Observations placeholder
Flying airplanes
Identifier
000407
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
From the Condon report: THE NATURAL PHILOSOPHY OF FLYING SAUCERS - R. V. JONES
Based on a lecture given to the North Eastern Branch of the Institute and Society (sic) and the Newcastle Astronomical Society
Air crew, because of the intense strain involved, appeared to be especially susceptible to apparitions. Air Commodore Helmore, one of our ablest pilots in World War I, recalled to me in 1939 that he and his contemporaries had been scared of a particular kind of German antiaircraft shell which burst with a purple flash. The legend was that these shells somehow radiated venereal disease — one can only guess at the chain of events that led up to these speculations.
In World War II our bomber crews repeatedly reported that they were shadowed by German single engine night fighters carrying yellow lights in their noses. The oddness of this observation was that, apart from the difficulty of putting a light in the nose of a single engine aircraft, there were at that time no German single engine fighters flying at night. No one ever completely explained the story.
When I did get a chance to ask a German nightfighter crew whether they knew what the explanation was they said that they also knew that no single engine fighters were flying but that they had seen much the same thing as I described to them. American aircraft, later in the war, also saw what may have been the same phenomenon, both over Europe and over Japan.