UFOs in wartime

The peculiar red orb hung motionless in the summer sky near Frederick.A boy at the time, Keith Chester vividly recalls that day in 1966. It was about 6:30 p.m. and Chester was on his way to a friend's house. As he walked, he noticed a shiny red ball in the sky near the Catoctin Mountains.
"The hair on the back of my neck stood straight up," Chester said. "I was so scared that I ran into my neighbor's house. I still think it was a UFO." To this day, the 50-year-old Bel Air resident has not been able find an explanation for the object, but incident sparked an interest in unidentified flying objects.In recent years, Chester's interest has grown into a passion that led him to write Strange Company: Military Encounters with UFOs in WWII. The 320-page book contains descriptions of UFO sightings by American and British service members culled from research that included documents at the National Archives. The road to writing the book began with that boyhood sighting of the red object. Chester devoured books about UFOs and became interested in space. He wanted to be an astronaut until he realized he didn't have the necessary aptitude for math, so his interest shifted to World War II history. From 1978 to 1998, Chester portrayed an infantry soldier as a member of the Military Historical Reenactment Society, taking part in events around the region.

Over time, Chester's interest in UFOs waned. But it was reignited in 1989 when he met Leonard Stringfield, who was director of Civilian Research, Interplanetary Flying Objects, a research group during the 1950s, that produced books about UFOs.

Stringfield was a sergeant in the 5th Air Force during World War II and said he had his own UFO sighting.

Chester said Stringfield told him about how he was among the first people to fly into mainland Japan after the bombing of Nagasaki. Stringfield said that he was on a plane flying between Ie Shima and Iwo Jima, when he looked out the window and saw three luminous, disk-shaped objects flying in formation.

by www.thesupernaturalworld.co.uk