Midnight Ghost Creeps
Overhead at 400 MPH

Plane, Tracked By Radar, Sweeps
Over British Coast, Disappears

By Associated Press

LONDON April 30–Recurring reports of a midnight "ghost plane" swooping out of the East at tremendous speed gave the British press a sensational aviation mystery today but the Royal Air Force, while admitting the whole thing was "slightly mysterious," refused to get excited.

Eyewitness accounts said the mystery craft, first plotted by radar early in January, zooms over the East Anglia coast —as tho (sic) it came from the continent—and disappears inland at a speed of 400 miles an hour or more.

What is even odder is that the plane has never been making the return journey from England to the continent. RAF night fighters have tried regularly to intercept the "ghost plane" but so far have been unsuccessful.

"Radar has plotted some strange things in its time, from children's kites and raindrops to formations of geese, but it surely never plotted a stranger thing than this," said the Yorkshire Post, adding:

"Is it a diamond or drug smuggler? Is it conveying a secret agent from one foreign power to another?"

All the Air Ministry would say for sure is that the plane was traveling at 30,000 feet when radar spotted it in January. " Our night fighters always try to intercept unknown craft, " a spokesman added.

This particular unknown craft is down in the official records as X362, "X" being the RAF symbol for a plane that hasn't been identified.