Ghost Rockets

Before they were called flying saucers or UFOs, they were known as ‘ghost rockets.’ At least, that was the name one type of mysterious flying object was called when they were seen by thousands in northern Europe in the mid-1940s.

The term has not been in common use for decades, so when I heard ‘ghost rockets’ mentioned recently during an e-mail exchange with a former employee of AUTEC, the secret navy base in the Bahamas, I had to Google it to find out more.

About 2,000 sightings were logged between May and December 1946, with peaks on 9 and 11 August 1946. Two hundred sightings were verified with radar returns, and authorities recovered physical fragments which were attributed to ghost rockets.  Cameras weren’t prevalent as today, so that the above photo is the only known one of a ghost rocket.

At the time the ghost rockets were attributed either to meteor showers or long-range tests by the Russians of captured German V-1 or V-2 missiles. However, some investigators for the Swedish military apparently believed the objects could not be conventionally explained, and instead hypothesized an extraterrestrial origin.

Here’s a part of a formerly top secret USAFE (United States Air Force Europe) document from November 4, 1948.

“For some time we have been concerned by the recurring reports on flying saucers. They periodically continue to pop up; during the last week, one was observed hovering over Neubiberg Air Base for about thirty minutes. They have been reported by so many sources and from such a variety of places that we are convinced that they cannot be disregarded and must be explained on some basis which is perhaps slightly beyond the scope of our present intelligence thinking.

“When officers of this Directorate recently visited the Swedish Air Intelligence Service, this question was put to the Swedes. Their answer was that some reliable and fully technically qualified people have reached the conclusion that ‘these phenomena are obviously the result of a high technical skill which cannot be credited to any presently known culture on earth’. They are therefore assuming that these objects originate from some previously unknown or unidentified technology, possibly outside the earth.”

The document ended with the statement that “we are inclined not to discredit entirely this somewhat spectacular theory [extraterrestrial origins], meantime keeping an open mind on the subject.”

 Notice that the date of the document is 1948 and of American origin. As a result, the term flying saucer was used instead of ghost rocket. That’s because on June 24, 1947, private pilot Kenneth Arnold  reported a string of nine, shiny unidentified flying objects soaring past Mount Rainer at a minimum of 1,200 miles an hour. Arnold’s description of saucer-like objects led to the coining of the new term–flying saucer. His report is usually referred to as the first modern era UFO sightings, and was followed by numerous reported sightings over the next two to three weeks.

While ghost rockets were a WWII-era term, Curt Rowlett, the former AUTEC employee mentioned above, used it to describe a sighting. Here is what he had to say:

“On one voyage on an AUTEC vessel in the summer of 1985, we were underway in the channel between the north end of Andros Island and Grand Bahama Island, bound for a port in West Palm Beach, Florida.

“During the midnight to four o’clock a.m. watch, my watch partner and I sighted what I would later describe in a Strange Magazine article as two “ghost rockets” that flew side by side over our ship on a west to east trajectory.  These “rockets” were highly unusual as neither made any sound, were traveling at an oddly slow rate of speed, and left behind contrails that glowed brightly and which were “multi-colored,” in that the contrail smoke changed from white to green to blue to pink and then disappeared completely after about ten minutes.  (I estimate that they passed over us at an altitude of about 500 to 1000 feet; both rockets were white-colored and perhaps 50 to 100 feet in length).

“I never have been able to determine with 100% certainty whether or not those rockets were a part of some sort of secret Navy submarine or destroyer test being conducted in the area; I have always assumed that they were not and for good reason. As an AUTEC vessel, we would definitely have been informed that such a test was being undertaken and subsequently, warned to stay out of the area.  This had always been the Navy’s practice during similar rocket firing tests that I witnessed while working at sea in the same area.

“After returning from the voyage, I asked a friend at the AUTEC base who worked as a sort of “air and ocean traffic controller” about the incident.  He told me that he had no knowledge of any sort of test-firing of rockets on that night and due to the sensitive nature of his job, he certainly would have been in a position to know.  (And as a very close friend of mine, he would have told me even if it was supposed to be top secret.)

“Again, I have never heard any satisfactory explanation as to exactly what it was we saw that night.  I have also never heard of rockets that travel in such close proximity to each other, i.e., the side by side flight that we witnessed, or at such an unusually slow speed.  Students of Fortean subject matter will of course remember that there is a known history of so-called ghost rocket sightings in other parts of the world.”

Finally, ghost rockets live on into the late ’90s as the name of a New Jersey bluegrass band.