Technology and Sightings of World War II
W.A. Harbinson

Foo-Fighters Index

At first it was assumed that the 'balls of fire' were static electricity charges, but the mounting body of evidence made it clear that they were under some kind of control and were certainly not natural phenomena. Indeed, according to a London Daily Telegraph report of 2 January 1945, RAF pilots were describing them as `strange orange lights which follow their planes, sometimes flying in formation with them, and eventually peeling off and climbing [author's emphasis]'. This soon led to speculation that they were German secret weapons, radio-controlled from the ground, and designed either to foul the ignition systems of the bombers or act as `psychological' weapons which confused and unnerved the Allied pilots. Finally, unable to solve the mystery, both the RAF and the US Eighth Army Air Force concluded that they were the products of `mass hallucination' and subsequently did no more about them. Sightings of the foo fighters tailed off and ceased completely a few weeks before the end of the war. The next wave of UFO sightings occurred in Western Europe, Scandinavia and the US, where from 19467 many people, including airline pilots and radar operatives, reported seeing strange cigar or disc-shaped objects in the skies.

On 21 June 1947, Harold Dahl reported seeing saucer-shaped objects flying toward the Canadian border. Three days later, Kenneth Arnold made his more famous sightings of saucer-shaped objects over the Cascades, also heading for the Canadian border.

These and subsequent sightings led to speculation that both the Soviets and the Americans, utilizing men and material captured in the secret research plants of Nazi Germany, including those at Peenemünde and Nordhausen, were developing advanced saucer-shaped aircraft. In the words of Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, then head of the UFO investigations at the US Air Force's Project Blue Book: `When World War II ended, the Germans had several radical types of new aircraft and guided missiles under development. The majority of these projects were in the most preliminary stages, but they were the only known craft that could even approach the performance of the objects reported by UFO observers.' It would seem that such speculations were based on facts.

The late 1800s and early 1900s produced some of the greatest advances in the history of aviation. The first successful flights of S.P. Langley's flying machines were made in 1896 the first year of the Great Airship Scare and by 1900 numerous patents for airships had been registered. In 1900 Count von Zeppelin's dirigible balloon, powered by an internal combustion engine and propellers, became the first real directed flight by man; and by 1901, in Paris, France, Santos-Dumont had flown an airship from St Cloud to the Eiffel Tower and back in under thirty minutes to win the French Aero Club prize; two years later, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, the Wright brothers made the first successful heavier-than-air manned flight; on the last day of December 1908, Wilbur Smith flew seventy-seven miles in two hours and thirty minutes; seven months later the French aviator Louis Bléériot flew across the English Channel from Calais to Dover, and throughout the Great War of 1914-18 the Germans successfully used advanced Zeppelin airships to bomb London and Paris. However, while these great aeronautical achievements were enthralling the world, even more radical theories and experiments were quietly taking place elsewhere.

Goddard was always well ahead of his time. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1882, he graduated from the Worcester Polytechnic in 1908, received his PhD in physics at Clark University in Worcester in 1911, taught at Princeton, and returned to Clark in 1914, the same year in which he obtained his first two patents for rocket apparatus. Five years later, he published his book A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes (1919) and by 1923 he was already testing the first of his rocket engines using gasoline and liquid oxygen the first advance over solid-fuel rockets. In 1926 he sent his first rocket soaring successfully skyward, and a larger one, financed by the Smithsonian Institution, went up three years later as the first instrument-carrying rocket.

In 1930, with further help from the Smithsonian Institution, the philanthropist Daniel Guggenheim and famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, he set up an experimental station in a desolate area near Roswell, New Mexico, where he built larger rockets and introduced many of the ideas that are now standard in rocketry, including appropriate combustion chambers, the burning of gasoline with oxygen in such a way that the rapid combustion could be used to cool the chamber walls, various revolutionary rocket steering systems, including rudder-like deflectors and gyroscopes, and the basics for the first multistage rocket. From 1930-35, in the seclusion of his testing grounds near Roswell, New Mexico, Goddard launched rockets that attained speeds of up to 350 miles per hour and heights of a mile and a half. Even more remarkable than Goddard's achievements was the fact that they were, at least until the advent of World War II ignored by the United States government though certainly they were not ignored in Germany. The German amateur rocket society, the Verein für Raumschiffahrt, or VfR, also known as the Spaceship Travel Club, had come into being in 1927 when a group of brilliant space travel enthusiasts took over an abandoned 300acre arsenal, which they called their Raketenflugplatz, or Rocket Flight Place, in the Berlin suburb of Reindickerdorf. From there they actually shot some crude, liquid-fuelled rockets skywards. By 1930 the VfR included most of the rocket experts of the day, including Rudolf Nebel, Hermann Oberth, Willy Ley, Max Valier, Klaus Riedel and the eighteen-year-old Wernher von Braun, who would end up in the US, heading the Moon programme for NASA. 

In April 1930 the Ordnance Branch of the German Army's Ballistics and Weapons Office, headed by General Becker, appointed Captain Walter Dornberger to work on rocket development at the army's Kummersdorf firing range, approximately fifteen miles south of Berlin. Two years later, after many experiments to find the most promising method of propulsion and the most stable means of flight, the VfR demonstrated one of their liquid-fuelled rockets to Dornberger and other officers at Kummersdorf. In 1933, when Hitler came to power, the VfR was taken over by the Nazis and became part of the Kummersdorf programme. Many of the German engineers, including the up-and-coming Wernher von Braun, revered Goddard and were known to have based their work on his ideas. While in the United States Goddard's theories were still being received with indifference and even contempt, Hitler's Germany was spending fortunes on rocket research that was, by and large, based on Goddard's work. As early as December 1934 two highly advanced A2 rockets, constructed at Kummersdorf, gyroscopically controlled, and powered by oxygen and alcohol fuelled motors, were launched from the island of Borkum in the North Sea and reached an altitude of one-and-a-half miles. Those stabilized, liquid-fuelled rockets were, at the time, the only known serious challengers to the rockets of Robert H. Goddard. Nor did it end there.

Shortly after Hitler's infamous advance across the Hohenzollern bridge on 7 March 1936, Captain Walter Dornberger, the head of he Rocket Research Institute, his assistant, Wernher von Braun, and their team of 150 technicians, demonstrated some more motors at Kummersdorf, including one with an unprecedented 3500lb of thrust. Those demonstrations so impressed the German Commander-in-Chief, General Fritsch, that permission was given for Dornberger and von Braun to build an independent rocket establishment in a suitably remote part of Germany, where research and test firings could be carried out in the strictest secrecy. The chosen site was near the village of Peenemünde, on the island of Usedom, off the Baltic Coast. The rest is now history. After numerous experiments in the Zeppelin subsonic wind tunnel at Friedrichshafen and the University of Aachen's supersonic wind tunnel, and with the completion of a remarkably reliable gyroscopic control system by the renowned electrical specialists Siemens, radio-controlled A5 rockets were soon being dropped from heights of up to 20,000 feet and obtaining speeds exceeding Mach 1, or the speed of sound.

History of German Rocketry in World War II

By late 1944 numerous V1 and V2 rockets were falling on London. What is not so well known is that when the V2 rockets were inspected by Allied scientists in the captured Nordhausen Central Works at the close of the war, it was discovered that the most notable features of the propulsion unit were the shutter-type valves in the fixed grill, the fuel injection orifices incorporated in the same grill, the combustion chamber, spark plugs and nozzle all of which were to be found in a Robert H. Goddard patent, issued 13 November 1934, and reproduced in full in the German aviation magazine, Flugsport, in January 1939. There were other striking similarities between the V2 and Goddard's original rocket. Both rockets had the same motor-cooling system, the same pump drive, the same layout front to rear, the same stabilizer and the same guidance and fuel injection systems. Indeed, the only notable difference between the two was that Goddard's rocket motors used gasoline and oxygen, whereas the V2 used hydrogen and peroxide; Goddard's rocket fuel was liquid oxygen and gasoline, whereas the V2 used liquid oxygen and alcohol; and, finally, Goddard's original rocket was a lot smaller than the V2. The V2 rockets had a thrust of 55,000 pounds, attained a velocity of 6400 feet per second, and could soar to an altitude of sixty-eight miles. What this meant, in effect, is that the Germans had taken designs shamefully neglected by the US government and used them as the basis for a radical, highly advanced, supersonic technology. They had also learned through Goddard of the necessity for gyroscopic control and thus potential control of the boundary layer. What is the boundary layer?

While being 4000 or 5000 times less viscous than oil, air is still viscous. Because of this, the air sweeping in on the solid body of an aircraft forms imperceptible stratifications of resistance and consequently decreases the speed of the body in flight. These layers of air are therefore known as the boundary layer and the boundary layer increases its resistance in direct proportion to the increasing speed of the flying object, thus imposing severe limitations on its speed and manoeuvrability. Though the boundary layer affects all forms of flight, the major problem regarding ultra-high-speed flight is to somehow move this negative air as far to the rear of the aircraft as possible, thus minimizing the expenditure of energy required to propel the aircraft through the sky. Moreover, it is possible that a revolutionary type of aircraft could by not only completely removing the boundary layer, but by somehow rerouting it and utilizing it as an added propulsive force fly through the skies using little other than the expelled air itself. Should this be accomplished, we would have an aircraft capable of remarkable speeds while using only the bare minimum of conventional fuel. The Germans were working on all aspects of the boundary layer even before the beginning of the Great War of 1914 - 1918.

A 1950 article written by a German émigré in Chile, Eduard Ludwig,  submitted to a Chilean magazine but apparently never published, was titled "The mystery of 'flying discs' -- a contribution to its possible explanation." It recounted Dr. Ludwig's wartime work at a Junkers research facility, where he helped to develop a "one-piece metal wing" functioning as a "speedily rotating top" capable of vertical takeoff and high speeds.   "The experiments turned out to be extremely difficult and involved many casualties," Dr. Ludwig observed dryly, clearly rueful that the spinning-top experiments had not come to fruition before the arrival of the Red Army.   He concluded: "The future will show whether the 'flying discs' are only the products of imagination or whether they are the results of a far-advanced German science which possibly, as well as the nearly finished atomic bombs, may have fallen into the hands of the Russians."

Physicist Dr Eduard Ludwig worked with the famous aircraft designer Hugo Junkers at his factory in Dessau where, in 1910, they produced one of the earliest `flying wing' designs. According to Ludwig, the first physicist to consider `this new branch of aerodynamics' was Professor Jukowski of Moscow. Before World War I, Jukowski worked with Dr Kutta of the Technical High School of Stuttgart, Germany, on the development of the theory of aeroplane wing beam and succeeded in establishing the differential equation of the boundary layer, which for the first time threw light on why `a plane wing can bear a load while moving forward through the air'. Since then, according to Ludwig, the Kutta/Jukowski Theory of Aeroplane Wing beam has been the foundation of all aerodynamics. However, even earlier than that, in 1904, at the Aerodynamic Experimental Institute of the Göttingen University, the physicist Professor Ludwig Prandtl discovered the boundary layer, which in turn led to the understanding of the way in which streamlining would reduce the drag of aeroplane wings and other moving bodies. Prandtl's work soon became the basic material of aerodynamics, and he went on to make pioneering discoveries in subsonic airflow, advance wind tunnel design, and other aerodynamic equipment design. He also devised a `soap film analogy' for the analysis of torsion forces of structures, and produced invaluable studies on the `theory of plasticity'.

By 1915, another member of the Technical High School of Stuttgart, Professor H.C. Bauman, utilizing the theories of Prandtl, received a patent for a Splitwing `through which the artificial interruption of the course of the current, the tearing of the boundary layer, and the consequent braking and diminishing of the landing speed would be attained'. Meanwhile, Anton Flettner, the German director of an aeronautical and hydrodynamic research institute in Amsterdam, had invented the rotorship, a vessel propelled by revolving cylinders mounted vertically on the deck. In 1926 he established an aircraft factory in Berlin, where he used what became known as the Flettner-Rotor for the production of Flettner FI 282 and other helicopters. Soon, at the behest of Professor Junkers, the Flettner Rotor (`a cylinder turning at great speed') was being utilized by professors Prandtl, Ludwig, and others, as a means of investigating `to what extent the uplift of a wing could be increased'.

The experiments were fraught with difficulty and cost the lives of at least four test pilots. This was due to `inexplicable vibrations and axle breakages', leading the scientists to the conclusion that `only a gas turbine could produce the required uplift of the cylinder'. This led in turn to the building of a wind tunnel in which many invaluable experiments on the relationship between supersonic speeds and the boundary layer were conducted, culminating in the first successful flight of a jet aircraft in 1939, as well as the launching of the VI and V2 rockets during the closing stages of World War II.

The German scientists and engineers believed that the perfect flying machine would be one that required no runway, since it would take off vertically, would be able to hover in midair, and would not be limited in manoeuvrability or speed by the boundary layer. As the build-up of the boundary layer is dramatically increased by the many surface protuberances of a normal aircraft wings, tails, rudders, rotors, cockpits it was felt that by getting rid of them completely, by somehow wrapping them together as part and parcel of the one, circular, smooth-surfaced flying wing, the first step in the conquest of the boundary layer would be achieved. Germany was the country with most interest in such developments and certainly the most advanced at that time. A disc-or-saucer-shaped aircraft, without any surface protuberances, powered by ultra-high-speed engines, is what they were after and many designs of the time were based on that conception.

It is therefore no accident that as early as 1935 a German, Hans von Ohain, had applied for a patent for a jet engine. Nor was it an accident that the first flight of a jet-powered aircraft was made by a Heinkel He 178 at Rostock, Germany, on 27 August 1939. Regarding vertical-rising aircraft, the FockeAchgelis Company had already announced in 1939 that it had almost completed its FW 61 helicopter, which would be the first fully operational helicopter in existence. That the Germans produced the first successful helicopter but were not known to have used such craft during World War II may be due to the fact that already they were more concerned with tailless aircraft or `flying wings', devoid of vertical stabilizing or control surfaces, which would lead them to the search for a jet-propelled, disc-shaped aircraft, or flying saucer.

By 1932 the Horten brothers of Bonn had produced some successful prototypes for the German Air Ministry at their factory in Bonn. The Horten I was an `all wing' (Nurflügler) aircraft, which in prototype form was a wooden-framed glider. It had a span of 40.7 feet, a wing area of 226 square feet, and a wing loading of two pounds per square foot. It had a flying weight of 440 pounds, a gliding angle of twenty-one degrees, and a flying life of approximately seven hours. As the Horten brothers were convinced that the most important form of aircraft would be the all-wing type, there were no vertical stabilizing or control surfaces on the Horten I. It was virtually flat and crescent-shaped, like a boomerang, with the pilot placed in a prone position, to reduce cockpit size. This so called `flying wing' certainly flew for seven hours, but it could never have been the basis of a flying saucer for one very good reason: it was still faced with the problem that had repeatedly foiled other German aeronautical engineers the limitations imposed by the boundary layer. 

A more advanced model, the Horten II,  D11167, was built in 1934 and test-flown at Rangsdorf, Germany, on 17 November 1938. According to the report of Hanna Reitsch (the popular female pilot who also demonstrated the Focke-Achgelis helicopter the same year), this test flight turned out to be highly unsatisfactory. The so-called tailless aircraft possessed great static-longitudinal stability and complete safety in relation to the spin, but its control surfaces were so heavy that measurements of manoeuvring stability could not be carried out.

The unsatisfactory arrangement of its undercarriage necessitated too long a takeoff; the relation between its longitudinal, lateral and directional controls was unsatisfactory; its turning flight and manoeuvrability were fraught with difficulty, and side-slipping could not be carried out. Nevertheless, the Horten designs were the first. on the road to a disc-shaped aircraft and would cause great concern amongst Allied scientists and intelligence officers involved in post-war investigations into the possibility of German, or German-based Russian flying saucers.

While experiments with `flying wings' and spherical aircraft were being conducted by the likes of the Horten brothers, many other German scientists, including Professor Betz, Flettner, and Junkers, were experimenting with specially equipped air wings in attempts to reduce the boundary layer. Most of these experiments were based on the `suction' method, in which the negative air is sucked into the wing itself, through tiny holes or slots, then expelled by means of a pump located in the fuselage. While this was a step in the right direction, the resulting aircraft still required heavy, obstructive engines (also the main problem with the Horten brothers' envisaged flying wing jet fighter). The belief persisted that in order to get rid of the boundary layer completely and in order to make use of the `dead' air not only for acceleration, but for manoeuvring as well the requirement was for an aircraft devoid of all obstructing protuberances, such as wings, rudders and even normal air-intakes, and not requiring a large, heavy engine. In other words, this revolutionary new aircraft should be the perfect flying wing that offers the least possible resistance, sucks in the `dead' air of the boundary layer, and then uses that same air, expelling it at great force, to increase its own momentum. It would therefore have to be a circular `wing' that is, in a sense, wrapped around its suction pump, with the pump being part and parcel of the engine: a machine shaped like a saucer.

UFO Sightings 1942 - 1946     World War II pilots on both sides of the conflict reported, "Foo fighters," bright, unidentified flying objects that move in the sky in a strange manner.   1942 • Japan: An Imperial Japanese Sally bomber aircraft, on a mission over the Sea of Japan, was approached by a small dark spherical object which flew around and between the aircraft in the formation. An alert gun-cameraman snapped one photograph. • Solomon Islands: While in the Solomon Islands US Marine Corp Sgt. Stephen J. Brickner sighted a staggering number of UFOs, laid out in virtually an enormous rectangle. They were in rows of 15 objects long by ten objects deep. The formation was 15 craft long and 10 deep. Formation sightings have been reported before but the rectangle shape is unique. • Timor Sea: The cruiser Tromp was approached by a large aluminum disc that flew at tremendous speed. It then circled the Dutch vessel for about three to four hours. Finally, it flew off at an estimated speed of 3,000-3,500 mph. • USA, California, Los Angeles: A gigantic black-out, covering the area from Bakersfield south to San Diego and eastward to Boulder City and Las Vegas, Nev., went into effect shortly after 8 o’clock last night on orders from the Army Fourth Interceptor Command. It continued until 11:03 p.m. As Los Angeles went dark amongst considerable confusion and uncertainty, The Interceptor Command announced, “this is not a practice black-out.” A yellow signal, indicating the approach of enemy air raiders, was flashed on the state-wide teletype at 7:35p.m.. Police said the signal indicated the presence of unidentified airplanes approaching Los Angeles from the sea but did not necessarily mean they were enemy. Anti-aircraft and machine gunners scrambled to their weapons at Ft. Mac Arthur, which was promptly placed on alert basis. Reports that the sound of gunfire could be heard could not be verified from listening posts at the beach or at the harbor. Definite indication that the Interceptor Command meant business by calling for the black-out was contained in a statement from a spokesman who said: “There are planes over the south of Los Angeles that are unidentified. The area will be blacked out until we can identify them.” When asked if Army planes had been sent aloft to contact these aircraft the spokesman said: “You can assume there have been.” Thousands of Angelinos, listening for straining ears for sounds of aircraft, were unable to distinguish sounds of motors, however. A few minutes after the black-out was ordered, the flashing of what appeared to be Army searchlights was visible in the higher portions of Los Angeles, 25 miles from the water front. Headquarters of the Fourth Interceptor Command, calling the blackout a success, said they had a report that unidentified planes were in the vicinity of Los Angeles.   1943 • Burma: US bomber pilots flying missions from Burma to China reported being buzzed and circled by 'glittering' objects. Instruments failed to operate until the objects flew off. • China, Qing Xian, Hebet Province: A domed UFO that emitted a white light was seen flying less than 20 feet above the ground. • Germany, Schweinfurt: On October 14, 1943, US B-17s of the 348th Bomb Group had started a bombing run over Schweinfurt, Germany, when they ran into a formation of 'scores' of small, silvery disks, about one inch thick and four inches in diameter, flying toward the bombers. Major E.R.T. Holmes reported that one struck the tail of one aircraft, but without effect. • Russia, Pushkino: Soldiers saw a disc-shaped object hovering high in the air above aircraft. 1944 • Austria, Klagenfurt: Major Leet, a bomber pilot, saw a luminous disc follow his plane and its maneuvers. • Germany, Hagenau: On December 22, 1944, Lt. David McFalls of the US 415 th night fighter squadron was over Hagenau, Germany. At 6:00 am, he saw two 'huge, bright orange lights' climbing toward the plane. McFalls dived, banked and turned his plane, but the UFOs stuck with him for two minutes, then peeled off and blinked out. • India, Kharagapur: On August 10, 1944, Captain Alvah M. Reida was piloting a B-29 bomber based at Kharagapur, India, on a mission over Palembang, Sumatra, when his right gunner and co-pilot noticed a sphere 'probably five or six feet in diameter, of a very bright and intense red or orange in color' that constantly throbbed, about 12,500 ft off the starboard wing. It kept up with the B-29, then flying at 210 mph. Reida tried to shake it off his plane, but it stayed in the same relative position until , after eight minutes, it 'made an abrupt 90 degree turn and accelerated rapidly, disappearing in the overcast.' • USA, Washington, DC. On February 22, Franklin D. Roosevelt writes a Top Secret memo on White House stationary for "The special committee on non-terrestrial science and technology." Both the title and the content clearly allude to extraterrestrial life, the former using the word "non-terrestrial" and the latter talks about "coming to grips with the reality that our planet is not the only one harboring intelligent life the universe.   1945 • North Korea, Wonsan: Three Japanese Zeroes engage two daylight discs in a dogfight. One Zero is shot down, and the UFOs flee into space. • USA, Alaska, Aleutian Islands: Fourteen men on the USAT Delarof saw a dark spherical object rise out of the water, circle their ship and fly off to the south. 1946 • Sweden: The well-documented 'Ghost Rocket' invasion of Sweden took place as cigar-shaped objects rained down on land and lake in this area of northern Europe. • USA, Florida: Pilot and crew of a C-47 aircraft 30 miles north-east of Tampa, saw a cigar-shaped object with luminous portholes hurtle towards them in horizontal flight at the same altitude of 4,000ft. At 1,000 yards distant it swerved to avoid them. Estimated size of object was twice that of a B-29 bomber.

Foo Fighters and the Kugelblitz   On November 27, 1944, a B-27 of the United States Air Force, returning from a raid on Speyer, West Germany, encountered a huge, orange colored light moving upward at an estimated speed of 500 MPH. When the pilots reported, sector radar had reported negatively, because nothing had registered on the screen.   But the object seen by the returning bomber was only the first of numerous others spotted by American pilots over wartime Germany and promptly baptized 'foo-fighters.'   Fighter pilots Falls and Backer, of the 415th Squadron, reported such an encounter a month later forcing the Air Force to admit that such objects might exist. Later encounters with foo fighters led experts to assume they were German inventions of a new order employed to baffle radar.   How close they came to the truth, they learned only when the war was over and Allied Intelligence teams moved into the secret Nazi plants. The foo-fighters seen by American pilots were only a minor demonstration, a fraction of a vast variety of methods used to confuse radar and interrupt electro magnetic currents.   Work on the German anti-radar Feuerball, or fireball, had been speeded up during the fall of 1944 at a Luftwaffe experimental center near Oberammergau, Bavaria. There, and at the aeronautical establishment at Weiner Neustadt, the first fireballs were produced. Later, when the Russians moved closer to Austria, the workshops producing the fireballs were moved to the Black Forest.   Fast and remote controlled, the fireballs, equipped with klystron tubes operating on the same frequency as Allied radar, which could eliminate the blips from radar screens. This allowed them to remain practically invisible to ground control.   The Nazi Feuerball failed to interfere with the Allied air offensive. The foo fighters had been launched too late and could no longer change the course of events, but in themselves they were significant not only because they were the outcome of a technical evolution which could have led to more dangerous weapons, but also because they showed that Nazi technology had moved in a direction far beyond anything expected by Allied Intelligence.   As the fall of Germany approached, the Nazi Leaders reverted to an ambitious project created by Gauleiter Franz Hofer who had become high commissioner for the Italian Tyrol and the Southern Alps. The project foresaw setting up an incredible fortress in the mountains, including parts of Italy, Austria and Bavaria.   Hofer submitted his plan to Hitler's aide, Martin Bormann in November 1944, having prepared for this moment back in 1938 when Nazi agents carefully mapped all mountain passes, caves, bridges, highways, and located sights for underground factories, munitions dumps, arms and food caches. To complete work on this fortress, Hofer demanded a slave labor force of a quarter of a million, to be composed of 70% Austrian workers and 30% men of the Tyrolese home guard.   So-called U-Plants were to be set up underground as gigantic workshops and launching pads for the secret weapons which were to turn the tide of the war in favor of the Nazis.   Among these were some 74 tunnels along Lake Garda, in Northern Italy, which were to be adapted and transformed into a vast assembly plant by FIAT of Turin in close collaboration with the department of Minister Albert Speer. Seven other tunnels along Lake Garda, near Limone, were to produce several weapons tested at the Hermann Goering Institute of Riva del Garda.   According to the archives of the German High Command and of the Allied Combined Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee, other plants in vital areas of Central Germany, code named M-Werke, were to produce powerful missiles such as the giant A.9/A.10 destined to destroy New York and Washington. But most important was the Alpine area, for it was from there that the supreme weapons were to come.   This report, never released by the Allies, was made by a French diplomat. It was forwarded to Free French Intelligence Headquarters at Algiers. The top secret report referred to the blue clouds as something approaching anti-aircraft projectiles based on the grisou (fire damp) gas found in mines, and which had been successfully tried against other bombers over Lake Garda.   The French report was intercepted by Italian agents and deciphered at SID (Italian Counter-Intelligence) Headquarters at Castiglione della Stiviere. The message was later captured by a military intelligence team operating for the eighth Army in Italy.   The contents of the message was no novelty to the Allies. Already, some time ago, shortly after the bombing of Dresden, British and American intelligence had obtained a brief account concerning the use of some such weapon used against a group of twelve American bombers.   That message, which came from an agent in Switzerland attached to Allen Dulles' team, also stated the attacker had been   "a strange hemispherical object which flew at fantastic speeds and destroyed the bombers without using firearms."   Then, after the German surrender in May, 1945, a team of British agents, investigating the files of some of the underground factories in the Black Forest, discovered that a large number of documents concerned 'important experiments made with LIQUID OXYGEN for new turbine engines capable of developing extraordinary power.'   Other documents described the use of 'gaseous explosives' which had been originally tested in Austria in 1936. Their existence was later confirmed by the ALSOS Mission and by Dr. Hans Friedrich Gold, of the Laboratory for Aeronautical Research at Volkenrode. The ejection of gas explosives had been part of the program tackled by researchers on Lake Garda and later tested with success by the circular flying object against Allied bombers. This object, in German military files, already had an operational name: 'Round Lightning' (Kugelblitz). This article, which appeared in Argosy Magazine in August, 1969, is reprinted in its entirety. It is important because it is one of the few reports that goes into detail about the revolutionary technical advancements made by the Nazi's in the field of aeronautical research.   Long and close observation between the special Air Research Corps of the SS, Austrian research centers in Vienna, the Hermann Göring Works and the vast complex of underground G-Works had previously produced amazing improvement on the fireball or foo-fighter which, despite it's anti-radar effectiveness, remained comparatively harmless. But by combining the principle of the aircraft with a round, symmetrical plane with direct gyroscopic stabilization, employing an ejector-gun using grisou and a gelatinous organic/metalic fuel for a total reaction turbine, adding remote control, vehicle take off, infrared seeking equipment and electrostatic firing systems, the harmless fireball became the lethal Kugelblitz!   Believe me, I can prove what I say (Renato Vesco). The Kugelblitz, to be on the safe side, employed, in addition to it's electrostatic firing system, a similar system based on short waves and built by the Patent Verwertungs Gesellschaft of Salzburg, Austria. The whole thing formed one compact, round mass which had absolutely nothing in common with any flying object ever produced before.   In documents found by British Intelligence teams and submitted to the British Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee - documents which I have been able to study - these and many other details are known. They can be found in the Sub-Committee's Final Report Number 61 on the 'Weapons Section of the L.F.A., Volkenrode.'   Kugelblitz, together with its "younger brothers of the fireball, lens-shaped bomb and other weapons, began the real history of the UFO's. In itself, it was a second generation fireball.   The 'round lightning' weapon, the incredibly fast and mysterious disk-shaped craft that had been rumored and sighted in action, was used only once. As the Allied forces crossed the Rhine, the only craft of it's type was destroyed by the SS on instructions from Berlin, to prevent it's capture. But ever since, due to the severe censorship imposed by 'T' force of the British Army in Germany, and later, thanks to the complete blackout imposed by London, nothing more was heard of "Round Lightning."   I know that agents of the 'T' force camp at Bad Gandersheim closely examined the documents found in the G-Works, documents which had been elaborated by the technical general staff of the SS and by technical control of the Henshel and Zeppelin works. These documents concern the propulsion unit of the Kugelblitz prototype built by the Kreislaufbetrieb Motor D.W. in 1943 for the F.F.K.F. (Forschungsinstitut for Kraftfhart and Fahrzeugmotoren) at Stuttgart-Untertürkheim and perfected by Professors Kamm and Ernst.   The British called this motor an 'oxygen recycle system.' It was later abandoned in favor of the Walter turbine, powered by hydrogen peroxide. The documents found discussed the possibility of using both systems in a compound-type propulsion unit.   To these basic facts, I must add: A mass of documents and equipment were taken by British 'T' teams to Bedford and then to Canada and Australia. In a certain sense, the British were more intelligent than the Americans, for they permitted German scientists to complete their work in Germany on the sight where they had worked all through the war - only, of course, under close supervision. This happened at Darmstadt and Goettingen.   Later on, these installations were dismantled and shipped to Britain. The Transport Service of the British Ministry of Aviation discreetly shipped the scientists and documents to Britain, Canada and Australia, in successive phases. Lists of the scientists to be sent overseas had been compiled in the spring of 1944 by the B.I.O.S. and formed separate and specialized teams.   One such team, composed of Professor Ben Lockspeiser and W.J. Richards, Dr. S.H . Hollingdale and Captain A.D. Green, handled 'advanced projects, missles, jet and turbine craft.' Another, including T.A. Taylor and M.A. Wheeler, investigated German advances in the field of Thermo-refraction. Another team, which obtained the services of Dr. Ernst Westermann, former director of the F.D.R.P. Institutes of Speyer and Saarbr üucken, concentrated on the fireball projects.   The then Ministry of Aircraft Production, similar to the German wartime Jägerstab, ceased to exist officially on March 31, 1946, and became part of the Ministry of Supply.   In the years that followed, these teams, and especially the experts headed by Professor Lockspeiser, worked on a multitude of German projects, adapting these to their own experiments in the field of 'suction' wings and on the work of two German scientists during the war, Professors Prandtl and Busemann, to develop a high speed fighter in which the air intake along the wings was discharged through a half-moon-shaped crescent along the fuselage in order to both drive and support the vehicle at high speeds.   This research comes to mind when one remembers the incident of January 3, 1956. A Cessna, employed on a job of aerial photography near Pasadena, encountered three circular flying objects which circled it at a speed of 1600 mph and at a distance of two miles. One of these objects, in suddenly breaking away from the formation, gave off a long, vaporous trail as it sped through a cumulous cloud, cutting the cloud in two. 'Exactly as if it had sucked up the cloud., ' the Cessna pilot exclaimed later.   Back in 1946, the British Broadcasting Corporation announced that Britain 'would soon have aircraft capable of speeds well over 1000 mph, that, according to some experts, such craft had already been built and that, in the near future, they could circumnavigate the globe several times because they needed only fuel for take off and landing..' Other British sources mentioned aircraft capable of speeds of several thousand miles an hour.   More than twenty years have passed since the otherwise so- eminently-careful BBC boasted of 'Britain's planes of the future,' and officially these aircraft still remain little more than a dream. And yet, did not Ben Lockspeiser, the man who was in charge of the most responsible 'T' teams, declare that 'such craft would need no fuel?' Did he not imply that such craft would gain their own propellant from the atmosphere by suction and expulsion?   On June 26, 1953, an intensely luminous flying object majestically crossed the night sky of Albacete, Spain, at an altitude of 60 miles. In Britain, scientific papers produced by members of the 'T' teams showed suggestive titles such as 'Boundary Layer Flow Over a Permeable Surface Through Which Suction is Applied' (J.H. Preston), 'The Aerodynamics of Porous Sheets' by G.J. Taylor, and Pankhurst's 'Aerofoil Catalogue'.   In 1959, aeronautical engineer N.S. Currey wrote: 'Canada today must be counted among the most advanced aeronautical powers in the world', and added cautiously, 'This refers above all to the field of jet propulsion.'   The Canadian Department of Mines and the Technical Surveys Mapping Branch reserved a vast area - 125,000 square miles - for production of experimental aircraft. This was one of the decisions reached by the committees of the Commonwealth Conference on Aeronautical Research. This desolate, heavily wooded and mountainous region between British Columbia and Alberta, with the Peace River district as it's Northern frontier and Washington State to the South, was an ideal location - few and easily controlled roads, few settlements, few railroads, but good communications in the north and the south via the trunk line from Prince George to Edmonton and that from Vancouver to the United States border, and only one major highway, to Alaska.   Britain already had considerable wartime experience in this sort of enterprise. In 1942, at the height of the German raids, the RAF had set up five secret airports in the very heart of the New Forest, in Hampshire.   The big thing about these installations was the fact that they included complete industrial plants, decentralizing major groups essential for war production. They were called 'shade workshops.' The Germans, too, had much experience in this field. One of their major plants at Volkenrode resisted all attempts at aerial identification throughout the war.   Neither the British nor the Americans, on an official level, saw eye to eye in scientific matters at the close of the war against Germany and afterward.   The United States' refusal to share atomic secrets with Britain was never quite forgotten in Whitehall, and Britain set out to prove, with Canada, that she was well able to produce her own fission bomb. If Congress steadfastly accused the British of giving little or nothing in return for information, the British felt they had been mistrusted and severely neglected. They preferred to go ahead with their plans in Canada.   The fact that the area has been photographed again and again by high altitude reconnaissance planes, both U.S. and Russian, does not perturb the Canadian or British authorities. The plants and saucer ports are underground, hidden in primeval forests of Columbia.   The question immediately arises: Why have not Britain and Canada made such craft available to their other partners in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization?   I (Vesco) believe there may be many answers to such a question, but one of the main points is this: Lack of confidence and fear of being exploited remain rife among the nations, as they are among people. And why should not Britain and her Commonwealth partner retain one major trump card which, one day, may become invaluable? The pooling of scientific secrets is rarely entirely sincere.   All the evidence, all the know how of British scientists before and during the last war, combined with the astounding progress in propulsion and the discoveries in suction aircraft of the Germans, based on 18 years of research into the most secret documents of the past war, have convinced me of one thing :   The flying saucers do not come from space. They come from a few hundred miles outside the United States. They mean no harm, and Washington knows this. Hence the long standing order to all U.S. Air Force pilots: Intercept--but do not fire upon.   Unfortunately, Vesco doesn't offer any real substantiation for the existence of the Kugelblitz, which is the crux of his subject. However, in his book "Intercept, UFO," he tells us that the Kugelblitz was indeed tested some time in February, 1945 over the great underground complex at Kahla, in Thuringia. Both the Kugelblitz and the Feuerball were then destroyed by the retreating S.S.