Mr. Spectator: Demon in the Sky

In the 1983 movie The Right Stuff, there's a scene where the protagonist, test pilot Chuck Yeager, generates a sonic boom with his aircraft, causing everyone on the ground to think that his jet just exploded. Then the X-1 emerges from the clouds, the music swells, and everybody is proud to be an American because we just conquered that damn "demon in the sky." Minus the synthesizers, this really happened. In Freudian terms, you could say that the X-1 was a manifestation of some deep-seated complex of the military-industrial persuasion, while many believe that it was this momentous event on October 14, 1947 that launched America dick first into the space age.

In the mythology of popular culture, Chuck Yeager is generally recognized as the first person to break the sound barrier. However, it is now believed that a German pilot named Hans Mutke likely did so two years earlier while engaged in a dogfight with Allied forces. In what was almost certainly among the top ten pants-shittingest moments of his life, the German pilot hit mach one entirely by accident while flying almost straight down at full speed, and nobody even realized what had happened until after the fact. Yeager, on the other hand, was flying a jet that was designed for specifically that purpose at a time when there was literally nothing else on TV.

Years later, Mutke is reported to have said something to the effect of, "Oh, so that was a sonic boom that I heard when I almost crashed my jet. How about that." Also, it doesn't hurt that Yeager was American, while most people at the time probably weren't too keen on the idea of celebrating a Nazi Luftwaffe pilot who was flying a German engineered jet. That said, in some parallel universe where Mutke is recognized for his accomplishment, there's a movie about it called The Wrong Stuff. The soundtrack is awesome.

Incidentally, after the war, Mutke went on to become a gynecologist... because he apparently hadn't seen quite enough ladyparts as an ace fighter pilot.