" John P. Szehwach, a radioman stationed on the USS Brownson, gave testimony of how UFOs appeared dramatically out of the ocean depths. On January 17, 1947 at 0700 hours, Szehwach said:
I and my shipmates in the pilothouse port side observed for several minutes the bright lights that ascended about 45 degrees into the sky very quickly… We couldn’t i.d., the lights, because our radar was limited to 250 miles in a straight line.[Our Real “War of the Worlds"]
Over the next several weeks, according to the Soviet report, the UFOs flew close over the US naval flotilla which fired on the UFOs which did retaliate with deadly effects. According to Lieutenant John Sayerson, a flying boat pilot:
The thing shot vertically out of the water at tremendous velocity, as though pursued by the devil, and flew between the masts [of the ship] at such a high speed that the radio antenna oscillated back and forth in its turbulence. An aircraft [Martin flying-boat] from the Currituck that took off just a few moments later was struck with an unknown type of ray from the object, and almost instantly crashed into the sea near our vessel…. About ten miles away, the torpedo-boat Maddox burst into flames and began to sink… Having personally witnessed this attack by the object that flew out of the sea, all I can say is, it was frightening.”[Our Real “War of the Worlds"]
There is a major problem with Sayerson’s quote. There has been no torpedo boat named Maddox in the US Navy. In the Russian documentary, the incident described by Sayerson (misspelt Sireson) refers instead to the destroyer “Murdoch.” There was, however, no destroyer named “Murdoch” active in the US Fleet in 1947. Instead there was a destroyer named “Maddox” (DD-731), but it did not serve in Operation Highjump. In fact, the USS Maddox was the destroyer fired upon in the Gulf of Tonkin incident of 1964.
According to Frank Joseph the USS Maddox was “either a torpedo boat, or torpedo-carrying destroyer.” He goes on to explain what may have happened to the Maddox mentioned in the Soviet report:
A USS Maddox was indeed sunk by enemy action, but five years earlier by a German dive-bomber during the Allied invasion of Sicily. Actually there were at least three American destroyers known by that name (DD-168, DD-622 and DD-731) all of them contemporaneous. The US Navy has long been notorious for falsifying the identity of its ships and re-writing their histories if they embarrass official policy…. So too, the “Maddox” cited by Soviet espionage was similarly consigned to an official memory hole.[Our Real “War of the Worlds"]
If Joseph is correct, then it is very possible that a USS Maddox was destroyed during Operation Highjump, and the US Navy changed official records to hide this."