• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Attack On An American Transport Plane (1940s)?

A

Anonymous

Guest
I've always had an interest in World War 2 and I love mysterires from that time even more when I hear about them. I vaguely remembered yesterday about a report I read in a book which I cant remember and i cant find the report online. I only remember some details and I remember that the report I read was rather short on details as well. I think it happened just after World War 2 and concerned a transport plane heading from san diego to Hawaii.It put out a SOS about being attacked and screams where heard over the radio b4 it got cut off. The plane eventually returned to base a couple of hours later and crash landed. When the base personel stormed onboard they saw the outside had blast damge, a strange sulphur smell inside and 7-9 deadcrew men including the co pilot who promptly died. The crew and passengers had all died from massive slahes and cuts and the pilot and co pilot had fired of their .45 Colt auto pistols, 14 rounds in total (anyone not familiar with guns should note that 2 rounds of .45 ammo is more than enuff to stop the average human).No bullet holes where found onboard or on the crew so whatever had been shot had left. That all i remember but I'd like to read the report again or read more on it. I find conspiratorial goings on in the 40s and 50s far more interesting than anything modern. Anyone know of a website with this story on it?
 
i remember reading about it but i thought it landed ok rather than crashed and that the guy who landed it died shortly after. can't remember the book title:confused:
 
Another version of this tale has been posted on this forum awhile back.
 
Yes, we've discussed this a couple of times but no one could remember the source. A lot of new members have joined since then so maybe someone can offer some new insight.

Several people (including me) recalled reading it in one of those 'strange mysteries' books written in the 60s and 70s by the likes of Frank Edwards, Vincent Gaddis, and John Keel. I saved quite a few of those books, but I haven't been able to find this story. (Note to
writers of paranormal books: INDEX, DAMMIT!!)

One detail made me a little sceptical. Would transport pilots carry sidearms in peacetime?
 
I read about it in The Devil's Triangle, a study of the Oriental equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle by our friend Mr. Berlitz.
It was soon enough after the Second World War for the pilots to still be armed. Maybe they always are in US aircraft.
 
All military pilots carry personal weapons as far as I know. I know the American Pilots definitly do currently and I'm surein the past, even in peacetime pilots were armed as normal practise. A gun is always part of a pilots survival kit anyway
 
I recall reading about this in one of Brad Steiger's books - "The New UFO Breakthrough", I think it was.

Details much as Wowbagger described, although I seem to recall Steiger placing it before the war (could be wrong about that, though).
 
Yes it was mentioned in a few Devil's/Bermuda triangle books of the 1970's..Keel mentiones it in ...(Our Haunted Planet sounds right)..but it's just a bare bones paragraph...What I am failing to remember is a ...book or magazine article that goes over the story and mentions a researcher that had put a great deal of time in to find documentation of the story with mild success..however I must mention that I'm thinking the book was from Mr. Berlitz..not a Bermuda triangle book..but one of his later Frank Edwards type paperbacks, so take with as many grains of salt as you prefer.
This "accident" supposedly happened in 1939.....but for all I know it could have been some person's after dinner tale...
 
Wowbagger - since you like World War 2 mysteries, have you heard this one?

(This time I have the source at hand: Fork-tailed Devil: The P-38 by Martin Caidin, although I don't know if Caidin's credibility is any better than Berlitz's.)

A P-38 failed to return to its base in North Africa after a patrol. Then, long after the missing plane should have run out of fuel, it was seen approaching the base. Suddenly it broke apart in mid-air. The pilot was thrown clear and his parachute opened.

Caidin writes: "The fuel tanks of the P-38, the same airplane that was hours beyond any possible remaining fuel, were bone dry.

"The pilot whose parachute opened, that lowered him to his home field, had a bullet hole in his forehead. He had been dead for hours."
 
That's a top story, Naitaka - have never heard that one before!

Martin Caidin - that name rings a bell - didn't he write a novel called "Cyborg", upon which the "Six Milllion Dollar Man" was based? (I'm sure there was a reference to that on the 6MDM credits - not that I've watched it since the seventies, you understand....)

Returning to the matter in hand, I've never seen it recounted anywhere else except in the Steiger book I have.

Whatever its provenance, it's a lovely story - reminding me of Lovecraft and, of course, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Horror Of The Heights".
 
Yep, another of my fav stories, I own a copy of the fork tailed devil. Isn't the P38 just one of the greatest planes ever built?! Stuff the mustangs. ME109s and Zeros (though not Spitfires Hurricanes or anything remotely british built, guess where i hail from) Theres also a story about a Japanese flying boat going missing. It gave out a distress call saying something strange was happening in the sky.... the sky is opening up and promptly vanished, sounds familiar doesnt it? Also love the stories about Uboats surrendering themselves in the south atlantic months after the war ended, we know hitler loved the antarctic, so what were they up to down there for so long?
Others include the not so mysterious but equally weird Japanese sub sunk in the mid atlantic near the end of the war whilst it transfer rubber and and other precious metals needed for the german war effort whilst the japs got some of the german gold deposits and a radar.
Or how about the fact 250,000 germans were unaccounted for after the war, even after war dead, lost and obliterated bodies, prisoners the russian may have taken etc were taken into account. And also, who stole the entire german federal reserve? And did Hitler die or is he in Argentina? Several German pilots claim to have seen him boarding a plane as the Russian started to move in on Berlin.
 
Martin Caidin

Caidin has written an interesting book or two.. Wowbagger, you may want to look up Ghosts of the Air-True Stories of Aerial Hauntings by him...if you can find it (think it's been out of print for a while)...lots of strange stories involving WW1 and WW2 planes..
ghost crews, planes out of time and space etc...

My favorite..."A pilot in a red and white Piper Cherokee is flying around puffy cloud banks, spiraling and soaring among the cloud's vertical banks when he turns and is directly in front of an old biplane! Both pilots turn and bank hard rudder right...and clip wings..The pilot was sure he had knocked the old plane out of the air...so when he got his plane under control, he circled to look for the biplane..and sawnothing . A few months later a local flying club was going around looking for old planes to rebuild..They heard of a farmer that had a vintage aircraft stored in his barn..but the farmer assured them it was so old that it couldnt be worth anything..They went into the barn and saw a old WWI vintage biplane....with flat tires and fabric rotted off the wings and tail..covered in dust..a plane that was unflyable..and that hadnt been flown in 20 or 30 years...and yet they noted that on one wingtip they're was a fresh red and white paint smear...and the logbook which was intact shows as the final entry--a near collision "with the strangest red and white machine of a type I had never seen or heard about before". "

A great story......
 
... (This time I have the source at hand: Fork-tailed Devil: The P-38 by Martin Caidin, although I don't know if Caidin's credibility is any better than Berlitz's.) ...

"The pilot whose parachute opened, that lowered him to his home field, had a bullet hole in his forehead. He had been dead for hours."

This story also appears in Caidin's Ghosts of the Air. A searchable version of (at least portions of ... ) the book can be accessed at Google Books. Here's the URL for the P-38 story (pp. 89 - 92):

https://books.google.com/books?id=V4tebtIEujoC&q=Japanese#v=snippet&q="flying boat"&f=false
 
Part of the OP story from Keel's Our Haunted Planet reads as follows:

"Each of the bodies carried large, gaping wounds, and the outside of the ship was similarly marked. Air Station men who touched parts of the craft came down with a mysterious skin infection.

"One of the most puzzling aspects of the whole affair was that the .45 automatics carried by the pilot and copilot as service pieces had been emptied, and the shells lay on the floor. A smell of rotten eggs pervaded the atmosphere inside the plane."

The above, according to Keel, is in turn quoted from an article by Jerome Clark published in Flying Saucer Review, and Clark's info came from "an extraordinary item in an old 1939 newspaper." Maybe someone should ask Clark!
 
Martin Caidin's novels blew me away as a youth. He knew (or convinced you he knew) every detail about aviation, space flight, the military, and technology. He gave me an inferiority complex that almost stopped me from pursuing a writing career. If I had aliens invading, I'd just write "the air force sent jets," or some such. Caidin knew which branch of the military would have responded, what weapons and vehicles they'd have, which base they'd be deployed from, and what forms Oscar Goldman would have to fill out in triplicate to requisition it all!
 
Hi ,sure I've read that tale in "Unatural Caueses" a book that is somewhere in my spare room,I,'ll dig it out ,:)
 
Martin Caidin's novels blew me away as a youth. He knew (or convinced you he knew) every detail about aviation, space flight, the military, and technology. He gave me an inferiority complex that almost stopped me from pursuing a writing career. If I had aliens invading, I'd just write "the air force sent jets," or some such. Caidin knew which branch of the military would have responded, what weapons and vehicles they'd have, which base they'd be deployed from, and what forms Oscar Goldman would have to fill out in triplicate to requisition it all!

He certainly seemed to know his stuff
Caidin bought and restored to full airworthiness the oldest surviving Junkers Ju 52 aircraft, a Ju 52/3m, Serial № 5489, which he named Iron Annie. Caidin was pilot-in-command of Iron Annie on November 14, 1981, when 19 people walked on one of its wings, a world record.[4] He was one of a small number of pilots to have successfully taken off a Junkers Ju 52 in less than 400 feet (120 meters). After touring extensively among shows of vintage military aircraft, or warbirds, Iron Annie was sold to Lufthansa during 1984. The airline renamed it Tempelhof, and continues to use it today, for charter and VIP flights. Caidin chronicled the warbird restoration movement generally in Ragwings and Heavy Iron, and the restoration and further adventures of Iron Annie specifically in The Saga of Iron Annie.[5]His novel Jericho 52 also incorporates many of his experiences with Iron Annie.

During 1961, Caidin was one of the pilots of a formation flight of B-17s across the Atlantic Ocean, likely the last such flight, from the United States to England via Canada, the Azores, and Portugal. During the voyage, the pilots had a near-miss with a submarine. Caidin recounted this journey in his book Everything But The Flak.

Caidin also worked as a pilot for the movie The War Lover, flew with the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds demonstration squadron for several months, and was made an honorary member of the U.S. Army's Golden Knights parachute demonstration team.

Additionally, Caidin wrote an aircraft manual for the Messerschmitt Bf 108, which has been approved by the Federal Aviation Administration as the standard manual for the plane, and twice won the Aviation/Space Writers Association award for the outstanding author on aviation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Caidin

Been a long time since I read any of his books - I remember Cyborg (the inspiration for The Six Million Dollar Man series) and Marooned which was made into a movie with Gregory Peck and Gene Hackman.
 
this story appeared both in john keel's haunted world and in albert rosales humanoids: the others amongst us series (a must read)
no idea if it is a real report
 
i find this story suspicious, the source was lost according to him, wich means he could have invented the story

Agreed ...

I'm not even sure Caidin intended the book's stories to be taken as fact versus folklore.
 
i find this story suspicious, the source was lost according to him, wich means he could have invented the story

I call this type of thing a “cutout”, e.g.:

a) “I bought the treasure map from an old prospector who died 20 years ago.”

b) “I was given the alien autopsy footage by the USAF cameraman who filmed it. He emigrated to [insert name of suitably remote country] in 1975 and hasn’t been heard of since.”

My simple rule of thumb is “cutout=cobblers”.

maximus otter
 
Agreed ...

I'm not even sure Caidin intended the book's stories to be taken as fact versus folklore.
the only history in this thread that could be traced back to its original source is the OP's one, the best wasy to locate the original source would to be asking garth haslam of http://anomalyinfo.com/ , he is a master at finding the original sources of often quoted paranormal stories and is currently building a online catalogue of spontaneous combustion stories
 
I call this type of thing a “cutout”, e.g.:

a) “I bought the treasure map from an old prospector who died 20 years ago.”

b) “I was given the alien autopsy footage by the USAF cameraman who filmed it. He emigrated to [insert name of suitably remote country] in 1975 and hasn’t been heard of since.”

My simple rule of thumb is “cutout=cobblers”.

maximus otter
i agree, i doubt a genuine encounter would receive such small investigation, its a very interesting story but unless somebody finds the documents, its pretty much a urban legend
 
My favorite..."A pilot in a red and white Piper Cherokee is flying around puffy cloud banks, spiraling and soaring among the cloud's vertical banks when he turns and is directly in front of an old biplane! Both pilots turn and bank hard rudder right...and clip wings..The pilot was sure he had knocked the old plane out of the air...so when he got his plane under control, he circled to look for the biplane..and sawnothing . A few months later a local flying club was going around looking for old planes to rebuild..They heard of a farmer that had a vintage aircraft stored in his barn..but the farmer assured them it was so old that it couldnt be worth anything..They went into the barn and saw a old WWI vintage biplane....with flat tires and fabric rotted off the wings and tail..covered in dust..a plane that was unflyable..and that hadnt been flown in 20 or 30 years...and yet they noted that on one wingtip they're was a fresh red and white paint smear...and the logbook which was intact shows as the final entry--a near collision "with the strangest red and white machine of a type I had never seen or heard about before". "
this one is even worse, no date , no location
totally whortless
 
FWIW ...

The OP's story about the 1939 transport plane at San Diego definitely appeared in Berlitz's World of Strange Phenomena. Here's an online poster's quoted text of Berlitz's description of the event from that book ...

“Something terrifying happened in the air one day in the late summer of 1939-and to this day the incident is shrouded in secrecy.

All that is known is that a military transport plane left the Marine naval Air Force Base in San Diego at 3:30 one afternoon. It and its thirteen man crew were making a routine flight to Honolulu. Three hours later, as the plane was over the Pacific Ocean, a frantic distress signal was sounded. Then the radio signal died.

A little later the plane limped back to base and made an emergency landing. Ground crew members rushed to the craft and when they boarded, they were horrified to see twelve dead men. The only survivor was the copilot, who, though badly injured, had stayed alive long enough to bring the plane back. A few minutes he was dead, too.

All of the bodies had large, gaping wounds. Even weirder, the pilot and copilot had emptied their .45 Colt automatic pistols at something. The empty shells were found lying on the floor of the cockpit. A foul, sulfuric odor pervaded the interior of the craft.

The exterior of the airplane was badly damaged, looking as it had been struck by missiles…The incident was successfully hushed up and did not come to light for fifteen years, when investigator Robert Coe Gardner learned of it from someone who was there. They mystery of what the crew encountered in midair that afternoon in 1939 has never been solved.”


The person quoting the Berlitz story then offers what's supposed to be Gardner's original version of the story, but without citing where it appeared in print:

“About three hours afterwards, several urgent distress signals sounded from the plane, followed by eerie silence. Later, the plane came limping back to execute an emergency landing. When Air Station personnel entered the plane, they found every man in the crew, including the copilot, who had lived long enough to fly the craft back to its base, dead of unknown causes.

Each of the bodies bore large, gaping wounds. The outside of the plane was similarly marked. Those who touched parts of the craft came down with a mysterious skin infection. The .45 automatics carried y the pilot and copilot as service pieces had been emptied and the shells lay on the floor. A smell of “rotten eggs” pervaded the interior.”


SOURCE (Quoting the book): https://www.quora.com/Was-there-rea...by-something-inside-the-plane-while-in-flight
 
I can now show the evidence from one step earlier than Berlitz (and who-knows-how-many others ...).

The story's informant is cited as Robert Coe Gardner. As far as I can tell, Gardner's version of the story is cited in relation to its earliest published re-telling by UFO writer Leonard Stringfield sometime in the early 1950's.

Stringfield's story is sometimes cited as having been published in 1954. I cannot confirm a 1954 publication date.

In 1955, Stringfield's self-published CRIFO (group) publication changed its name from 'NEWSLETTER' to 'ORBIT'. The only Stringfield account of the 1939 San Diego story I can find is found on the front page of:

C.R.I.F.O. ORBIT
November 4, 1955 Issue
Vol. II, No. 8

Here's the text ...
VIOLENCE IN RETROSPECT
Beyond estimation is the number of aircraft, military and otherwise, that have been lost to the UFO. Surely, the earliest date for such occurrences goes back farther than the classical Mantell "death chase" of 1948. In this category, we once again refer to the files of Robert Gardner which reveal for us this unusual incident dating back to 1939 - just before the outbreak of World War II.

Case 107, Between San Diego and Honolulu. Late Summer 1939 - At 3:30 p.m., a military transport plane with thirteen men aboard left the Marine Naval Air Station in San Diego for a routine flight to Honolulu. When three hours at sea the aircraft was in dire distress. Mayday calls were radioed back to the base , then suddenly nothing more was heard until the craft came limping back and executed an emergency landing. The first men to reach the craft were shocked by what they saw - all thirteen members of the crew were dead, save for the co-pilot who managed, miraculously, to steer his charge in safely. Three minutes later he was also dead! Examination of the bodies showed remarkably large gaping wounds, not unlike those received by the surface of the craft, which indicated the impact of missiles. A second amazing discovery was that the service pieces, 45 Colt automatics, carried by the pilot and co-pilot, had been emptied and their shells found lying on the floor of the cockpit. Lastly, and possibly akin to saucer phenomena, was the characteristic rotten egg odor which pervaded the chamber's atmosphere. It was also learned regarding the incident that personnel who handled parts of the aircraft showed a mysterious skin infection. Security measures, Gardner was told, immediately blanketed the affair and cameras restricted. Corpsmen were barred from removing the bodies and the job of identification and diagnosis was limited to three medical officers only.

SOURCE: http://www.cufos.org/Orbit/ORBIT Volume II 1955-56R.pdf
 
FWIW ...

The OP's story about the 1939 transport plane at San Diego definitely appeared in Berlitz's World of Strange Phenomena. Here's an online poster's quoted text of Berlitz's description of the event from that book ...




The person quoting the Berlitz story then offers what's supposed to be Gardner's original version of the story, but without citing where it appeared in print:




SOURCE (Quoting the book): https://www.quora.com/Was-there-rea...by-something-inside-the-plane-while-in-flight
that "original" account is how it appeared in john keel's haunted planet, definitely not the original source
that first one however looks very close, but that part of "he learned it from someone that was there" sounds suspicious, is this another tale from a unknow source?
 
Back
Top