Prior to the first visitation by the US Navy’s Nautilus nuclear powered submarine beneath the northern polar ice cap in 1957, the newly formed US Air Force was forced to patrol the skies over the North Pole, Bering Straights, and Aleutian Island Chain that ran perilously close to the Siberian border of the Soviet Union. B-29 Super Fortresses, the same bomber that had carried the plutonium or A Bomb to Nagasaki and Hiroshima to end World War II, now conducted aerial reconnaissance over the Arctic.
In these vast regions of ice fields and frozen arctic oceans the carefully guarded boundaries of the Soviet Union and United States maintained a tense peace time patrolled by bombers, first generation targeting radars, and the navies of the two super powers as the “Cold War” played out. Everyday Air Force bomber crews maintained vigilance over thousands of miles of ice and snow fields occupied by tiny Inuit villages in the most remote and brutal conditions that man could claw out an existence in.
In 1949 Wendell Stevens commanded one of the early warning patrols that scanned the skies and frozen terrain for enemy movements, threats of invasion, or attempted aerial intrusion into American air space. These men flew long hours in sometimes treacherous conditions to insure a safety for the American homeland that only vigilance could insure in the face of hostile political ideologies that threatened to clash at anytime. As the Russians developed their plans for their first nukes and began building huge rockets from captured V-2 plans using German scientists prisoners, the American military, being the first to ever deploy nuclear bombs was now locked in an arms race with the Soviet Union.
However, as reported by former Air Force Colonel, Wendell Stevens, something even more bizarre was manifesting itself out there in the frozen altitudes of the northwestern frontier. Something that would change his life forever, and make him aware of another reality that was every bit as real as the Cold War, but much more mysterious and less easily monitored than anything the Russians were capable of deploying.
As arctic surveillance crews cruised the northern altitudes seeking contact with possible Russian bomber crews a strange thing happened over and over again. These huge reconnaissance bombers were rigged for photographic intelligence work, fitted with wing to wing camera arrays designed for recording any enemy movements that could be interpreted as aggressive or militarily oriented as threats. However, they came face to face with something else. As each crew flew their lonely missions they began to capture video footage of something strange and bewildering!
Disks were seen and photographed that sat on the arctic ice, took off from the frozen surface, and even plunged into the frigid arctic ocean! This was captured on their wing mounted cameras. Sometimes the B-29 crews found themselves followed by these amazing unconventional aerial craft that were elliptical in shape with mirror-like metallic skin. These unknown airborne crafts would sometimes fly alongside aircrews while they frantically photographed the strange aerial intruders who made no radio contact while seemingly testing the capabilities of the US Air Force aviators.
Wendell Stevens and his men would hustle over to beneath the wings of the B-29’s as they landed and begin downloading the precious film data that revealed someone else was out there. Someone more advanced, someone whom we knew nothing about, yet seemed to be able to master our airspace with their incredibly elegant disk shaped vessels that easily outdistanced the US B-29’s at will making photographic study sometimes difficult even with high speed cameras.
Each time the crews landed, Colonel Stevens was there with his ground crews off loading the valuable filmed evidence and rushing it to the proper intelligence channels while keeping the fantastic sightings a under wraps. If it wasn’t the Russians who had designed and built these advanced vessels, Stevens often wondered, then who? The possibilities were maddening as each successive aircrew brought in their gigantic bombers now fitted for surveillance with camera film that revealed a new friend or foe up their in those high and vast stretches of frigid air space. Colonel Stevens finally came to the conclusion that an intelligence that exceeded man’s capabilities was out here in the frozen fringes of the arctic, ready to flash across the windscreens of the pilots at fantastic speeds, or just fly alongside the bombers pacing them as they flew.
The B-29 crews were mystified by what they’d seen. Yet, they were ordered by high command not to discuss or divulge what they were witnessing while they flew over the northern ice cap in air search mode for any seemingly hostile Russian aircraft or war ships in the narrow arctic seas that remained passable during some months in spring and summer. This was the beginning of SAC (Strategic Air Command) now being developed under the tutelage of General Curtis LeMay, who, years later, would make a public admission to an interviewer that there were things his air crews had encountered that could never be explained pertaining to UFO’s.
The year before in July 24,1948 2:45 AM Captain C.S. Chiles and Officer Whitted flying on Eastern Airlines Flight 576 from Houston to Montgomery, Alabama encountered a cigar or rocket shaped object that they met on a head on course. The unknown object turned at terrific speed in front of their prop driven airliner revealing what appeared to be a row of portholes or windows as the tail of the craft burned a cherry red. The two pilots, another pilot onboard, and a passenger, along with two other aircraft in the area all reported a flying saucer at that time sequence. The sighting left both pilots shaken up. Wright Patterson air intelligence questioned the witnesses along with Doctor J. Allen Hynek’s Project Sign personnel who also investigated.
In the very same year of 1949 thousands of miles from where Air Force officer, Wendell Stevens was busy with his polar reconnaissance command, an alarming incident took place in Texas. The pilot of a Mustang P-51 was flying near San Antonio when he encountered a hostile UFO that dove on his aircraft time and time again forcing the stunned pilot to execute one radical evasive maneuver after another to avoid a collision with the unknown craft. Finally, the Air Force pilot was able to make an emergency landing at San Antonio Airfield, the air control tower there had listened to his hysterical voice transmissions prior to his landing. Upon setting down on the runway and landing, the frantic pilot was immediately met by intelligence officers for a debriefing on the incident. It seems in the year of 1949 there was an unprecedented amount of unknown and potentially dangerous air traffic in the skies of the United States, and the Air Force simply did not know who or what was responsible for the spine tingling encounters that were being experienced all over the skies of the nation.