Ancillary Mercy полностью

On August 13, American General James Doolittle and David Sarnoff arrived in Stockholm. Doolittle, it will be recalled, had recently headed the American 8th Air Force’s investigation of foo fighters, a fact unknown to the public. Doolittle said he was in Sweden merely as a private citizen on behalf of his new employer, Shell Oil Company. Sarnoff, of RCA, was one of the world’s leading electronics experts, a pioneer in radio and television, and had been a brigadier general during the war. Upon consulting with the highest Swedish authorities on the ghost rockets, they learned that some objects had been tracked on radar. Unfortunately, little else is known about the Doolittle-Sarnoff trip or what conclusions they reached. What is clear, though, is that soon after their arrival, the Swedish government clamped down on ghost rocket information. That, in turn, coincided with an upsurge in interest by prominent Americans. The New York Times, for example, mentioned that American Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson was personally interested in the matter, although he maintained that the U.S. government was never consulted officially on the subject. Were Doolittle and Sarnoff “loose cannons,” acting on their own? This seems doubtful. Most likely, Doolittle and Sarnoff were acting on behalf of the U.S. government under the cover of private citizens. ²⁴

On the fifteenth, Swedish authorities disclosed that they came upon a fragment of metal less than three inches long and with letters on it. If this ever helped to solve the mystery, the answer is not publicly known. A week later, on August 22, Sweden’s defense staff announced it had obtained radar results, and that they would soon identify the source and nature of the rockets. In the meantime, they issued a ban of information “limited to any mention of where the rockets have been seen to land or explode.” In Norway, where the activity was only slightly less intense, the Norwegian General staff asked the press not to mention any appearance of the “rockets” over Norwegian territory, but instead to report them to the Intelligence Command of the High Command. The Danish military soon followed suit.²⁵

Let us pause for a moment to reflect on the significance of rockets that were “seen to land.” Invading one’s airspace was serious enough, but landings-if these were indeed controlled landings—were a problem of an entirely different magnitude. In the first place, it would rule out natural phenomena. Second, it would point to piloted craft, assuming we are talking about human technology—in 1946, an object that landed had to be piloted. But what human agency could have piloted these objects? No viable candidates ever emerged. What did the military authorities think about this? We do not know.

While the Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes investigated and clamped down, Britain and America provided assistance. On August 23, British radar experts, back from Sweden, submitted secret reports to the British government on the origin of the rockets. Their conclusion: the objects were not of Soviet origin. The scientific advisor to MI6, Prof. R. V Jones, found it doubtful that “the Russians were supposedly cruising their flying bombs at more than twice the range that the Germans had achieved.” On September 9, the British Air Ministry’s Directorate of Intelligence (Research) summarized the main features of the ghost rocket phenomenon and included eight types of sightings. Some Americans remained steadfast in their belief that the ghost rockets were a Russian ploy to intimidate the Swedes. On August 29, the American Embassy in Stockholm sent a Top Secret message to the State Department in Washington:

While over eight hundred reports have been received and new reports come daily, Swedes still have no tangible evidence. Full details of reports thus far received have been forwarded to Washington by our military and naval attaches. My own source is personally convinced some foreign power is actually experimenting over Sweden and he guesses it is Russia.²⁶

Within Sweden, explanations were conventional. Some scientists blamed mass hallucinations, others meteorological balloons, others were openly puzzled. Although, inevitably, the rockets became the butt of jokes, no one mentioned extraterrestrials. UFO researcher Jacques Vallee pointed out that “there does not seem to have been one single voice suggesting that the objects seen in 1946 might have been of interplanetary origin.”²⁷