During the Vietnam War in the DMZ, spotters saw a group of lights moving south. F-4 Phantom fighter bombers were launched and fired on the lights (they thought they were enemy helicopters) but instead hit friendly ships including the HMAS Hobart.
During the Vietnam War in the DMZ, spotters saw a group of lights moving south. F-4 Phantom fighter bombers were launched and fired on the lights (they thought they were enemy helicopters) but instead hit friendly ships including the HMAS Hobart.
Ep 38 HMAS Hobart
Rick Black. I hope everything is going well with you. Before I start on this episode, I need to go back to episode 35 for a second. In that episode I mentioned the UFOs in paintings. Well, I found out by watching Chris White’s documentary that the figures in the paintings that look like people flying in UFOs are representations of the sun and moon. And that this was common in Medieval and Byzantine art. Check it out at Ancient Aliens Debunked.com.
Last week I teased an episode that I said I was excited about. Well, I did it. I hope you find it as interesting as I did.
We’re going to have to go back to the Vietnam War. I haven’t looked at the demographics of my audience, but I think its safe to say that most of you weren’t alive during the Vietnam War. Or at least at the beginning of the war. The war was between North Vietnam and South Vietnam and started on November 1st 1955 and lasted for twenty year. The north was supported by the Soviet Union, China and other communist states while the south was supported by the United States and other anti-communist allies. This made the conflict a proxy war between the United States and the Soviet Union.
My father was in the navy during the war, but he was assigned to the Atlantic Fleet so he never had to go over there. But a lot of young men did go over. There was a draft and the U.S. sent over 184,000 men to fight and support South Vietnam. The American people for the most part, were against America’s involvement. There were protests, celebrities were speaking out against the war, it was a whole thing there. A huge mess. 58,220 U.S. service members died in the conflict.
So, that’s the background for this possible UFO story.
In June of 1968 The Australian guided-missile destroyer HMAS Hobart was badly damaged by ‘friendly fire’ in Vietnam. Two crewmembers died and seven were wounded as a result of the hit. Now, if you didn’t know. Friendly fire is where you are hit by your own side. It’s an accident. A really big ‘my bad’. I hate the expression by the way.
The Hobart was nicknamed the ‘Green Ghost’ for her reputation as a quiet vessel during three tours of duty in Vietnam. The Hobart was the most decorated naval vessel of her era. Here is the official report of the incident.
At 0300 the destroyer HMAS HOBART, (CAPT K. W. Shands, RAN), was accidentally attacked by a US Air Force F-4 fighter, off Cap Lay, Vietnam. The aircraft fired a total of three missiles at HOBART, in two separate attacks. All three missiles hit the ship, and two RAN personnel, Ordinary Seaman R. J. Butterworth, and CPO R. H. Hunt, were killed, and seven others wounded. An enquiry into the incident revealed that due to the darkness, the pilot of the aircraft mistook the radar picture of the ship as an enemy helicopter.
Here are bits from an article by freelance writer and editor Jon Wyatt.
It all started on Friday, June 15th 1968 when Allied forward spotters along the eastern part of the Demilitarized Zone reported seeing approximately 30 strange slow-moving ‘lights’ in the night sky. The demilitarized zone is a 9.6 kilometer wide strip separating North and South Vietnam. When the spotters saw the lights, their first thoughts were that they were Russian-built Mi-4 ‘Hound’ helicopters that the North Vietnamese used. These bulky, lumbering helicopters were thought to be carrying men and material over the border.
After the sightings, Allied Command, fearing another Tet Offensive-style build up, send a bunch of anti-aircraft guns to the border. They put some F-4 Phantom fighter-bombers at Danang Air Base on standby. And they asked available Allied warships to patrol the DMZ coast. The HMAS Hobart was one of the warships that responded. The F-4 Phantom was an awesome fighter. It could go mach 2.23 and at the time was breaking performance records for speed, Altitude and time-to-climb. It’s only drawback was that it had a wide turning radius.
The forward spotters again saw the strange lights of the ‘enemy helicopters’ and reported them. The Allied forces didn’t waste any time in responding. Several U.S. 7th Air Force Phantom fighter-bombers came screaming onto the scene and started firing on the intruders. There were supported by anti-aircraft ground fire also. During the allied attack the ‘enemy helicopters’ were seen to move down the east coast and then out to sea-and from there, the whole incident went south.
After the enemy helicopters or ‘lights’ flew out the sea, the first ‘friendly fire’ incident occurred. It was just after midnight when the U.S. Navy swift boat PCF-19 was sunk by three air-to-air missiles while patrolling a few miles south of the DMZ. Five of the seven crewmen were killed in the incident.
At 3:30 a.m., the Hobart was patrolling near Tiger Island, which is about 12 miles off Cap Lay. She was running blacked-out and maintaining radio silence when her radar room detected a fast, in-coming aircraft.
The IFF (or Identification Friend or Foe) system indicated it was ‘friendly’ and the ship was attempting to establish further identity when a Sparrow air-to-air missile struck her amidships on the starboard (right) side. The missile penetrated the aluminum hull and exploded killing Ordinary Seaman R. J. Butterworth and wound two others.
Do you know how to tell starboard from port? Right or left? You can remember that right has more letters than left, starboard has more letters than port and green has more letters than red. The longer lettered words are all on the same side. Right is starboard and green, Left is port and red. Now you know. If you didn’t already.
After the missile hit the Hobart, the crew rushed to Action Stations, but then two more air-to-air missiles penetrated he starboard side and killed Chief Electrician Hunt and wounded several others – and barely missed a magazine. If it had hit that, the whole ship would have gone down. Hobart fired five rounds from a deckgun, but the missed the fast flying Phantom.
During the DMZ ‘lights’ operation, the guided-missile destroyer USS Edson, the guided-missile cruiser USS Boston, the US Coast Guard cutter Point Dume, and the USS PCF-19 also came under ‘friendly fire’, but fortunately without causing more casualties.
Eventually, the Phantom pilots involved in the operation that night and early morning were recalled and grounded.
So what happened? Why did the Phantoms fire on Allied ships?
Well, A US Navy Board of Inquiry, which investigated the Hobart ‘incident’ for the Australian government, found shortcomings in the Phantom’s radar system were partly to blame. To stop big targets from flooding the radarscope, the radar had a cut-off mechanism, so the returns from a warship and a slow moving low flying helicopter would appear similar on the screen.
After the accident, the sun comes up and US helicopters come and airlift the wounded Australian sailors to Danang and the damaged Hobard limped to Subic Band in the Philippines for repairs. She was off the scene for five weeks. And that night, the DMZ mysterious lights returned.
So, spotters see lights, they think that they are enemy helicopters carrying men and supplies across the border. F-4 Phantoms sweep in and fire on the helicopters, the helicopters flee to the sea where the Phantoms follow and continue firing, but their radar confused the allied ships for helicopters and the Phantoms hit the ships with their missiles. Did they also hit some of the helicopters? Actually, no. Adding to the mystery, no wreckage of downed enemy aircraft was found in the area. In August 1968 the Royal Australian Navy News confirmed that “No physical evidence of helicopters destroyed has been discovered in the area of activity nor has extensive reconnaissance produced any evidence of enemy helicopter operations in or near the DMZ”.
What? Then, what were the lights that were spotted by the spotters? Whatever the ‘lights’ actually were remains a subject of conjecture, but it appears that they were sighted for several weeks and went unchallenged. A week after the Hobart incident, the Melbourne Sun reported that “sightings were reported by radarmen in Quang Tri Province about five miles below the border zone. It was the sixth time since last Saturday that such sightings have been reported…US Command has ordered its fighter-bombers and artillery to withhold fire not wanting a repeat of the incidents in which the Allied ships were fired upon.”
In a 1996 interview with Jon Wyatt, Ken Shands, who was the Hobart’s skipper at the time said “Neither before nor after the incident…was there any report by any of the ships of a helicopter being there [around Tiger Island]. Now having said that, the captain of one of the American ships told me later at Subic Bay that he thought there were helicopters there, but the fact is he didn’t report, and if he believed there was a helicopter….it was his duty to report it at the time, but there was no report.”
If there were no helicopters, what were the Phantoms chasing? What did the spotters spot? Something was there.
There have been a lot of discussion about the events of that night. In fact, it was the costliest day in the entire war for the Royal Australian Navy. Australian navy history books mention ‘unusual atmospheric conditions over the DMZ’, ‘insect swarms’ or ‘bird flocks’ as possible sources of the sightings, but were they unidentified flying objects? General George S Brown (1918-1978) was commander of the 7th Air Force and deputy commander for Air Operations, Military Assistance Command Vietnam from 1968 to 1970 – and so was in command of the Phantoms involved in the snafu. In later years he rose to chair the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington. In 1973, he fronted a Chicago media conference held to discuss the North American UFO flap of that year, and while airing his views on UFOs at the conference he said:
“I don’t know whether this story has ever been told or not [but UFOs plagued us in Vietnam]. They weren’t called UFOs they were called enemy helicopters, and they were only seen at night and they were only seen in certain places. They were seen up around the DMZ in the early summer of ’68, and this resulted in quite a battle. And in the course of this, an Australian destroyer [Hobart] took a hit…there was no enemy at all involved but we always reacted. Always after dark. The same thing happened up at Pleiku at the Highlands in ‘69”.
I don’t know if he was being facetious or serious when he referred to the UFOs as enemy helicopters.
George Filer, today Director of the Mutual UFO Network Eastern, USA, served as a USAF intelligence officer under General Brown during the Vietnam conflict, and he has also said. “In 1968, I briefed General Brown the USAF Chief of Staff most mornings on the intelligence situation in Vietnam…a lot of times we’d get UFO reports over the DMZ.” The late Bill Cooper served as a patrol-boat captain in Vietnam from 1967 to 1969, and during a talk at the 1989 Los Angeles UFO conference he said: “After about five months I was sent up north to the DMZ, to a place called Qua Vieaf [perhaps QuaViet] on the Tacan river…It was while there that I discovered that there was a tremendous amount of UFO and alien activity in Vietnam. It was always reported in official messages as ‘enemy helicopters’. Now any of you who know anything about the Vietnam war know that the North Vietnamese did not have any helicopters especially after our first couple of air raids into North Vietnam [during 1965]. Even if they had, they would not have been so foolish as to bring them over the DMZ, because that would have ensured their demise.”
USAF intelligence officer. Have you ever heard of Richard Doty? He was a USAF intelligence officer and he admits that the air forces intelligence department mixes lies with the truth to create a pattern of disinformation to keep people from really understanding what is going on. They will admit that there are UFOs to keep the truth, whatever that happens to be, from getting out. George Filer was with the Air Forces intelligence. Who’s to say he isn’t lying about the UFOs to cover up something egregious?
By the way, Cooper later recanted his belief in an alien presence and instead insisted UFOs are “technology originally developed by the Germans in their secret weapons programs during WW-II, by geniuses like Nikola Tesla and many others”. This statement didn’t put a halt to the interest in the mystery of 1968 DMZ ‘lights’. Jim Steff, ENC, USN Retired, served on the patrol boat PCF-12 on the night of the Hobart ‘incident’, and he confirms strange goings-on in the sky. In his article ‘The sinking of PCF-19 as seen from PCF-12, he states the PCF-12 met the ill fated PCF-19 at sea that night to fix the PCF-19’s radar. At approximately 0030 hours the PCF-12 received a ‘flash traffic’ that PCF-19, the first ‘friendly fire’ target, had disappeared in a flash of light. The PCF-12 reached the scene as Point Dume was pulling the two badly wounded survivors aboard. As PCF-12 searched in vain for more survivors, she found she had company.
As he and the crew peered into the darkness, the moon sometimes behind the clouds, “we spotted two aircraft ‘hovering’ on our port and starboard beams. They were about 300 yards away and 100 feet above the water. As the boat swung around to pu the aircraft ahead and astern of PCF-12, I could hear Mr. Snyder [the Officer in Charge] requesting air support and identification of these helos. The answer from the beach was ‘no friendly aircraft in the area, have contacts near you on radar and starlight scope.”
So that means the helos they saw weren’t ours and the North Vietnamese didn’t have helicopters, they obviously had to be UFOs and the beach was looking at them on radar.
Steffes says he saw one ‘helo’ in the moonlight and believed “it had a rounded front like an observation helo and it looked like two crewman sitting side by side”. Then, “I watched as tracers began to come toward us as this helo opened fire. The guns were from the nose of the helo. Our guns opened up and I ran back to my position as the loader on the after gun. We heard a crash of glass and a splash as one of the helos hit the water, the other helo broke contact and left the area.”
Steffes says for the next two and a half hours the PCF-12 played cat and mouse with one of more helos, opening fire whenever they moved in. He also observed the Point Dume firing tracers at blinking lights moving around her in the air. All the radios were crackling constantly as friendlies were checked out. “The result was no friendlies, these had to be North Vietnamese.”
Then, three and a half hours later, at about 3:30 a.m., military jets roared overhead and after they acknowledged the PCF-19s position, he soon heard explosions and gunfire to the north (the Hobart ‘incident’?). “As dawn broke, we could only see the shoreline and the Point Dume.”
Steffes concluded: “We continued to monitor and track these ‘lights’ for several weeks after this up until September…I know what the ‘official story’ is, but this is mine as true and complete as I can remember.”
Jon Wyatt says that Jim Steffes’ story of course raise many interesting questions like:
Did the PCF-12 crew fall victim to ‘cultural tracking’: aliens using their advanced technology to mimic our technology to interface with humans?
If the lights were North Vietnamese observer helicopters? Why did they fly around for hours with their lights on, why weren’t they shot down, and why was no ‘helo’ wreckage ever retrieved?”
What Jon doesn’t seem to remember is that Jim Steffes said “We heard a crash of glass and a splash as one of the helos hit the water”. If the helicopter was hit and splashed into the water, they wouldn’t have been able to see it. Right? And as for any other helicopters that were hit while they were flying above the water, they wouldn’t have been able to see them either. Over land, sure but not over water. I do have to mention that they didn’t claim to see any evidence of a crashed helicopter in the water, evidence like flotsam or and oil-slick.
Many Ufologists believe alien visitors have long been studying human wars, and this may have been the case in 1968.
As I was putting this together I was sitting in a hospital waiting room. I took my father to an appointment. When we walked outside after the appointment, a helicopter flew in and landed on the top of the building across the street. It was about three hundred yard away. It was very loud and unmistakable. UFOs are generally described as being silent. If the craft that the men in the patrol boat saw were helicopters, they would definitely know it. In this report, sound wasn’t mentioned at all.
Jon Wyatt added a paranormal postscript to his article:
Hobard served out three tours of duty in Vietnam, however it seems after 1968 she had an extra crewman.
A signalman, who served on the ship during the 1990s, says that one morning at 4 a.m. when the warship was approaching Hobart, Tas., he was climbing a flex ladder to the flag deck when he felt the ladder move below him, then felt “something actually walk past/through me on the ladder”. Then, when he reached the flag deck and entered the Signal-mans Shelter, he sensed “someone in there with me and could hear them breathing as though they had been running or working hard”.
The Signalman later learned from the Chief Coxswain, a 15-year veteran, that “a Leading Seaman Signalman” had been killed while scaling the ladder to action stations in 1968: “Apparently, the ship took a missile hit and a piece of shrapnel took this poor man’s head clean off his shoulders”.
During the late 1990s when the Signalman was re-posted to the ship he sent a young sailor up the ladder to “test the waters”, and the bloke also came down shaking.
The “Green Ghost”, as the ship was also affectionately known, was de-commissioned in May 2000, and scuttled at Yankalill Bay, south of Adelaide, in late 2002, where she is now a scuba-dive spot.
This story hinges on the whether or not the North Vietnamese had helicopters. At the beginning of the story Jon Wyatt mentioned that the spotters thought that the lights were soviet made Mi-4 ‘Hound” helicopters. Since this was a proxy war between the Soviet Union and the US, it makes sense to me that the Soviets would have supplied the North Vietnamese with weapons of war, one of which could very well have been the Mi-4 ‘Hound’ helicopters. And on top of that one witness claimed that he heard the sound of breaking glass and a splash as if a helicopter had been hit and crashed into the water.
Using Occum’s Razor and those two little bits of information, I am going to lean toward the truth of the whole story being entirely terrestrial. These are just events in war.
What do you think? You can believe what you want.
Remember, Believe none of what you hear and half of what you read.
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