STRANGE COMPANY: Military Encounters with UFOs in World War II

by Keith Chester

In a startling feat of historical research, Keith Chester's STRANGE COMPANY details an aspect of World War II that has been shrouded in ignorance for more than sixty years. Chester reveals that as the war gripped the world for six years, military personnel reported seeing numerous highly unconventional aircraft in all theaters of operation. These objects had extraordinary flight performance capabilities, came in a variety of shapes, sizes, and colors, and were able to travel at extraordinary speeds and avoid radar detection. The author recounts the reactions by military commands, their viewpoints, and theories as they struggled to make sense of the observations. A scientific panel convened by the CIA eight years after the war admitted that these unconventional objects were of unknown origin.

"In this eye-opening, thoroughly researched book, bristling with surprising revelations," writes UFO historian Jerome Clark in the foreword to the book, "Keith Chester challenges decades of conventional wisdom about the UFO phenomenon."

It's time to drop the pretense that UFOs were a rare sight before 1947, when pilot Kenneth Arnold witnessed nine "flying saucers" over Washington State. While Arnold's sighting is regarded by many as the beginning of the UFO phenomenon, Strange Company illustrates just how pervasive the phenomenon was years earlier--before, during, and after World War II. "What this work suggests," says author Keith Chester, "is that while an immense twentieth century war was raging on Earth, someone, or something, from somewhere else, was watching us."

Keith Chester is an artist and filmmaker living in Bel Air, Maryland. After witnessing a daytime UFO in the mid-1960s, he became fascinated with the phenomenon. By the late 1980s, he was devoting considerable time to research on UFOs.

Genres: Nonfiction

316 pages, Paperback

First published May 30, 2007

Reviews

[Dan Pfeiffer]

I appreciate good, well sourced, official documentation and this book provides plenty. 20% of it is footnotes from US, UK, Japanese and German military files. No conclusions or wild speculations are drawn. Just the facts as reported by military personnel.

[Hans]

When Kenneth Arnold told about an unknown phenomenon that he saw in the sky in 1947, and a journalist coined the term 'flying saucers', people started seeing all kinds of stuff in the skies. Obviously this is not strange as we would see lots of experimental stuff that would start flying around and not all of it was made public. Think of the U-2, A-12/SR-71 and more.

But keep in mind that just a few years before this event thousands of men crisscrossed through the skies during WWII. Didn't they come across weird stuff...? Well, they did, and this book tells us about it. Or at least, it tells parts of it since there must be far more of this hidden somewhere.

During the war years Allied aircrew saw strange lights following their aircraft. It appeared in all kinds of shapes and sizes and with a war going on the Allied intelligence services wanted to know what the Axis powers were up to. But the Axis aircrew did see strange thing too!
The book contains quite a number of strange sightings made by aircrew over Europe, but also in the Pacific. After returning from a mission the crews were debriefed and all that they had seen and heard was noted down. Also the weird and unknown stuff. Some of this might be explainable as new weaponry under development or experimentation to see if a certain idea worked. But what about a strange light following a bomber, which tries to shake it of in all kinds of ways, for 20+ minutes? What about an aircraft being chased by a glowing orb, diving into a cloud, and being confronted by the same orb when leaving the cloud again? There are also observations made by both Allied and German servicemen, seeing a large Zeppelin like object moving from the horizontal into the vertical and moving away in a flash.

In recent years some information has become available that German continous wave radar might have created a plasma that, obviously, followed Allied aircraft during flight. It is possible that some of this might be true. But a number of the sightings are really hard to explain. Now Europe has a lot of land mass and lots of military installations and radar sites. The Germans experimented with all kinds of weapons and rocketry was taking flight, no pun intended, too. But what about the Pacific...

B-29 bombers encountered strange lights and glowing orbs and stuff over Japan. Technical development of Japan differed significantly from what Germany did, despite the transfer of some of it. But if the bombers left land and flew back over the ocean, how do you explain strange lights or even a metalic like object following along for an hour or so. What about a radar crew that saw an enormous blob move their way, changing in shape and size while coming closer, but aircraft in the sky scrambled to take a look saw nothing but blue skies. Or a crew of a warship in the Pacific suddenly seeing a large metalic object in the sky. And no, not two men on a midnight watch, but 200+ guys in broad daylight!

I do not want to state here that aliens were responsible for all of this, but what is hidden in here? What did the Allies, who organized all kinds of staff and agencies to study this during the war, discover? They did move all over Germany for spoils of war but also investigated the many aircrew reports. Were they able to discover what went on or maybe connect the dots...

An interesting read.

[Maria]

In STRANGE COMPANY, author Keith Chester examines the strange objects that soldiers and pilots saw during World War II. The objects appeared in Germany. Many pilots and soldiers saw them; the strange lights came in different sizes and colors. Sometimes the lights appeared for a few minutes and then faded out; other times the lights followed the plane for a brief period.

Later in the war, the lights appeared in Japan.

Military personnel and pilots tried to explain the strange lights, but in the end, they could only shrug their shoulders. One pilot nicknamed the lights "foo fighters," and the name stuck.

Although the lights never hurt anybody or damaged any aircraft, they were a huge mystery. Soldiers hoped that after the war, they'd discover what the lights were and, even more, who was responsible.

I thank the author for writing such an incredible book. These strange lights shouldn't become a forgotten memory. Were the lights an enemy? Were they an experiment? Were they truly from outer space? The author doesn't draw any conclusions.

To this day, the lights remain a mystery.

This book is not an action-packed thriller. It is a historical account of the strange appearance of these lights. I was never a history buff, but I appreciate this book. It lends another mysterious side to World War II, perhaps one that will never be explained.