Ghost Planes
It's not hard to find reports of
World War II ghost planes.
Unfortunately, it's quite hard to
find documented sources of
these ghostly tales. The fact is,
they're all pretty much folk tales.
They take many forms, but there
are two basic types.
First, you have post-war stories
about people encountering
planes from the past. Typically,
you'll have a young couple out
for a country stroll in the 1960s,
70s or 80s. They hear an odd
sound and turn around to see a
prop-driven vintage warplane
cruising along at low altitude,or
perhaps an entire flight of them.
Some of these stories are heavily
embellished (the plane
disappears into thin air, the
sighting was a harbinger of a
tragic plane crash that happened
shortly thereafter, the ghostly
pilots waved sadly to the
witnesses as they passed).
Stories might incorporate
speculation about "time slips."
The second type is more
interesting. These are ghost
plane sightings that happened
during the war. In its most
common form, the story revolves
around a flight of planes thatleft
for a dangerous mission. Later,
all the planes return and are
accounted for except one.
Everyone watches the sky,
hoping they made it out alive, but
no plane appears on the horizon.
Then, hours later, the drone of
radial engines sounds in the
distance. A plane is spotted.
Could it be their missing
comrades? But, no they would
have run out of fuel hours ago.
Still, there it is, heavily damaged,
limping along toward the air
field. It makes a ragged landing
and fellow airmen rush to the
scene. Inside the plane they
find…nothing. Not a soul. Nota
corpse. And the fuel tanks are
bone dry.
There are variations – sometimes
the crew is on board, but dead.
Sometimes the plane is so badly
damaged there's no physical way
it could have flown. There's a
story that a U.S. plane appeared
over the California coast hours
after the Pearl Harbor attack,
smoking and sputtering.
Witnesses could see a pilot on
board, but when the plane
crashed, the wreckage was empty.
Story no 2
A few months after Pearl Harbor, America was pretty on-edge, especially along the west coast. Everyone was scanning the sky and sea in fear of another Japanese attack. A Japanese submarine had shelled the Ellwood oilfield near Santa Barbara in February of 1942. Later that month, the mounting tension exploded into full-blown hysteria. An AWOL weather balloon triggered the initial panic. After that, flares were fired into the night sky, either to illuminate potential threats or signal danger. People saw the flares as more attackers, and a barrage of anti-aircraft fire soon filled the night.
The activity continued for several nights. In the end, the only casualties from the whole affair were three heart attack victims and three dead due to friendly fire. No Japanese aircraft were found, and the Japanese later denied having anything in the air near L.A. at the time.
That's the official story, at least. There were claims of a cover-up and a bunch of wild theories. The incident was five years prior to the Kenneth Arnold flying saucer report that sparked the U.S. UFO craze, but this is sometimes retroactively described as one of the first major UFO sightings. Newspapers at the time thought the whole thing was orchestrated to drum up support for the war effort by inducing panic. Tight-lipped military reports did little to alleviate concerns – a full public investigation wasn't performed until 40 years later.
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