Lights Seen Over Japan: A 1945 B-24 Report Sent to Intelligence in 1953
In January 1953 the Air Force's chief historian sent the Director of Intelligence a wartime mission report: two glowing objects that shadowed a B-24 from Truk toward Guam in May 1945, one of them for an hour.
What this record is
This is a small special project file from the archives of the USAF Historical Division at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. The PDF has 12 pages, but only three carry substance. Page 5 of the PDF is a one-paragraph cover letter dated 22 January 1953 on Air University Research Studies Institute letterhead, signed by Albert F. Simpson, Chief of the USAF Historical Division, and addressed to Major General John A. Samford, Director of Intelligence at Headquarters USAF. Page 7 is its enclosure, a typed extract from a Second World War mission report. Page 3 is a modern index card from the Air Force Historical Research Agency’s IRIS database, giving the call number K110.7023-1 and the title “Lights Seen Over Japan”. The remaining pages are blank apart from declassification stamps, except page 9, which is an index card for an unrelated file on Japanese and Russian ramming tactics against B-29s and seems to have been scanned with this one by accident.
The letter and enclosure were stamped RESTRICTED and “Security Information”, and a stamp on the letter records that the classification was changed to unclassified on 17 November 1955. It is in the UAP transfer because the enclosure describes unidentified airborne objects.
What it says about UFOs
All of the UFO content is on two pages. Simpson’s letter (page 5 of the PDF) is short. “In view of recent news stories of lights seen over Japan,” he wrote, the attached account “may be of interest”. He added that the original was held in the Historical Division’s archives. He says nothing more, and the letter does not identify which news stories he meant.
The enclosure (page 7 of the PDF) is headed Headquarters VII Bomber Command, Mission Report No. 11-327, dated 2 May 1945 (Greenwich time). The crew of plane #616, flying over Fala Island in Truk Atoll, observed two airborne objects at their own altitude of 11,000 feet. The objects changed from cherry red to orange to a white light, which would die out and then turn cherry red again. One sat out on each wing, beyond the range of the bomber’s .50-calibre machine guns, and both followed the B-24 through all types of evasive action.
The bomber turned for Guam. One pursuer dropped away after about an hour. The other kept following, never closer than 1,000 yards, and when the B-24 went through cloud it sped up and emerged ahead of the bomber on the other side. In daylight this object was seen to be bright silver. As the B-24 let down at Guam, the pursuer took up a course of 330 degrees at 15,000 to 20,000 feet.
The same extract records two other encounters that night. One B-24 met eight intense light-green flames, one of which burst and hung at 5,000 feet with no trail or warning before the burst. Another reported nine or ten red tracer-like trails of fire rising to 5,000 feet in pairs, one pair passing within 50 to 100 yards of its tail, each pair from a different point of origin. A bracketed note gives the source as Seventh Bomber Command Mission Reports, file 742.332, covering 8 February to 16 May 1945.
Nothing in the file mentions Japan except the letter and the title. Truk and Guam are in the central Pacific, more than a thousand miles from Japan. The IRIS abstract on page 3 describes the file as observations “in vicinity of Japan and island of Guam”, but the mission report itself does not support the Japan part.
Context
Allied aircrews in both Europe and the Pacific reported glowing objects that followed their aircraft in 1944 and 1945. Crews called them “foo fighters”. The best-known reports come from the 415th Night Fighter Squadron over the Rhine. Truk was a bypassed Japanese stronghold that VII Bomber Command’s B-24s bombed regularly from the Marianas, so a crew returning to Guam fits the setting.
The timing of Simpson’s letter is notable. Samford was the intelligence chief who had faced the press over the Washington sightings of July 1952, and the CIA-sponsored Robertson Panel had met from 14 to 18 January 1953, days before this letter was written. The file does not connect the two. It shows only that the Air Force’s own historians were combing their holdings for older precedents while the subject was in the news.
Status
This is a secondhand extract of a 1945 mission report, copied eight years later for a reader interested in a different set of lights. It preserves what one crew reported at debriefing, not an investigation. Wartime reports of lights pacing bombers have been attributed to many things, among them night fighters, flares, reflections, ball lightning and aircrew fatigue. The green “flames” that burst and hung, and the paired red trails rising to 5,000 feet, read much like anti-aircraft pyrotechnics, flares or rockets, and the report does not say whether Truk’s defences were active. The object that followed the bomber for an hour and was silver by daylight is harder to explain from this page alone, but the page contains nothing else that would allow a check.
The record adds a dated, numbered source (Mission Report No. 11-327, 2 May 1945) and shows that it was being passed to the Director of Intelligence in January 1953. It adds nothing about the Japanese lights of 1952–53 that prompted the letter.
Sources
- National Archives catalog entry: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/659965402
- PDF of the record: https://catalog.archives.gov/medialz/electronic-records/rg-615/656595571/00467939_Lights_Seen_Over_Japan.pdf
- Series: Records from the Department of the Air Force Relating to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/656595571
- National Archives, Record Group 615 UAP records: https://www.archives.gov/research/topics/uaps/rg-615