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NICK COOK 41
something—anything—that signaled the presence of another aircraft,
jinking the plane left and right to check his blind spots.
Still nothing.
It was only when he started to execute a turn back to base that
Ringwald told him the lights were back again.
Schlueter followed the line indicated by Ringwald and saw them a long
way off. Impossibly far, in fact, but still within radar range. He called out
to Meiers, but the radar operator was now having technical problems
with his AI set.
Schlueter again prepared to engage the enemy, but the lights had
already begun to glide away to the northeast, eventually retreating deep
into the German lines and disappearing altogether.
Nobody said anything until shortly before the Black Widow landed.
Although Schlueter and Meiers were agreed that the Germans must
have been experimenting with some new kind of secret weapon, neither
wanted to hazard a guess as to what this weapon might have been. There
was nothing they knew of in their own inventory that approached the
weird, darting performance characteristics of the aircraft they'd just
seen.
Fearful they would become the target of unwelcome squadron
humor—along predictable lines they were "losing it"—they decided not
to report the incident. And Ringwald, the spook, went along with it.
Reports of this incident exist in a number of UFO books—books I'd
not encountered before because to someone steeped in the dry reportage
of nuts-and-bolts technical journalism, they'd never entered my orbit.
The incident showed that almost three years before Twining wrote his
memo to General Schulgen unconventional aerial objects had appeared
in German skies prior to their manifestation across the U.S.A. in 1947.
On odd days off work and at weekends, I'd begun trawling public
archives for corroborating evidence of this sighting. What I found were
details on the 415th Night Fighter Squadron and the aircraft Schlueter
had flown at the time of the encounter; details that allowed me to fill in
the gaps of the published account and to visualize the sense of bewilderment
and fear that Schlueter and his crew would have experienced that
night. But along the way, I discovered that Schlueter's sighting was far
from unique. All that winter of 1944-45, Allied aircrew reported small,
ball-shaped aircraft glowing orange, red and white over the territory of
the Third Reich. While some attributed the lights to natural phenomena
such as ball lightning or St. Elmo's fire, others could not dismiss the
sightings so easily. The devices appeared to be able to home in on Allied
aircraft as if guided to them remotely or by some built-in control system.