Page 9 - The 'X' Chronicles Newspaper - May/June 2022 Edition

Mysterious UFOs Seen by WWII Airmen 9

Mysterious UFOs Seen by two lights in a large orange glow, seeming to rise doughnuts and the derivatives of the grape.”
from the earth to 10,000 feet, tailing the fighter
WWII Airman Still “for approximately two minutes.” After that, the Lt. Krasney’s son, Keith Krasney, says his late
lights, “peel off and turn away, fly along level father didn’t fit the stereotypical profile of a
Unexplained for a few minutes and then go out. They appear UFO theorizer. In fact, he never even suggested

to be under perfect control at all times,” that the glowing wingless cigar-like object that
according to Keith Chester’s Strange Company: flew next to his plane was extraterrestrial in
It was nearly the end of World War II. But for the Military Encounters with UFOs in World War II. origin.
airmen of the 415th Night Fighter Squadron, it
felt more like the beginning of War of the And then there was Lt. Samuel A. Krasney’s “He was very level-headed, very analytical,”
Worlds. experience: a wingless cigar-shape object, says Krasney of his father, adding that he kept a
glowing red, just a few yards off the plane’s notebook where he wrote about (and drew) his
Lt. Fred Ringwald was the first to see it. He was wingtip. Lt. Krasney, justifiably spooked, foo-fighter sighting. But although he never
riding as observer in a night fighter piloted by instructed the pilot to attempt evasive seemed prone to conspiracy theories, Krasney
Lt. Ed Schlueter, with Lt. Donald J. Meiers on maneuvers, but the glowing object stayed right says his father was open to one: “He entertained
radar. It was a late November evening in 1944, next to the jet for several minutes before it “flew the idea that it could be late-breaking German
partly cloudy with a quarter moon. They were off and disappeared.” technology. He did express the view that there
roaming the Rhine Valley just north of were a lot of things during the war that were
Strasbourg on the French-German border when Eventually, the airmen named the lights: foo kept quiet.”
Ringwald said, “I wonder what those lights are, fighters, inspired by the comic strip “Smokey
over there in the hills,” according to an Stover,” in which Smokey (a firefighter) would Was it the work of Nazi
American Legion Magazine story on the often declare, “Where there’s foo, there’s fire.”
astrophysicists?
sightings from 1945.
The ‘combat fatigue’ explanation
There were eight to 10 of them in a row, glowing Holding Nazi Germany responsible for the
flying glowing orbs isn’t too far-fetched. For
fiery orange. Then Schlueter saw them off his An Associated Press reporter broke news of the one thing, the sightings took place over Nazi-
right wing. They checked with Allied ground foo-fighter sightings on January 1st, 1945, and occupied Europe, at a time when Germany’s
radar, but they registered nothing. Thinking that theories about their origins quickly abounded:
the lights might be some kind of German air The sightings were flares, or weather balloons or Luftwaffe was making tremendous strides. Then
there’s the fact that the sightings stopped once
weapon, Schlueter turn the plane to fight…only St. Elmo’s Fire—a phenomenon where a light the German army was defeated.
to have the lights vanish. appears on the tips of objects in stormy weather.
But the members of the 415th rejected all those But the most compelling link to the foo fighters
At first the men said nothing, fearing they’d be theories. Flares and weather balloons can’t track
ostracized. But then the sightings spread through planes like these objects could, and they’d seen might be Wernher von Braun, a 32-year-old
wunderkind rocket engineer. Von Braun helped
the unit. St. Elmo’s fire and could distinguish the two.
the Nazis develop the V-2 rocket: a long-range
guided ballistic missile that Hitler was using in
On December 17, 1944, near Breisach, Then there were those who claimed that the 1944 against Belgium and other parts of Allied
Germany, a pilot was flying at approximately airmen were suffering from “combat fatigue,” a
800 feet when he saw “5 or 6 flashing red and polite way of saying that war stress was driving Europe. It’s not to hard imagine pilots—
unfamiliar
with
ballistics—
long-range
green lights in ’T’ shape.” The lights seemed to them insane. But there was scant evidence to comparing these rockets to a cigar-like wingless
follow him, closing in “to about 8 o’clock and suggest collective psychosis: The 415th had an planes. The V-2 could even explain the glow,
1,000 ft.” before disappearing as inexplicably as otherwise excellent record, and when a reporter since its tail emitted a long burning plume.
they came. for American Legion Magazine went to report
on the squadron he described them as “very (Continued on Page 10)
Then on December 22nd, two more flight crews normal airmen, whose primary interest was
sighted lights. One crew, near Hagenau, reported combat, and after that came pin-up girls, poker,