PROJECT FU-GO

EARLY IN THE evening of December 6, 1944, citizens of Thermopolis, Wyoming, spotted something unusual in the sky. They watched the “alien mechanism” drift for a moment. Suddenly, glowing red lights erupted from it. Seconds later there was a whistling noise. Then a deafening explosion echoed through the town.

The sheriff rushed to the scene, where he found fragments of a bomb. Days later a local newspaper concluded that an American warplane had accidentally dropped part of its payload. But there was no plane, and the explosion was no accident. The mysterious blast was part of a top-secret Japanese World War II mission code-named Project Fu-Go.

American military investigators got their first hint about Project Fu-Go a few weeks before the Thermopolis explosion. In early November a navy patrol ship snagged some tattered cloth with Japanese markings floating in the Pacific. No one knew exactly what the mysterious cloth was, but everyone suspected the worst.

Those suspicions deepened a week later when a Coast Guard ship scooped up some fuses and