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 Frederick high school teacher who worked for a U.S. Army Colonel at the Pentagon, 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."
excerpt from artilcle: By Ron Cassie
News-Post Staff