Alien Dawn Patrol
NIGEL WATSON asks if the Red Baron really shot down a UFO 100 years ago...
German flying ace Manfred von Richtofen, the notorious Red Baron, is alleged to have shot down a UFO whilst on an early morning mission over western Belgium in the spring of 1917. According to fellow German Air Force ace Peter Waitzrik, who was flying in an accompanying Fokker Dr.1 triplane at the time, the craft resembled an upside-down, silver-coloured saucer about 136ft (40m) in diameter and bore undulating orange lights. It appeared suddenly out of a clear blue sky. Waitzrik recalled: “We were terrified because we’d never seen anything like it before. The US had just entered the war, so we assumed it was something they’d sent up. The Baron immediately opened fire and the thing went down like a rock, shearing off tree limbs as it crashed in the woods.”
It was astonishing that the Baron was able to shoot down a highly advanced spacecraft; things got even weirder when two bruised and battered occupants got out of the crashed ship and ran off into some nearby woods. Indefatigable alienhunter Scott C Waring explains the Baron’s remarkable feat on his UFO Sightings Daily website: “It’s possible that the Red Baron’s two front machineguns could have damaged not the UFO, but the… antenna on the top centre of the craft. Not all craft have this antenna... it controls steering... If this antenna was hit by the Baron, then yes, a UFO would lose control and be forced to land to make repairs.”
Waitzrik said that on the return from their patrol: “The Baron and I gave a full report on the incident back at headquarters and they told us not to ever mention it again. And except for my wife and grandkids, I never told a soul.” Waitzrik continued to believe that what they had seen must have been a top-secret US aircraft until the late 1940s when flying saucer reports hit the headlines. By 1999, the 105-year-old retired airline pilot felt that he had nothing to lose by going public, 80 years after the event, and concluded: “So there’s no doubt in my mind now that that was no US reconnaissance plane the Baron shot down – that was some kind of spacecraft from another planet and those little guys who ran off into the woods weren’t Americans, they were space aliens of some kind.”
The main problem with this incredible story is that it first appeared on page 4 of the 31 Aug 1999 edition of the Weekly World News, better known for its sensational headlines than its accurate factual reporting. Another flaw in the story is that Fokker Dr.1 triplanes, as illustrated in the news story, were not put into operational service until August 1917. We might also wonder what happened to the crashed vehicle and its crew, which would have been conspicuous even in the middle of a battle zone. Perhaps, as Scott Waring suggests, they were able to conduct repairs and make their getaway. Sadly, they were not so lucky exactly 30 years later when they crashed again, this time at Roswell. At least the Red Baron can’t be blamed for that one.
On his ‘UFO Related Entities Catalog’ (URECAT) website, Patrick Gross notes that this story is completely fictional. Besides the Fokker triplane error, the flying ace Peter Waitzrik would seem to be an invented character. A picture of him with his fellow flying officers in front of an Albatross D.III aircraft, as used in the Weekly World News story, is real enough and was taken around 23 April 1917; but the person circled as Peter Waitzrik was really Erich Lowenhardt (or Otto Brauneck according to some websites). Either way, there was no known German WWI pilot with the name Peter Waitzrik.
Aviation expert Dave Homewood also demolishes the ‘secret US aircraft’ idea, pointing out that: “In the Spring of 1917 the US had no aircraft in the war, nor were they even at the front. The American Expeditionary Force was not even formed till July 5, 1917, and the very few Americans who’d actually made it to the front lines before then as mercenaries flew French aeroplanes.”
Despite these facts indicating that the story was either totally made-up or the product of (the probably non-existent) Waitzrik’s imagination, it has since been repeated as fact in numerous books and on various UFO websites. As a consequence, there continues to be a belief that the Red Baron was the first man to shoot down an alien spaceship, and the event has even been re-created in a Spanish youtube video, which has attracted several thousand viewers.
Oddly enough, a website called ‘John Kettler Investigates’ – where “the truth is earnestly sought and answers are relentlessly hunted down” – changes some details of the story. Kettler claims the craft was 125ft in diameter, not 136, and gives the date of the event as 13 March 1917. He is also touchingly concerned about the impact of the incident on our alien visitors, adding: “I get the impression that losing such a powerful craft to a veritable peashooter was so upsetting and confounding as to be almost incomprehensible. Additionally, there is a view emerging that this case may be unknown because a cover-up was performed over this incident.”
Even Mr Kettler has to admit the Red Baron could not have been flying a Fokker Dr.1, but he does seem to think the mysterious saucer was being operated by the infamous Grey aliens, who believed their craft invulnerable and didn’t bother to “switch on the shields”. Pride goes before a fall, after all.