Operation Trojan Horse: The Classic Breakthrough Study of UFOs

by John A. Keel

  The hundreds of UFO flights seemingly emanating from the Arctic regions and following routes south have helped reinforce the popular theory that flying saucers are coming from a hole in the North Pole. The Aerial Phenomena Research Organization has advanced the theory that the objects enter the earth’s polar regions from space in order to avoid the intense radiation belts that are concentrated in space above the temperate zones.

  Radio Signals from Nowhere

  Enigmatic radio signals were widely received throughout Sweden and Norway during the flights of the ghost fliers. These also became a topic of discussion in the press.

  A widely published dispatch datelined Umea, Sweden, January 11, 1934, noted: “Members of the headquarters of the Air Force are of the opinion that the mystery airplanes are equipped with wireless transmitters and radio navigational aides… The airplanes are part of an extraordinary organization.”

  An item in the Hudiksvalls Tidningen, January 1, 1934, states:

  Radio listeners in Umea have been receiving conversations on their loudspeakers containing information about the ghost fliers, indicating that their intelligence service is modern …The conversations are on the wavelength of a popular gramophone program in Umea and discussed a meeting at a special point. The broadcast concluded with a discussion of which radio station should be used the next time.[8]

  At 6 P.M. on Thursday, January 25, 1934, a workman named Hjalmar Hedstrom reportedly picked up the following message on “a lower wavelength” in Norrbyskar, Sweden: “The sea is calm; two degrees warmly; therefore you can go down on the water and catch what you shall have… Returning quarter to eight for further message.” There was also a statement on wind direction and position, all in broken Swedish, but Hedstrom couldn’t remember all of it.

  Another radio listener, in Hedesunda, picked up an identical message that same day. And additional messages were received at the appointed hour of 7:45.

  Some messages came over the 900-meter band. Others were received between 230-275 meters.

  A majority of all the 1934 sightings took place at 6 P.M., no matter where the locale. The flap died down in March 1934, but there were periodic reports throughout the 1930s. Here’s one datelined Harstad, Norway, November 21, 1936:

  Reports of a mysterious light have arrived from several different places. The Norwegian Telegraphic Agency correspondent learned of the sightings during an interview with the Sixth Division. An inquiry into the reports is being conducted by the county constabulary. The division has also received a message about mysterious lights seen Tuesday evening outside Tromso.

  There is every reason to believe that the observations are real. During the last sighting in upper Norway many people received mysterious radio signals.

  The ghost fliers returned to Scandinavia in 1936, following the same routes and patterns of the 1934 sightings. They were again accompanied by baffling radio signals. The New York Times correspondent, who had tried to blame Japan in 1934, now accused Germany of broadcasting the signals. But none of the Scandinavian newspapers mentioned Germany in connection with the planes or the radio signals.

  When a brilliant glowing object pursued a railroad train across the Midwest in 1937, the New York Times (August 15, 1937) quoted astronomers who explained the incident as being caused by Venus.

  I hardly need mention that the populations of northern Scandinavia are very familiar with the northern lights and other routine atmospheric and astronomical phenomena. It is unlikely that they would pay too much attention to something that seemed to have a natural explanation.

  We have two widely separated reports from 1937 that deserve notice here. On Thursday, February 11, 1937, the crew of the fishing boat Fram started out from Kvalsvik, Norway, at 9 P.M. Just outside of Kvalsvik there is a cape with high hills separating it from the mainland. As the Fram circled this cape, they discovered a very large airplane resting on the water. Thinking the plane was in trouble, the captain changed his course and headed for it. Red and green lights were glowing on the machine, but as the boat approached, the lights were suddenly extinguished. Then the plane was quickly enveloped in a cloud of smoke, and it vanished!

  At noon the next day, Friday, February 12, 1937, an unknown aircraft appeared over Vienna, Austria, and circled the city. This event was unusual enough to be widely noted in the European press. Apparently the identity and origin of the plane were in doubt for some reason.

  Scandinavia: 1946

  On June 10, 1946, objects “resembling German V weapons” passed over Finland. Within a few short weeks UFO-type lights, cylindrical objects, and unidentified winged machines were being seen by thousands of people throughout Norway and Sweden, with the greatest concentrations taking place in the bleak, sparsely populated north country. The European press played up the stories. “Ghost rockets” had replaced the ghost fliers of 1934. They were seen over Greece, far to the south, and over the mountains of Switzerland, weaving expertly through the valleys and canyons. They were tracked on radar. They were photographed. (One picture of an arrow-shaped streak of light taken near Stockholm was published in the London Morning Post, September 6, 1946.) They were measured at speeds of from 400 to 1,000 miles per hour. Some of them seemed to explode in midair. Some released fragments of metal that proved to be common slag.

  The British and Scandinavian newspapers openly accused the Soviet Union of testing new rocket weapons in the skies of northern Europe. Moscow denied it. In September, bright green fireballs were seen over Portugal. “Flying projectiles with a tail of flame” flashed over Casablanca. Great glowing things hurtled out of the skies over Oslo, Norway, and exploded with deafening noises. On Wednesday, July 3, 1946, a mysterious explosion shook central Scotland at 9 P.M., blowing out windows and killing one man (apparently by concussion). No source or explanation for the blast was found. Swedish authorities collected more than 2,000 ghost-rocket reports. General James Doolittle flew to Stockholm to join in the investigations, even though this flap was barely mentioned in the American press. London was shaken by a series of explosions that no one could account for.

  At the end of August 1946, the lid came down. The Daily Telegraph of London reported on August 22: “To prevent technical information from being obtained from the firing of rockets over Denmark, the Danish government has asked newspapers not to name areas where the missiles have been seen.”

  On August 31, 1946, the Telegraph’s correspondent in Oslo revealed: “The discussion of the flight of rockets over Scandinavia has been dropped in the Norwegian newspapers since Wednesday. On that day the Norwegian General Staff issued a memorandum to the press asking it not to make any mention of the appearance of rockets over Norwegian territory but to pass on all reports to the Intelligence Department of the High Command…In Sweden the ban is limited to any mention of where the rockets have been seen to land or explode.”

  In a brief fifty years, we had gone from mystery inventors to spies and smugglers and then on to Russian secret weapons. Because none of these explanations was ever proven valid, and because the phenomenon continued despite all our explanations, we seemed to have only theories left—the arrival of Martians and Venusians. Already the erstwhile members of the Fortean Society, fans and followers of the late Charles Fort, were warming up in the bullpen. They had the answer even before they knew what all the questions were. You see, it worked out this way: In 1945, we dropped our atom bombs on Japan. The bombs sent a blast of energy into space, where it was detected by the sensitive instruments of superintelligent beings on other worlds. Said beings were terribly concerned that poor, bumbling man had discovered the secrets of atomic energy. So an expedition to the earth was formed to investigate. However, some superintelligent navigator made a slight error. Instead of leading his spaceships down to troubled Japan, he missed by a wide margin and ended up in Scandinavia instead. Sorry about that.

  Mystery Helicopters

  The thousands of sightings of phantom dirigibles and mysterious airplanes from 1896 to 1938 provide us w
ith a substantial body of evidence which indicates that the phenomenon is actually flexible and that it tailors itself to adopt acceptable forms for the time periods in which it operates. All of this raises a very sticky question for the believers. Did all of these things really exist? Or were all of these thousands of reports merely examples of mass hysteria, journalistic jokes, and misinterpretations of some natural phenomenon?

  You can’t have both. Either a very large percentage of all these reports are honest and valid—or they are all pure poppycock.

  If I were writing a book on, say, the Civil War, I would go to these very same sources—old newspapers, historical records, letters of the actual participants—and I would produce a book that would be accepted by scholars and historians with little or no questions asked. But flying saucers have been dragged down by the amateur theorists and thrown into disrepute by the believers in extraterrestrial visitants. Their efforts have produced skeptics who have found the obvious flaws in the beliefs and have therefore decided that all UFO data are equally invalid.

  If a farmer of the 1860s fought in the Civil War and left behind a packet of scrawled letters describing his experiences, historians would pounce on those letters and quote them over and over again in scholarly tomes. But if this same farmer saw an unusual object in the skies over California in 1875 and reported it to the local newspaper in the form of a letter, that printed letter would become a source of controversy today. Skeptics would dissect every word and debate the man’s frontier semantics.

  We must stop asking: Can these things be? And begin asking: Why are there these things?

  Misguided souls might make up stories about wonderful spaceships from Mars. But would they make up stories about seemingly conventional airplanes and helicopters? Yes, we have phantom helicopters, too!

  On Tuesday, October 11, 1966, a brilliant flying light bobbed over the Wanaque Reservoir in New Jersey. There had been many unusually close sightings in the area prior to this one, but this incident had an added twist. A formation of mystery helicopters turned up minutes after the object left.

  “This thing was so bright that it blinded me so bad I couldn’t find my car,” Wanaque police sergeant Ben Thompson, one of the many witnesses, told Dr. Berthold Schwarz. “It was all white, like looking into a bulb and trying to see the socket, which you can’t do …I was totally blinded by that light for about twenty minutes.”

  Within fifteen minutes after the glowing object departed, a formation of seven helicopters appeared and circled low over the area. They were accompanied by ten or twelve jet airplanes. Lines of cars were parked all around the reservoir, filled with eager UFO watchers. They knew a helicopter when they saw one. But they were all baffled by this unexpected group of choppers. Police sergeant Robert Gordon discussed his own bewilderment: “I’ve never seen seven helicopters at one time in this area before in all my life …And I’ve lived here for forty years.”

  Science writer Lloyd Mallan investigated the Wanaque incidents, and he checked with all the local Air Force bases, airports, and even the Pentagon. All denied knowing anything about these planes and helicopters. The Civil Aeronautics Board was baffled, too. No one could throw any light on the mystery. Nor did it seem plausible that the Air Force could have acted so quickly, particularly because no one ever formally reported any of the Wanaque sightings to the Air Force directly. There are those, of course, who believe that the Air Force lies about everything connected with UFOs. But there aren’t seven helicopters available instantly and at one time at the McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey and the Stewart Air Force Base in New York, the two closest bases. Nor could slow-moving, short-ranged choppers have made it from those two points in fifteen minutes.

  The people at Wanaque were convinced they saw helicopters and jets that night. Were they all lying? If so, why? If not, then who was flying these machines, how, and why?

  The North Vietnamese are pitifully short on aircraft, especially helicopters. Nevertheless, late in June 1968, a formation of inexplicable lights appeared over the Ben Hai River, and one nonexistent “helicopter” was reportedly shot down. Robert Stokes, Newsweek’s Vietnam correspondent, was there. Here’s his report (Newsweek, July 1, 1968):

  It was 11 P.M. and U.S. Army Captain William Bates sat in front of a radio set at his regimental headquarters at Dong Ha. Just then, a Marine forward observer came on the air reporting that he had spotted, through his electronic telescope, thirteen sets of yellowish-white lights moving westerly at an altitude of between 500 and 1,000 feet over the Ben Hai River which runs through the middle of the DMZ. Bates immediately checked with authorities at Dong Ha to see whether there were any friendly aircraft in the area of the reported sightings. He was told there were not. Then he checked with the counterbattery radar unit at Alpha 2, the northernmost allied outpost in I Corps. Within minutes, the answer came back from Alpha 2’s radar tracker: The “blips” were all around him, 360 degrees.

  By 1 A.M., U.S. Air Force and Marine jets were scrambling at Pa Nang in pursuit of the unidentified objects. Forty-five minutes later a Marine pilot radioed that he had just shot down a helicopter. But when an Air Force reconnaissance plane, equipped with infrared detectors which pick up heat, flew over the area, it could find no evidence of burning wreckage. All it could confirm, the plane reported, was a “burned spot.”

  These objects were tracked on radar “nearly every night” over the Demilitarized Zone that June. They were never identified, and there was little reason to believe that they were actually Vietcong aircraft. If they were, the North Vietnamese stopped using them very abruptly, and they haven’t been heard from since.

  A few weeks after this series of incidents, the mystery helicopters turned up in the state of Maryland. At 8:20 P.M. on the night of Tuesday, August 19, 1968, an oval object with a center band of red and white flashing lights hovered above the Rosecroft Racetrack near Phelps Corner, Maryland. One of the many witnesses, Mrs. Gwen E. Donovan, reported that she also saw at least seven helicopters circling the object. “It struck me as funny,” she said, “because I have never seen so many in the sky at one time.”

  Is the U.S. Air Force secretly chasing flying saucers in lumbering helicopters? We do frequently scramble jets to pursue “unidentifieds,” but I’ve talked with a lot of AF personnel and have never even come across any rumors about the use of helicopters.

  Helicopters are expensive machines, and they’re difficult to fly. The World War II predictions that there would be “a helicopter in every garage” never came to pass because of this. A UFO-chasing operation would demand that several helicopters were readied and fueled at all times, and that properly trained pilots were on constant alert and available to fly them. I’ve snooped around AF bases looking for evidence of such an operation—and have drawn a complete blank.

  I can only conclude that these unidentified helicopters fall into the same category as the ghost fliers of 1934 and the tiny aircraft of Calgary. They are part of the UFO activities, not part of our UFO-chasing operations.

  Do Flying Saucers Really Exist?

  Thousands of UFO photos have been taken since 1882. Many of these are of indistinct blobs and streaks of light, but many are of apparently solid machines of some sort, with windows, fins, and other clearly discernible features. There’s just one problem. With very few exceptions, no two UFO photographs are alike. I have received hundreds in the mail and have been shown hundreds more in my travels. Because photos are too easy to fake and too hard to authenticate, I usually avoid getting involved in an in-depth investigation of the pictures and their photographers. I have yet to personally handle two exactly similar photos taken in two different areas.

  During these past three years I have conducted thousands of investigations in person, by telephone, and by mail, and while many of the descriptions of the luminous, flexible “soft” objects are exactly the same, I have rarely heard two independent witnesses describe separate seemingly solid “hard” objects in the same terms. I have been told about
tiny “buzz-saw” devices, whirling “chains” over strip mines in Ohio, and gigantic gondola-shaped machines with “rows and rows of windows” hovering above the Kittatinny Mountains of northern New Jersey. There seem to be as many different kinds of objects as there are witnesses. Yet I have managed to reassure myself again and again that the witnesses were reliable and were describing the objects to the best of their abilities.

  Because the witnesses seem to be telling the truth, we must assume that UFOs come in myriad sizes and shapes. Or no real shapes at all. This leads us to the old psychological warfare gambit once more. If the phenomenon has built-in discrepancies, then no one will take it seriously. If people in Brazil, Iowa, and Australia all gave exactly the same descriptions, then the scientific and military establishments would have to take the subject far more seriously.

  Project Blue Book Report No. 14 tackled this problem. Air Force teams ran 434 “unidentified” reports through a computer, hoping to come up with a basic model. They ended up with 12 very different basic objects. From the thousands of reports compiled since then, it is obvious that there may be 1,200 or 12,000,000 different types. The 12 objects described in Report No. 14 have rarely been seen since 1955.