PROJECT 1947


Yorkshire Post - Wednesday, April 29, 1947

The Ghost 'Plane

Applied science sometimes threatens to explain everything and so to take the mystery out of life. Yet here is radar plotting a mysterious aircraft that rushes across the coast of East Anglia at 400 m.p.h. at dead of night and disappears inland. Radar has plotted some strange things in its time from children's kites and raindrops to formations of geese. But it surely never plotted a stranger thing than this. What is the aircraft? Speculation takes us into those regions where the scenes are laid for so many thrilling stories in the boys' magazines. Is it a diamond or drug smuggler? Is it conveying a secret agent from one foreign Power to another? In that event it would of course have the secret papers and probably a beautiful woman spy on board. Is it a guided missile? On this last the Air Ministry is disappointingly prosaic.

Some will say that the whole thing is a hoax or more politely a figment of the imagination, a story comparable with some of those equally mysterious stories which circulated after the war of 1914-18. But even that theory is not without significance. For it seems to be established that it is only at times of peculiar stress that the public is in the psychological state to receive and circulate such stories.

The practical steps are clear. Fast Royal Air Force fighters must continue trying to intercept the visitor if it should return. Our air service has the fastest fighters in the world and should not find it impossibly difficult. Such practical steps are needed because it must be confessed that there is just a possibility that the story of the air smuggler is fact and not fiction. Air smuggling became fairly profitable after the 1914-19 war. Radar may make it more difficult, but it has yet to prove that it has made it impracticable. Meanwhile, we may enjoy the atmosphere of mystery and imagination which surrounds the ghost aircraft. The story gains continually in the telling. The only version we have not yet heard—perhaps because of Mr. Bevin's return from Moscow—is that the aircraft's wings were covered with snow.



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