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European press played the stories up. ‘‘Ghost rockets’ had replaced the ghost fliers of 1934. They were seen over Greece, far to the south, and over the mountains of Switzerland, weaving expertly through the valleys and canyons. They were tracked on radar. They were photographed. (One picture of an arrow-shaped streak of light taken near Stockholm was published in the London Morning Post, September 6, 1946.) They were measured at speeds of from 400 to 1,000 miles per hour. Some of them seemed to explode in midair. Some released fragments of metal that proved to be common slag. : The British and Scandinavian newspapers openly accused the Soviet Union of testing new rocket weapons in the skies of northern Europe. Moscow denied it. In September, bright green fireballs were seen over Portugal. “Flying projectiles with a tail of flame’ flashed over Casa- blanca. Great glowing things hurtled out of the skies over Oslo, Norway, and exploded with deafening noises. On Wednesday, July 3, 1946, a mysterious explosion shook central Scotland at 9 P.M., blowing out windows and killing one man (apparently by concussion). No source or explanation for the blast was found. Swedish authorities collected more than 2,000 ghost-rocket reports. General James Doolittle flew to Stock- holm to join in the investigations, even though this flap was barely mentioned in the American press. London was shaken by a series of explosions that no one could account for. At the end of August 1946, the lid came down. The Daily Telegraph of London reported on August 22: “To prevent technical information from being obtained from the firing of rockets over Denmark, the Danish government has asked newspapers not to name areas where the missiles have been seen.” The discussion of the flight of rockets over Scandinavia has been dropped in the Norwegian newspapers since Wednesday. On that day the Norwegian General Staff issued a memorandum to the press asking it not to make any mention of the appearance of rockets over Norwegian territory but to pass on all reports to the Intelligence Department of the High Command... In Sweden the ban is limited to any mention of where the rockets have been seen to land or explode. Ina brief fifty years we had gone from mystery inventors to spies and smugglers and then on to Russian secret weapons. Because none of these explanations was ever proven valid, and because the phenomenon contin- 122 / Operation Trojan Horse On August 31, 1946, the Telegraph’s correspondent in Oslo revealed: