What's it like ... to see a UFO?

Originally published March 06, 2008

By Ron Cassie
News-Post Staff

This is one in a series of stories that goes behind the scenes to explore the unusual, memorable, quirky things people do -- and go through -- in the courses of their lives.

Frederick County native Keith Chester is among the 14 percent of Americans, along with former President Jimmy Carter, who told The Associated Press last year that they've seen an Unidentified Flying Object. Now, after four years of research at the military National Archives in College Park, Chester has published a print-on-demand, 320-page book on the subject titled, "Strange Company: Military Encounters with UFOs in WWII." Available through Anomalist Books, the work contains detailed accounts of unconventional sightings by American and British pilots culled from military and government documents, interviews and news stories.

Marion Lambert remembers the late summer day 42 years ago when her son, Keith, then 9 years old, ran frightened into their house, telling his mother he'd seen a huge, shiny ball in the sky over a nearby tree line.

"Oh, he was scared to death, petrified," Lambert recounted. "He'd seen it with some of his friends and said it was a large, red circle. They said it hung up above the trees and then it just -- went."

"It was about 5:30 or 6 p.m. and the sun had already gone down behind me, behind the mountain," said Keith Chester, who now lives in Harford County with his wife, Nancy, and is researching a second book. "It was completely bright, large, round and red. Immediately, the hair on the back of my neck stood up and I instantly felt fear."

Lambert said about six months before her son's sighting, she and her grandmother, Effie Spurrier, had witnessed something similar from their backyard at the base of the Catoctin Mountains in Yellow Springs.

"There was a very bright light, very high in the sky, the whole mountain was lit up," she said, recalling the mid-1950s through the 1960s when they and neighbors would sit outside in the evening, looking for possible extraterrestrial objects amongst the clouds and stars. "I never did find out what that was. It was hovering over the trees off Bethel Road toward Mountaindale, but certainly wasn't a helicopter, I knew what they looked like."

Lambert recalled seeing news reports shortly after her son's sighting, with the government explaining that it had been weather balloons that several local citizens spotted in the Frederick area. She didn't buy it.

"Apparently, there were a bunch of people that saw what my son saw, but weather balloons weren't red," Lambert said.

The national -- and local -- mystery around UFOs and his own sighting sparked a lifelong interest for Chester. But he didn't give the subject a serious look until he heard secondhand that a former Army colonel secretary turned Frederick high school teacher, was telling students in the late 1980s about a earlier military cover-up around a recovered UFO.

By 1999, he began researching his book about the sighting of unexplained aerial phenomena by American and British fighter and bomber squadrons during World War II. Sometimes called foo fighters (lead singer Dave Grohl of the rock band by the same name is a UFO aficionado), Chester started chronicling accounts from 1931 until the end of the war.

Shortly after in 1947, in what would later become the most famous of all UFO incidents, an episode shook up Roswell, N.M., though it didn't reach the public consciousness until decades later.

Eventually, Chester met a former WWII Army Air Force sargeant turned UFO author and researcher, named Len Stringfield. He told Chester of his sighting flying over the Pacific on the way to Toyko, days after the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki. Chester said he later found a CIA document, called the Robertson/Durant Report, from 1953 that said while the "foo fighter" sightings were likely misidentified electrical weather phenomenon, such as what's known as St. Elmo's Fire, their exact cause wasn't explainable. This report encouraged Chester to dig deeper.

Over his four years of research, Chester said he made perhaps 150 trips to the National Archives, pulling thousands of boxes and documents. He said that what makes his work unique is it focuses on the WWII-era that has not been comprehensively chronicled previously. His book cites over 500 references to declassified documents, memorandum, notes, newspaper accounts and interviews.

"Strange Company" starts with the re-telling of a "100-foot flaming dirigible" in West Virginia from a 1931 New York Times story and a 1932 New Jersey police report of another odd aircraft. Among research from the war, he found a 1944 report from British pilots of a "airship-like," silver, cigar-shaped object. The crew said they could see lights and windows at the bottom of the massive object 2,000 to 3,000 feet away.

A Feb. 11, 1945, document, classified as secret, from the Air Staff Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, cited worried crew reports of "flight phenomena" from the 415th Night Fighter Squadron, stressing "that something should be done to get to the root of the matter."

A March 1945 military document headlined, "BALLS OF FIRE -- RED," said "Bomber Command crews have for some time been reporting similar phenomena." It suggested flak and German Me-262 rockets as "the most likely explanation," but went to say the whole affair remained something of a mystery.

The issue and reports from U.S. Army Air Force pilots attracted enough attention at the time that in 1945 both Time and Newsweek ran stories of foo fighter sightings, which briefly became a catch-all phrase before terms like "flying saucer" entered the lexicon and the later name, UFO, took hold.

"There was a great deal of disbelief by those who were not witnesses," said Chester, who has been profiled recently in such disparate publications as UFO magazine and The (Baltimore) Sun. He said crews were often ridiculed by intelligence investigators, some of whom accused the men of drinking on the job. This prevailing attitude, he said, "persuaded airmen to remain quiet."

Both Stringfield and Harold Auspurger, the commanding officer of the 415th Night Fighter Squadron, were interviewed extensively by Chester. They maintained that what unnerved them during the war wasn't German-made. Later, they came to believe it was something extraterrestrial. Those interviews, his own sighting and his research has convinced Chester.

"I tried to look at and represent everything I found at face-value," he said. "I certainly can't call all these veterans liars. They were elite, highly-trained observers, and assuming they're telling the truth, I don't think flares, rockets or the moon explain what they said they saw.

"It suggests something otherworldly," Chester concluded. "There is nothing before, (or) during (WWII) or today that's been invented and behaves in the way the things they described did. I personally would be more surprised to discover we are alone in the universe. It puts us in that realm. But there is no absolute proof, it's still speculation. I tried to lay out the facts for people."