire at them either because they weren't entirely sure what would happen if they did.
00:07:47
Speaker
And there was one other factor as well. They didn't appear on radar. So these aircraft that were flying around, they were night fighters. They had onboard airborne interception radar. It was very short-ranged. The range was maybe five, six miles. It wasn't very much. But that was enough. If that had been a solid object, if it had been some kind of German night fighter, some German secret weapon, chances are it would have been picked up on the radar. But every time, they didn't see anything at all on the radar scopes.
00:08:16
Speaker
And even on the ground, radars as well didn't pick anything up at all. I mean, that kind of sounds like, you know, there's something from nothing more or less. Where did...
00:08:28
Speaker
You know, when the pilots first saw them, did they just pop into being or were they kind of like these floaty objects that they came across, you know, when they were going back and forth over sister Europe? Some of the reports suggest that they were coming either up from or very near to the ground.
00:08:46
Speaker
But other reports say they just appeared or they were seen in the distance above hills or above trees or just generally somewhere else and then they made a beeline for the aircraft and sat off their tail or off their wingtips. Sometimes they just appeared.
00:09:02
Speaker
Now, there are other reports where they were seen at a distance as well, and they didn't actually interact with the aircraft, the pilot and the radar observer were observing them from. So there's all different facets, there's no real two stories exactly the same, but there's a whole raft of reports. Now, these reports, just because they were being reported by the Americans, that wasn't just the scale of phenomenon.
00:09:25
Speaker
Now they were called Foo Fighters because a particular crewman from the 415th Night Fighter Squadron called them that and that was where the name comes from but the actual phenomenon itself had been seen much earlier in the war and you're going back to 1942 when the first records or sort of verbal records of pilots and crew members seeing similar things
00:09:49
Speaker
flying around the skies of Europe were encountered. So, you know, it's not a particular kind of phenomenon was just confined to those American units in Europe, in Italy, and that particular part of the wall. It just happened to be called something else beforehand.
00:10:06
Speaker
Sure. And so when these, you know, what kind of planes were being encountered by these lights? Was it just your standard fighters like the Spitfire and Aragon? No, these were specialized night fighter aircraft. So the Americans, because when they entered the war, they didn't have actually a night fighter type of their own. They had to borrow or rather lease Bristol bow fighters, which was a standard night fighter aircraft from the RAF.
00:10:35
Speaker
and they sort of gave some of their more war-weary aircraft to the Americans when they were setting up night fighter units based in England in 1943. There was actually one unit, the 416, which was based in Italy, which encountered food fighters over the winter of 44-45. They were actually formed and trained about two miles down the road from where I live in the thunderland. So I've got a little bit of a sort of tenuous local connection here.
00:10:57
Speaker
It's one of these two fighters sort of encountering units, as you're like. They trained at Aclington. One of their aircraft actually crashed a couple of miles from where I live. So, you know, there is a connection there. But that was one of the types of aircraft. The other aircraft was an indigenous type, an American type, which was built slightly later and only appeared on the scene just before D-Day. So in about May 1944, the first deliveries of the P-61 Black Widow, the Northrop,
00:11:26
Speaker
Black Widow, which was a two or three-seater aircraft with a remote-controlled turret in some versions, and it was a dedicated night fighter. And they started delivering them in 1944. They were ready to go to Europe just after the Normandy invasion, and then they started equipping units. The 422nd night fighter squadron in Belgium operated them.
00:11:45
Speaker
and there was also some delivered to Italy, one of the Italian squadrons as well, but mostly they were bow fighters. The four and fifth where the name Foo Fighters come from, they flew exclusively bow fighters and so did the one of the units in Italy as well. So yeah, they're not well known types, you know, they're not like Spitfires or Hurricanes, you know, everybody you wouldn't know. These are quite dedicated aircraft for that particular task for night fighting.
00:12:11
Speaker
Sure. So going back to the color and the shape, you've already said there's red and green lights that were seen. And now with regards to shape, were they just, were they spherical? I mean, did anyone get close enough to see anything else about it? For example, like Ryan Graves, Lieutenant Ryan Graves, as mentioned, off the East Coast of America, he's sort of like a cube within a spear.
00:12:36
Speaker
I mean, did the pilots get that close? Did they get that kind of detail in the reports? Right. The thing is, you have to go back to the war and how much time and how much effort was spent on putting together these reports, not just these particular reports as in Foo Fighter reports, but generally reporting on missions.
00:12:54
Speaker
you were lucky to get a lot of detail. Most of it was fairly standard. The way the things were formatted was quite standard. And unless it was something really unusual, then you didn't get much more than a few lines or a few words. And even that depended on the particular unit and the person who was putting it together. Some just couldn't be bothered. There's variations. But when you do get the reports,
00:13:17
Speaker
it talks about just lights basically you get very little else than that so you don't get a sense of the kind of shape involved whether there was circular whether they were oval whether the square you know this kind of stuff yeah um some of them do go a little bit in more into more detail but you very rarely get much more than a red light that followed the aircraft and of course some of them were so bright that they couldn't really work out was there anything behind them they were just lights
00:13:43
Speaker
um you know there were no shapes or anything that these lights could have been fitted to so that you know you were quite hamstrung unfortunately by the lack of detail in the official reporting beyond lights that followed aircraft yeah hence they were called you know the thing or the light and you know it was just you know they they weren't chasing birds no
00:14:08
Speaker
Yeah, that was the RAF nickname. They were the RAF nicknames, the thing or the light for effectively what were the Foo Fighters later on that were coined by the Americans. And these stories, I mean, some of them, when you hear some of the or read some of the pilots who were chasing these things or being chased by these things,
00:14:26
Speaker
they are simply lights with no substance beyond just lights. There's one particular story of a hurricane pilot who was flying back over northern France, back towards the channel on a night intruder mission at the end of 1942. And these two orange lights, that's sort of in tandem, they're next to each other, but one's higher than the other. Now, you would think, oh, two lights, they're probably just on the wing tip of an aircraft.
00:14:51
Speaker
but the aircraft would be at an angle and have one wing high and one wing low and of course if you don't fly like that so but that's what the pilot said how they
Military Intelligence on Foo Fighters
00:15:01
Speaker
were chasing him and then when they got the english channel and by halfway across the channel they then just bugged off sort of thing so you know it was it was weird and of course when he got back to his squadron his colleagues didn't believe him so one of the pilots decided right the next night to try and find them
00:15:16
Speaker
And he encountered them as well. So it's it's really strange. You know, just lights and time after time after time, you see the same reports, but with very little else in kind of detail. Sure. I mean, I can imagine the RAF, you know, the higher ups, they would have been like up in arms, you know, just trying to work out what these things were, why they were being encountered by that pilot.
00:15:43
Speaker
and I guess they were trying to work out whether there was any pattern to them. Are they just appearing over certain areas, sensitive areas, or were they just completely random locations that just happened to be on
00:15:59
Speaker
you know a new way home or something like that. It's interesting to try and work out how far these reports went up the kind of food chain in terms of the senior officers. There's different levels to how the information went up the line. So you have the crews came back from missions, the bomber crews let's say, came back from missions.
00:16:19
Speaker
before they could retire for the night, once they got back to their base, they would be debriefed by the intelligence staff. Now they would just be flight lieutenants, they'd be quite lowly officers and they would sit around a table with the crew and one guy and he would just take down notes.
00:16:34
Speaker
But a lot of the time they didn't believe the crews. They thought there was all kind of spurious reasons as to why they were reporting all these kind of things. You know, have you been drinking? You know, are you trying to get off flying duties? You know, are you trying to say that you're mad, you know, that you're unfit for flying? Because that's obviously that was a kind of morality. Have you been drinking the alcohol from the compass?
00:16:51
Speaker
Yeah, all sorts of things were coming up. But when the reports did get past that level, that kind of barrier to pushing the information up the chain, then sometimes we know it was taken more seriously because there are records to say that happened. And it went up to not just beyond squadron level, but up to group level, which was the next rank up in terms of command. So that was like a collection of squadrons.
00:17:16
Speaker
But then whether it went any higher than that, well it did, but then that's where the trail goes cold. And you don't see, especially in the early part of the war, say 4243 from the RAF's point of view, you don't really see where these reports went and what was done with them in terms of senior officers. Now that's not the same as the RAF Bomber Command's operational research section.
00:17:41
Speaker
which effectively is like a precursor to the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson, who did air technical analysis of flying saucer reports in the 40s and 50s.
00:17:56
Speaker
operational research, the research section of Bomber Command, were effectively looking at patterns in terms of German anti-aircraft weapons, in night fighter defenses, in searchlight patterns, all this kind of stuff, to try and work out better ways of not being shot down. Now the kind of strange lights
00:18:14
Speaker
came into this equation very early on. So even when you and I were down at the records down in Kew Gardens in London last year, I was digging through reports from 1941 from the operational research section of Bomber Command looking at their analysis of these strange lights.
00:18:33
Speaker
And back in that time in the war, they were following aircraft for sometimes were 100, 150, even in one case, 250 miles across Europe, you know, towards the towards the target, but doing nothing. And most of the time, they couldn't even, you know, again, what we said before.
00:18:51
Speaker
They couldn't see any shape behind the light. It was just a light. But if these were night fighters, why weren't they making any attempt to shoot the bombers down? Why were they just following them? It didn't make any sense because the idea of a night fighter force is to prevent enemy bombers coming in and raiding your cities or raiding your industry, etc.
00:19:11
Speaker
Yeah, and I can imagine like being on a night flight, you know, it's pretty noisy in those planes the rest of the times. So you're not going to be able to tell if there's any sound coming from these lights. You mentioned they might be like subterranean or, you know, they just appeared from above the ground. So that's probably why, you know, it makes sense that they thought it was some kind of guided flak or, you know, like a German home in mine or something like that that may have been.
00:19:40
Speaker
developed. As we know, the Germans were working on some pretty technically advanced stuff at the time. Most of it didn't work. Some of it did. Very true. There was always going to be that thought in the back of the RAF command that do we need to capture one of these to work out what it is?
Allied Intelligence Efforts
00:20:07
Speaker
Yeah, so first, in the early part of the war, the allies knew that the Germans were experimenting with certain types of rocket. They weren't entirely sure about exactly what they were in the designations, not just anything, but they knew they had them on the drawing board, at least. And then when the reports, the crew reports of these things that sometimes zigzagged in flight towards them, just these lights, they thought, therefore, that these were some kind of flak rockets, so a guided, effectively, a service to a missile.
00:20:36
Speaker
Now there's reasons why the Germans couldn't perfect such things because they hadn't even started developing them actually in 1942 when these first reports came through. The first prototypes of these missiles started in 1943 in terms of designing and then sort of later in that year and in 1944 when they started putting them together and trying to launch them. They never actually had a proper guidance system that worked so therefore these things never ever sought combat in terms of guided missiles.
00:21:01
Speaker
they had a very very rudimentary unguided missile and it was like a projector effectively but it was only for low flying aircraft and that only ever saw service from about March 1945 onwards in very very limited numbers along the river Rhine and further into Germany. So really you're looking at things that just didn't exist
00:21:22
Speaker
But of course, the Allies didn't know that for definite. As the war went on, they were getting more and more intelligence about some of these things. And of course, they broke the Enigma code. So they did get bits and pieces, dribs and drabs of information. And in certain cases, they actually had bits of hardware to play with. So the Germans lost a V2 missile that went off course and landed on an island just south of Sweden.
00:21:47
Speaker
it was called, the nickname, the back of a rocket, and Allied Intelligence actually managed to get some of the pieces of this rocket to examine the fuel pump and part of the engine, things like that. There was also another one fell into a swamp in Poland from a testing range at Blizner in Poland, and the Polish Underground managed to hide it before the Germans could find it, and that too was smuggled in a Dakota aircraft from Poland back to Britain. So, you know, they did get bits of hardware,
00:22:12
Speaker
and then there was various intelligence officers, special agents, and all this kind of thing, and photographic reconnaissance managed to work out that they were experimenting with V1 flying bombs from Pinnamunder in northern Germany. So they had physical proof that these things existed, whereas the Foo Fighters and the things that came before that in terms of, you know, the thing, the light, etc., none of this existed.
00:22:35
Speaker
They only had the crew reports. They had no nothing to go on beyond that. So they did that photographs. They didn't have evidence in terms of bits of pieces, bits of hardware that it crashed or bits that had been captured, et cetera. It was just a complete mystery. So it really did hamstring the kind of efforts to try and work out what was happening. Sure. I mean, were these like squadrons and fighters that they were interacting with these things or was it like
00:23:04
Speaker
You know, there's some pilot who's got lost, you know, he's sat there and he's thinking I'm going to learn an easy target. And then he suddenly swarmed by two or three lights and he's basically.
00:23:17
Speaker
He just wants to go out. So you have to look at how the Bomber Command actually operated from the beginning of the war to the end of the war. In the first couple of years of the war, aircraft used to take off singly. They used to go to the target in 1s and 2s, and they would independently go to the target, bomb the target, and return home. But because the losses were quite high, because they were easy to pick off one by one, they actually started to effectively mob the target
00:23:43
Speaker
by sending as many aircraft over a particular target to overwhelm the defenses at one time. So you get a bomber stream of aircraft which might last half an hour in terms of length, in terms of time over a target, but there'll be multiple aircraft in that stream because they found out that the Germans used to have a night fighter defense in what's called boxes. So one aircraft per box
00:24:04
Speaker
So if aircraft flew into the box, they would be attacked because the radar would pick them up and the search lights would pick them up. Whereas if you could send 30 or 40 aircraft at a time through a similar box, then the night fighters would only have time to shoot maybe one, maybe two aircraft down and all the rest would escape. So they worked out tactics to defeat in depth the German night fighter force. So these lights that were seen were often seen by maybe not just one crew, they were sometimes seen by a number of crews.
00:24:32
Speaker
And occasionally you'll see the reporting where it's not just one crew that report these lights. You'll look at the squadron, the kind of the reports from each aircraft that go on a mission from a particular squadron, and you'll find that for one raid, one crew reports something strange.
00:24:48
Speaker
but then if you look down the list again, next page, yeah, so another squad, another crew, another pilot has seen the similar thing, reported a similar thing, or even from another unit on the same raid, about the same time, yeah, they saw them too. Right, so when you were researching your book, you just went through kind of like the crew logs and the reports from the RAF. Did you ever come across any sightings of these lights from the ground?
00:25:19
Speaker
There are some reports from the ground, but the kind of the reporting is difficult to try and find. So it's very easy. Well, say easy, that's maybe not the term to use, but it's much easier to you to look through the RAF Squadron records for all the bomber units. They're not all as good as each other. Some of them really good, some of them are fairly average and some are really ridiculously awful in terms of how much detail they had. So you can only really go with what you have.
00:25:48
Speaker
And of course, the Americans as well, they reported things really well. So together, those two Air Force's official records are brilliant. And then you have an extra layer of, as you said before, the crew testimony. And that mostly came out after the war. There's very little in the war itself beyond anonymous reports that end up in some of the intelligence reports. They didn't actually name the squadrons or the pilots involved for security reasons.
00:26:13
Speaker
But after the war, obviously those restrictions didn't exist and some people came out of the woodwork afterwards to tell you what they'd seen. So you have that.
00:26:24
Speaker
Right. I mean, the only reason I'm kind of asking that is because, you know, the war in Europe, there was a large, incredibly large number of ground troops. Yeah. And you would have got like, you know, the soldiers would have seen all these planes flying overhead. Yeah. You know, you might have had the odd cloud spotter or, you know, just you would have had people with binoculars from the ground looking up, seeing, you know, allies and Germans as well.
00:26:52
Speaker
You never came across any reports. Well, if it was mentioned in somebody's war diary that we saw, you know, lights flying around. So you're going to a different level of reporting there. And the process is more difficult. It's extremely difficult. So you have multiple, like, as in thousands of units to go through records. And you wouldn't know where to start. And chances are you'd spend most of your time actually finding nothing.
00:27:21
Speaker
and it would be quite difficult to find the reports, whereas the Air Force reports are much easier to look through. There's less detail, there's less missy eye around, and just my head will explode trying to think about going through Army reports. It's possible.
00:27:37
Speaker
And I'm sure there will be some buried away there. But I think the level of like the kind of amount of effort you'd have to put in to try and find the same level that I managed to find for the book through the Air Force records, I would be on maybe 10 years, and I wouldn't be able to find as much.
00:27:53
Speaker
Now, that's not to say that there are reports from the ground because there are some reports of soldiers who saw things. There are reports of British American and German soldiers who saw things from the ground flying around. There's even reports of the Spanish unit that fought for the Germans against the Russians in 1943.
00:28:16
Speaker
seeing something above a battlefield. So there are stories, but they're few and far between and they're based on people coming up after the war and seeing other stories about UFOs and thinking, oh yeah, well, I've got a story to tell as well. Whether they're true or not is, you know, I'm not sure how many people have actually gone and checked the official records. Probably not many. And maybe that's something that somebody should do, if not me, than somebody else, to actually make sure some of these stories stand up or whether there are some others.
00:28:43
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's only a matter of time, but, you know, yeah, thinking about it now, I should have known it was a pretty futile question. I mean, it's possible. It's not something I write off, but I think the level, the kind of amount of time and effort to spend on doing that side of things would not reap the kind of rewards that a cursory look of the, you know, so much as time as I spent on looking through the squadron records actually managed to find so much information. Yeah, and I know
00:29:12
Speaker
how long you spent going through them as well. If we go back to the actual objects themselves, when the pilots returned to their squadrons in Blighty, I can imagine them explaining what they've seen to a commander or to fellow pilots, the conversation would probably go something along the lines of, George, you're exhausted.
00:29:41
Speaker
Let's go down, you know, whether they're talking down in the park or whatever, you know, it's just I have a cigar, chill out.
00:29:50
Speaker
Could have a drink in the bar. You know, calm your nerves. Can we use up more nerves? You know, people got the DTs, as they used to call it. My dad used to call it, he was ex-forces. You know, the shakes kind of thing. Finger trouble. They used to call it, the RF had a phrase. All these kind of things. Let's go to North Africa, 1943. This is spring 1943. This is 43 Squadron, Hurricane Squadron, who operated a lot at night, attacking German targets behind the lines.
00:30:18
Speaker
And one and quite a few of the pilots had seen lights, you know, like the ones we described following aircraft, etc. And of course, they were sort of set upon by colleagues, by, you know, just kind of, they always kind of rebelled comments and, you know, calling them, you know, sort of derogatory names and saying you're seeing things and all this having just having a laugh at their expense, basically, until one by one, the rest of the squadron start seeing them as well.
00:30:43
Speaker
So it's all very well you on the outside seeing one of your mates coming back looking quite shaken and having a bit of a laugh at his expense because he's seen a light and he's yammering on about this weird thing that follows aircraft. You need a rest, George, or you need to drink the glass or something.
00:30:58
Speaker
you know you're clearly or you're angling to to be taken off flying duties kind of thing all this stuff you know and it might have been said in jest but it obviously gets under people's skin um because you've been just the butt of jokes for the you know the rest of the night and maybe the days afterwards and the person who saw a strange light or he's trying to get himself off flying duties yeah he's suddenly back there
00:31:19
Speaker
Yeah, you know, the light guy, rather than the UFO guy. Yeah, for whatever, you know, one of the, obviously, you didn't call them UFOs back then, because they'd know. No, exactly. Yeah. But we're seeing something that just sounded ridiculous, you know, until they saw them as well. And there is one particular pilot who wrote a letter to the New Zealand Air Ministry in 1945, and 1955, after a sighting.
00:31:41
Speaker
and he came up with a story that he was an ex-43 squadron pilot, and a light had chased him and it sat off his tail, then off his wingtip, and then it managed to maneuver away because it had some kind of delay behind it every time he moved. It wouldn't react as quick as he did, but then it managed to latch onto his tail or his wing again, and it got to the point where he could actually open fire a few times on it, and he did, but to no avail, it just
00:32:07
Speaker
the bullets, I suppose, nothing happened. And that story in terms of firing at these things on these odd times when the pilots or gunners did, nothing seemed to happen. But then there was no adverse effects to the aircraft involved, at least to the survivors, because we don't know about the times when. And then something really violent happened. I mean, we kind of forget
00:32:35
Speaker
the resolve and the, you know, the kind of gumption that these pilots had during those times. I mean, they were going up in these bone shaking planes, basically, you know, little bits of tin with wings attached. And, you know, often they go out on these missions, bombing missions or, you know, surveillance missions. And, you know, most of the time they'd be thinking there's no way back.
00:33:00
Speaker
it's gonna be a one-way trip. So you get a light attached to your wing or something following you for 250 miles over the low lands. And you kind of forget the mental capability of the pilots in those days to not just ditch their plane or just freak out in the middle of the air.
Psychological Impact on Pilots
00:33:24
Speaker
And they'd still have to turn around or complete their mission, turn around,
00:33:30
Speaker
and then get ready for the next one after a good night's sleep. They would, yes. But it would still have an effect on them. So what we call PTSD nowadays, that was the thing then. It just wasn't recognized. If you were so scared that you didn't want to fly, at least in the RAF, you declared what they called LMF, which is lack of moral fibre. You would reduce the ranks and make the skip floors. And you were the base of the butt of everybody's derision on the squadron. You were made to feel insignificant because it was, you know, they didn't have people
00:33:59
Speaker
um you know sort of joining them you know that they made them really scapegoats it was that's what they did um so the last thing people wanted to do was basically you know show weakness in terms of not wanting to fly you know so you had to man up you had to you know just you know just do it
00:34:14
Speaker
otherwise the alternatives were horrible. But you can put yourself in this situation. The cover of the book that I wrote, you'll see it down in Rula's artwork. That was a real case. That's based on the pilot's testimony. That's not just something I dreamt up and asked them to draw.
00:34:33
Speaker
it you know it's actually that allegedly happened in March 1942. Now you can imagine you put yourself in this into the position of a crew and gunners who are trained to shoot down German night fighters and they may have done already but then this light comes up behind them and they do what they do naturally where they think it's a German aircraft or a German secret weapon and they open fire at it.
00:34:56
Speaker
So how does that make you feel? And then it moves around to the side of the aircraft or the wingtip. And again, they were opening fire at it and nothing happens. It moves around to the nose of the aircraft and sits off the nose as they're flying through the air at 180 to 200 miles an hour. And it's just sitting there keeping station. And again, the nose turret gun is now firing at it. And again, nothing happens and it just shoots off in the distance. I mean, how would that make you feel? You know, when you return to base,
00:35:20
Speaker
because you managed to get back home. You're trying to work out and process what this is. You're scared because your bullets, which are your your own weapon, are useless. You get back, your intelligence officer says, have you been drinking? They don't believe you. And then you've got to go up the next fight. You might think you're going to meet it again. And what is it going to do? So, yeah, that's going to take its toll, hasn't it? Yeah, you know, I'm pretty sure that there were a certain number of pilots who did encounter these things that went MIA.
00:35:54
Speaker
There's certainly were affected by it. If you go to the American squad, one of the American squadrons in Western Europe, when they first saw one of these things, and this is again before the name crew fighters was invented, so you're looking at October 1944,
00:36:09
Speaker
There was a crew that came back down after an encounter with one of these lights, and the radar observer was scared out of his wits. One of his friends on the squadron said he was sucking wind, as he described it, for like 24 hours afterwards. He was just like, you know, he was that kind of thing.
00:36:26
Speaker
and also the Americans trek there you know people who were low on morale and a bit more frightened you know differently than the RAF did um they basically grounded them you know for a bit sort of thing but they had to go up and of course these crews were seeing them again night after night so you imagine the prospect of having to go up again and face these things
00:36:44
Speaker
because every night, if it wasn't them, it was one of the mates on the squadron who were seeing these things. It probably did reduce crew efficiency. That was a term that the Americans used to use. They were always into how efficient were the crews, how efficient were the squadrons, and trying to find ways of making sure that they were better and they could perform missions. But this must have really set them back because
00:37:06
Speaker
the prospect of flying every night and then thinking they're going to come against these things and what were they going to do? That must have been fairly scary. Exactly. I'm kind of assuming that most of the flight tours would have been probably an average age of early 20s as well. Oh yeah, they were fairly young.
00:37:25
Speaker
even commanding officers were like, you know, 25, 26, 28 sometimes. Yeah, they weren't that old either. Did you ever come across any reports of these things actually coming inside the fighters or traveling through them? Always it would just all confined to like outside in the clear. There are anecdotal stories of lights inside aircraft, but they're quite difficult to pin down. In terms of the official reporting, they
00:37:54
Speaker
you know, you can count those stories on like a finger or two, you know, they're very few and far between. There's a story over the Balkans which I came across and I'm not entirely sure how true it is. It was a light that would be inside an aircraft and it caused damage and chances are that was more flak, you know, explosion and it was like shards of metal coming from the explosion that passed through an aircraft. So you have to balance the kind of reporting up with what really probably happened.
00:38:21
Speaker
So there are stories of things like lights that went through aircraft but they were probably like red hot bits of metal that
00:38:29
Speaker
like punch through an aircraft and went through it because damage they could see damage you know to the skin it wasn't like um some kind of you know let's say let's call it plasma or something they just like entered the aircraft went through and didn't you know do anything so yeah i think you have to treat stories like that with a bit of suspicion but there are one or two but i think they've got more mundane explanations right yeah the kind of friend of a friend
00:38:53
Speaker
Yeah it was. There are stories like that you know right across the UFO world aren't there so some of them we have to treat with a slight pinch of salt I'm afraid. Oh yeah well stranger things have happened. Oh exactly yeah. So these
00:39:08
Speaker
One question is always I've always wanted to ask about Foo Fighters and it's not when is the next album coming out. It's. Were these things ever seen during the daytime? Yes, I know in the cold day in the sun, you know, would.
00:39:25
Speaker
what would these things have looked like? So, I mean, we'll move away from just Foo Fighters, you know, in terms of the lights that were seen, you know, because that nickname effectively just is a small window of time in a small area. It wouldn't necessarily be lights in the daytime anyway, would they?
00:39:43
Speaker
lights certainly bright things were seen in the daytime you know like things that didn't look like stars most like a lot of the blue book reports that you talk about you like silver discs and things in the daytime those were seen during the war as well so things that looked like 200 or 300 foot long zeppelins that were in places where no self-respect you know respecting zeppelin would have been seen
00:40:05
Speaker
You wouldn't fly Zeppelin's airships in World War II anywhere, they would just be packed down at the skies. They were seen in the middle of the night over northern Italy, but they were seen during the day as well as reports over Eastern Europe of things like that being seen in 1944.
00:40:20
Speaker
There are other shapes like something that looked like an upturned bathtub that was seen over that battle in near Leningrad in 1943. An upturned bathtub. An upturned bathtub. It was sitting above an air battle between Luftwaffe and Soviet Air Force that was going on above a battlefield on the ground. It seemed to be observing.
00:40:42
Speaker
So that was how it was described by the Spanish army soldiers. They were fighting for the Germans. It was the 250th Infantry Division. They were called the Blue Division. And they were the Battle of Krasnibor, February 1943. And there were at least four of these soldiers had seen this thing and reported it. All right. So when you say upturn Bastub? That's what they reported as. Right. OK.
00:41:12
Speaker
Are we talking like a Twinkie shaped bathtub or are you talking like the old Victorian central?
00:41:25
Speaker
I don't know. There's not much detail beyond what kind of bath it was. It's just a standard bath, I'm afraid. It's one that shapes it with a bottom line slightly longer than the top line. I can't remember what you call that shape, but it's not a parallelogram, is it? That's a different thing altogether. Well, if you just got curved, it was just a twinkie showing.
00:41:49
Speaker
Twinkie flying through the sky above Twinkie, you know, various different air bases. But other people, other crews saw, there's a fair story and it keeps appearing in various books of a show of little silver discs that flew through a bomber formation. That story appeared in one of Frank Edwards' books in the 1960s. Through a bomber squad. Through a bomber formation flying over Germany in the daytime.
00:42:15
Speaker
It appeared in his book, Flying Saucers, Serious Business, in that book. But it comes from a Martin Caden book. He was a famous aviation author in the 1960s. And he wrote a book about the Schweinfurt raid, and that's when
Foo Fighters: German Weapons?
00:42:30
Speaker
this happened. It also happened on a Stuttgart raid as well. This is sort of towards the end of 1943. It's two separate raids and these kind of shows of what... Look, I describe it in the book as hockey books, because that's effectively what they looked like in terms of description.
00:42:44
Speaker
they were about maybe three inches across, they were tiny, but they flew through a formation of aircraft and one of them was allegedly supposed to have set a wing of an aircraft on fire. Now that's not been proved and the actual reporting, the official reporting from the squadron that was involved doesn't back that up, but I'm not sure how much of the story's been embellished
00:43:07
Speaker
and whether this was some kind of like local modification from a German weapon that they dropped bomb, like a bomb with little bomblets on a on a on a bomber formation. I go into more detail in the book, you have to read it to get into the into the depths of this. But you know, the Germans did experiment with dropping cable bombs attached to cables into the middle of bomber formations, but they weren't that successful.
00:43:33
Speaker
without the recoil. So it's possible that they came up with some kind of like a cluster bomb type, what we would think of a cluster bomb now, little bomblets that come out of the dispenser to try and drop over a formation of aircraft and destroy them just by little explosions. But there's no records of such a thing existing in terms of the Luftwaffe inventory. So it's difficult to marry it up with something that actually existed.
00:44:01
Speaker
But that story has persisted over the years. I'm saying the first time the reference I can come across it is about 1960. And so it's perpetuated. But how much truth there is to it? You tell me. I can't. So these things, objects, fireballs, for your fighters, when the pilots
00:44:29
Speaker
Well, when these things disappeared, I mean, did they just return? Did they drop down towards the ground? Did they burn away? Did they just fly off somewhere? Did they go up? Or did they just pop?
00:44:43
Speaker
different ways. Sometimes they would shoot off into the distance or they would shoot upwards. Sometimes they would just wink out if there were lights. There was all different methods. You name it in terms of methods of departure. Sometimes they would fade away. Sometimes they would just disappear off faster than anything that the Allied pilots knew.
00:45:05
Speaker
So they're all different methods of vanishing. No two seem to be alike. But then again, that matches the kind of methods of arrival as well. They're the same kind of methods. Sometimes they just appeared on a wingtip. Other times they were seeing the distance making a beeline for the aircraft. So it's all different. You name it, it seemed to happen. OK, well, I'll throw a monkey wrench near then and try and name some. Right. Are we talking about because I'm assuming
00:45:33
Speaker
These were being seen at all different times of the year, so we can count out like ice crystals forming on the canopies or anything like that.
Enduring Mystery of Foo Fighters
00:45:43
Speaker
We can count out glare from anti-aircrafts or searchlights from below. Yeah. And glare coming off the canopies or anything like that, or glare coming off, you know, bouncing off other planes in the formation. Yeah. I'm guessing we can count out
00:46:01
Speaker
Well, we've counted our enemy fighters. We can definitely count our atmospheric anomalies, which I'm sure Donald Menzel would have had a field day with. I'm sure. All these things appear in the intelligence reports as well as the things that ruled out for various reasons. So yeah, we can count our balloons, birds, seagulls.
00:46:31
Speaker
I know. I'm not going to ask you what I was about to, but then I changed my mind because obviously, you know, if you've known you. Yeah. Well, yes. Yeah. If you'd know, you did tell me by now. I would have told you by now. Yeah. And it would be the book and people are read by now. Yeah. Yeah. Nobody knows the answer. Yeah. And it's like UFOs writ large.
00:46:57
Speaker
Nobody knows the answer to that either. So it's just a huge mystery. But it certainly sets the clock back in terms of when these things started. I know everybody says about Kenneth Arnold, you know, in 1947. But actually, it was a lot happened beforehand. A lot. Yeah, a lot. Yeah. I mean, there wasn't that much in the literature. I mean, I've told I've mentioned this before in previous podcasts that, you know, when I was younger, and I was reading the first UFO books that I came across,
00:47:22
Speaker
There was very little reference to Foo Fighters. You were lucky if you got a paragraph or two, or even sometimes just a few words. But that was because the amount of cases where you could almost count the one on the things of two hands. Ghost rockets were mentioned quite frequently. Oh yeah, yeah, ghost rockets. Everyone goes about ghost rockets back then.
00:47:40
Speaker
Well, I knew about ghost flyers or ghost aircraft from the 20s and 30s by reading John Keel's books, or one particular book that went into some detail about those, and also about the ghost rockets. But then they had this big gap between those two times. And there was very little, if no reporting at all, on the wartime period. And I just thought that was really strange. A few reports came through in the 60s and the 50s and 60s, but not many. By the time Keith Chester wrote his book in 2007, The Strange Company,
00:48:09
Speaker
There weren't that, still there weren't that many reports. You were looking at maybe a couple of dozen, if that. And then he found a few more going through various records in the States. But then when I started looking as well, and I looked through many more RAF squadrons, I was finding things from the Balkans. I found maybe a hundred reports from just over the Balkans in 1944, from about three different squadrons. So there was a lot of stuff that has never appeared in any literature.
00:48:37
Speaker
So I was quite pleased to find all this stuff that just never been discovered before.
00:48:42
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I'm trying to wrap my brains here. Just trying to remember if they've ever been depicted in a film or TV series at a time. No, even back to Taken. Taken. Yes. The first episode of Taken. That's right. Yeah. Steven Spielberg's Taken, not William Neeson. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. That would be a whole distraction. I'm sorry. Yeah. It was the start of. Yeah, I know who you are. I have special skills.
00:49:10
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, no. Yes, Bill Berg's taken. I never finished that series, you know. Did you not? No, I got it on DVD and you know, I think I've got two episodes left and I left it for a year. OK, I'm pretty sure I saw the time all the way through. Yeah, but yeah, you're right. The Foo Fighters were depicted. I think that's where it's.
00:49:32
Speaker
Yeah, that's where the whole genealogical thing starts with that particular story, isn't it? Yeah, from that, yeah, from one of the points of the story. I don't think there's many other, if any, depictions I can think of. I mean, the audience might come up with a few that I'm not aware of, but certainly, you know, there are very few in far between. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I was trying to think of whether anything was in Project Blue Book series. I think they only covered the Gorman encounter.
00:50:01
Speaker
Well, it's the first episode, wasn't it? I've never actually seen that. Well, you know, you've got time. I have. What is it on Disney or history? It'll be on something I don't have. It's on Sci-Fi Channel. That's why I haven't seen it, because I don't have that. Well, you know, you need to get it. It's good series. You need good series. I spent my time writing. I'm going to spend time to binge watch things.
00:50:31
Speaker
but in times like these, you need a break. Well, that's true. Although I did enjoy the expanse, however. There's a shout out for Dan, because he loved the expanse. He does. And Graham Gaultier as well, who's on your photo, he was in it. He was in it, yes, that's right. I've got a question for you that I don't think anybody's ever
Aviation Anecdotes and Interviews
00:50:54
Speaker
asked you. Have you ever thought to yourself,
00:50:59
Speaker
I want to learn to fly. I'm assuming you're not a pilot. You've never had any lessons. Have you ever considered?
00:51:10
Speaker
Oh yeah, I've considered it. Back in the back of the day I toyed with the idea of paying the two grand to go to Florida and have like a two-week intensive course, getting my American pilot license and then converting it to a British one when you come across back to Britain. It was a thing that people used to do back then, you know, I think you can still do it nowadays. But it got to the point where I didn't have the money
00:51:34
Speaker
I spent the money to go to Siberia and have a few weeks of travel around Russia and Siberia. So that's where that money went instead. Is it a flip of a coin?
00:51:51
Speaker
heads florida tailside no yeah i wish it was so simple it was uh i got attracted by a magazine advert in an aircraft magazine towards the end of 1991 so and it was just i won these kind of chances of a lifetime opportunity so i jumped i thought well i'm not going to get a chance again so and nobody ever has repeated that trip anyway so and especially not at the moment well not if you wrote a book about it but yeah
00:52:17
Speaker
Well, yeah, it was a it was a war to know story about my trip around Siberia. If anybody wants to read it, you know, please file free of by nuns and call to the ends of the earth. And it is really to it to the ends of the earth adventure. So, you know. Well, no, I was just wondering because, you know, you've written a lot of aviation books and obviously I just wondered if you wanted to put yourself in the place of the pilots and imagine why you
00:52:47
Speaker
Oh, I've flown in light aircraft, I've flown in gliders, Michaelites, etc. So it's not as if I haven't flown in like small aircraft, and you get more of a feel for it rather than sitting in an airliner, you know, sort of thing like that. And I've been in some fairly dodgy airplanes in terms of reliability and all this.
00:53:07
Speaker
I've survived Aeroflot domestic for God's sake. I've landed on gravel runways in the Arctic and all sorts of stuff like that. I've flown in military helicopters which shake to bits when you fly them.
00:53:22
Speaker
and you have to question the kind of like the competency of the pilots sometimes in the Russian world but you know some of the like some of the light aircraft are flown in this country. I flew one aircraft and it was a de Havilland Dragon, it repeated, it was a really old biplane transport from before the second world war and the door flew open as we took off you know sort of things so the passenger door like unlatched and so I've had some
00:53:49
Speaker
strange experiences when I've been flying in this country up in Orkney and things like, and nearly having bird strikes with flocks of birds and things like that. So I've got a sense of what goes on and I've read enough and I've spoke to enough pilots over the years to have some kind of sense. But yeah.
00:54:09
Speaker
So I felt when I read, when I wrote the book, I had a little bit of idea about what was happening in terms of the time, the context and what people were going through. It wasn't just like maybe like another UFO author attacking a subject with maybe less kind of idea of what was happening. So hopefully I brought that to life in the book. Well, absolutely you did. And, you know, I think, you know, if people want to learn more about
00:54:36
Speaker
you know, the Foo Fighter phenomena, I think they should also go and check out your interviews with Micah Hanks. Because he is just a mine of historical information. And one of the smartest guys in this subject, you know, and member of the debrief as well. And, you know, having you two bouncing off each other and talking about this particular era, and what was going on, that was, you know, if people
00:55:05
Speaker
don't learn anything from that conversation, then that'd be very disappointing. I've had the fortune to actually speak to some really nice people and some really interesting people. And I've enjoyed all the podcasts I've done in terms of the Foo Fighters, but there's two particular ones I'd like people maybe want to go away and catch if they haven't heard these already. One is Micah Hanks' interview with me. The other one's Andy.
00:55:34
Speaker
Andy McGrillan from that podcast. He came up with some really interesting questions. And I'm not just saying that because he is our boss. He said beforehand when he said, look, do you want to come on the program? I'll ask you things that hopefully you haven't been asked before. And he did. He was true to his word. And that's where I find the interest is people asking me things like you've done today as well, things that people haven't asked me before. Yeah.
00:56:03
Speaker
brings something else to the conversation, it kind of jogs the memory banks, you know, what you're saying in one podcast, you know, it might be just a run of the mill podcast, you're answering the same questions about the field fighters over and over again. But then you get thrown a question and it kind of makes you think, hang on a minute, I remember something very similar in the records, which I haven't talked about before. And then that will go on to something else and something else. And then you end up, you know, going end over end.
00:56:31
Speaker
you know, background in a huge circle. And then you just think, well, that was a really enjoyable conversation because it kind of spurs you into writing another book as well, I guess. You've talked about the Pacific Theatre. Well, we haven't touched on the Pacific Theatre, you know, I wanted to kind of touch on that briefly, because it wasn't just over mainline Europe.
Pacific Theater Sightings and Rare Encounters
00:56:54
Speaker
No, it wasn't. There were sightings over the Pacific theater operations down from Alaska, down to sort of New Zealand, you know, and across into more sort of the mainland Far East, if you like, as well. So things like that happened. The scale doesn't seem to be as huge. But then again, until you start looking at the reports in depth, you can't tell.
00:57:13
Speaker
So, you know, and I haven't done that yet. I'm still sort of scratching the surface of what I'm looking at. I'm actually working on some other things at the moment. So my attention has been diverted somewhat from those. But I have actually looked at some and I've also sort of looked toying with the idea of doing a follow up to the European Foo Fighters book as well, because I found more information since then. I found some more cases and some more intelligence reports. So there's definitely, you know,
00:57:40
Speaker
you know, some material there to use. So those books are kind of a more long-term project. They're not going to come out, you know, next month, next year. They'll probably come out maybe a few years down the line. There's a few things I've worked on since then, which probably come out beforehand. But yeah, you're right that when people do ask me things and I think, oh, that's a good one. And it does, you know, sort of dredge up things that I haven't probably talked about before. So far, there's only one person actually asked me about, you know, whether, you know, any beings were seen.
00:58:06
Speaker
you know, extraterrestrials, if you have called something like that, you know, so I was kind of thinking that these nights would have been.
00:58:15
Speaker
so small that, you know, it's probably impossible to actually fathom whether there was anything in there. I mean, this is when you get beyond the just the light. So if you talk about, you know, maybe not the word Foo Fighters, but just generally UFOs during the Second World War, there were all sorts of shapes and sizes. But there's one, there's only really one case that actually has beings in it. And it's I'm not going to give too much away here. But
00:58:38
Speaker
It's from Poland in 1943, July 1943, and a person who was a conscripted laborer, he was actually French, but he was working in Poland, and he came across a crashed craft in the sand dunes on the Baltic coast with what he thought was a female pilot. Trying to dig it out. It was like half sort of buried into the dunes.
00:59:04
Speaker
sand dunes in the Baltic. Yeah, at the top of Poland around the sort of Danzig area, well we used to call it Danzig, it's called something different there, that area there was actually a torpedo training session like a Luftwaffe torpedo trials place there, but there was all these sand dunes along the coast, it's that particular part of Gdynia, that's where it is, Gdansk, it's around there. There are sand dunes, it's that kind of area, I've been a part of Pomerania before,
00:59:31
Speaker
Part of it is like that, actually, and this craft was seen in the dunes. That's mental. But that's about the only story. Yeah. And he thought it was a secret weapon from Peanut Munder, which is in the far away.
00:59:47
Speaker
Yeah, well it was about maybe all along the coast. It's just along the, yeah, it's just to the west below the coast. Somewhere else I've actually visited back in 2014, a really interesting place to look around. But, you know, the things that were tested there, flak rockets, V1, V2, nothing but nothing that resembled this craft. No, no, no, imagine that. Well, I know you've got to go Graham. So,
01:00:13
Speaker
We'll have to wrap it up here anyway. But yeah, as we mentioned earlier in the episode, we have a competition. We do. To win a signed copy of Graham's book, UFOs Before Roswell. European Foo Fighters, 40 foot 45. I should write it down. Should have a book in front of me. I think it's holding my door open. Oh, well, please do. Thank you. No, it's on the shelf. Pride of place. Excellent.
01:00:44
Speaker
But yeah, this competition, right, it's the Foo Fighters and obviously the band, the Foo Fighters. Now, if you've been listening carefully, I had a list of Foo Fighters songs, song titles. I had 52 song titles that I wanted to try so hard to get every single one into this conversation tonight. Now, the competition we have is you need to
01:01:12
Speaker
follow anomalous pod network on Twitter. And when you see the tweet regarding this episode, obviously you would have seen it already because you're listening to it. But what we want you to do is to retweet that tweet of the episode and then either DM anomalous podcast network or put in the comments below the tweet, how many Foo Fighters on titles do you think I managed to squeak into this conversation tonight?
01:01:43
Speaker
Now, obviously, if you listen to this in six months, the competition's closed and we apologize for that, but you missed it, you should've caught it at the time. But yeah, there'll be a expiry date on the competition and we'll work that out when we get to it. But I wanna see if you're paying attention. Well, we both wanna see if you're paying attention because Graham is so knowledgeable, so knowledgeable, not knowledgeable.
01:02:11
Speaker
so knowledgeable about the Foo Fighters and the amount of work he put into that book was incredible and it just makes us look forward to not only the Pacific book but any sequel that you're going to write as well Graeme because you know that there are no Foo Fighter books really that go into the depths that yours did.
01:02:29
Speaker
Thanks, Dave. I'm just pleased that there was so much information that I could actually find to put in. It became a real sort of joy to actually write. I keep joking with some people that it almost wrote itself after a while. It had a kind of momentum that built
01:02:48
Speaker
But yeah, it was great just finding so much information that had never been put out there before and putting a few things right that were sort of slightly wrong in terms of the established record as well. And I just felt that this is something that needed to be done because as I've said to other people before, if I didn't write that book, chances are nobody might have. So I'm pleased that it's set some people's shells and I'm pleased that people have bought it. I'm really pleased that people have enjoyed it. And some of the things that people have said to me about it, it's great. It makes me feel really good. And if you haven't bought it already,
01:03:18
Speaker
I'd love you to do so and let me know what you think about it. And if you haven't done so, put a review on Amazon, please. That'd be great. Thank you. Is it just Amazon you can buy it? It's only Amazon you can buy it from, I'm afraid, but it's an ebook, softback and hardback. And there's even a French and a Spanish language version of it now as well. So, ah, brilliant. I mean, that'll be, um, cause I saw you on an interview with Baptiste the other night and, um, yeah.
01:03:47
Speaker
I mean, the fact that he's done that interview and he got a French version of the book out as well. I mean, hopefully you'll get some new French readers. Yeah. Yeah, that was the idea, because I don't like the idea of these everything just being kind of Anglo centric, you know, in terms of everything is for the English language sort of community. There are people out there, you know, elsewhere in the world who see things, who want to know about things, who want to understand what's going on, just like we do. And it's also that that sort of slightly like sort of there's a barrier, there's a language barrier to them getting on board.
01:04:16
Speaker
and I felt it was important that you know they can they can read this as well and of course yeah I suppose you know from a partisan side it was extra sales but you know my motivation is to try and get you know the information to as many people as possible yeah absolutely and four credits here Graham thank you okay well we're going to leave that there and I'll just remind you again if you want to enter the competition full details will be posted on the anomalous podcast network twitter account in due course when the interview when the episode is out
01:04:44
Speaker
I'd like to thank Andy McGrillan of that UFO podcast for setting up Anomalous Podcast Network, and also the other shows on there, Quantum Witch Cafe with Priscilla Stone and Disclosure Team with Vinnie Adams. Graham, it's been a pleasure again, as always. Thank you. And have we got any ideas of what's in store for the next episode yet? Oh, well, there's so many things to talk about, doesn't there? There is, and I kind of, I don't know, do we dare venture down to Antarctica yet?
01:05:19
Speaker
Well, exactly. I mean, if you if you heard my incredulous kind of incredulosity, is that a word? Building is now. Yeah, it is now. Yeah. If you heard that building through the other Maury Island episode, then I'll I'll just start throwing things at the monitor if we talk about base 211. So I'll start swearing. One of the two. I'm not sure which one will come first, but one that will. Well, as this is probably a family show. We'll leave Antarctica for another day then.
01:05:33
Speaker
We should leave that.
01:05:49
Speaker
Yeah, we'll think of something. And yeah, join us next time. Definitely. This has been the Unidentified Aerial Podcast, part of the Anomalous Podcast Network. Thank you for listening and good join you soon. Bye bye. I'm here to discuss the so-called flying saucers.
01:06:11
Speaker
In Washington, ghost-like objects dart across the radar screen at the CAA Traffic Control Center at National Airport for several hours. You are interested in the unknown, the mysterious, the unexplainable. That is why you are here. You are about to experience the awe and mystery