Hitler's Terror Weapons (26 page)

(4) The SS
Naviero
was an ex-Liberty freighter of the Argentine Shipping Lines. She had a cargo of explosives and gunpowder, and for that reason a very good watch was being kept. Her officers and crew were summoned on deck on the morning of 20 July 1967 off the coast of Brazil to see a powerfully glowing object in the sea not more than 15 metres away. It was cigar-shaped, 100 feet in length and had no external control surfaces or protruding parts. It made no noise and left no wake in the water. After a while it suddenly dived and headed off rapidly at very high speed. This sausage-like submersible had a measureable geographical location, was even visible optically in two media, air and water, but was not tangible enough to leave a wake.

In two of the above cases the presence of the UFO in question varied between being physical and paraphysical at different times: the other two were paraphysical throughout the encounter. It may now be becoming clearer why London and Washington will not even hypothesize the existence of UFOs for discussion. Late in 1942, at the stage of the conflict when the German leadership had accepted that the planned objectives of the war were no longer unattainable, the Waffen-SS began trying out aerial machines which acted just like the four mysterious vehicles quoted above. Who in London would want to talk about the implications of that?

The Kugelblitz/Feuerkugel was an experimental stage of the German flying disc project. What must have been learned by chasing and homing-in on Allied aircraft across another dimension over Reich and Axis Pacific airspace during 1943 and 1944 was to be put into practice aboard the real thing at a later time. Meanwhile German aeronautical engineers had worked around the clock on the project for which the Foo Fighters were the preliminary stage and next came the search for the perfect aerodynamic shape.

Germany was the world pioneer in helicopter development and in 1942 the Flettner 282
Kolibri
became the first helicopter anywhere to enter operational military service. It was the most advanced orthodox helicopter development of the war. The German supersonic helicopter had a system in which the fuel was piped to combustion chambers at the rotor bladetips where it exploded, whirling the blades around at a fantastic speed.
¹⁵⁸

Germany thus led the world in helicopter knowledge and design.

Within thirty months from July 1942 German aeronautical engineers designed and built several giant circular aircraft which were basically sophisticated autogyros and first flew in early 1945.

The 1919 Treaty of Versailles had so drastically restricted German aircraft production that glider flying became important for pilot training and research. The Horten brothers transformed the living room of their parents' house into a workshop and in 1933 test-flew their first glider, Ho I, at Bonn-Hagelar. All three brothers were Luftwaffe officers and Nazi Party members. During the Battle of Britain their Ho II and Ho III designs formed part of a special glider unit for Operation Sea Lion. In 1942 at the request of the Luftwaffe they built a stronger and larger version of the Ho V to take a Schmitt-Argus pulse-jet. The variant was designated Ho VII. At about the same time as Schriever's autogyro blueprint, they were designing a strange crescent-shaped glider, the Ho VI Parabola. Everything regarding this development was destroyed in a mysterious fire at Hellegenberg that year and we hear no more about it until 1947, when the USAF were most anxious to interview Reimar Horten, who by then had escaped to Argentina and was unfortunately incommunicado.

CHAPTER 16

German Flying Crescents and Discs

T
HE FLYING DISC Project in Hitler's Germany was one of three most secret research programmes and was classified
Geheime Reichssache,
the highest possible top secret. Nowhere, in any academic history of the Second World War, nor in any memoir of a military or political leader of any of the nations involved, Allied or German, will the researcher find the mention of a German flying disc. It is as if the project never existed. Here is the greatest mystery of the Second World War: why a flying vehicle held in such low regard for modern commercial and military purposes should have merited not only Hitler's but, postwar, the Allies' highest secrecy rating for it. Very recently the CIA archive has released documents full of accounts by German engineers of their work on circular aircraft capable of astonishing speeds, but useful information on the craft themselves remains elusive.

Had it not been for the spate of UFO sightings by US Air Force personnel over a twelve-day period in 1947 which led the US Army and Air Force to mount a combined project to investigate the phenomenon, the existence of the documentary evidence for the German project would have remained a secret in perpetuity. The confirmatory paper was not declassified until 1969, and only then as an appendix to a fatuous report of 964 pages issued by a University of Colorado committee under the chairmanship of Dr Edward U. Condon, and under contract to the Office of Scientific and Technical Research of the US Air Force.
¹⁵⁹
This outfit spent two years and $600,000 of US Air Force appropriation to conduct an in-depth investigation of the UFO problem. The study was a total farce and, while having nothing useful to say about UFOs, it did, unintentionally one suspects, confirm the existence of a successful Nazi flying disc programme, and so was not a complete waste of time and money.

The official report prepared on 23 September 1947 remained classified until 8 January 1969 when it was published as Appendix R to the Condon Report. The matter enquired into had begun on the night of 28 June 1947 when two pilots and two intelligence officers at Maxwell Air Force base watched an illuminated UFO perform “impossible aerobatics”. On 29 June a naval rocketry expert watched a silvery disc above the White Sands Testing Grounds. On 8 July three officers at the Muroc supersecret USAF test centre in the Mojave Desert reported three silver-coloured objects heading westwards, and ten minutes later a pilot test flying the new XP-84 reported a yellowish-white spherical object resembling nothing being currently tested or flown heading west into the wind at a fantastic speed. Two hours later a crew of technicians filed a report regarding an object interfering with a seat ejection experiment at 20,000 feet. It appeared to be of white aluminium oval construction with two projections on the upper surface which might have been fins. These crossed each other at intervals suggesting slow rotation or oscillation. No obvious means of propulsion was seen. The following day an F-51 pilot at 20,000 feet about 40 miles south of Munroc sighted a flat object of light-reflecting nature with no vertical fin or wings. He attempted to pursue but it outclimbed him.
¹⁶⁰

This investigation concluded that UFOs are real and not visionary or fictitious. The objects reported on by USAF personnel were the shape of a disc and as large as a man-made aircraft. Reported operating characteristics such as extreme rates of climb and manoeuvrability (particularly roll) lent possibility to the idea that some of the objects were controlled either manually, automatically or remotely. They had a metallic or light-reflecting surface, showed an absence of trail except in a few instances when the object was apparently operating under high performance conditions, were circular or elliptical in shape, flat on the bottom and domed on top, maintained formations in flights varying from three to nine objects, had no associated sound except in three instances when a rumbling roar was heard, and cruised at above 300 knots.

This is the US Air Force describing UFOs in flight, quite a contrast to the usual official type of opinion released to the public. The signatory to the report, Lt Gen Nathan Twining, Commanding General, Air Material Command, stated that:

“It is possible within the present US knowledge – provided extensive detailed development is undertaken - to construct a piloted aircraft which has the general description of the objects in the sub–paragraphs above, which would be capable of an approximate range of 7000 miles at sub-sonic speeds. Any developments would be extremely expensive, time-consuming and at the considerable expense of current projects…”

Thus it seems that the USAF had no knowledge of domestic flying disc construction by the United States, nor was it particularly keen to get involved in it.

On the afternoon of 24 June 1947, while en route to Yakima, Washington, private pilot Kenneth Arnold saw a formation of nine bright objects flying south from Mount Baker towards Mount Rainier (about 130 miles apart). The leader was higher than the rest and they were flying diagonally in an echelon with a larger gap between the first four and the last five. Arnold assumed they were jets, but he could see no tailplanes. He calculated their speed over a 50-mile distance between two elevations as 1700 mph. They were next “in a chain in the neighbourhood of five miles long, swerving in and out of the smaller peaks, flipping from side to side in unison, dipping and presenting their lateral surfaces”. Eight of the objects looked like flat discs, the other, larger than the rest, resembled a
crescent.
The following day in a newspaper interview, Arnold likened the objects' movements to “a flat rock bouncing up and down as it skipped across water”. He was subsequently misquoted and later asserted, “the objects were not saucer-shaped but flew erratic, like a saucer if you skip it across water. They were not circular but reporters misunderstood the term”. Dr Jacqueline Mitton of the Royal Astronomical Society, a firm disbeliever in UFOs, agreed that “Arnold's original drawings were much more a kind of boomerang shape”. Arnold's description of the leader, the flying crescent, coincides very exactly with an object reported on numerous occasions by USAF pilots and scientists.

A secret
Draft of Collection Memorandum
signed by Brig-Gen G. F. Schulgen for the Air Intelligence Requirements Division on 30 October 1947 stated that the alleged flying saucer-type aircraft in which the USAF was interested approximated the shape of a disc and had been reported by many competent observers, including USAF rated officers, from widely scattered places such as the USA, Canada, Hungary, Guam and Japan, both from the ground and from the air. The object had a relatively flat bottom with extreme light reflecting ability. Its plan form approximated an oval or a disc with a dome shape on the top surface, about the size of a C-54 or Constellation aircraft. It was silent except for an occasional roar when operating under super performance conditions. It left no exhaust except occasionally a bluish Diesel-type trail which persisted in the atmosphere for about an hour. Other reports mentioned a brownish smoke trail which could be from a special catalyst for extra power. It had extreme manoeuvrability and the apparent ability to almost hover: it could disappear quickly at high speed or dematerialize, and to suddenly appear without warning as if from extremely high altitude. Several of the craft formed a tight formation quickly and evasive tactics indicated possibly manual or remote control. Under certain power conditions, the craft seemed able to cut a half-mile-wide path through cloud, but this was only seen once.

The draft continued by saying that the first sightings in the United States were reported mid-May 1947 and the last over Toronto on 14 September that year. The greatest activity over the United States was during the last week of June and first week of July. Arnold's sighting occurred on 24 June. Brig-Gen Schulgen regarded the strange object, “in view of certain observations”, as “a long-range aircraft capable of a high rate of climb, high cruising speed (possibly sub-sonic at all times), highly manoeuvrable and capable of being flown in tight formation. For the purpose of evaluation and analysis of the so-called flying saucer phenomenon, the object sighted is being assumed to be a manned aircraft … based on the perspective thinking and actual accomplishments of the Germans”.

The signatory was assuming at the time that the aircraft was built by the Soviets to German blueprints, but we know now that was not the case. The craft described had “a high rate of climb”, but did not lift up vertically. It was “possibly sub-sonic at all times” but could dematerialize or appear suddenly without warning which, at sub-sonic speed, suggests it entered and left Gravity II at will. Supporting this hypothesis is the fact that the hull had “extreme light reflecting ability”. Brig-Gen Schulgen was by no means convinced that this craft was extraterrestrial: “There is a possibility that the Horten brothers' perspective thinking may have inspired it – particularly the Parabola, which has a crescent plan form [see
Appendix
]. The Horten brothers' latest trend of perspective thinking was definitely toward aircraft configurations of low aspect ratio. The younger brother, Reimar, stated that the Parabola configuration would have the least induced drag – which is a very significant statement…. What is known of the whereabouts of the entire Horten family? All should be contacted and interrogated regarding any contemplated plans or perspective thinking of the Horten brothers.”

These USAF sightings were of an aircraft at a much higher stage of development than anything the United States could have put into the air at the time, (or now, if it was capable of Gravity II travel). It was admitted by the US authorities in the CIOS-BIOS/FIAT 20 report that in aeronautics and all methods of jet and rocket propulsion and guidance systems, at the war's end the Germans were ahead of the US by at least ten years. By virtue of the quality of observers involved – rated USA officers, test pilots and aeronautical scientists – we can make a positive statement. Either the crescent-shaped aircraft was German-built and operating from some clandestine base. Or it came from the Beyond. One must choose, for there is no third plausible possibility.

German Flying Saucers – The Alleged Machines

The German tradition alleges that Spitzbergen was used for some of their test flights. In a video-recorded interview, Andreas Epp, an aeronautics writer and one of the five principal engineers involved in the German project during the war, stated that a flying disc under remote control from Breslau crashed and was wrecked on Spitzbergen while attempting a landing. In late August 1946 Air Force General James H. Doolittle arrived in Stockholm to investigate UFO sightings along with Swedish military intelligence but his first mission was to visit Spitzbergen, where he supervised the shipment aboard the battleship
Alabama
of the remains of “a crashed UFO”. According to former crew members of the warship, the bodies of “aliens” had been found, but the craft was thought to be “a short-range reconnaissance saucer” because “no provisions were found aboard”.