The new book Shadow Flights: America’s Secret Air War Against the Soviet Union by Curtis Peebles (Presidio) details how at the beginning of the Cold War the United States conducted a secret air war against the Soviet Union. The famed U-2 spyplane was developed, an aircraft that could fly higher than any other. While the downing of Francis Gary Powers blew the lid off the super-secret U-2 programme and ended the overflights, the history of the U.S. aerial war against the Soviets remained cloaked in secrecy as the Cold War went into a deep freeze. Presidio tell us that Curtis Peebles drew on previously top secret Soviet and U.S. documents for this book, as well as the recollections of participants on both sides. The result is an intriguing and exciting history of this secret, and often very hot, ‘theater’ of the Cold War. An interesting side-effect of testing the U-2 was the creation of accounts of UFOs. To quote from the book: “Although the radar data from the training flights indicated that the U-2 was nearly ‘invisible’ to radar, there were visual sightings of the aircraft at altitude. Most of these came from airliner pilots and usually occurred in the early evening on flights going east to west. One of the most heavily travelled air routes, Chicago to Los Angeles, passes close to Las Vegas and the Paradise Ranch, the secret test site and base at Groom Lake. The piston-engine airliners of the mid-1950s such as the DC-3, DC-6, and Constellation, flew at 20,000 feet. At twilight, the low-flying airliner would be in darkness whereas a U-2 at 70,000 feet would still be illuminated by the sun. Its bare metal wings reflected the sunlight, and it appeared as a fast-moving, fiery object far higher than the airliner and many miles distant. Most airliner pilots were ex-military pilots, and they knew of no aircraft that flew higher than 45,000 feet. Because the object was obviously much higher than that, they assumed that it could only be a flying saucer. The pilots would report the sighting to air-traffic controllers. Under ideal conditions, it was also possible to spot a U-2 in full daylight from the air and even from the ground. The aircraft would appear as a flash or glint. Ground observers and airline pilots wrote letters reporting their sightings to Project Blue Book, the air force investigation unit. Blue Book staff members who had been briefed on the U-2 established procedures to handle such reports. If a sighting report came in that might have been caused by a U-2, the project staff would be contacted with the time, date, and location of the sighting. The staff would then have to check the flight logs. This was a laborious process, because an individual route flown by a U-2 would have to be matched with the location and other details of the sighting. With the training and test operations under way, there were numerous flight logs to go through, which involved considerable work for the project staff. Once a match was found, Blue Book had a problem. They knew what had caused the sighting, but it was a closely guarded secret. Rather than tell a witness that he had seen a secret ultra-high flying airplane, the sighting was explained away as some natural phenomenon, such as ice crystals or temperature inversions. The exact number of flying saucer sightings caused by U-2s is unknown. Many years later, Cunningham made an off-the-cuff comment: ‘Hell, they were half of them.’ This referred to the reports that Blue Book sent to the project staff as possible U-2 sightings rather than the more than 13,000 total sightings reported.” Back to Greenhill Military Book News No. 107 Table of Contents Back to Greenhill Military Book News List of Issues Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 2001 by Greenhill Books This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com