Ancillary Mercy полностью

The puzzling foo fighter sightings of the war had scarcely ended when a new wave of aerial sightings took place. In the spring of 1946, the Scandinavian countries began witnessing an impressive spectacle of luminous objects zipping through their skies, night after night, and at times during the day. Sweden remained the center of action throughout, with additional heavy activity in Finland, Norway, and Denmark. By late summer, the phenomenon had spread throughout Europe and beyond, to places such as Portugal, France, Tangier, Italy, Greece, and even India. Witnesses eventually numbered in the tens of thousands. This was a serious development, and indications are that the American military watched it closely.

Many sightings were of elongated, cigar-shaped objects. On May 24, 1946, at 2 A.M., for example, several Swedish witnesses saw a wingless cigar-shaped object, a scant three hundred feet above the ground, spurting “bunches of sparks” from its tail. The object moved at the speed of an ordinary airplane. On the thirty-first, just before noon, a wingless, huge metallic cigar was seen moving rapidly at about one thousand feet altitude.¹⁸ From these kinds of descriptions, the objects acquired the name of “ghost rockets.” It soon became clear, however, that these could not be conventional rockets. In the first place, they left no exhaust trail. Second, they were almost always silent. Third, many of them moved too slowly to be rockets. Fourth, they were often seen in formation, breaking formation, maneuvering, or hovering. Finally, the longest trajectory recorded by observers was one thousand kilometers : this was three times the range of the German V rockets. Strange rockets, for sure.

Still, the Swedes, Americans, British, and other interested parties (which included just about everybody) looked into the possibility that these were Soviet missiles of some sort, constructed with the help of their cache of German scientists from Peenemunde, home of the V rockets. Even then, most investigators realized this was unlikely, but few could rule it out completely.

Americans were most likely to blame the Soviets. On July 11, 1946, a member of the American Embassy in Stockholm actually saw a ghost rocket and sent a telegram to Washington:

One landed on beach near Stockholm... without causing any damage and, according to press, fragments are now being studied by military authorities.... If missiles are of Soviet origin as generally believed (some reports say they are launched from Estonia), purpose might be political to intimidate Swedes ....¹⁹

This is an important development: here is a clear statement that fragments were collected and studied. Who had them, and what were they? If the fragments were not Soviet, perhaps they were from a meteor, as some have later asserted.²⁰ Still, conclusive evidence remains lacking.

Many people assumed the ghost rockets were meteors. On July 19, the French newspaper Resistance wrote about them as “bright meteors traveling at fantastic speeds across [Swedish] skies.” However, on July 25, a Swedish defense staff spokesman told newspapers, “[That] they are meteors in every case is a theory which has been rejected without further ado.” Two days later, a French newspaper described the objects as rocket-propelled projectiles and said that over five hundred of them had been seen over Sweden since the beginning of July. The sheer number of occurrences suggested a serious national security concern.²¹

Needless to say, the ghost rockets were the topic of conversation in Sweden. On August 8, the chief of Swedish Air Defense, Gen. Nils Ahlgren, stated that some of the objects were seen at low altitudes, many maneuvered in half-circles, and most appeared to come from the south. On August 11, the Swedish military issued a press release acknowledging that the objects had become a common occurrence. A New York Times article described Stockholm as “near the boiling point.”²² On the thirteenth, it reported that “the Swedish General staff... described the situation as ‘extremely dangerous,’ and it is obvious that Sweden no longer is going to tolerate such violations.” The General staff noted, for example, that they received more than a thousand reports of “rocket bombs” from the night before and that very morning. One astronomer evidently saw one such “bomb.” It was at least ninety feet long, he said, exploded without a sound only a mile and a half away, and gave “a terrific light” that “for a moment blinded me. No fire, no smoke or sparks were noticeable.”²³