pigfarmer
tall, thin, irritable
I posed this in another thread and thought it might be worth it's own to kick around.
Had my nose in both of these. Paperclip is well written non-fiction and it unintentionally compliments UFOs Before Roswell. Not sure how to classify the latter as anything other than special interest. The title alone assumes there was a crash at Roswell in the first place, although it may just be descriptive to say there were earlier accounts and may have little do do with Roswell itself. I'm not done with either one yet but already picked up on a few things.
UFOs is dull as cow's teeth. I really have to saw my way through it but I am sticking with it because unlike any other book I've read about WW2 encounters the author takes great pains to research the accounts in detail and consider alternatives. All other books I've seen are almost purely anecdotal. To be fair, corroborating documents are rare. He tries to answer the most important question first: did this really happen? Sadly the answer so far is 'unknown'. Again, I'm not done but at the point I'm at it's still fairly early in the war before '43 when the US Army Air Forces came to town and got busy. The British and Free Polish accounts are spotty at best as there was no universal method of collecting after action reports and it varied from unit to unit. Reports from action over France, Italy and North Africa are included.
I'll be curious to see how US involvement is treated - we know that the famous Black Thursday raid produced a UFO report. On a personal note I remember my 6th grade teacher literally telling war stories. Apart from his description of a 'short arm inspection' as part of the first sex education class they forced him to teach - imagine that going over in 2022 - I remember a few about his experiences as a bomber crewman in Europe and later the Pacific theaters. He recalled seeing jets for the first time over Italy. Didn't know that was possible honestly, but he described them as moving so fast they looked like 'flying telephone poles' . I seriously doubt his personality would have ever considered 'flying saucers' or 'Martians' or whatever they may have called them at the time. Context is important and I just don't think that mindset was at all prevalent at that time.
In an era when you had large numbers of people in the air, many of which were very new to it all, experiencing combat etc it isn't surprising that under tremendous stress people see things. The author actually points that out - some reports were literally a case of being frightened of their own shadow. That said, reports of different color orbs splitting to pieces, dripping molten fragments, outperforming any known aircraft are dammed interesting and sound an awful lot like much more contemporary cases.
Paperclip illustrates how disorganized and amateurish collection of technical intelligence was during that period. There was such institutional thick-headedness in that regard as to be almost criminal. I smell a certain bias out of the author but he literally describes exactly what Nazi Germany had at it's disposal at that time and how it was regarded and does a much better job than Rendall illustrating it. Again, the mindset of the time failed to believe obvious examples of German technical superiority even with it literally in hand, so more esoteric explanations just would not have been part of the picture. Like my teacher. Connecting the reports to UFOs came later - as far as I know.
Bottom line is that I think that amongst a lot of irrelevant stuff there probably are some accounts in there that wouldn't look out of place today and that has me wondering. AAWSAP and BASS too it seems. I also see the genesis of the Cult of Nazi Science and how remnants have survived for decades after the war. They make great villains for Indiana Jones but once the war was over their further achievements were under the auspices of the US and USSR and not some secret South American entity. I am saying I can see the seeds of pop culture mythos in there.
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