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Captain Ruppelt, Chief of the US Air Force Project Bluebook added in 1956,
When WWII ended, the Germans had several radical types of aircraft and guided missiles under development. The majority were in the most preliminary stages, but they were the only known craft that could even approach the performance of objects reported to UFO observers…
Some of these German war-time technical advances were well known. The first military jet was the German Heinkel 178 that flew in 1939. In 1943 the Germans also deployed the only jet fighter to go into regular service during the war, the Messerschmitt 262. This jet could easily overtake the fastest Allied aircraft, yet fortunately Hitler ordered that these planes should be fitted as bombers rather than defensive fighters which saved Allied aircraft from devastating casualties.
Then Heinrich Focke was involved in the design of and production of the FW6, Fa223, Fa226, Fa283 and 284 models during the war. He designed a propulsion system known as the ‘turbo-shaft’, which is still used in most helicopters today. Using this technology, Focke designed this upright, vertical take-off aircraft, which was just coming off the drawing board as the war ended. At the end of each of the three long arms of this technologically advanced craft was a small jet propulsion unit. The rotating arms were used to lift the body from the ground like the blades of a helicopter.
In 1939 Focke patented a saucer-shaped craft with enclosed twin rotors described as follows: "The exhaust nozzle forked in two at the end of the engine and ended in two auxiliary combustion chambers located on the trailing edge of the wing. When fuel was added these combustion chambers would act as afterburners to provide horizontal propulsion to Focke’s design. The control at low speed was achieved by alternatively varying the power from each auxiliary combustion chamber."
Cruise missiles were also first used by the Third Reich and V-1 bombs were launched from German occupied territories across the channel into
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History of German Rocketry in |
The next German rocket, the V-2 proved to be the predecessor of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles that filled the arsenals of the former
These then, were some of the known German advances. However there were also hints of darker technologies not fully understood. It was in 1944 that knowledge of these became public for the first time when the New York Times of 14th December reported "Floating Mystery ball is New German Weapon.
Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force, Dec 13 - A new German weapon has made its appearance on the western air front, it was disclosed today. Airmen of the American Air Force report that they are encountering silver coloured spheres in the air over German territory. The spheres are encountered either singly or in clusters. Sometimes they are semi-translucent. (1)
A typical incident was reported by a veteran pilot of the 415th Night Fighter Squadron. He was flying a mission over
The purpose of these strange objects was a mystery, for they merely followed warplanes, but apparently never opened fire or otherwise attacked them. These objects were named ‘Foo Fighters’, a term which came from a headline ‘Where There’s Feu, There’s Fire.’ Each side in the war seemed to believe that the Foo Fighters were the inventions of their enemy and several reconnaissance missions were launched to gain further information. To date, it has never been clearly established where the technology came from, and the origins of the foo-fighters remain an historical puzzle alongside the Scandinavian ghost rockets. What was clear, however, was that it wasn’t Allied technology, and that was a serious cause of concern.
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Establishing fact from fiction from over fifty years ago is no easy matter, and we are forced to consider information that is largely unverifiable. Yet when pieced together a plausible story of Nazi flying disk technology does begin to emerge.
One person who made claims regarding the development of ‘flying saucers’ in Nazi Germany is former Luftwaffe Flight Captain and aircraft designer Rudolf Schriever.
This story first appeared in ‘Der Spiegel’ magazine on 30th March 1950 in an article entitled ‘Untertassen-Flieger Kombination’ which stated
Rudolf Schriever, who says engineers throughout the world experimented in the early 1940s with flying saucers, is willing to build one for the United States in six to nine months. The 40-year-old Prague University graduate said he made blueprints for such a machine, which he calls a flying top, before Germany’s collapse and that the blueprints were stolen from his laboratory. He says the machine would be capable of 2,600mph with a radius of 4,000 miles, Schriever is a US Army driver at Bremerhaven. (3)
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· Thule H-Gerät Hauneburg Device, Haunebu I disc aircraft, 1939, 2 produced · Thule Haunebu II disc aircraft 1942, 5 produced · Thule Haunebu II Do-Stra disc aircraft co-produced by Dornier. Do-Stra = DOrnier STRatosphären Flugzeug, 1944, 2 produced · Thule Haunebu III disc aircraft, 1945, 1 produced · Thule Haunebu IV disc aircraft project Vril, SS Military Technical Branch E-IV/E-V |
His claims are backed up by a 1975 Luftfahrt International Report that noted that after Shriever’s death in the late 1950s, papers found amongst his belongings revealed incomplete notes for a large flying saucer, a series of sketches of the machine and several newspaper clippings of himself and his alleged flying saucer. Up to his death, Schriever had repeatedly claimed that the UFO sightings since the end of the war were proof that his original ideas had been taken further with successful results.
Researcher Bill Rose was able to discover that Schriever was involved with other scientists Klaus Habermohl and Giuseppe Belluzzo (an Italian engineer) as well as one Dr. Walter Miethe. Rose’s research established that Miethe had been the Director of the saucer programme at two facilities located outside
We certainly do know that one scientist, Viktor Schauberger, was involved in the production of flying disks, and that he flew one in 1945 near Prague, just as Schriever had claimed.
His experimental prototypes were based on levitation. Born in 1885, Schauberger considered the natural world his greatest teacher although many in the world considered Schauberger to be somewhat deranged. In forests, alongside rivers, he studied what he considered life-enhancing energy, water and air vortices.
He argued that "Prevailing technology uses the wrong forms of motion. It is based on entropy – on motions which nature uses to break down and scatter materials. However, nature uses a different type of motion for creating order and new growth. The prevailing explosion-based technology – fuel burning and atom splitting – fills the world with expanding, heat-generating centrifugal motion." Schauberger believed that energy production could instead use inward-moving cold-generating centripetal motion, the same as nature employs to build and enliven substances. Even hydroelectric power plants, Schauberger said, use a destructive motion – they pressure water and chop it through turbines. The result is ‘dead water’. He built suction turbines that he considered enlivened and invigorated, resulting in clean, life-giving water downstream.
Schauberger also produced electrical power from a unique suction turbine using implosion principles and was later pressured into developing a propulsion system using the same principles applied to air.
His work came to Hitler’s attention and his son recounts the meeting between his father and Hitler: "In June of 1934 my father was invited by the Reich’s Chancellor Adolf Hitler to discuss his work. Hitler wanted to know about his discoveries and talk about the various possibilities and what his great plan was. And he said ‘yes, I’m looking for a new technology that must once again harmonise with the natural order of things and that is my real programme.’
"Shortly before the meeting, Hitler as Reich Chancellor gave the two deputies his orders. The two had come to discuss Herman Göring’s plan. And he said ‘Viktor Schauberger, you will speak with the two Reichs deputies and tomorrow or by the latest the day after tomorrow a second meeting will take place. And he said to the two deputies ‘I find the plan fascinating. Yes, we Germans will bring about a whole new science.’" (4)
Hitler wanted Schauberger to supervise the building of a new flying craft that could levitate without burning any fuel. This idea for this new craft was based upon a discovery made by Schauberger a few years before of how to develop a low-pressure zone at the atomic level. The scientist claimed to have achieved this in a laboratory setting when his prototype whirled air or water ‘radically and axially’ at a falling temperature. Schauberger named this resulting force as ‘diamagnetic levitation power’ and noted that nature already used this direct or ‘reactionary’ suction force in weather generation, solar fusion stability etc.
Schauberger was given a team of scientists to help him with his work, and he insisted that these be treated as free men rather than prisoners of the Nazis. During their work, however, their research headquarters was bombed and they were all transferred to Leonstein. There they perfected the ‘flying disc’ powered by Schauberger’s turbine which rotated air into a twisting type of oscillation resulting in the build-up of immense power causing levitation. Schauberger’s prototype was then developed into a vehicle known as the Belluzzo-Schriever-Miethe Diskus, a machine built up to 22ft in diameter. These craft travelled at over 2000 km/hr and were planned to go over 4,000 km/hr. By 1945 they could reach 1300 mph and gain an altitude of 40,000 feet in less than three minutes. The craft was also noted to glow blue-green as it rose and left a silvery glow.
The Munich publication, ‘Das Neue Zeitalter’ wrote in 1956 "Viktor Schauberger was the inventor and discoverer of the new motive power, implosion, which, with the use of only air and water, generated light, heat and motion."
The publication reported that the first unmanned flying disc was tested in 1945 near Prague, that it could hover motionless in the air and could fly as fast backwards as forwards. It was also reported to have a diameter of 50 meters.
Other evidence in support of this event had appeared earlier in an interview given on 18th November 1954 to the Zürich-based ‘Tages Anzeiger’. One Georg Klein stated that he had witnessed a flying saucer test on 14th February 1945 and that the craft had reached a height of 30,000 foot in three minutes and could travel at hundreds of miles an hour.
In this interview, Klein gave further information regarding developments behind the disks, claiming that some of the work had taken place at Peenemünde, where the V-2 rocket was being developed and where Wernher von Braun was director. Klein also stated that the stability of the craft had been achieved by using a gyroscope; the same method used by the Von Braun-Dornberger team. The research then moved to the Mittlewerke underground facilities near Nordhausen in the Harz Mountains.
The ‘Bible’ of the story of the development of the Atomic bomb, ‘Brighter than a Thousand Suns’, also confirms these events: "The first of these flying saucers, as they were later called – circular in shape, with a diameter of some 45 yards – were built by the specialists Schriever, Habermohl and Miethe. They were first airborne on February 14th 1945, over Prague and reached in three minutes a height of nearly eight miles. They had a speed of 1250 mph which was doubled in subsequent tests." (5)
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That these events occurred is also supported by former CIA agent Virgil Armstrong who commented "We know that in the early parts of the war there were certain factions of the Allied forces that did not believe he had a secret weapon and it wasn’t until the Americans made much emphasis of this that they began to look at it seriously and indeed did discover that Hitler not only had a secret weapon, he had what we would call today a UFO or spacecraft.
"He had one already off of the drawing board and flying and it was capable of 1200 miles an hour. Vertical take-off, 90° changes, much like a helicopter, and of course was far superior to anything the Allies powers had at that time. Secondly they knew he had another craft about to be up and going it was capable of doing 2500 miles per hours, which was double the original. Not only did it have the characteristics of the original craft, but it also had a laser weapon aboard it which capable of penetrating four inches of armour. Needless to say that really spooked the allied forces into making a redemptive attempt against him and bringing him … into a state of capitulation." (6)
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Bulgarian Physicist Vladimir Terziski also wrote the following about these mystery craft. "According to Renato Vesco …
This appears to be the extent of information that can be verified to a degree. However there is much more that ‘fits’ within the known facts, but cannot be verified independently and therefore may well be fiction portrayed as fact.
Claims have also been made that Nazi Occult societies were involved in the development of such unconventional saucer craft. One such, the ‘Vril Society’ was allegedly ‘channelling’ messages from an alien civilisation in the Aldebaran solar system and planned to develop a craft that could make physical contact with the civilisation there. This may or may not be true; but there was certainly a high level of occult activity in mid-Europe at that time, and no doubt organisations did exist then with unconventional beliefs just as they do today.
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Whatever the truth of this, by 1934 the Vril Society had apparently developed its first UFO shaped aircraft, known as the Vril 1, which was propelled by an anti-gravity effect. This was the same year Viktor Schauberger had his meeting with Adolf Hitler.
The society then allegedly went on to develop this craft, and later - and again allegedly - produced the RFZ-2. This craft was apparently 16 feet long and fitted with an improved propulsion system and for the first time, magnetic impulse steering. Interestingly, when in flight, it reportedly produced colour effects normally associated with UFOs.
By the end of 1940 the RFZ-2 had entered service as a reconnaissance aircraft and there is certainly photographic evidence to support this, for example an RFZ-2 was photographed near
Yet the RFZ-2 was largely ignored with only the SS showing an interest in the Vril Society’s work. An inner organisation of the SS then set up its own SSE-4 department to develop new alternative technologies to ensure
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By 1939 the SS had produced the RFZ-5, which it called the Haunebu 1. In August 1939 the machine made its maiden flight and proved its viability, being more than 65 foot in diameter and offering considerable storage space. It should be noted that there is scant corroborative and historically verifiable information to support these claims, however the design of the Haunebu II should be noted for future reference.
Whatever their exact nature, it appears confirmed that a range of alternative design aircraft were by now either on the drawing board, hovering above the ground, or crashing into it. Some of these designs proved viable and successes were being reported. On 17th April, 1945 Miethe was able to advise Hitler that the V-7 had been tested in the skies above the Baltic. This particular craft was a supersonic helicopter fitted with 12 BMW Turbo aggregate engines. During its first test it reached an altitude of 78000 feet and then 80000 feet on its second test. Miethe reported that the new craft could be powered by unconventional energy sources in principle. However these new technologies were coming on-line too late, for the war was already being lost and won.
Within months the Allies and Russians had poured into central Europe, Hitler was dead and the war apparently over.
And as soon as the war was over, ghost rockets started appearing over Scandinavia and within two years ‘flying saucers’ were being reported wholesale over mainland United States.
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It was no co-incidence.
After the end of the war in 1945, Russian and American intelligence teams began a hunt to track down this perceived military and scientific booty of the advanced German technology. Following the discovery of particle/laser beam weaponry in German military bases, the US War Department decided that the US must not only control this technology, but also the scientists who had helped develop it "to ensure that [America] takes full advantage of those significant developments which are deemed vital to our national security." It therefore launched a project to bring these personnel to the
The thinking behind Paperclip was exemplified in a letter Major General Hugh Knerr, Deputy Commanding General for Administration of US Strategic Forces in Europe, wrote to Lieutenant General Carl Spaatz in March 1945: "Occupation of German scientific and industrial establishments has revealed the fact that we have been alarmingly backward in many fields of research, if we do not take this opportunity to seize apparatus and the brains that developed it and put this combination back to work promptly, we will remain several years behind while we attempt to cover a field already exploited."
There was however, one slight problem: It was illegal, for US law explicitly prohibited Nazi officials from immigrating to America, and as many as three-quarters of the scientists in question were allegedly committed Nazis. (Indeed as at least 1600 scientists and their dependants were taken to America under Operation Paperclip and its successor projects, it could hardly avoid including Nazis.)
However President Truman decided that the national interest was paramount and that America needed the German scientists to work on America’s behalf. In fairness to Truman, he expressly ordered that anyone found to "have been a member of the Nazi party and more than a nominal participant in its activities, or an active supporter of Nazism or militarism" must be excluded from the operation.
Operation Paperclip was carried out by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) and had two aims: Firstly, to exploit German Scientists for American research by rounding up Nazi scientists and taking them to America. and, secondly, to deny these intellectual resources to the Soviet Union (7). (The name ‘Operation Paperclip’ derived from the fact that those individuals selected to go to the United States were distinguished by paperclips on their files joining their scientific papers with regular immigration forms.(8)
The Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) then conducted background investigations on the identified scientists, and in February 1947 the Director of the JIOA, Navy Captain Bosquet Wev, submitted the first set of dossiers to the State and Justice Departments for review.
These dossiers, though, proved to be damning, with Samuel Klaus, the State Department’s representative on the JOIA Board claiming that all the scientists in the first batch were ‘ardent Nazis’. The visa requests were consequently denied. (Wev already knew those proposed had Nazi backgrounds this for in a memo dated 27th April 1948 to the Pentagon’s Director of Intelligence, he wrote "Security investigations conducted by the military have disclosed the fact that the majority of German scientists were members of either the Nazi Party or one or more of its affiliates." (9)
Wev was furious and he fired off a memo to the State Department in March 1948 warning that "the best interests of the United States have been subjugated to the efforts expended in ‘beating a dead Nazi horse’" (10).
The following month, 27th April 1948, Wev again wrote to his superiors concerned about the delays in approving the German scientists. He stated "In light of the situation existing in Europe today, it is conceivable that continued delay and opposition to the immigration of these scientists could result in their eventually falling into then hands of the Russians who would then gain the valuable information and ability possessed by these men. Such an eventuality could have a most serious and adverse effect on the national Security of the United States." (11)
By this time the Nazi Intelligence leader, Reinhard Gehlen had met with the future CIA Director (26th February 1953 – 29th November 1961), Allen Dulles, and they had hit it off. Gehlen was a master spy for the Nazis and had infiltrated Russia with his vast intelligence network. (In 1942 the future CIA Director Dulles had moved to Bern, Switzerland, as Head of Office of Strategic Services to negotiate with some Nazi leaders who were already convinced they were going to lose WWII and wanted a deal with the US about a possible future war with the USSR.) Dulles was not above pursuing his own agenda with the Nazis, for he had worked with many of them before the war; as a prominent New York lawyer (1926-1942 and again from 1946 to 1950)
When Gehlen surrendered to the US, he was taken to Fort Hunt, Virginia, where he and the US Army reached an agreement: his intelligence unit would work for and be funded by the US until a new German Government came into power. In the meantime, should he find a conflict between the interests of Germany and the US, he could consider German interests first (12). For almost ten years the ‘Gehlen Org’ as it became to be known, operated safely within the CIA and was virtually the CIA’s only source of intelligence on Eastern Europe. Then in 1955 it evolved into the BND (the German equivalent of the CIA) and continued to co-operate with its US counterparts.
The scientists immigration problem was then side-stepped with the dossiers being ‘cleansed’ of incriminating evidence and, as promised, Allen Dulles delivered Gehlen Org, the Nazi Intelligence Unit, to the CIA, which later opened many umbrella projects based on earlier Nazi research.
Operation Paperclip also had a part to play in events at Maury Island. Washington State, itself, was the location of several aerospace defence contractors, which were benefiting from the then secret Paperclip Operation. It was also the location of sightings in 1947 of a number of aircraft that looked suspiciously like some that had been seen on Nazi drawing boards and in the skies above Europe towards the end of the war.
The officers who attended the Maury Island incident, Davidson and Brown belonged to G-2: It was G-2’s responsibility to ensure Operation Paperclip was kept as a covert activity and provide the necessary security to achieve this. Another function of G-2 was the surveillance of anyone whose activities put Paperclip security at risk. That they were on their way to Wright-Patterson AFB with the objects Crisman had given them, was entirely logical – Wright Patterson (then Wright-Field) was the major research and development centre where many of the Nazi scientists had been taken to continue their work.
One of the most prominent of the Paperclip physicians was Hubertus Strughold, later known as the ‘father of space medicine’ and after whom the Aeromedical Library at the USAF School of Aerospace medicine was named in 1977. His April 1947 intelligence report stated "[H]is successful career under Hitler would seem to indicate that he must be in full accord with Hitler." However he was admitted under Operation Paperclip on the grounds that he was "not an ardent Nazi." (13)
Other Nazis included Klaus Barbie, the so-called ‘Butcher of Lyon’, Otto von Bolschwing, infamous for his holocaust activities and the SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny (14). However the cleansing of the files did not always stand up to the scrutiny of time. In 1984, Arthur Rudolph, who, in 1969 had been awarded NASA’s Distinguished Service Award, left the country rather than face charges as a Nazi war criminal.
Another former alleged Nazi was Wernher Von Braun. Born on 23rd March 1912, von Braun became one of the world’s first and foremost rocket engineers and a leading authority on space travel. Born the son of Prussian aristocrats Baron Magnus and Baroness Emmy von Braun, the young Wernher read Hermann Oberth’s ‘By Rocket into Planetary Space’ (Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen), and his new interest led him to later enrol at the Berlin Institute of Technology in 1930. In 1932 he received his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and he was then offered a grant to conduct and develop scientific investigations on liquid-fuelled rocket engines (15). Von Braun’s rocket experiments were tested at the Kummersdorf Proving Grounds, sixty miles south of Berlin, between 1932 and 1937.
Kummersdorf was the launch site of two German V-2 rockets in 1934 (16). After their launch, Braun started work on a jet-assisted take off vehicle for heavy bombers and all-rocket fighters (17) however Kummersdorf was too small for this task, and so von Braun relocated to Peenem
Over a course of twenty years, von Braun received approximately 25 honorary degrees and he accepted many other awards and medals, presented to him from small cities, to NASA and even the President.
His dossier was apparently rewritten so he didn’t appear an enthusiastic (alleged) Nazi and he attempted to play down his real Nazi involvement by claiming "In 1939 [sic] I was officially demanded to join the National Socialist Party. At this time I was already Technical Director at Peenemünde … The technical work had … attracted attention at higher and higher levels. Thus, my refusal to join the party would have meant that I would have to abandon the work of my life. My membership in the party did not include any political activity (23)."
However, von Braun’s claim was simply untrue, for other scientists successfully used an old rule of the Weimar Republic that was still in use, forcing anyone in the military to abstain from political affiliation.
Wernher von Braun’s mentor, Hermann Oberth also entered the US after the war under Operation Paperclip. Born 25th June 1894 in the Transylvanian town of Hermannstadt, Oberth is widely recognised as the founding father of modern rocketry, having published the paper in 1923 that was to so inspire von Braun, ‘Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen’ (By Rocket into Planetary Space.) This was followed by a longer version (429 pages) in 1929 that was internationally regarded as a work of tremendous scientific importance.
When in his thirties, Oberth took Wernher von Braun (who affectionately referred to Oberth as his ‘teacher’) on as an assistant, and they worked together at Peenemünde developing the V2 rocket. After entering the US at the end of the war along with the remaining 100 V2 rockets and components, Oberth again worked with Von Braun as the entire Peenemünde team was re-assembled at the White Sands Proving Grounds. Oberth and Von Braun continued their work and it was a later development of the same V2 rocket which had inflicted so much damage on Northern Europe that was eventually to propel the first American into space in the Saturn V rocket. Oberth retired three years after entering the US and returned to Germany where he headed us the Oberth Commission for the German Government into the UFO phenomenon.
Another scientist who brought new knowledge to America was Viktor Schauberger. Although there is no evidence that Schauberger had Nazi sympathies, he was viewed by the Americans as a collaborator and put ‘into protective custody’ for six months at the end of the war.
Dr Walter Miethe, and Rudolf Schriever also entered America under Operation Paperclip, however it is believed that their colleague Habermohl fell into Russian hands.
Whilst in the US, Miethe continued his ‘flying disk’ work working primarily for the US Air Force, however he was sub-contracted to A. V. Roe and Company.
In 1959 Jack Judges, a freelance cameraman was flying over this company’s plant in Canada when he saw and photographed a picture of a disk shaped craft sitting on the ground.
After the photograph was published in the papers, speculation grew that the disk was a secret weapon, and one that may have accounted for many of the UFO sightings during previous years.
In response to the speculation, the US Air Force released an official photograph of the craft. It was called the ‘Avro’ and had first been launched in 1955.
A CIA memo of that year confirmed that the craft was based work undertaken by German scientists, notably Miethe, during WWII. The design was later abandoned in the late 1960s with the Air Force maintaining it was still at an experimental stage when abandoned. The 1990s were to reveal the craft was part of the secret ‘Project Silver Bug’, a project to develop a craft that had VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) capabilities that would dispense with the need for runways – and reduce the risks of such runways been targets of attack thus immobilising any aircraft that may rely on it.
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Other German scientists similarly brought their expertise – and designs – into the US after the war. ‘America’s Aircraft Year Book’ notes how many of them worked at Ft. Bliss (von Braun et al above) and Wright Field:- the first and second homes of the Roswell wreckage. Among those in the German group at Wright Field were Rudolf Hermann, Alexander Lippisch, Heinz Schmitt, Helmut Heinrich, Fritz Doblhoff and Ernst Zündel.
Hermann was attached to the Peenemünde Research Station for Aerodynamics where Germany’s V-2 rockets were hatched and launched against England. A specialist in supersonics, he was in charge of the supersonic wind tunnel at Kochel in the Bavarian Alps. He was also a member of the group entrusted with Hitler’s futuristic plans to establish a space-station rocket-refuelling bases revolving as a satellite about the Earth at a distance of 4,000 miles – a scheme which he and certain high ranking AAF officers in 1947 still believed possible."
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One of these scientists Dr. Alexander Lippisch had designed another German craft that could be mistaken at the time for a flying disc, certainly at least when viewed from the side.
Lippisch had developed a number of projects leading up to the war, having been inspired by witnessing a flight by Orville Wright in September 1909 when a boy of 14. By November 1944, Lippisch, along with his students, had constructed the DM-1a delta with 60° swept leading edges. This craft was later to be flown at a speed of 497mph under the power of a rocket motor, and was shipped back to the US at the end of the war along with its creator. The DM-1 was to inspire the design of many US delta-wing aircraft such as the F-102 and F-104.
Lippisch joined Collins Radio Company as an expert on special aeronautical problems and in 1966 founded the ‘Lippisch Corporation’. He went on to develop the X-113A Aerofoil Boat before dying in 1976 at the age of 81.
Another craft that looked suspiciously like a ‘flying disk’ was the AS-6. This craft was built by Arthur Sack following encouragement from Ernst Udet, Germany’s Air Minister in 1939.
Constructed at the Mitteldeutsche Motorwerke Company, and completed at the Flugplatz-Werkstatt at the Brandis Air Base in early 1944, the plane was not a success, and not further developed.
A similar craft to the AS-6, the V-173, was built by ‘Chance-Vought’, and known as the ‘flying pancake’. The V-173 has the honour of being the one occasion that the US authorities actually ‘admitted’ that technologies developed in Germany during the war years could account for the wave of UFOs seen over America in the 1940s.
The Navy released a picture of a V-173 in 1947 during the wave of UFO excitement generated by Kenneth Arnold’s sighting and the headline of the saucer crash at Roswell.
The Navy stated that the V-173 was the only craft in operation at that time that could in any way come close to the flying disks being sighted everywhere.
Certainly the V-173, or another development at Chance-Vought was mistaken for a UFO by a local resident Thomas C. Smith whilst working for the company a year before the famous Roswell incident.
In 1997 Smith disclosed his story which appeared in the Lancaster New Era newspaper in Lancaster, Pennsylvania on 12th July 1997. In the article Smith stated he had seen a flying saucer, but not a visitor from another planet but one that "was a human-engineered, experimental aircraft nestled in a Connecticut hangar.
"‘My God, what is that?’ the 20-year-old Smith wondered. ‘It was standing there on these stilts.’ It reminded Smith of something out of Orson Welles' 1938 radio broadcast ‘The War of the Worlds,’ about a Martian invasion of Earth. Armed with U.S. government security clearance, Smith watched, he says, as the 40-foot-wide elliptical craft hovered 10 feet off the ground and flew away, driven by twin propellers. A pilot lying in a cramped cockpit guided the craft. Smith, now a retired 72-year-old executive, recalled the experience during the UFO frenzy created by the 50th anniversary of the Roswell episode this month. Does he have proof that a craft like the one he saw crashed in Roswell during a test flight? No, but he says he believes that theory is more probable than visitors from outer space.
At the time, Smith was a mechanical-engineering graduate just out of Penn State University. He was working for Chance-Vought Aircraft in Stratford, Conn., which was building planes for the U.S. Navy. Smith was testing the high-altitude bonding of a composite material: wood sandwiched between two layers of metal.
He says he was curious about what would be built with the material, and since he had security clearance, a supervisor led him into a guarded hangar. He was shown a new jet the company was developing, but his attention was attracted to the other craft in the hangar, a flying saucer made of the material he had been testing.
‘It was very streamlined,’ Smith recalls. The khaki-coloured saucer was a few inches thick at the edges to about two feet thick at the pilot's cockpit, which had a bubble window allowing the pilot to look forward and down at the ground. ‘I saw him get in, and he lay down flat,’ Smith says. The craft had two propellers and rudders in the back. Smith went back at night to watch test flights. The saucer, he says, would float straight up, then fly off.
‘They'd get it off the ground and it would disappear’ into the darkness, he says. He says there were reports in the area of unidentified flying objects. About the time he left Chance-Vought in 1947, it moved operations to Texas, where it would have better conditions for test flights, Smith says." (24) Thus, Chance-Vought moved to a state next to New Mexico the year of the Roswell crash.
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Other aircraft, at the time, seemed equally unconventional. In the 1930s and 1940s in Germany, the Horten brothers, Walter and Reimar, built a range of planes that they called the ‘Ho’ series. The first of this series, the Ho I, was a simple flying-wing sail plane.
By the end of that decade the brothers had developed the Ho III, a metal framed glider that was fitted with a folding blade propeller for flight. Then in 1944 they finished the prototype HO IX, their first combat intended design, powered by the Junkers Jumo 004B turbojets, the craft had a metal frame and plywood exterior . It made its maiden flight on 2nd February 1945 and satisfied with its performance, the Air Ministry ordered forty of the craft to be built by the Gotha Waggonfabrik under the designation Ho-229.
When the US Third US Army Corps reached the Gotha plant on 14th April 1945 they took over the factory, and shipped back to the US the near completed HO IX V3.
In fact, many of these German designs seemingly account for many of the reports of Unidentified Flying Objects seen over the US after the war.
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Kenneth Arnold himself described what he saw as a flying disc, yet when Arnold actually drew a picture of what he had seen, it looked little like the popularly conceived silver-round disc that readily springs to mind.
In fact, the diagram Kenneth Arnold actually drew of what he had seen that fateful day in 1947 looks remarkably like the German HO IX or other craft developed during the war.
George Adamski’s UFOs also have a similar Nazi connection. A light enhanced frame from a 8mm cine film taken by George Adamski in the presence of Madeleine Rodeffer and other witnesses at Silver Spring, Maryland in February 1965, looks remarkably like the drawings for the Nazi Haunebu II during the second world war.
Again, the object photographed in February 1954 by Stephen Darbishire and his cousin Adrian Myers in the Lake District of England looks suspiciously like the German craft.
Its contours and design are too much like the Haunebu craft to be a coincidence, and on the bottom left hand side can be seen one of the ‘bubbles’.
The idea of such flying disks should come as no surprise for after the war there were a number of such designs in existence.
A craft developed the Lockheed Skunk Works in Palmdale, California was an unmanned aerial reconnaissance vehicle, It had a saucer shaped body with long wings and could easily be mistaken for a flying disk when seen at certain angles.
The prototype of a giant ‘flying saucer’ designed to revolutionize air transport. Designed by British firm, Airship Industries, the Skyship was planned to cruise at about 100 miles an hour at an altitude of 5000 feet.
It seems likely, therefore, that many of the UFO sighting reports made after the war can be accounted for by misidentified or unrecognised German/US designs that were being developed in a secrecy necessitated by firstly the Cold War and secondly by the fact that most of the technologies were the result of works undertaken by former Nazi scientists secretly and often illegally brought into the US.
Yet this cannot account for all of the sightings, for it is inconceivable that the CIA, NSA, FBI etc. would have been in such a blind panic as described in previous chapters had the sightings simply been known terrestrial if unconventional aircraft. (Each agency may not always have been aware of all developments at all times, but the official investigation into the UFO phenomena in the US went on officially for over twenty years, it would not be unrealistic to have expected a terrestrial explanation to have been circulated within that time frame.)
So if unconventional but terrestrial craft cannot account for many of the sightings – and the official interest – then what can. There have certainly been rumours circulating for many years that the German designs were actually man-made attempts to reproduce crashed real ‘flying saucers’ - attempts that failed because the engineers and scientists involved were unable to recreate the steering and propulsion systems of the alleged crashed craft.
As bizarre as this sounds, this claim certainly better explains the number of sightings over hundreds if not thousands of years and the inability of the major governmental agencies to account for much of the activity in the skies after the war. And it is a claim that is backed by some major players on the world stage.
One of the most impressive of those backing this claim is Colonel Philip J. Corso (Ret.) .
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Corso published a book entitled ‘The Day After Roswell: A Former Official Reveals the US Government’s Shocking UFO Cover-up’ in which he makes a number of revelations.
Corso’s background itself is formidable. He was Chief of the US Army’s Foreign Technology Division, and was a member of President Eisenhower’s National Security Council. He later went on to work for Senator Strom Thurmond after retiring from the army in 1963. Corso was interviewed by Michael Lindemann of CNI News on 5th July 1997 and asked;
ML: There have been rumours and speculations that Roswell, and what came from Roswell – the way we exploited Roswell technology – might not have been the very first time such a thing happened. There have been indications or speculations that the Nazis had done such a thing, that some of their extraordinary technological developments may have come from a similar source. What do you think of that?
PC: Yes. True. I had German scientists on my team. I discussed this with them. I discussed this with Oberth, von Braun. I was part of ‘Project Paperclip’ with General Trudeau… There were crashes elsewhere, and they [the Germans] gathered material too. The Germans were working on it. They didn’t solve the propulsion system. They did a lot of experiments on flying saucers. They had one that went up to 12,000 feet. But where all, we and they, missed out was on the guidance system. In R&D we began to realise that this being [a captured alien] was part of the guidance system, part of the apparatus himself, or itself, as it had no sexual organs."
In his book Corso also describes the UFO that crashed at Roswell and noted General Twinning’s observations regarding the design; "The crescent-shaped craft looked so uncomfortably like the German Horten wings our flyers had seen at the end of the war that he had to suspect the Germans had bumped into something we didn’t know about. And his conversations with Wernher von Braun and Willy Ley at Alamogordo in the days after the crash confirmed this. They didn’t want to be thought of as verrückt but intimated that there was a deeper story about what the Germans had engineered." (25)
Certainly this ‘deeper story’ was confirmed by the father of the modern rocket, Hermann Oberth. He independently confirmed that during the war years there was a Nazi-Extra-terrestrial connection when he stated, "we cannot take credit for our record advancement in certain scientific fields alone. We have been helped." When asked by whom, he replied, "the peoples of other worlds." (26)
Wernher von Braun was equally frank about the issue and did not doubt that extraterrestrials were visiting the Earth nor that many of the advancements he was involved in were a result of back engineering alien technology. Indeed, he talked openly about the issue following an incident on 3rd of June 1959 when the ‘Discoverer III’ failed to achieve orbit, having been deflected whilst travelling. Von Braun commented, "We find ourselves faced by powers, which are far stronger than we had hitherto assumed, and whose base is at present unknown to us. More I cannot say at present. We are now engaged in entering into closer contact with those powers, and in six or nine months it may be possible to speak with some precision on the matter." (27)
If these reports from Oberth and Von Braun are to be believed, then clearly the Germans held a knowledge not previously available to the Western allies. And it appears that the scientists entering the US after the war under the auspices of Operation Paperclip shared this knowledge with the US military who within weeks set in place one of the fastest but little known invasions of the Twentieth Century.
Sources:
1) New York Times 14th December 1944..
(2) Lore, Gordon I. R. Jnr., and Deneault, Harold H., Jnr., ‘Mysteries of the Skies; UFOs in Perspective’ Prentice-Hall, New Jersey 1968.
(3) ‘Der Spiegel’ magazine 30th March 1950
(4) Third Reich Video
(5) Jungk, Robert, ‘Brighter Than a Thousand Suns’
(6) Ibid
(7) Memorandum to Members of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments 5th April 1995, from Advisory Committee Staff ‘Post World War II Recruitment of German Scientists – Operation Paperclip’
(8) Stuhlinger, Ernest and Ordway, Frederick III, ‘Wernher von Braun: Crusader for Space’ p. 67 Kreiger Publishing Company, Florida 1994.
(9) Memorandum to Members of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments 5th April 1995, from Advisory Committee Staff ‘Post World War II Recruitment of German Scientists – Operation Paperclip’
(10) Ibid.
(11) Ibid.
(12) Zapezauer, Mark ‘The CIA’s Greatest Hits’
(13) Memorandum to Members of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments 5th April 1995, from Advisory Committee Staff ‘Post World War II Recruitment of German Scientists – Operation Paperclip’
(14) Ibid.
(15) Buckbee, Edward O., ‘Biographical Data: Wernher von Braun’ Alabama Space and Rocket Centre, 1983.
(16) Stuhlinger, Ernest and Ordway, Frederick III, ‘Wernher von Braun: Crusader for Space’ p.15, Kreiger Publishing Company, Florida 1994.
Foundations for Globally Managing Extraterrestrial Affairs – The Legacy of the Nazi Germany-Extraterrestrial Connection
17) Bergaust, Erik, ‘Wernher von Braun’ , National Space Institute, Washington DC, 1978.
(18) Dooling, David, ‘Academic American Encyclopaedia’Grolier Inc 1993.
(19) Donefer, Charles, ‘Wernher von Braun: National Hero or Enemy to the World?’ 1996
(20) Ibid
(21) Buckbee, Edward O., ‘Biographical Data: Wernher von Braun’ Alabama Space and Rocket Centre, 1983.
(22) Ibid
(23) DeVorkin, David H., ‘Science With A Vengeance: How the Military Created the US Space Sciences After World War II’, Springer-Verlag, New York 1992.
(24) Lancaster New Era newspaper, 12th July 1997.
(25) Corso, Philip, ‘The Day After Roswell’ Pocket Books, New York 1997
(26) Collyns, Robin, ‘Did Spacemen Colonise the Earth?’ , Pelham Books, London 1974.
(27) ‘News Europa’ Jan 1959
The Great Patents Heist
One of the greatest ripoffs of all time was the theft of German patents after World War II
