Burde is quick to add, though, that he believes Washington had no idea he was dealing with creatures from another planet.
Rather, according to Burde, the man who would go on to win the Revolutionary War and become the first president of the United States probably thought he was talking to a powerful Indian war chief or a medicine man proficient in the ways of magic.
Unbelievable? Maybe.
But as strange as this story may sound, even stranger things are yet to come.
PART TWO
World War I and the 1930s
2
Something Strange in the Air
As the story goes, one day in the spring of 1917, with World War I raging across Western Europe, two Fokker triplanes of the German air force’s Jagdstaffel Jasta 11 took off from their base in occupied France and headed for the skies above Belgium. They were looking for Allied warplanes.
One of the Fokkers was piloted by Captain Peter Waitzrik; the other by Captain Manfred von Richthofen, the famous “Red Baron.”
It was a clear morning, with few clouds and a bright blue sky. Von Richthofen was Germany’s top fighter ace at the time. He’d already received the Blue Max, the country’s highest military award, and within a month he would be leading his legendary Red Baron’s Flying Circus.
Not long into their patrol, Waitzrik and von Richthofen spotted something in the sky ahead of them. It was not an enemy fighter. According to Waitzrik, it was a flying object more than 100 feet in diameter, bright silver in color and shaped like a saucer.
“We were terrified,” Waitzrik told the British tabloid the World Weekly News years later. “We had never seen anything like it. But the United States had just entered the war, so we assumed it was something they’d sent up.”
Von Richthofen immediately opened fire on the object, hitting it.
“The thing went down like a rock,” Waitzrik said. “It sheared off tree limbs as it crashed in the woods.”
Waitzrik and von Richthofen then watched as two occupants climbed out of the strange craft and escaped into the forest.
“The Baron and I gave a full report on the incident back at headquarters,” Waitzrik said. “But they told us not to mention it ever again.”
For years afterward, Waitzrik assumed the gleaming silver disk was some sort of Allied secret weapon — until the flying saucer craze of the late 1940s convinced him otherwise.
“That’s when I realized this thing looked just like those saucer-shaped spaceships that everybody [started] seeing,” Waitzrik said. “It’s been over eighty years now, so what difference could it possibly make? But there’s no doubt in my mind that it was no U.S. reconnaissance plane the Baron shot down that day. It was some kind of craft from another planet and those guys who ran off into the woods weren’t Americans.”
Though he went on to shoot down a total of eighty Allied planes, von Richthofen would be dead within a year. Waitzrik survived the Great War and the next one, and became an airline pilot.
About his encounter with the strange aerial craft, he confided years later: “Except for my wife and grandkids, I never told a soul.”
Captain Waitzrik’s famous companion was not the first combat pilot to shoot at a strange flying object during World War I. That had happened more than a year before. On January 31, 1916, British Royal Naval Air Service sub-lieutenant J. E. Morgan climbed into his BE2c fighter and took off from his base outside London. It was nighttime and Morgan was on the lookout for German zeppelins.
While the British would one day become astute at shooting down the enormous armed blimps by equipping their airplanes’ machine guns with incendiary shells, that technological leap was still a year away. This winter night, Morgan was on a recon mission, a sort of crude early warning system, hoping to spot any German airships heading for London. What he found above the British capital, though, was something else entirely.
First documented in 1925, in a book by Captain Joseph Morris entitled German Air Raids on Great Britain, 1914–1918, Morgan had ascended about a mile above London when he saw a bizarre object flying slightly higher than him. He described it as having a row of lighted windows and looking something like a railway carriage with the blinds drawn.
Despite its weird appearance, Morgan was convinced he’d stumbled upon a German blimp about to attack London.
German zeppelins had bombed England for the first time in January 1915, helping to ignite history’s first aerial conflict. But the timing for the world’s first air raid had been unusual. As a rule, the Germans preferred flying their zeppelins when the weather was fairly warm, between March and September, because in winter months their blimp crews faced freezing and sometimes deadly temperatures flying high above the British Isles. So, for Morgan to encounter an authentic zeppelin over London in the middle of winter would have been a little peculiar.
The mysterious object was about 100 feet above him when Morgan first spotted it. Again, still thinking it was a German blimp, he drew the only weapon he had — his service pistol — and began firing at it.
Suddenly the object shot straight up at tremendous speed and disappeared into the night. The object rose so quickly, in fact, that Morgan thought his own plane was actually losing altitude. This disorientation forced him to crash-land in a marsh.
Morgan was not the only person to spot the weird flying object that night. Fifteen minutes after his encounter, another British pilot reported seeing something unusual caught in searchlights panning the skies above London. Others on the ground later said they’d seen the strange object as well.
Whatever happened, Sub-Lieutenant J. E. Morgan holds a particular distinction in UFO lore: He is considered the first person to shoot at an unidentified flying object from the air.
If it was a UFO, that is.
To understand what Sub-Lieutenant Morgan may or may not have seen over London that night, we have to go back seven years, to 1909.
In the spring of that year, people all over the British Isles, particularly along England’s east coast, began seeing strange things in the sky. So many of these mysterious flying objects were reported, it became known as the Great Airship Scare of 1909. The aerial intruders, whatever they were, were dubbed “scareships.”
In a story related by many, but researched with particular levelheadedness by journalist and UFO writer David Clarke (see drdavidclarke.co.uk), it all started in the early morning on March 23 when a policeman on duty in Peterborough, a city located in East Anglia, thought he’d heard the sound of a car approaching in the dark. Police Constable Kettle soon realized, though, that the noise was coming from overhead. When he looked up, he saw an object about 1,000 feet above him moving at tremendous speed. The object was oblong and narrow, had a powerful light attached to it and was accompanied by a whirring sound. It was so large, the policeman said, it blotted out the stars. He watched in astonishment as it quickly vanished to the northwest.
Kettle told his fantastic story to the local Peterborough newspaper, and it was later picked up by the Daily Mail of London. But even though the newspaper claimed another Peterborough policeman had verified the constable’s sighting, the incident was soon forgotten.
Only temporarily, though, because about six weeks later, there was a veritable deluge of airship sightings over East Anglia. Suddenly people were seeing Kettle’s mysterious craft everywhere. So many reports came in, the British press decided to pursue the story aggressively. A media frenzy followed.