Messerschmitt Me 262

They were surprised.

They didn't understand, you know, many of them had encountered the ME-262 jet, which was the first.

Could you imagine being 19, 20 years old and encountering the first jet in combat? That was something very extraordinary to see, I'm sure.

Sure was, yeah.

He couldn't shake the thought that what they were witnessing was some form of cutting-edge man-made technology.

As a teenager growing up in war-torn Italy, an aircraft aficionado like young Vesco likely would have heard stories of advanced German air weaponry like the Me 262 jet fighter and the V1 and V2 rockets.

During his lifetime, Vesco would go on to write 11 books on the supposed origins of UFOs.

Though most were only published in Italian, his two most popular works, Intercept UFO and Man-Made UFOs 1944-1994, 50 Years of Suppression, co-authored with David Hatcher Childress, gained enough traction to warrant English translations.

You're going to get a Wildcat.

You're going to get an ME262 all in 172nd scale.

My good friends at Lionheart Hobby.

And that's going to go to Mr. Ken Schaefer.

And finally, mark your calendar for the annual Coleman Veterans Day celebration Saturday, November 7th from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Coleman Regional Airport in Vinemont.

This year, you'll get to see a Messerschmitt Me 262, the world's first operational jet fighter and the first one ever displayed in the South.

There will also be a D-Day C-47, a Spitfire, and a Huey helicopter you can climb aboard.

Mike Durant, the Army Black Hawk pilot whose story was told in The Black Hawk Down, will speak at 1030.

For example, Franz Stigler once told me a story.

He said he loaned his Messerschmitt 262 to a young fighter pilot, and that fighter pilot flew a couple laps around Munich Reem and crashed in a nearby village.

Franz said he got in a Kubelwagen, raced there, pulled the young pilot out of the wreckage, and he died in his arms.

And then Franz said after the war, I went and visited his sister in Graz, Austria, and I conveyed his last words and, and told about how he, how he died.

It really, uh, looks pow, pow, pow.

When I got the Me 262 in the air, it was so fast.

It was virtually untouchable.

It had four 30-millimeter cannon, which is a huge punch.

Batteries of rockets.

I saw American Marauder aircraft being attacked by an Me 262.

One minute there was this beautiful looking Marauder in the sky, a minute later, confetti.

I've flown almost all the World War II aircraft, and I rank it as the most formidable aircraft of World War II.

That's a big part of my enjoyment of the hobby is the learning.

And one of the stupid pieces of trivia that I know only because I have researched A subject I'm really interested in is that inside one of the shock cones of an ME262 engine is a lawnmower engine with a pull start ring, because that's how you started the ME262's engines.

And I wouldn't know that if I hadn't dived into that subject because I really took a liking to the ME-262.

And there are thousands of little pieces like that.

Yeah.

That's the one that's got Me 262 on it.

That's a good one.

Me 262, that's the German jet fighter.

The, the, the thing with a lot of these bands, like, I really like The Hives, and, but-

I love them

There are also misidentifications of known aircraft.

For example, a German Me 262's afterburner plume could appear as a glowing orb from certain angles, especially during night operations.

The limited data streams of the era meant that pilots had to interpret raw radar returns and visual cues without the clarity we take for granted.

Despite the plethora of mundane explanations, the persistence of the reports is what intrigued historians.

There's a lot of stuff in Operation Paperclip where the Allies have this idea that Germany ...

Like, they look at the, they look at the Comet, they look at the Me 262, they look at all of these weapons that Germany is churning out at the end of the war, and they think that they're, like, Ace Combat super weapons, and then they get their hands on them and they immediately realize, like, oh, this thing's kind of a piece of shit.

Right.

And so, you know-

Exactly.

Now, Wright Field had a long history as a place where foreign aircraft designs were tested and reverse engineered, going all the way back to World War I.

In World War II, they rebuilt and test-fired V1 cruise missiles and acquired dozens of advanced German aircraft like the Me 262 jet fighter.

So it was a natural place to send a bunch of people who had worked on those exact same missiles and aircraft.