According to Donald Keyhoe, USMC retired Major, and aircraft journalist, the decade of the 1960’s would lead to more than psychedelic rock music, Vietnam war protests, free love, and radical politics. It was a decade that began a series of eerie and frightening UFO incursions over the United States and a number of fighter pilots powerless to do anything to stop it, but even more bizarre a series of inexplicable fatal flight accidents also occurred.

Unreachable

Defense contractors in charge of spy satellite development, jet interceptor production, and missile defense were reporting large orbital objects passing over the US, but technology to identify further what they were was not yet available. According to Philip J. Corso in his book “The Day After Roswell” he was doing everything possible under orders from his boss General Trudeau to quietly pass on the “Roswell Artifacts” as the recovered crash debris was named, that contained fiber optic cable, solid state circuits, light weight and near indestructible composite metals, and wireless pilot to ship controls that were relegated to US defense contractors as captured foreign technology. All this in the hopes of the US gaining parody against the extraterrestrial threat.

Outclassed

In one incident a gigantic unidentified ship hovered over a military installation at 90 thousand feet in height. The fighter interceptors of the time could only reach perhaps 50 to 60 thousand feet. Such aircraft as the venerable F-8 Crusader, the F-101 Voodoo, the F-100 Super Saber at the time the very backbone of General Curtis Lemay’s Strategic Air Command (SAC) even the one man missile the F-104 Star Fighter that had been flown to a record just over 100 thousand feet by famous test pilot Chuck Yeager, flamed out in the thin atmosphere and went into a fatal spin. Yeager barely escaped by ejection with his life. All the hapless interceptor jet pilots could do was to fly helplessly at a lower altitude while air defenses remained powerless.

Not enough capability

This was only one of several demonstrations by unknown forces of technical superiority. The race was on between defense contractors to develop the best high performance machines from zero gravity generation, to hyper Mach speeds such as the X-15 manned test rocket that achieved Mach 6 in controlled flight, but test prototypes were not interceptors with squadrons located throughout SAC. Years prior had already revealed amazing performance of unidentified airborne objects. According to US Navy pilots as revealed by Donald Keyhoe. In 1949 in the Gulf Coast off the coast of Texas a B-29 reconnaissance radar picked up a rendezvous of several smaller bogies with a larger mother ship at a speed of 4,400 knots! It was an apparent recovery of smaller crafts.

Met by human aggression

Although hostile actions by anti-aircraft shore batteries in Los Angeles in 1942 just 6 months after the Pearl Harbor attack where an elliptical object flying slowly over the city was pounded by more than 1400 rounds of artillery, and it simply flew off over the ocean unscathed without retaliating. In 1950 a US Air Force pilot in his F-86 Saber fired upon a canopy shaped UFO that outdistanced his aircraft already in full after burner. In desperation he tried to bring it down firing his six fifty caliber wing to wing machine guns observing no effect upon the unknown aerial intruder. That the “Bird” commander, a colonel ordered the intelligence report destroyed and that Donald Keyhoe luckily obtained a copy demonstrates the probability of a lot more air to air engagements that went covered up or unreported in that era.

Deadly retaliation

However, one incident that kicked off a series of some 600 fatal inflight, landing, and mechanical disasters occurred in 1963 according to Donald Keyhoe, who was convinced that all these losses were as a result of a retaliation for a shoot down. In 1963 a US Naval missile destroyer reported an unidentified object hovering above it at about 6 miles in altitude. After some time the commander ordered a launch and a missile from the ship struck and destroyed the unknown aerial vessel. This was in the midst of the “Cold War” and tensions were high. Within days a series of fatal aviation disasters and failures began all over the world with unprecedented frequency. Were the two instances related? According to Keyhoe, it was no coincidence!

Death in the sky

The Russians and their Communist allies had also had their run-ins with the unidentified flying phenomenon. In 1967 according to an NSA communications intercept an unknown sphere with a reflective metallic surface was headed toward Cuban air space. Two Mig-21’s were scrambled to intercept the “Bogey”. After several attempts to hail the object the seasoned senior pilot with his wing man behind him armed his air to air missiles and was immediately disintegrated in mid-air! His Wing man screamed in terror for several minutes as the UFO exited the area at high speed untouched.

A mystery never solved

I had written a similar article for the Plano Star Courier and number of years ago, but Linda Moulton Howe, famous for her “Alien Harvest” HBO special report in the early 1980’s revisited Donald Keyhoe’s exact same essay on this series of events while at the UFO Crash Retrieval Conference in Las Vegas in 2006. Brian Woods and Father Robert Woods, a flight engineer for McDonald Douglas for more than 40 years had proposed multi year project to get to the bottom of the UFO conundrum, but after a few years their efforts fizzled with dwindling interest. It seems the general public would rather gamble and play video games than learn about the history of aviation and its relationship with the unknown.

Conclusion

Some people such as former USAF officers and Frank C. Feschino, author of “Shoot Them Down” a collection of bizarre reported war plane disappearances and attempted intercepts believe that an undeclared air war has existed for some time in the frozen thin air of the higher altitudes where pilots assigned the role of air defense face dangerous odds with the unknown. Today we are reminded of the same technical inferiority despite our latest generation of fighters and interception role aeronautics. It seems that even more that impossible physics beyond our comprehension continue to elude explanation.