UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

In the long history of human warfare, we have constantly tried to one up each other on the battlefield, devising new technology, tactics, and weaponry to give ourselves the edge. In this sense it seems only natural that at some point we should turn to the vast wealth of supposed psychic poers lying within the human mind and try to use them to our military advantage, and this was, and perhaps still is, done on a surprisingly large scale within the American military and intelligence agencies. Here we have tales of psychic soldiers, men who stare at goats, and the American Jedi soldiers.

One of the most famous psychic projects pursued by the U.S. military was a program that sought to delve into tapping into a wide variety of mental powers in for military purposes, which was eventually called Project Stargate. Originally started in 1978 at Fort Meade, Maryland, it was the brainchild of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and a California company called SRI International, and its scope would become wide beyond what enyone could have expected. The idea was simply to try and develop psychic powers for use in military operations, initially focusing on remote viewing, wherein faraway objects and places can be seen by the psychic, but soon branching out to clairvoyance, manipulating computer systems with the mind, and even supposedly powers straight from a movie, such as levitation, invisibility, walking through walls, or killing with the power of the mind.

It was largely overseen by the esteemed general and self-professed psychic General Albert Stubblebine III, and is a project popularized by the 2009 Hollywood blockbuster The Men Who Stare At Goats, starring George Clooney and Ewan McGregor, itself based on the 2004 book of the same name by journalist Jon Ronsonthe, the title of which refers to having psychics stare at goats or other animals and try to physically affect them with their thoughts. As absurd as it may sound, there were indeed many living creatures subjected to these sorts of experiments in an effort to create psychic assassins, and there were allegedly successes at times and even supposed real research that that was said to conclusively prove that negative mental energy could be focused upon mould to inhibit its growth, which is useful for the military? I suppose? Even the famed psychic and spoon bender extraordinaire Uri Geller was allegedly brought into the fold and asked to kill a pig with his mind for the military, which he says he refused to do, not because he couldn’t, mind you, but because he thought it was unethical. Geller would say of this:

They asked me to kill the poor creature using thought alone. I cannot tell you how shocked I was. I love animals. My powers cannot be used to harm. In those days, I was young and naive, but in that moment I realised who I’d become associated with. I catapulted myself out of that room and left the program.

While this might all sound like pure fantasy, it was bizarrely a totally real program that expanded quite rapidly. The Cold War in particular saw some in the American military war machine terrified that the nefarious Soviets were pursuing psychic warfare, spying on them, influencing them, or even trying to disarm nuclear weapons with the power of the mind, and efforts to counteract this were stepped up. As a result, the project began to give birth to other clandestine offshoot programs and sister programs, all with colorful code names right out of a comic book that these sorts of thing were known for, such as GONDOLA WISH, GRILL FLAME, CENTER LANE, SUN STREAK, and MK ULTRA, and all devoted to different areas of psychic phenomena. It was all very hush hush, and funded secretly, but inevitably word leaked out about these covert operations. It might sound ludicrous that the military would pour so much time and money into all of this, but it was apparently all taken very seriously, and one remote viewer and Special Forces Sergeant Glenn Wheaton has said of such secret programs:

You have to understand that these ideas were not considered wacky. They were seen as the next military frontier. We needed to know whether it was possible to use paranormal forces for military ends. We also needed to know how to protect ourselves should they be used against us.

One of these projects was called Project Jedi, named after the Jedi of the Star Wars films, and which sought to focus on creating soldiers who could use their mental powers not for merely spying, but for actively offensive purposes and to increase human performance on the battlefield. The program first started to come together in the late 1970s and early 80s, and was also known by such titles as the “Ultimate Warrior Training Program,” “The Jedi Warrior Training Program,” and the “Earth’s First Battalion,” and which was designed specifically for use by elite Special Forces and envisioned as potentially revolutionizing warfare.

One area that was developed towards these ends was to utilize what was called by them “Biocybernaut training combined technologies of biofeedback, neurofeedback, cyberphysiology, and contemplative inner methods of mastery drawn from the vast array of contemplative science traditions” to supposedly hone soldiers’ perceptions and mastery over their minds and bodies. This was allegedly used to sharpen the marksmanship of the soldiers to nearly superhuman levels of ability, and it was claimed that soldiers trained with these methods were better shots in less than half the training time of conventional methods, and that they could even reach a level where they could shoot accurately when blindfolded. These methods could also supposedly be used to increase the speed of mastery of foreign languages, as well as to consciously manipulate brain chemicals such as endorphins for the purpose of enhancing physical prowess. They were also apparently trained to be able to control numerous bodily functions such as blood flow, muscle tension, healing rate, blood pressure, and physiological reactions to stress, as well as turn off pain and also how to “synchronize their brainwaves.”

A great deal of this training was also focused on increasingly deep meditation exercises and martial arts skills. One of the main guys they had working on this in the early stages of the program was instructor Mike Echanis, who was an almost cult-like figure of the martial arts world at the time and by many accounts was able to utilize many of these mental powers to improve his fighting abilities, with one account saying of one training exercise:

The students couldn’t see him. It wasn’t that he was actually invisible, but he could blend in, using both camouflage and mental trickery, that they couldn’t spot him. He was able to adapt and blend into the environment so well that those looking down into the pit just could not see him. A trainee would jump into the pit, and suddenly Echanis would come out of nowhere and be upon him, and the hand-to-hand combat would ensue. The students were certain to endure a severe beating.

Echanis was also said to have the ability to kill animals with the power of his mind alone. Indeed, according Wheaton this was sometimes spectacularly successful, such as one episode in which he personally witnessed the martial artist kill one of the animals in this way, of which he says:

Michael focused on the goat pretty intensely. It started to bray like a donkey or horse. It dropped down to its forelegs; blood began to drip from its nose. About 20 to 30 seconds later red suds began to froth from the goat’s mouth. The goat lost its equilibrium and passed away in a fit.

There was also a martial arts instructor with the program named Guy Savelli, who claimed to have vast knowledge of ancient secret techniques such as the death touch, as well as “reflex-reaction, touch sensitivity, concepts of power and invisibility, and mind-striking techniques.” Interestingly, his “mind striking” powers were purportedly so advanced that he was able to throw grown men across the room, as well as kill small animals such as hamsters with a thought, earning him the nickname “Hamster Killer.” Folks you can’t make this stuff up, it writes itself. Another big hitter in the program was Dr. John Alexander, former commander of Special Forces in Vietnam and psychic, of which his biography says:

As part of his official military duties, he became involved in studying psychic phenomena and attempting to understand what the Soviet Union was doing in this area. He learned how to teach psychokinesis, involved professional magicians in the process, and then brought these skills to many high-level officers. His studies also covered remote viewing and extensive work in Neuro-linguistic Programming. These techniques were applied to accelerating learning and skill acquisition.

Project Jedi only lasted 6 months before it was sort of closed down, but it still adds to the wider lore of Project Stargate, of which it was a part. The whole bonkers program was passed off to the CIA and eventually downsized and eventually terminated in 1995, with the CIA declassifying the documents and claiming that none of the projects ever saw any real verifiable promise for actual intelligence or battlefield work, and that it was a waste of resources that could be spent elsewhere. However, of course there is the opinion that programs such as Project Stargate and others like it never really stopped but were rather buried deep away from the public eye. Such programs are claimed to have actually seen plenty of military action, such as pervasive rumors that U.S. remote viewers were instrumental in locating and bringing down the terrorist Osama Bin Laden. is this true and is the military still actively engaged in using psychic powers for warfare? Who knows?

So here we have psychic warriors, real Jedi fighters, and the channeling of the power of the human mind into military capacities. Is there anything to any of this? While it is certainly true that the U.S. government did pursue these avenues of research and did try to weaponize psychic powers, how successful were they really, and does any of this still go on? Like any good conspiracy there is probably no way to convince anyone either way, and the debate and speculation will probably rage on.

World War II was an expansive morass of violence that spanned two regions of the globe and went on to grip the entire world with fear and suffering. It is a turbulent time already infused with a rich history, but scattered amongst the tales of battle and valor are other, more little-known stories of strange mysteries from beyond our understanding. Many of these are connected to the skies of World War II, which were invaded by warplanes, bombs, and explosions, but which also hold some of the most intriguing unexplained mysteries of the era. Here is a selection of some of the weirder unsolved mysteries of the skies of the intense cauldron of human violence that was World War II.

Of all of the planes flying about and tearing up the skies in the era of World War II, many of them obviously never came back, but the strangest of these cases are when they simply vanished into thin air without a trace. One of the most oft-discussed and mysterious vanishings of aircraft revolves around the enigmatic Flight 19, in 1945. The flight in question was actually a group of U.S. Navy TBM Avenger torpedo bombers that took off from Ft. Lauderdale, Florida on December 5, 1945, on a Naval exercise called “Navigation Problem Number One,” which was for the purpose of carrying out mock bombing runs along an area known as Hens and Chickens Shoals in the Bahamas. It was all a standard, routine flight, and each of the five planes in the squadron was manned by 3 experienced men, with the whole thing under the command of a seasoned pilot by the name of Lieutenant Taylor.

The first half of the mission all went according to plan, the dummy bombs were dropped, and the planes headed off on the second leg of their mission, but this was when things would get strange indeed. The leader, Taylor, began to complain that his compass was on the fritz, and he further proclaimed that the planes were all flying in the wrong direction. As the group of planes floundered about trying to get their bearings, one of the pilots radioed, “I don’t know where we are. We must have got lost after that last turn.” A passing Navy plane piloted by a Lieutenant Robert F. Cox was flying by at the time and overheard the radio chatter, after which he extended an offer of help, as well as a message to the nearest air station of what was going on. In response, he got a chilling message from a frightened sounding Taylor that said:

Both my compasses are out and I’m trying to find Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. I’m over land, but it’s broken. I’m sure I’m in the Keys, but I don’t know how far down.

This was strange to say the least, as the group had just successfully fulfilled the first half of their mission near the Bahamas and should have been nowhere near the Florida Keys at that point in time. After this, Taylor, convinced that he was way off course, instructed his squadron to veer off towards the northeast, thinking it would take them home but really only sending them further out to sea. Some of the other pilots in the group protested the move, saying they should fly west, but the order had been given and off they went. At one point Taylor changed his mind and directed them west, but then they changed their course to east once again. It was all rather bizarre behavior to say the least. As this was happening, the radio chatter from Flight 19 became fainter and more distorted, and one of the final transmissions was:

All planes close up tight. We’ll have to ditch unless landfall…when the first plane drops below ten gallons, we all go down together.

This seemed to suggest that Taylor was aware that their fuel was running low and that they were on a one way ticket into the sea, and after that the radio transmissions became plagued by strange static before going silent. The Navy was quick to respond, sending out a search crew almost immediately after this final transmission, but they were unable to find any sign of Flight 19. Indeed, one of the searchers, a Mariner aircraft and its 13 crew members, also suddenly lost communications and dropped off the face of the earth as well to join Flight 19 in the annals of great mysteries. This in turn prompted its own search party and the whole thing turned into a hot mess quite rapidly.

In the end, the Navy would scour over 3,000 square miles of sea in search of the missing planes but would turn up not even a scrap of wreckage. Of course, considering the proximity to the notorious Bermuda Triangle the media was all over this and theories began to fly. One was that Taylor had been somewhat unfit for duty, which had impacted his judgement during the doomed mission. There are reports that he had arrived late on the day of the mission and had for unknown reasons implored the command not to go through with it. This has led to the most popular, “rational” theory that these planes under his questionable state simply made a mistake, ran out of fuel, and crashed into the ocean to never be seen again. The mystery was even tantalizingly “solved” for a time when in 1991 a team of treasure hunters came across the wrecks of five World War II Avengers planes at the bottom of the sea, but these turned out to have not had anything to do with the mysterious lost flight. The fate of Flight 19 remains unknown.

Just as mysterious is a phenomenon that pervaded the war in both the European and Pacific theaters in the form of myriad unexplainable occurrences collectively known as “Foo Fighters.” These typically took the form of inexplicable orbs, lights, glows, and “balls of fire” that darted about in the war-torn skies with inhuman maneuverability to startle even the most experienced pilots, and which were first seen from around 1944. One of the earliest Allied accounts was from Army Air Major William D. Leet, who in December of 1944 was on a mission aboard a B-17 near the Adriatic Sea when he and his crew saw something up there in the clouds that did not belong, a small disc that seemed to defy all laws of physics in its movements and which tracked them for some time. In that very same month another pilot with the 415 Nigh Fighter Squadron over Hagenau, Germany had his own encounter with glowing orange balls in the sky, saying:

Upon reaching our altitude they leveled off and stayed on my tail. After staying with the plane for two minutes, they peeled off and turned away, flying under perfect control, and then went out.

Another early report is that of Charles R. Bastien, of the Eighth Air Force, who said that he had seen “two fog lights flying at high rates of speed that could change direction rapidly” while on a mission over the region of Belgium. In another report over the Indian Ocean one of the crew of a U.S. B-29 Superfortress says they saw something very unusual near the plane, saying of the bizarre experience:

A strange object was pacing us about 500 yards (475 m) off the starboard wing. At that distance it appeared as a spherical object, probably five or six feet in diameter, of a very bright and intense red or orange… it seemed to have a halo effect. My gunner reported it coming in from about a 5 o’clock position (right rear) at our level. It seemed to throb or vibrate constantly. Assuming it was some kind of radio-controlled object sent to pace us, I went into evasive action, changing direction constantly, as much as 90 degrees and altitude of about 2,000 feet (600 m). It followed our every maneuver for about eight minutes, always holding a position about 500 yards (475m) out and about 2 o’clock in relation to the plane. When it left, it made an abrupt 90 degree turn, accelerating rapidly, and disappeared into the overcast.

Such sightings became rather common and occurred all over the place, often seen by entire crews, and with none of these experienced airmen able to find a rational explanation for what they had seen. The objects were also picked up quite frequently by radar crews and air traffic control, who often claimed that they would accelerate rapidly or vanish from view for no reason. Many pilots tried to take evasive maneuvers but this never really worked, and the occasional attempts to shoot the lights down were equally unsuccessful. These were beyond our comprehension.

Sightings of the Foo Fighters were well reported in the press at the time, and became so numerous that they were obviously not simply a figment of the imagination, and what they could be was heavily speculated upon. The most common explanation was that they were some sort of experimental German aircraft, but this didn’t seem to fit as the mysterious objects were nonthreatening and never seemed to take any aggressive action, and it would also turn out that enemy forces had been seeing the exact same kind of things, which they had conversely thought to be experimental aircraft of the Allies. Other explanations have included that they were the result of some sort of atmospheric phenomenon such as electrical discharges called St. Elmo’s fire, that they were ball lightning or an electromagnetic disturbance, that they were merely afterimages of flashes from explosions, and of course that they were alien UFOs, but the strange phenomenon of the Foo Fighters of World War II has never been fully explained and remains a mystery.

In addition to vanishings and mysterious lights there are also cases of what can only be called “ghost planes.” One famous case of such a mystery is what is often called the “Pearl Harbor Ghost Plane,” and which involves a very odd occurrence that supposedly happened on December 8, 1942, just about a year after the infamous attack. On this day, an unidentified incoming plane was detected flying towards Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, from out over the Pacific Ocean, seemingly coming from nowhere. Attempts at radio contact were met with silence, and warplanes were scrambled to investigate the intruder.

On closer inspection it was seen to be an out of date model called a Curtiss P-40 Warhawk, which had not been in operation since the attack on Pearl Harbor. The mystery aircraft seemed to have seen better days, its shell perforated by numerous bullet holes a and the engine sputtering noticeably, and there seemed to be a pilot within who was bloody and struggling to keep his plane under control. The military escort paced the plane for a while, baffled as to where it had come from and wondering what to do, when the mysterious pilot waved at them and proceeded to crash land. When the wreckage was examined it is said that there was no sign of the pilot that had been seen, and the only clue that could be found was a diary in which it was written that the plane had flown in from the island of Mindanao, a full 1,300 miles away. The pilot has never been seen, no reason ascertained for why it appeared, and the Ghost Plane of Pearl Harbor continues to be a weird World War II mystery.

Probably even more bizarre is a case from November 23, 1944, when a British Royal Air Force antiaircraft unit stationed near Cortonburg, Belgium was surprised by something they saw lumbering towards them in the sky. There barreling in their direction was an American Army Air Corps B-17 bomber, a four-engine heavy bomber so colossal and heavily armed that it was nicknamed the “Flying Fortress.” The plane was coming in rather fast with its landing gear down, and because there was no such landing scheduled and because of the speed of the incoming aircraft it was assumed that it was preparing to make an emergency landing at their base. A communication with the base proved that indeed no such B-17 landing was expected, and the gunner crew braced themselves as the massive aircraft came hurtling in towards a nearby open, plowed field.

It was a rather messy landing to say the least, with the aircraft bouncing and swerving along as the terrified gunners looked on, finally stopping dangerously close to the position after one of its wings clipped the ground, yet it was still in one piece and had not actually crashed. The aircraft sat there looming over the field as its formidable propellers continued to spin in a cacophony of noise, but as the minutes ticked by no one exited the plane. When 20 minutes had passed with no sign of human activity, and the plane just squatting there with its engines running like some growling beast, it was decided to go in and investigate.

The team warily went in, opened the entry hatch located under the fuselage and proceeded to enter, expecting that perhaps the crew had been injured or otherwise unable to get out of the plane. What they did not expect was that the plane would be completely empty. A full sweep through the aircraft showed that not a single crew member was aboard, although it would later be reported that there were signs that the crew had just recently been there and must have vacated the aircraft in a hurry. There were found to be chocolate bars unwrapped and half eaten lying about, a row of neatly folded parachutes, with none apparently missing, and jackets that had been neatly hung up. The superior officer, a John V. Crisp, would say of the eerie scene:

We now made a thorough search and our most remarkable find in the fuselage was about a dozen parachutes neatly wrapped and ready for clipping on. This made the whereabouts of the crew even more mysterious. The Sperry bomb-sight remained in the Perspex nose, quite undamaged, with its cover neatly folded beside it. Back on the navigator’s desk was the code book giving the colours and letters of the day for identification purposes. Various fur-lined flying jackets lay in the fuselage together with a few bars of chocolate, partly consumed in some cases.

Where had they gone and how had the plane landed on its own? No one had any idea. Crisp had the engines shut down and the interior was further inspected. The log book was found opened, and the last cryptic words written in it were “bad flak.” Yet considering that all of the parachutes seemed to be accounted for and the exterior of the plane did not have evidence of damage except for what it had incurred in its rough landing, such as the buckled wing and one disabled engine, it seemed to be a rather strange last message.

The mystery B-17 began to be called the “Phantom Fortress,” and nobody knew just how it could have come in to make a landing by itself minus a crew, or what had become of those aboard. It would not be until a team was sent in by the Advanced Headquarters, 8th Air Force Service Command in Brussels, that a picture of what occurred was formed. It was ascertained through the aircraft’s serial number that the plane had been part of a bombing squadron called the 91st Bombardment Group, and that they had been on a mission to bomb oil refineries in Merseburg, Germany, when problems arose.

B-17

According to the bomber’s crew, all of whom were tracked down and found to have been alive and safe, their aircraft at some point had developed a malfunctioning bomb rack and had been forced to abort. They flew off away from the rest of the group but had been hit by enemy fire, which knocked out one of the aircraft’s four engines. There was also a hit on the bomb bay itself, which had caused a bright flash, but rather oddly had not set off the ordnance. The decision was made by the crew of the limping, damaged plane to set a course towards England, but this idea was quickly abandoned when it became apparent that the hobbled aircraft was never going to make it that far.

They changed their course towards Brussels, Belgium, at the same time making the plane lighter by dumping and jettisoning any unnecessary or nonessential equipment on board. When the plane still continued to suffer and a second engine on the struggling plane sputtered out, it was decided that the aircraft would be unable to make the journey, and the crew had then decided to bail out. The B-17 was put on autopilot and left to its fate as the crew jumped to safety. No one thought it would make it very far, let alone somehow land, but land it did. This was all very interesting information, but it still did not seem to explain a lot of odd details. For one, why did ground crew report all 4 engines working as the bomber had approached, with one being damaged only upon landing, when the report said that 2 engines had been knocked out during the mission? Indeed, where was the damage from the claimed enemy fire? Also, why were all of the parachutes still there if the crew had bailed out? Perhaps most mysterious of all, how had a large, cumbersome plane like the B-17 manage to come to a landing without a pilot?

Authorities on the case, as well as crew members of the Phantom Fortress, offered up some theories to try and shed some light on at least a few of the mysteries surrounding the event. For instance, with the engines it could have been that the technical difficulties cleared up on their own after the crew had bailed out, making the plane seem to have 4 fully operating engines on approach, although why they would start working again after being taken out remains mysterious. If the engines had been in bad enough shape for the crew to abandon the aircraft it seems odd that they should kick back into working order on their own and continue whirring away even after the rough landing.

With regards to the lack of any apparent visible damage from enemy fire, it has been suggested that this could have just been simply due to the untrained eyes of the team that initially investigated the plane after it had landed. They were after all a gunner crew, not trained aviators, and may have mistaken the damage reported by the B-17 crew as being from the crash. They simply might not have noticed that the aircraft had sustained battle damage, but then again they were antiaircraft gunners and might have had some idea. With the parachutes, it was surmised that they had possibly mistaken some spare parachutes as the full compliment. However, this is all speculation, and the mystery has never been totally solved.

As to how the B-17 could have come to a landing mostly intact without a pilot, that is still largely a mystery as well. Autopilot is one thing, but landing is another beast altogether. After all, there is that old saying, “Flying is easy, landing is hard.” Even with a pilot landing such an immense aircraft would be very difficult. A pilotless B-17 landing by itself with no one on board was totally unprecedented, and one would expect it to have careened into the ground to crash into a ball of fire and debris, or at least ended up a heap of twisted wreckage, so how could this happen?

Although no one really knows for sure, the main theory is that the plane simply lost altitude slowly, at just the right speed, and with just the right angle of descent to come down relatively softly enough to appear as if it was landing, with the B-17’s legendary toughness and sturdy frame managing to hold it together to keep it from disintegrating. The odds of all of this happening in just such a way seem to be extremely small and unlikely, but is this really possible at all? Also, there is the rather odd detail that this unmanned plane just happened to come down in the exact best place to land under the circumstances, in that wide open field, and not one of the countless other places it could have come down more tragically. This could very well all be pure, blind chance, and these disparate factors all amazingly coming together just right, but it still all seems very strange indeed.

The mystery landing of the “Phantom Fortress” did happen, but the details of how it did remain mysterious and open to speculation. What we do know for sure is that this B-17 was on a bombing mission in Germany, that it did land without a crew in that field, and that the crew members were later found to have been alive and well with quite a story to tell, but questions remain. Are the B-17 crew’s reports or the British gunnery crew’s accounts totally accurate? Why don’t they line up? Did everything happen as they said it did? How could this plane have landed by itself in just the right way and in just the right place to keep from being a mangled pile of metal? Just what in the world happened here?

There is also the ghostly plane that haunted the skies of Northern Italy during the war to rain down destruction upon the countryside, and came to be known to the cowering people as “Pippo.” The rather cartoonishly named Pippo was said to appear only at night, always alone, and would most often perform punishing strafing runs on seemingly indiscriminate targets, either firing with its blazing machine guns or dropping fiery bombs. Sometimes it was said to deploy rather bizarre ordinance, such as exploding pens, incendiary flares, or poisoned candy. Sometimes it was known to drop so-called “butterfly bombs,” which was interestingly a German 2 kilogram anti-personnel submunition used by the Luftwaffe.

The mystery plane seemed to have no rhyme or reason to its choice of targets, unleashing death upon everyone from both Axis and Allied soldiers, to innocent civilians, to farmers working their fields. At other times, the plane would not attack at all, and would merely circle overhead for some inscrutable reason known only to it, all the while emanating that strange, haunting sound said to be unlike any other known aircraft. The terrified people deeply feared the plane, and would retreat into their homes at the slightest sign of the unique, unmistakeable, and rather strange unsettling “pip-pip” sound it was said to make, perhaps the origin of its relatively non-threatening sounding name. Once inside, the lore suggests that it was necessary to turn off or block all lights or else the phantom plane might choose your house as its next target.

Most of the time the bizarre phantom plane remained unseen and cloaked in darkness, its odd sound and the destruction it delivered the only evidence that it was even there at all. In every case, Pippo would appear from nowhere, go about its dark work, and then simply vanish. In more than a few cases it was said to sometimes vanish into thin air right in the middle of one of its attacks, as if it had never been there at all, with only burning rubble and dead bodies testament to the fact that it had made its presence known. It is unsure just where Pippo came from, what type of plane it was, or who was piloting it. Those loyal to the fascist government regime blamed the plane on the Allies, while those siding with Allied Forces thought it to be a Luftwaffe or Italian Air Force aircraft. Most of the terrified people claimed that there was no pilot at all, and that it was a ghost plane powered by some malevolent force loyal to no one or even the devil himself.

There are scarce records of this phenomenon in the official aviation literature. Accounts of Pippo are known of mostly through oral tradition, letters, diaries, and newspaper reports, but as phenomenal as the idea of a spectral plane flying solo missions over the Italian countryside may seem, it has been mostly agreed upon that the stories have some grain of truth to them and were likely based upon an actual plane. However, it is not clear just what its origins could have been. One possibility was that it was the Italian government orchestrating a propaganda campaign against the Allies or some kind of psychological warfare, by having one of their own planes attack its own civilians and then blame it on the enemy to turn public opinion against them. Others say it was some loose cannon pilot waging a personal vigilante war against his enemy, perhaps on some unknown vendetta. There is also the possibility that the plane could have been one of the many tactical night missions launched by the Allies in the aftermath of gaining the upper hand in Italy.

At this time, there were numerous solitary sorties done in the dark of night which were meant to halt German troop movements and prevent them from reinforcing their ranks. For such perilous missions, the Royal Air Force made much use of a type of aircraft called the de Havilland Mosquito, which was known for its rather unusual and distinctive buzzing drone, a fact that could explain the persistent detail of Pippo’s unusual sound. It has been surmised that the planes on these solo night missions, such as the Bristol Beaufighter, Northrop P-61, or de Havilland Mosquito, may have given rise to the stories of a lone ghostly plane terrorizing the populace. Still others stand by the theory that Pippo was exactly what many of the citizens thought it was; a phantom or ghost hellbent on some unknowable purpose.

There are other cases like this as well, and this has only been a section of the many air mysteries of World War II. It seems that even as the sky exploded and warplanes buzzed overhead there was something more to just the blood and the carnage. Beyond the violence and the fog of war were also mysteries that have never really been satisfactorily explained, and which serve to put a new sheen of the weird over one of the most tumultuous and bloodiest times in human history.

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