At around this time, the Soviets made a noteworthy medical breakthrough, in this case better assassination techniques. The new method involved a small metal canister that contained a firing device which would spray poisons in the form of the vapor. Once inhaled, the vapor quickly caused death by contracting the blood vessels, as in a cardiac arrest. After death, the blood vessels quickly relaxed so that an unsuspecting pathologist would conclude the victim had died of an ordinary heart attack.10
WORLDWIDE MILITARY AIRCRAFT ENCOUNTERS
During late 1956, UFOs were tracked on military radar stations around the world. In August and September, Danish radar tracked several moving at 1,800 mph. On October 26, two American jet fighters collided above the sea near Okinawa as they tried to identify several unknown objects detected by radar. Japanese fishermen rescued one pilot; the other one died.11
An air force cat-and-mouse game with a UFO took place sometime in late 1956 at Castle AFB in California. Control tower personnel spotted a luminous elliptical object, and two interceptors closed in. The object eluded them by using cloud cover, but the pilots saw it at various angles and as close as a few hundred yards. It appeared to be a flattened circular shape. Ground radar tracked the object, and the pilots obtained weak returns before the object accelerated away. Several officers arrived from another base to debrief the pilots and appeared very knowledgeable of UFOs. They sought “confirmation, not information,” and told the pilots not to discuss the sighting at all, not even with each other. Citizens who had seen the episode were told that the pilots had been chasing ducks or geese. UFO researcher Richard Hall, who reported this incident, added that he personally knew of many instances in which military witnesses were debriefed by officers who displayed detailed knowledge of UFOs.12
On November 21, at the port of Kobe, Japan, a customs official and a maritime safety station officer heard an explosion as they walked along the pier. They saw something resembling fireworks on the bay and two balls of fire, whirling and then submerging.13 In “the Far East” in December, two USAF jet pilots obtained strong radar returns from an object twenty miles away, “at least as large as a B-29 four engine bomber.” Flying at 750 mph, one of the pilots got to within eight miles of the signal and saw it as a round object, about three hundred feet in diameter, exactly where radar showed it to be. Suddenly, strong interference jammed his radar. Using anti-jam procedures, he reestablished a lock-on and continued to close. The UFO then accelerated so quickly that his radar could not read it accurately, though he estimated its speed at 2,000 mph. This report, dated February 1957, went all the way up the chain of the U.S. Far East Air Force Command, and was leaked to NICAP by “a member of air force intelligence.” While it was not officially classified, it remained unknown to the public for about a year. When the United Press ran the story on October 1, 1957, the air force press desk issued “no comment.”14
Air force jets were also scrambled at least once during a multi-day UFO sighting near Pierre, South Dakota, from November 24 to 25, and possibly longer. At one point during this series of sightings, state police chased the object. On December 13, 1956, a Swedish ship radioed harbor control at La Guaira, Venezuela, that a bright, cone-shaped object had fallen vertically into the sea off the Venezuelan coast. It gave off “strange glares,” and when it hit the water, the crewmates heard an explosion, and the sea became brilliantly colored. After the colors subsided, a boiling motion continued to disturb the sea. On January 21, 1957, shortly before the army UFO secrecy order, army intelligence reported a sighting of a “large shiny metal ball” and other objects over APO Army base. On March 23, 1957, another object plunged into a Venezuelan body of water, Lake Maracaibo.15
A number of civilian pilots reported UFOs in the coming months. On March 8, 1957, a pilot flying near Baudette, Minnesota, saw a luminous circular object flying against the wind. It was about twenty feet in diameter and flew so low that it appeared to suck up the snow. The next day, at 3:30 A.M., a pilot flying a DC-6 off Florida saw a bright UFO coming toward his plane; he estimated it to be “at least the size of a DC-3.” His evasive action threw some passengers from their seats, injuring a few, and ambulances met the plane. Other pilots also reported the object. Miami Air Traffic Control sent a “Flash” to the Civil Aeronautics Board which described the near collision:
