This time a very interesting study dismantling the famous urban legend of nazi ufo. Enjoy!

BR/zespri

THE NAZI UFO MYTHOS

An Investigation by Kevin McClure

The following is, essentially, the article published under the title ‘Phoney Warfare’ in Fortean Studies 7. Having allowed a decent interval for those who had intended to buy Fortean Studies to do so, I’m happy to have it appear on the Magonia site so that it can reach a wider – and undoubtedly discerning – audience.

The relationship between the history of the paranormal, and the 'consensus' history that most of us, informed by historians and the mainstream media, agree on as real, is usually pretty distant. Forteanism could be said to lie somewhere between these two histories, in that it notes the allegedly factual, but possibly anomalous accounts recorded in the media of 'consensus' history, while often rejecting the 'consensus' explanations given for dismissing the strangeness of those events, and the rationale and reasoning adopted in doing so. Fort was lucky to live and work before the worst excesses of Ufology and the New Age appeared. His method of approaching existing, already-recorded facts with an open and wide-ranging mind would often have been thwarted by the sheer lack of facts, and the predominance of imaginary elements, in both of those disciplines. He was generally able - and willing - to trust the reports his research uncovered. To take that approach now would invite ridicule.

The investigations I've set about during the last twenty-odd years usually had their origins in my unease at the wild interpretations being made of reports which had never been properly researched. The 'Egryn Lights' of evangelist Mary Jones and others were being turned into evidence for the 'earthlights' lobby. The Fatima visions and the 'Dance of the Sun' were becoming a 'classic UFO event', artificially extending the history of the UFO thirty years back before 1947. The 'Angels of Mons' legends, in contrast, were being too readily debunked. The usual skeptical explanation was too trite, and I think mistaken. Similarly, most of my research has been in areas where, although the phenomena in question has been visible - audible, tangible even - to certain individuals, its visibility has been selective. There was always room for a debate about why certain persons subjectively perceive extraordinary sights, and events, and information, while others do not.

The situation here, where vast metal disks were meant to be thundering across the European skies before the summer of 1945, is completely different. They were either there or they weren't.What prompted me to start questioning the accepted wisdom about 'Nazi UFOs' was that awful period in Fortean history, two or three years ago, when newsstand magazines of limited quality and dubious intentions blossomed all over the UK. In addition to FT itself and 'UFO Magazine', suddenly there was Alien Encounters, Sightings, UFO Reality and all sorts of other, short-lived titles, all struggling to fill their pages with startling and saleable material. Rotten writers started submitting articles half-heartedly strung together from a handful of second-hand sources, and a couple of hours on the Internet. The publishers accepted these articles with open arms and small amounts of money, and old myths were revived and new myths born. Among them were myths based around the creation and flight of Nazi UFOs.

The more I looked at the emerging tales of astounding Nazi technical achievement, and compared them with Germany's ignominious and ruinous defeat, the less sense that contradiction made. It isn't - and I know I need to make this clear - that I'm asserting that the Axis had no plans, designs, or hopes for the production of high-performance flying disks. Nazi Germany was good at plans, and designs, and - perhaps fortunately for the rest of the world - wasted much time on speculation, and dreams of achievement and power. But it looks as though no high-performance disc so much as left the ground, and if that proposition is true then the Nazi UFO mythos, now celebrating a half-century of vigorous existence, is the most sustained, widespread, complex and multi-faceted hoax ever contrived in our field. A hoax, strangely enough, in which few of the principal participants even knew each other, but which has attracted hundreds to play their part in its development and many, many more individuals to believe that some or all of its claims are true. Tentative as some of my findings of fact may be as yet, what is published here is what I've established so far.

This is not a story with a beginning, middle and an end. Like all the best myths it starts when somebody either thought of it, or first recounted publicly a pre-existing tale. It looked to the past to find support for its claims and then, as time went on, spiraled out of control as further elements were added. My intentions in setting out this 'first investigation' of the Nazi UFO mythos is to make available, in one place, the principal sources for all of the reports and claims that seem relevant and of which - of course - I'm aware. I'm sure there will be more. I make no pretence of having done all this work myself, or of having any kind of monopoly on the subject. If others want to use this piece as a basis for pursuing their own research, I'll be more than pleased. If I've quoted or adopted anyone else's work without crediting it, please accept my apologies.

I'll start by giving a substantial overview of what is probably the only genuine unsolved mystery in all of the speculation about wartime aeronautical technology.

This is the first of five specific 'cores' of key material that I've concluded lie at the heart of the mythos. Having set those cores out first, I'll deal with many of the other contributors to the development of the mythos, both deliberate and unplanned. One brief explanation in advance - while I've almost certainly made errors of my own in translation, and the names of people and places, I've generally refrained from correcting the spelling and grammar of quoted material. Sometimes, style and presentation conveys almost as much as content!

The 'foo fighter' phenomenon seems to have been so named after a wartime US comic strip which featured a character called Smokey Stover, whose catchphrase was "where there's foo there's fire". No doubt this seemed funny at the time, but it is in giving a memorable and appealing name to a very disparate, and under-researched, range of reports of aerial light phenomena that Stover has found lasting fame. Without that name, such different reports might never have been linked together.In a way, the 'foo fighter' evidence doesn't help us much. It is reasonably clear that whatever was seen, the accounts are seldom, if ever, of solid, metal objects. Many of them actually come from the skies over Japan and other Far East countries. Nonetheless, reports of the existence and behavior of the 'foo fighters' over Europe during the war underpin key strands of the 'Nazi UFO' mythos, and while this can't be the thorough examination that the subject deserves to receive one day, any investigation has to start somewhere. I can claim particularly little credit for the research into foo fighters which, effectively, sets the scene for my own research into the more exotic world of the Nazi UFO, but I hope that by setting it out here, it will become more accessible, and will eventually be seen in its proper - very distant - relationship to later claims of wartime flying disk development.

Two thorough and credible researchers have investigated the wartime 'foo fighter' phenomenon. One is the UK researcher and ufological iconoclast Andy Roberts, and the other is US folklore graduate Jeff Lindell. Both have, helpfully, published summaries of their material on the net, and it would be fair comment to say that they have reached somewhat different conclusions. Before turning to their more careful analysis, and ignoring the dubious material presented in post-war editions of Ray Palmer's largely fictional Amazing Stories , it is first worth considering the key, popular article on the subject which, as Roberts comments, "forms the substance of almost every piece written on the subject of foo-fighters". It appeared in the American Legion Magazine for December 1945, one with which Renato Vesco - who had worked in the USA - was familiar, but the German Rudolf Lusar, apparently, was not.

The article was titled 'The Foo Fighter Mystery', and was written by one Jo Chamberlin. This account is enlivened with contemporary "quotes" from the witnesses, making it that much more immediate and appealing. It begins with an account of reports from Japan, apparently after Germany had been defeated:

. . . During the last months of the war the crews of many B-29s over Japan saw what they described as "balls of fire" which followed them, occasionally came up and almost sat on their tails, changed color from orange to red to white and back again, and yet never closed in to attack or crash, suicide-style. "The balls of fire continue to be a mystery -- just as they were when first observed on the other side of the world - over eastern Germany.

This is the way they began. At ten o'clock of a November evening, in late 1944, Lt. Ed Schlueter took off in his night fighter from Dijon, France, on what he thought would be a routine mission for the 415th Night Fighter Squadron. Lt. Schlueter is a tall, competent young pilot from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, whose hazardous job was to search the night sky for German planes and shoot them down. He had done just this several times and had been decorated for it. As one of our best night fighters, he was used to handling all sorts of emergencies. With him as radar observer was Lt. Donald J. Meiers, and Lt. Fred Ringwald, intelligence officer of the 415th, who flew as an observer. The trio began their search pattern, roaming the night skies on either side of the Rhine River north of Strasbourg -- for centuries the abode of sirens, dwarfs, gnomes, and other supernatural characters that appealed strongly to the dramatic sense of the late A. Hitler.

However, at this stage of the European war, the Rhine was no stage but a grim battleground, where the Germans were making their last great stand. The night was reasonably clear, with some clouds and a quarter moon. There was fair visibility. In some respects, a night fighter plane operates like a champion boxer whose eyesight isn't very good; he must rely on other senses to guide him to his opponent. The U. S. Army has ground radar stations, which track all planes across the sky, and tell the night fighter the whereabouts of any plane.

The night fighter flies there, closes in by means of his own radar until usually he can see the enemy, and if the plane doesn't identify itself as friendly, he shoots it down. Or, gets shot down himself, for the Germans operate their aircraft in much same way we did, and so did the Japanese. Lt. Schlueter was flying low enough that he could detect the white steam of a blacked-out locomotive or the sinister bulk of a motor convoy, but he had to avoid smokestacks, barrage balloons, enemy searchlights, and flak batteries. He and Ringwald were on the alert, for there were mountains nearby. The inside of the plane was dark, for good night vision. Lt. Ringwald said,"I wonder what those lights are, over there in the hills." "Probably stars," said Schlueter, knowing from long experience that the size and character of lights are hard to estimate at night. "No, I don't think so." "Are you sure it's no reflection from us?" "I'm positive."

Then Ringwald remembered -- there weren't any hills over there. Yet the "lights" were still glowing -- eight or ten of them in a row -- orange balls of fire moving through the air at a terrific speed. Then Schlueter saw them far off his left wing. Were enemy fighters pursuing him? He immediately checked by radio with Allied ground radar stations. "Nobody up there but yourself." they reported. "Are you crazy?" And no enemy plane showed in Lt. Meiers' radar. Lt. Schlueter didn't know what he was facing -- possibly some new and lethal German weapon - but he turned into the lights, ready for action. The lights disappeared - then reappeared far off. Five minutes later they went into a flat glide and vanished.

The puzzled airmen continued on their mission, and destroyed seven freight trains behind German lines. When they landed back at Dijon, they decided to do what any other prudent soldier would do - keep quiet for the moment. If you tried to explain everything strange that happened in a war, you'd do nothing else.

Further, Schlueter and Meiers had nearly completed their required missions, and didn't want to chance being grounded by some skeptical flight surgeon for "combat fatigue." Maybe they had been "seeing things." But a few nights later, Lt. Henry Giblin, of Santa Rosa, California, pilot, and Lt. Walter Cleary, of Worcester, Massachusetts, radar-observer, were flying at 1,000 feet altitude when they saw a huge red light 1,000 feet above them, moving at 200 miles per hour. As the observation was made on an early winter evening, the men decided that perhaps they had eaten something at chow that didn't agree with them and did not rush to report their experience.

On December 22-23, 1944, another 415th night fighter squadron pilot and radar-observer were flying at 10,000 feet altitude near Hagenau. "At 0600 hours we saw two lights climbing toward us from the ground. Upon reaching our altitude, they leveled off and stayed on my tail. The lights appeared to be large orange glows. After staying with the plane for two minutes, they peeled off and turned away, flying under perfect control, and then went out." The next night the same two men, flying at 10,000 feet, observed a single red flame. Lt. David L. McFalls, of Cliffside, N. C., pilot, and Lt. Ned Baker of Hemat, California, radar-observer, also saw: "A glowing red object shooting straight up, which suddenly changed to a view of an aircraft doing a wing-over, going into a dive and disappearing."

This was the first and only suggestion of a controlled flying device. By this time, the lights were reported by all members of the 415th who saw them. Most men poked fun at the observers, until they saw for themselves. Although confronted with a baffling situation, and one with lethal potentialities, the 415th continued its remarkable combat record. When the writer of this article visited and talked with them in Germany, he was impressed with the obvious fact that the 415th fliers were very normal airmen, whose primary interest was combat, and after that came pin-up girls, poker, doughnuts, and the derivatives of the grape. The 415th had a splendid record. The whole outfit took the mysterious lights or balls of fire with a sense of humor. Their reports were received in some higher quarters with smiles: "Sure, you must have seen something, and have you been getting enough sleep?" One day at chow a 415th pilot suggested that they give the lights a name. A reader of the comic strip "Smokey Stover" suggested that they be called "foo-fighters," since it was frequently and irrefutably stated in that strip that "Where there's foo, there's fire." The name stuck.

What the 415th saw at night was borne out in part by day. West of Neustadt, a P-47 pilot saw "a gold-colored ball, with a metallic finish, which appeared to be moving slowly through the air. As the sun was low, it was impossible to tell whether the sun reflected off it, or the light came from within." Another P-47 pilot reported "a phosphorescent golden sphere, 3 to 5 feet in diameter, flying at 2,000 feet." Meanwhile, official reports of the "foo-fighters" had gone to group headquarters and were "noted." Now in the Army, when you "note" anything it means that you neither agree nor disagree, nor do you intend to do anything about it. It covers everything. Various explanations were offered for the phenomena - none of them satisfactory, and most of them irritating to the 415th.

It was said that the foo-fighters might be a new kind of flare. A flare, said the 415th, does not dive, peel off, or turn. Were they to frighten or confuse Allied pilots? Well, if so, they were not succeeding -- and yet the lights continued to appear. Eighth Air Force bomber crews had reported seeing silver-colored spheres resembling huge Christmas tree ornaments in the sky -- what about them? Well, the silver spheres usually floated, and never followed a plane. They were presumably some idea the Germans tried in the unsuccessful effort to confuse our pilots or hinder our radar bombing devices.What about jet planes? No, the Germans had jet planes all right, but they didn't have an exhaust flame visible at any distance. Could they be flying bombs of some sort, either with or without a pilot? Presumably not - with but one exception no one thought he observed a wing or fuselage. Weather balloons? No, the 415th was well aware of their behavior. They ascended almost vertically, and eventually burst. Could the lights or balls of fire be the red, blue, and orange colored flak bursts that Eighth Air Force bomber crews had reported? It was a nice idea, said the 415th, but there was no correlation between the foo-fighters they observed and the flak they encountered. And night flak was usually directed by German radar, not visually. In short, no explanation stood up.

On Dec. 31, 1944, AP reporter Bob Wilson, was with the 415th and heard about the foo-fighters. He questioned the men until 4 a.m. in the best newspaper tradition until he got all the facts. His story passed the censors, and appeared in American newspapers on January 1, 1945, just in time to meet the customary crop of annual hangovers.

Some scientists in New York decided, apparently by remote control, that what the airmen had seen in Germany was St. Elmo's light - a well-known electrical phenomenon appearing like light or flame during stormy weather at the tips of church steeples, ships' masts, and tall trees. Being in the nature of an electrical discharge, St. Elmo's fire is reddish when positive, and blueish when negative. The 415th blew up. It was thoroughly acquainted with St. Elmo's fire. The men snorted, "Just let the sons come over and fly a mission with us. We'll show em."

Through January, 1945, the 415th continued to see the "foo-fighters," and their conduct became increasingly mysterious. One aircrew observed lights, moving both singly and in pairs. On another occasion, three sets of lights, this time red and white in color, followed a plane, and when the plane suddenly pulled up, the lights continued on in the same direction, as though caught napping, and then sheepishly pulled up to follow. The pilot checked with ground radar - he was alone in the sky. This was true in every instance foo-fighters were observed. The first real clue came with the last appearance of the exasperating and potentially deadly lights. They never kept 415th from fulfilling its missions, but they certainly were unnerving.

The last time the foo-fighters appeared, the pilot turned into them at the earliest possible moment -- and the lights disappeared. The pilot was sure that he felt prop wash, but when he checked with ground radar, there was no other airplane. The pilot continued on his way, perturbed, even angry -- when he noticed lights far to the rear. The night was clear and the pilot was approaching a huge cloud. Once in the cloud, he dropped down two thousand feet and made a 30 degree left turn. Just a few seconds later be emerged from the cloud - with his eye peeled to rear. Sure enough, coming out of the cloud in the same relative position was the foo-fighter, as though to thumb its nose at the pilot, and then disappear.

This was the last time the foo-fighters were seen in Germany, although it would have seemed fitting, if the lights had made one last gesture, grouping themselves so as to spell "Guess What" in the sky, and vanishing forever. But they didn't. The foo-fighters simply disappeared when Allied ground forces captured the area East of the Rhine. This was known to be the location of many German experimental stations. Since V-E day our Intelligence officers have put many such installations under guard. From them we hope to get valuable research information -- including the solution to the foo-fighter mystery, but it has not appeared yet. It may be successfully hidden for years to come, possibly forever. The members of the 415th hope Army Intelligence will find the answer. If it turns out that the Germans never had anything airborne in the area, they say, "We'll be all set for Section Eight psychiatric discharges." Meanwhile, the foo-fighter mystery continues unsolved. The lights, or balls of fire, appeared and disappeared on the other side of the world, over Japan -- and your guess as to what they were is just as good as mine, for nobody really knows." [8]

Had this article not been published, then we would probably have heard little more about this unusual range of events, in different times, in different places, which has been gathered together under the foo-fighter name. Fortunately, others have gone on to gather more accurate, less dramatized accounts, and to make informed judgments about the possible causes underlying the reports.

ANDY ROBERTS

Andy Roberts is a seasoned UK researcher with a reputation for unraveling seemingly complex cases. He went out and found a number of first-hand experiencers.

"I wrote to every air-related magazine in the UK with a request for information from ex-aircrew. To date I have had some thirty replies from pilots and crew detailing their experiences with strange balls of light (incidentally not one of them knew them by the name "foo-fighters," or any other name for that matter).Official confirmation of wartime phenomena was not so easy to come by"My research so far with the RAF/MOD/PRO in the UK has drawn a total blank regarding official documentation and investigation of the subject, as have preliminary investigations in the USA. UFO skeptics will of course say that this is because it doesn't exist, proponents, especially cover-up buffs, will say it is because it is being kept secret. The simple facts are that if documentation does exist in the UK I am unlikely to be able to get at it easily because of our archaic procedures for obtaining any government documents. We are not blessed by a FOI Act as is the USA, and obtaining any document depends on whether a department can be bothered to answer your letters or if so, can be bothered to undertake a meaningful search of their records. The situation is further complicated by the fact that many records in our Public Records Office are hard to locate due to how it is organized and furthermore are subject to "rules" such as the 30 year rule whereby information is not available for 30 years from date of classification. Worse still many W.W.II records are languishing under a 75 year rule for reasons I have not yet fathomed! In addition to this fact I have spoken to some ex-wartime RAF intelligence people in the UK and they claim no knowledge of the phenomena."

Roberts has a very low opinion of most 'foo fighter' research. I fully support his view, which he illustrates by identifying one certain 'foo' hoax, and another probable one: these are summarized in the 'False Histories' section, below. Yet Roberts is not entirely disillusioned by his discoveries, and concludes of the many apparently guileless reports of aerial lights that:"Out of all this some clear facts are apparent. Hundreds of aircrew saw and recorded what we now call foo-fighters during W.W.II. There must be many thousands of ex-aircrew who have stories to tell. The problem is finding them and the odd ad. or article is only going to draw a few out and I have yet to attempt to get to American information from squadron survivors units etc. The situation regarding German information is further complicated by a language barrier but it is only a matter of time. I firmly believe that foo-fighters were a real, although non-solid phenomena and I reject the hallucination/misperception hypothesis almost entirely. These people's lives depended on being able to see and identify aerial objects very quickly. One mistake and it was their last. Some crew have admitted misperceiving Venus etc., but realizing it in seconds, and certainly not a whole crew being fooled for any length of time." [9]

JEFF LINDELLUS

Folklorist Jeff A Lindell is a retired USAF electronic warfare systems analyst. He has conducted extensive interviews with airmen who witnessed light phenomena during WWII, and tends towards a rationalist explanation of all such reports, utilizing the possible misinterpretation of different kinds of natural events. In his paper 'The Foo Fighter Mystery: Revised' in the context of historical accounts identified as 'Jack o'Lantern' and 'Will o' the Wisp', he sets out some key 'foo fighter' reports from earlier sources.

"Let us proceed with the World War II version of this legend type. Early in October of 1944, pilots in the 422 Night Fighter Squadron (NFS), based out of Florennes, Belgium began to report "balls of light" pacing their fighters over Western Germany. By early November several 422nd pilots and radar operators had reported encounters with Me163 rocket fighters and Me262 jet fighters on night missions over the Reich.

On the 7th of November of 1944 the Associated Press Corps in Paris released this statement:

Paris (AP) - The Germans are using jet and rocket propelled planes and various other 'newfangled' gadgets against Allied night fighters," Lt. Col. B. Johnson, Natchitoches, La., commander of a P-61 Black Widow group, said today." In recent nights we've counted 15 to 20 jet planes," Johnson said. "They sometimes fly in formations of four, but more often they fly alone." (The Day, New London, Connecticut, p.1).

In an interview with Philip Guba, Assistant Intelligence Officer of the 422 NFS, he states"At first we thought they (the pilots) were seeing things, and they kept saying that these things were chasing them around. Whether they actually identified... not while I was on duty, they did not identify a jet as such. But I think that was the only conclusion we could reach... that was a jet. It could not have been a Will-o'-wisp or something like that. What they reported seeing was simply the exhaust, you see. They did mention that these guys (the jets) seemed to play around with them. They did mention that these guys (the jets) never shot at them and I can't recall whether the Radar observer actually saw them on the screen. It was mostly visual in other words."Meanwhile, the 415th N.F.S. based out of Dijon France began to report the "balls of fire" which they had affectionately dubbed, "foo fighters."

On the 27th of November the first foo fighter was sighted over Western Germany by an Ed Schleuter and Don Meiers flying a Beaufighter, here is Don's account:"A foo fighter picked me up at 700 feet and chased me 20 miles down the Rhine Valley," Meiers said. "I turned to starboard and two balls of fire turned with me. We were going 260 miles an hour and the balls were keeping right up with us. On another occasion when a foo fighter picked us up, I dived at 360 miles an hour. It kept right off our wing tips for awhile and then zoomed into the sky. When I first saw the things, I had the horrible thought that a German on the ground was ready to press a button and explode them. But they didn't explode or attack us. They just seem to follow us like the Will - o'- the-wisp."(N.Y. Times, 2 Jan.1945, p.1,4.)

Well, to complicate things even more, the 416th N.F.S. stationed in Pisa Italy also began to spot "foo fighters" in February of 1945. Here are some excerpts from the 416th NFS' historical data and operations records respectively:

17 February 1945: "Our crews are beginning to report mysterious orange-red lights in the sky near La Spezia and also inland. These "foo fighters" have been pursued, but no one has been able to make contact. G.C.l. and intelligence profess to be mystified by these ghostly apparitions. The hypothesis that the foo-fighters are a post-cognac manifestation has been disproved. Even the teetotalers have observed the strange and mysterious foo-fighters which have also been observed in France and in Belgium." (17 Feb.1945, 416th historical data. U.S. Army.)

17 February 1945: "At 21:30 saw reddish white light going off and on in spurts about 6 or 8 miles away, near La Spezia at 10,000 ft. going NE. chased it at 280 MPH for 11/2 minutes. It took erratic course and faded out. At 21:40 saw some type of light 10 miles South of La Spezia and it went North and turned East of La Spezia at 9000'. Faded near La Spezia. Pilot came within 5 miles of La Spezia, suspected Ack Ack trap. At 21:55,10 miles south of La Spezia chased another and it went across La Spezia and pilot followed. Faded 10 or 15 miles North of La Spezia. Our aircraft at 300 MPH couldn't catch it. No ack ack at La Spezia. At 22:50, 5 miles south of Pisa, saw same light from distance of 10 miles. Chased it for 2 or 2 1/2 minutes. It took north course, disappeared over Mt. this light 10,000'. Light described as glow that alternates between weak and bright. No contacts on Al (radar). Apparently no jamming." (17 Feb.1945. Daily Operations Report, 416th NFS, 12th AF-SCU-01.)

The above sighting was made by George Shultz and Frankie Robinson." Lindell presents a convincing case for accepting that whatever the cause of the reports, because of their low numbers and limited geographical range, Me163 rocket fighters and Me262 jet fighters were seldom responsible. He reports"Kurt Welter was appointed to form the first Me 262 Night Fighter test detachment (Erprobungs-Kommando) on 2 November of 1944. This was the only German Jet Night Fighting outfit in WWII and until the last week in February, Kurt Welter was the only pilot flying the Me 262 aircraft at night. Welter's detachment did not become operational until mid-December of 1944 with only two Me 262 Al-a's. His orders were to intercept the nightly assaults of Mosquito bombers hitting Berlin known as the "Berlin Express." This allows Welter very little time to organize, recruit, equip and fly all of the missions which Allied pilots claim were flown. (From Hugh Morgan's "Me262, Stormbird Rising)

This still leaves us with the question of the Me 63 rocket fighters. The Second Squadron of Jagdgeschwader (JG) 400, the first and only Me 63 Combat Wing, was stationed at Venlo airfield in the Netherlands and saw limited action until it was withdrawn to the home wing in Brandis, south of Leipzig, in July of 1944.

At Brandis, JG 400 saw its peak of operational performance on the 28th of September of 1944 when it was able to scramble 9 Me 63s in order to intercept an Allied day-light bombing raid. This rocket fighter was only used as a day interceptor for bombers; no records exist concerning the night testing of the Me 163 at the German experimental airfield, Estelle Retime, which is where all of the experimental aircraft were tested for night flying. (Morgan, Price, Ziegler.)

Mano Zeigler who flew as one of the three chief test pilots assigned to Erprobungs-Kommando 16 and later a Rocket pilot in JG 400 commented on the practicability of flying such a nocturnal mission in a Me 63, "Trying to land in the dark you'd spread yourself in small pieces around the countryside!" (Ziegler p.113)

This aircraft also had an effective combat radius of no more than 25 miles under perfect visual conditions and thus limited JG 400's operations to the Leipzig area for the duration of the war."[10]

Lindell goes on to present information about later sightings of mysterious - and possibly responsive - lights in the Far East where, of course, the war continued after Germany's defeat. Interesting, and broadly similar, as that material is, it doesn't really form part of our investigation into the flight of high-performance German disks. His careful conclusions are, however, helpful. He admits to a fairly skeptical approach to the material, but conclusions drawn from such thorough research have considerable value. He says: "At this point it is of vital interest to relate the above terms with that of "aviator's vertigo."

In May of 1946, Dr W. E. Vinacke submitted the first ever report concerning folk beliefs among aviators concerning anomalous experiences associated with flying. In his report 'The Concept of Aviator's Vertigo', Vinacke states:"Vertigo is primarily a psychological problem. It appears to be associated with the mental hazards of flying, and with the 'mysterious' events which sometimes happen in an aircraft. there is thus a two-fold source of emotional loading in the term 'vertigo', i.e. dangerous conditions and unexplained, though actual, phenomena. (Vincacke p.2)

In the pursuit of fairness I have also interviewed the same pilots periodically and concerning various topics involving night flying. This effect has been significant. Pilots who never reported seeing foo fighters were asked if they had experienced vertigo. The vertigo stories could easily be classed as foo fighter stories. These persons tended to be either commanders or high ranking experienced night fighters. The point is that there are a wide variety of "conditions" in which a story can be recounted concerning an anomalous personal experience. Persons who had not seen foo fighters could offer no such similar experience other than a "mistaken identification" interpretation such as St. Elmo's fire, jets, Venus, etc.

Persons who had experienced "visual-vertigo" in night flying offered experiences which are, for all practical purposes, identical to first hand experience narratives concerning foo fighters, baka bombs, jets, Venus, balls of fire and the Jack-o'-lantern. Edgar Vinacke writes,"Pilots do not have sufficient information about phenomena of disorientation, and, as a corollary, are given considerable disorganized, incomplete, and inaccurate information. They are largely dependent upon their own experience, which must supplement and interpret the traditions about 'vertigo' which are passed on to them. When a concept thus grows out of anecdotes cemented together with practical necessity, it is bound to acquire elements of mystery. So far as 'vertigo' is concerned, no one really knows more than a small part of the facts, but a great deal of the peril. Since aviators are not skilled observers of human behavior, they usually have only the vaguest understanding of their own feelings. Like other naive persons, therefore, they have simply adopted a term to cover a multitude of otherwise inexplicable events." (Vinacke p.5.) [11]

Surprisingly, this is probably the most thorough account of 'foo fighter' reports yet published, and I've almost completely ignored the reports from outside the European theatre of war. There is an excellent book to be written about the whole 'foo fighter' issue, which ideally would include the research conducted by both Andy Roberts and Jeff Lindell. I would strongly suggest, however, that none of the 'foo fighter' evidence correlates in any objective manner with the later claims for the existence of high-performance flying disks.

A final point about 'foo fighters': there are various photos of planes seemingly accompanied by blobs of what may be light, or emulsion flaws, or tiny aircraft, or whatever. They are paraded periodically - Mark Ian Birdsall of the UK UFO Magazine seems keen on them - as evidence of the physical reality of the phenomenon. To date, I have found no evidence of the specific provenance of any of these photos - who took them, on what date, where, with what camera, in what circumstances, and so on. In the case of the photo most commonly reproduced, it is not even clear what type of aircraft is shown. Others images look as if they might well have been manipulated. At present, these photos are evidence of nothing but the willingness to accept inadequate evidence to support an inadequately evidenced belief. Of course, if relevant provenance could be established, my opinion might well change.

One individual - only partially aware that he was doing anything of the sort - turned the press reports of 'foo fighters' into armed, controlled, high-performance flying discs.

His name was Renato Vesco, an Italian who wrote three books in his own language, only one of which was translated into English. He also had an article published in the August 1969 edition of the US men's magazine Argosy, which was probably little more than a hack writer's rendering of material in the book.

The article was titled "Aerospace expert claims Flying Saucers are Canada's Secret Weapon", and in the introduction to the piece there first appears the statement which lies at the heart of the authority which Vesco has come to command over the years.

It said:"Renato Vesco is a fully licensed aircraft engineer and a specialist in aerospace and ramjet developments. He attended the University of Rome and, before WWII, studied at the German Institute for Aerial Development. During the war, Vesco worked with the Germans at the Fiat Lake Garda secret installations in Italy. In the 1960s, he worked for the Italian Air Ministry of Defense as an undercover technical agent, investigating the UFO mystery." [12]

It is in the context of this statement that many writers have first considered the material set out by Vesco in the first of his three books, often without having actually seen the book itself.

Here are some key selections of what Vesco says about the supposed Feuerball and Kugelblitz in the paperback version of 'Intercept UFO'.

"... another center, run by Speer and the S.S. Technical General Staff, had adopted the idea of employing "proximity radio interference" on the very much more delicate and hence more vulnerable electronic apparatuses of the American night fighters... Thus a highly original flying machine was born; it was circular and armored, more or less resembling the shell of a tortoise, and was powered by a special turbojet engine, also flat and circular, whose principles of operation recalled the well-known aeolipile of Hero, which generated a great halo of luminous flames. Hence it was named Feuerball (Fireball). It was unarmed and pilotless. Radio-controlled at the moment of take-off, it then automatically followed enemy aircraft, attracted by their exhaust flames, and approached close enough without collision to wreck their radio gear.The fiery halo around its perimeter - caused by a very rich fuel mixture - and the chemical additives that interrupted the flow of electricity by over-ionizing the atmosphere in the vicinity of the plane, generally around the wing tips or tail surfaces, subjected the H2S radar on the plane to the action of powerful electrostatic fields and electromagnetic impulses (the latter generated by large klystron radio tubes protected with special anti-shock and anti-heat armor). Since a metal arc carrying an oscillating current of the proper frequency - equal, that is, to the frequency used by the radar station - can cancel the blips (return signals from the target), the Feuerball was almost undetectable by the most powerful American radar of the time, despite its nighttime visibility. In addition, the builders of the device hoped - and their hopes were fulfilled - that when the Allied flyers, not knowing their nature or purpose, noticed that the fiery balls were apparently harmless, they would not fire on these enormous-looking (because of their large halos of fire) "inoffensive" devices for fear of being caught in some gigantic explosion. More than one, in fact, as they fearfully watched those huge lights close in, the American pilots thought that some German technician on the ground was perhaps getting ready to push a button and cause the Foo Fighter to explode. Project Feuerball was first constructed at the aeronautical establishment at Wiener Neustadt, with the help of the Fluggfunk Forschungsanstalt of Oberpfaddenhoffen (F.F.O.) in so far as radio control of the missile was concerned (but was it really a missile?) One person who saw the first short test flights of the device, without its electrical gear, says that "during the day it looked like a shining disc spinning on its axis and during the night it looked like a burning globe". Hermann Goring inspected the progress of the work a number of times, for he hoped, as in fact happened, that the mechanical principle could also later be used to produce an offensive weapon capable of revolutionizing the whole field of aerial warfare.When the Russians began to press on toward Austria, the construction of the first Fireballs was apparently continued by a number of underground plants in the Schwarzwald that were run by the Zeppelin Werke. The klystron tubes were supplied by the section of the Forschungsanstalt der Deutschen Reichpost (F.D.R.P.) of Aach bei Radolfzell on Lake Constance, and later also by the F.D.R.P. section of Gehlberg, whose products, however, were not as perfect as those delivered by the F.D.R.P., a fact that caused a number of Fireballs to be used simultaneously in formation." [13]

Expressly identifying the reports of aerial lights known in some parts of the US Air Force as 'foo fighters' as being evidence of the amazing, hitherto and hereafter unheard of secret weapon he called the Feuerball, Vesco sets out some more technical details:

"... The Foo Fighters did contain a strong explosive charge to destroy them in flight in case serious damage to the automatic guidance system made it impossible for the operators to control it... It seems, however, that during the time they were last seen, at least one American flyer opened fire on a Foo Fighter from a safe distance without succeeding in shooting it down, although he had it well within his sights. A convincing detail, this, especially in view of the fact that under the armored covering of the Foo Fighters there was a thin sheet of aluminum attached to it (but electrically insulated) that acted as a switch. When a bullet pierced the outer covering, contact between the two sheets was established and the consequent closing of the circuit that operated the maximum acceleration device of the craft (generally in a vertical direction) caused the Foo Fighter to fly off, taking it out of the range of further enemy fire." [14]

Now and then, Vesco includes references which support his claims, but he never does so with regard to the Feuerball. Let's analyse what he is actually saying here, and what sense (if any) it makes, because, thanks to Vesco, and Vesco alone, we know that this device designed to achieve “proximity radio interference” ; "was circular and armored, more or less resembling the shell of a tortoise" ; " was “enormous-looking” ; "during the day it looked like a shining disc spinning on its axis and during the night it looked like a burning globe" ; "was powered by a special turbojet engine, also flat and circular, which generated a great halo of luminous flames around its perimeter" ; "was unarmed and pilotless" ; "was radio-controlled at the moment of take-off" ; “automatically followed enemy aircraft, attracted by their exhaust flames" ; "approached close enough to the enemy aircraft, without collision, to wreck their radio gear" ; "carried large klystron radio tubes protected with special anti-shock and anti-heat armor" ; "could be used simultaneously in formation with other feuerballs"; "contained a strong explosive charge to destroy it in flight in case serious damage to the automatic guidance system made it impossible for the operators to control it" ; "had under its armored covering a thin sheet of aluminum attached to it (but electrically insulated) that acted as a switch. When a bullet pierced the outer covering, contact between the two sheets was established and the consequent closing of the circuit that operated the maximum acceleration device of the craft (generally in a vertical direction) caused it to fly off, taking it out of the range of further enemy fire* had chemical additives (in its fuel?) that interrupted the flow of electricity by over-ionizing the atmosphere in the vicinity of the plane, generally around the wing tips or tail surfaces, subjecting the H2S radar on the plane to the action of powerful electrostatic fields and electromagnetic impulses, making it almost undetectable by the most powerful American radar of the time".

I don’t want to labor the point here - we could go on for a long time making fun of this nonsense - but this is not a description of anything real. We aren’t told what its actual size was. We know that it had no wings, but that it did carry a powerful engine, two layers of metal to protect it and trigger its escape when hit, liquid fuel (lots of it, presumably), large klystron radio tubes protected with special anti-shock and anti-heat armor, a strong explosive charge, radio control equipment, and the absolutely mysterious devices which interfered with radio transmissions and made it nearly invisible to radar. It must, therefore, have been a dense, heavy, tortoise-shaped package.

We can only speculate how it developed the lift not only to reach heights of 10,000 to 25,000 feet (the range within which bombing raids usually took place), at speeds in excess of 200mph just to follow the bombers, and faster to accelerate away from them. It seems to have been radio-controlled at launch (however launch was achieved, let alone landing - were these devices meant to be landed and reused?), and also, because otherwise why would it contain “a strong explosive charge to destroy it in flight in case serious damage to the automatic guidance system made it impossible for the operators to control it” during flight. Between 2 and 5 miles up. In the dark. All these things just to follow aircrafts traveling at 200mph or so, apparently over considerable distances.

We are again left to speculate how the operators knew what they were controlling, what was happening to their particular feuerball at any given moment, or what form of radio control could, in 1943 - 1945, work that accurately over that distance.

Vesco does not address the question of how direction or speed of flight (if the motion of an armored wingless tortoise can be accurately described as flight) was controlled or determined.Other questions arise. How did the feuerball distinguish an enemy aircraft from a friendly one? How did it stop following the exhaust flames? Where did it go when it stopped? Why, when it was traveling laterally behind the engines of an enemy aircraft, attracted by its exhaust flames, did it suddenly depart “generally in a vertical direction” when hit? Which “chemical additives interrupted the flow of electricity by over-ionizing the atmosphere in the vicinity of the plane”? Just how did that work? How did it wreck the radio gear of enemy aircraft? Where? When? And how, for pity’s sake, Why? Could these devices ever have flown “in formation with other feuerballs”? Those of you who actually know about aeronautical engineering - as Vesco is supposed to have done - will be able to phrase these questions far better than I.

Perhaps Vesco himself would like to put his mind to answering them: I certainly can’t. At present, though I’m happy to be persuaded otherwise and to publish any hard evidence to that effect, my view is that the feuerball - which even Lusar had never heard of - is a fantasy. How this fantasy came to be published, I’m really not sure. But I wondered for a year or two how he had come to construct these pseudo-technical descriptions, which originate absolutely and only with Vesco.

Eventually I realized that what he had done was to look at the few reports of 'foo fighters' that he quotes - from the 'American Legion Magazine' and 'Amazing Stories', because he didn't have the benefit of the excellent investigative work done by Roberts or Lindell - and to build round those descriptions of the behavior of those lights, speculative technical explanations which he considered matched their reported performance. The only reasonable conclusion available to me is that Vesco - or one of his obviously careless editors or publishers - put these 'technical' descriptions in his book knowing that they had no factual basis. Passing time, the laziness of later authors, and the inexplicable readiness to believe in the wonders of Nazi intellect has gradually turned these dumb speculations into accepted facts. Unless strong and reliable evidence appears to the contrary, I think we can dismiss the feuerball - and its even less defined relative the kugelblitz, to which Vesco mistakenly gave the name of a flak panzer in development early in 1945 - as objects that never had any physical reality, and were probably never even designed. I think that we could, quite reasonably do this on technical and scientific grounds alone.

Yet Vesco continues to be highly influential, regarded as the leading authority of the Axis on secret technological developments in aeronautics. And, given his background, his experience and his authority, as summarized in the article in 'Argosy', what could be wrong with that? Had readers looked as far as the cover of the book from which these claims came, they would have found a substantially different version of Vesco's authority to that given in 'Argosy'.

This didn't say that he had, before WWII, "studied at the German Institute for Aerial Development." Or that, during the war, he had "worked with the Germans at the Fiat Lake Garda secret installations in Italy." Nor did it claim that "In the 1960s, he worked for the Italian Air Ministry of Defense as an undercover technical agent, investigating the UFO mystery." Instead, it said that"Renato Vesco was born in Arona, Italy, in 1924. A licensed pilot, in 1944 he commanded the technical section of the Italian Air Force. In 1946-47 he served in the Reparto Tecnico Caccia. Mr Vesco has been a senior member of the Italian Association of Aerotechnics since 1943, and is a student of aeronautical problems, particularly in the field of jet propulsion. He is a contributor to various aeronautical publications." [15]

There is clearly something very wrong here. Born in 1924, Vesco would have been 14 or 15 when WWII broke out. Surely, by that age, he had not attended the University of Rome and studied at the German Institute for Aerial Development? If he worked with the Germans at the Fiat Lake Garda secret installations in Italy, why didn't other authorities mention him? Would he really have "commanded the technical section of the Italian Air Force" at the age of 19 or 20, and "been a senior member of the Italian Association of Aerotechnics" at the age of 18 or 19? Surely, if he really were that remarkable, that important, his name would have appeared in the index or references of at least one of the countless books about the war that I've examined? Yet it doesn't. Who was Vesco, and what did he really know about wartime German aircraft? Where did his material come from?

Thanks to the highly-respected Italian researchers Maurizio Verga and Eduardo Russo, we now have clear answers to these questions: they both know Vesco personally. As Verga says:"Vesco exists, definitely!

He is an old man now, born in 1924. What's written by him by people like Al Pinto on the Internet and BBSs, as well as by Harbinson, is complete rubbish.

His introduction in the 1971 English translation of his first book is quite accurate, even though he was not commanding any "technical section" in the Italian Air Force. He was an aeronautical engineer and he got an interest in flying saucers (always seen as a secret development of man-made aircraft) in the late 40's. He published several articles (about German secret weapons, flying saucers, aviation and other subjects) since the very early '50s, soon becoming a real skeptic against the then-common idea of ETH visits (he commented and explained some sightings due to atmospheric or conventional phenomena). The manuscript of his first book was ready in 1956, but he stopped publication because he was to go abroad for a long time, due to his job. When he was back in the '60s, after collecting a huge quantity of additional stuff, he had hundreds and hundreds of written pages, later to be turned into his three books. Vesco claims his sources are BIOS and CIOS reports dating between 1945 and 1947, plus other military and intelligence documents, mostly British. He told me "important persons" (I guess high-ranking officers from the Italian Air Force and other foreign Air Forces) contributed to his research with information and documents still classified. He promised not to make public their names, even though he says that most of them are surely dead. I know he borrowed the BIOS/CIOS reports he quoted in his books from some Italian AF officers, through the library or libraries of the IAF itself. It is true he is the only aviation student who introduced the 'Feuerball' and 'Kugelblitz' devices, at least as far as I know. Please also note that 'Kugelblitz' was a name given to other German weapons, including a flak panzer.Vesco thinks the Schriever & Co stories simple bullshits, while Vril and Haunebu pure science-fiction." [16]

The deceptive biographical information provided by Vesco’s various publishers has succeeded in misleading many later writers and researchers, and in providing support for the false claims of others. Like all too many of those involved in the world of Nazi UFOs, Vesco gave an impression of authority, and that authority was accepted without challenge. It now appears that Vesco was a man with an interest in man-made UFOs, who was strongly opposed to the extra-terrestrial hypothesis (ETH), used to explain many early ‘flying saucer’ sightings. He provides, in the feuerball and kugelblitz accounts given in a book we now know was completed by 1956, what sounds like a convincing hypothesis for explaining away, without the involvement of spacemen and interplanetary travel, not only the 'foo fighter' reports of which he was aware, but also the very ‘physical’ sightings and photographs of the late ‘40s and early ‘50s. It is unfortunate that, in seeking to use his knowledge of aeronautical engineering to popularize what he apparently saw as a rational explanation for a body of irrational reports and interpretations, he only succeeded in co-founding the Nazi UFO mythos, a living and growing belief system which, for sheer irrationality and unpleasantness, came to far exceed anything from those innocent early days of ufology.

The book “German Secret Weapons of the Second World War” by Rudolf Lusar contains less than two pages of text in the section headed 'Flying Saucers', but its influence has been quite remarkable. Here, in full, is the text of that brief section: "Flying saucers have been whirling round the world since 1947, suddenly turning up here and there, soaring in and darting off again at unprecedented speed with flames encircling the rim of the saucer's disc. They have been located by radar, pursued by fighters and yet nobody has so far succeeded in establishing the existence of such a 'flying saucer' or managed to ram or shoot one down. The public, even the experts, are perplexed by an ostensible mystery or a technical miracle. But slowly the truth is coming out that even during the war German research workers and scientists made the first moves in the direction of these ''flying saucers''. They built and tested such near-miraculous contraptions. Experts and collaborators in this work confirm that the first projects, called "flying discs", were undertaken in 1941. The designs for these ''flying discs'' were drawn up by the German experts Schriever, Habermohl and Miethe, and the Italian Bellonzo.

Habernohl and Schriever chose a wide-surface ring which rotated round a fixed, cupola-shaped cockpit. The ring consisted of adjustable wing-discs which could be brought into appropriate position for the take-off' or horizontal flight respectively.

Miethe developed a discus-shaped plate of a diameter of 42m in which adjustable jets were inserted. Schriever and Habermohl, who worked in Prague, took off with the first "flying disc'' on February 14. 1945. Within three minutes they climbed to an altitude of I2,400m and reached a speed of 2,000 km/h in horizontal flight (!) It was intended ultimately to achieve speeds of 4,000 km/h. Extensive preliminary tests and research were necessary before construction could be started. Because of the great speed and the extraordinary heat stress, special heat-resisting materials had to be found. The development, which cost millions, was almost completed at the end of the war. The then existing models were destroyed but the plant in Breslau where Miethe worked fell into the hands of the Russians who took all the material and the experts to Siberia, where work on these "flying saucers" is being successfully continued. Schriever escaped from Prague in time; Habermohl, however, is probably in the Soviet Union, as nothing is known of his fate. The former designer Miethe is in the United States and, as far as is known, is building "flying saucers" for the United States and Canada at the A. V. Roe works. Years ago, the U.S. Air Force received orders not to fire at "flying saucers". This is an indication of the existence of American "flying saucers" which must not be endangered. The flying shapes so far observed are stated to have diameters of 16, 42, 45 and 75 m respectively and to reach speeds of up to 7,000 km/h. (?). In 1952 "flying saucers" were definitely established over Korea and Press reports said they were seen also during the NATO maneuvers in Alsace in the autumn of 1954. It can no longer be disputed that "flying saucers" exist. But the fact that their existence is still being denied, particularly in America, because United States developments have not progressed far enough to match the Soviet Union's, gives food for thought. There also seems some hesitation to recognize that these novel "flying saucers" are far superior to conventional aircraft - including modern turbo-jet machines - that they surpass their flying performance, load capacity and maneuverability and thereby make them obsolete." [17]

THE SAUCER-BUILDERS

I am grateful to the carefully-presented information provided by Maurizio Verga on the UFO Online website [18] for much of the material I have used, in this section, to try and answer the questions raised by Lusar.

Belluzzo

The earliest claim by an individual of the construction of a wartime flying disk was made by Guiseppe Belluzzo on or around March 27 1950, at a time when there had been a number of flying saucer reports in the Italian media, and European interest in the subject was high. On that date the Italian newspaper 'Il Mattino dell'Italia Centrale' published, with a vague and uninformative line-drawing as illustration, Belluzzo's apparent claim that circular aircraft had been developed since 1942, first in Italy, and then in Germany. The Italian idea was, supposedly, developed by the Germans in North-East Norway. The story also appeared in 'Il Corriere della Sera', 'La Nazione', and 'La Gazzetta del Popolo', and, in 'Il Corriere d'Informazione' of March 29-30 1950, with a comment by a General Ranza of the Italian Air Force dismissing Belluzzo's claims. It seems that Belluzzo did not claim that the disc flew during the war but that, by 1950, it had been sufficiently developed to deliver an atom bomb. This development was said to be some 10 meters wide, constructed with very light materials, and unmanned.We know something of Belluzzo's background and competence. Verga notes that he lived from November 25 1876 to May 21 1952, and was a turbine expert who published nearly fifty technical books. He was elected to the pre-war Fascist parliament, and from 1925 to 1928 served as Minister of the National Economy. I have traced a listing for a book of his - on turbines - full of technical drawings and translated into English in 1926. It is quite feasible that he could have contributed to a range of technological projects, but it seems that he never claimed to have built a flying disc, or to have named those who worked with the Germans in Norway. As in all such reports, no viable propulsion, launch, lift, flight, control or landing data is provided, and the criteria for publication seems to have been that the object should resemble the flying saucers which, as ever, had caught the media's attention. It is quite possible that a former Fascist minister would be happy to seek a little belated glory for his nation and his regime, but for all of the later interpretations of his role in the history of Nazi UFOs his claims were very limited, and so far as the assertion of a design for a reasonably-sized, unmanned flying disc was concerned, they are neither unique nor implausible. Belluzzo may, in part at least, have been telling the truth. It is worth noting that several later sources changed the name of the one individual who we can be sure actually had some relevant technical background from Belluzzo to Bellonzo.

Schreiver

News travels fast. Verga speculates that the Belluzzo story was also published in Germany, where it would certainly have been of great interest. Anyway, just days after Belluzzo's claims were first published, one Rudolph Schreiver made very similar claims in a general flying saucer article in 'Der Spiegel' for March 30 1950. He, too, claimed only that he developed blueprints, starting in 1942, which he believed later fell into the hands of the Americans or Germans. The article first introduced a wonderfully infeasible drawing/diagram which looked like something designed by a latter-day Otto Lilienthal and, of course, lacked any meaningful technical information. This regularly resurfaces (most recently as an amazing new and secret discovery on the Sightings website [19]) in the belief-oriented media. It is said that drawings of flying discs were found among Schreiver's possessions after he died in the late 1950s. It seems that Schriever described himself as "Flugkapitan Schriever", and that in March 1950 he was working for the US Forces in Germany, delivering copies of the newspaper 'Stars and Stripes' to army bases. Vladimir Terziski, that least reliable of sources, tries to find some glamour in this job, suggesting it was a cover for smuggling valuables of various kinds for some Nazi underground. Harbinson says that he purported that his 'flying disc' had been ready for testing in early 1944, but, with the advance of the Allies into Germany, the test had been cancelled, and the machine destroyed. Initially, though, he appears to have claimed little more than Belluzzo earlier the same week. Again, his involvement is just a side-bar to media coverage of a UFO flap. Again, it is others who have made entirely different claims for him. After all, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to be a lorry driver!

Miethe

There is an interview with a "Dr Richard Miethe", 'German aeronautical engineer' and 'ex-Colonel', in France-Soir for 7 June 1952. I only have a transcript, in French, but apparently the paper also published a photo of Dr Miethe in his swimming trunks. My French isn't great, but it seems that in the interview with Dr Miethe, conducted in Tel Aviv in June 1952, he says that he is 40 years old, gives specific details of his military background, and claims that he built a flying-saucer - the V7 which he built in 1944, the motors of which the Russians found at Breslau. He claims that from April 1943 he commanded a group of technicians of the 10th Reich Army, at Essen, Stettin and Dortmund, where the main research into German secret weapons was conducted. He doesn't name any of the other six engineers he says were involved, but says clearly that three are dead, and three are believed to have been taken by the Russians. Not unusually, the heart of the interview is his comments on some recent Brazilian flying saucer reports, and his opinion that if flying saucers are seen, then they will have been Russian-built from the knowledge of his three captured colleagues. But perhaps the most important point of all is that this Miethe seems to have had nothing to do with the USA, Operation Paperclip, or anything similar. The article says, I think, that a few days before the German surrender he left the front to join the Arab Legion based in Addis Ababa and Cairo, where a number of Hitler's senior officers had regrouped. At the time of the interview, in Tel Aviv, it seems that he had been ejected from Egypt, where he says he had been working with others to reconstruct the engine with which his earlier flying disc had been powered. The trigger for the expulsion may have been a breakdown in diplomatic relations between Germany and Egypt. As ever, we have no idea how the saucer flew or functioned, but more than two years later, in September 1952, the Italian magazine “Tempo” published some fuzzy, unconvincing photos of something looking not unlike a curling stone, on an angle against a featureless background (those featureless backgrounds are everywhere in 50s ufology). These, 'Tempo' claims, were taken over the Baltic on April 17, 1944, when the Miethe saucer was test-flown. The article persisted with the assertion that the Russians had obtained the secrets of these miraculous flying discs.

George Klein - February 1945

Harbinson notes that "alleged eye witness Georg Klein, a former engineer with Albert Speer's Ministry for Armament and Ammunition, told the press that he had actually seen the test flight of the Schriever disc, or one similar, near Prague on 14 February 1945."Redfern and Downes quote a CIA report dated 27 May 1954, which says "A German newspaper (not further identified) recently published an interview with George Klein, famous German engineer and aircraft expert, describing the experimental construction of 'flying saucers' carried out by him from 1941 to 1945. Klein stated that he was present when, in 1945, the first piloted 'flying saucer' took off and reached a speed of 1,3000 miles per hour within 3 minutes. The experiments resulted in three designs: one designed by Miethe was a disc-shaped aircraft, 135 feet in diameter, which did not rotate; another designed by Habermohl and Schriever, consisted of a large rotating ring, in the centre of which was a round, stationary cabin for the crew. When the Soviets occupied Prague, the Germans destroyed every trace of the 'flying saucer' project and nothing more was heard of Habermohl and his assistants." [20]

The German newspaper appears to have been 'Welt am Sonntag' for (different dates are given) April 25 or 26 1953. The article is titled "Erste 'Flugscheibe' flog 1945 in Prag", and there is a photo of 'George Klein' pointing at the same vague diagram that Lusar reprints.

HABERMOHL

It may be that there is another source of which I'm not aware, but 'Klaus' Habermohl seems to have made his first and last appearance in Klein's 1953 account. Real history and science reveal nothing of his existence or his achievements. He may well have lived nowhere but in the active brain of Herr Klein, of whose existence the worlds of science and engineering are similarly ill-informed.

The Lusar question - solved

The copy of “German Secret Weapons of the Second World War” that I read came from the British Library. It is worth noting that it didn't have a dust jacket, which may have contained additional information, but the text of the book itself gives no clue as to the author's background, his sources, or of any special authority or knowledge he might have had, or of access to information that was not already in the public domain. To afford some impression of authority, others have given Lusar various different jobs and titles by various different commentators, but as with so many others in the mythos, there is no objective evidence to verify any of them. The simple fact is that all the 'factual' content of Lusar's section about 'flying saucers' came from the content of the newspaper comments by Belluzzo, Schriever and Klein. He seems to have been aware of the “Tempo” article including the photos of the 'Miethe saucer', but not of the earlier interview with Miethe. He has Miethe as a builder of saucers, but says he is in Canada, and not in Egypt or Israel. He ignores the fact that neither Belluzzo nor Schriever - initially at least with regard to the latter - claimed that discs had been built or flown. Instead, he adds Klein's claims of construction and flight to the names and supposed background of Belluzzo and Schriever and, as he had seen the photos of Miethe's disc in Tempo, purports that Miethe's design flew, too. Why he excluded Klein's name from “Secret Weapons...” is not clear, but because he wasn't named, he never achieved the fame of the others. Even Habermohl, whose name was neither German nor Italian, and who probably never existed at all in the context of the development of flying discs, has achieved greater fame than George Klein. Perhaps we can, in future, acknowledge the vital, perhaps paramount part he played in building the Nazi UFO mythos. After all, it was Klein who decided that the high-performance wartime discs actually flew: Lusar only gave Klein's decision lasting, international publicity.Very few writers have made clear that Lusar actually wrote his explanation of German disc developments in the context of worldwide flying saucer reports. Indeed, little emphasis has been placed on the fact that all of the material published prior to Lusar’s book only appeared in that context, providing a relatively local angle on reports of flying saucers furthers a field. Given the total absence of tangible, objective, contemporary evidence to support any of Lusar's assertions, I think we can safely say that Nazi UFOs did not lead to any of the reports of flying saucers from 1947 onwards. It would be far more accurate to say that the flying saucer craze led to the making of increasingly false and hollow claims about the existence, and achievements, of Nazi UFOs.Finally, the question of why Vesco, published in 1969, didn't mention Lusar or the Saucer Builders. The answer seems to be that because Vesco’s first book (the only one of interest to us here) was completed in 1956, before the earliest version of Lusar’s book appeared, and because Lusar’s book was published long before the actual publication of Vesco’s first book in 1969, we shouldn’t be surprised that their two theories of German flying saucers are entirely exclusive: Lusar doesn’t mention Vesco’s feuerball and kugelblitz, and Vesco has clearly never heard of Lusar’s SMBH disk. There's no mystery here. There just isn’t anything at all!

SF author W. A. Harbinson has written a series of chunky paperbacks based on the Nazi UFO mythos. The series is run under the overall title Projekt Saucer, the key titles relating to WWII being Inception and Genesis [21].

I find his writing interesting and often quite exciting, though the accounts of violence and cold Nazi ruthlessness can be a little strong for my taste. Were these books sold only as fiction, they'd be of little interest to us here. However, not only do the novels include an 'Author's Note' which suggests that the author's own research has established a factual basis to his 'fiction', but he has also published a non-fiction book , Projekt UFO. The blurb on the back says "For nearly half a century, ever since the first UFO sightings of June 1947, it has been assumed that flying saucers, if they exist at all, are of extraterrestrial origin. Projekt UFO: The Case for Man-Made Flying Saucers proves conclusively that this is not so." [22]

The book extends well beyond the end of WWII, and for the most part it deals with the usual post-war questions regarding the reality of UFO sightings, the development of terrestrial technologies, and key cases, such as Socorro. It also introduces - in Harbinson's Foreword - the 'Brisant' document, one of the truly great ufological red herrings"

In May 1978, at Stand 111 in a scientific exhibition in the Hanover Messe Hall, some gentlemen were giving away what at first sight appeared to be an orthodox scientific newspaper called Brisant. The paper contained two seemingly unrelated articles: one on the scientific and ecological value of the Antarctic, the other about a German World War II flying saucer construction project, named 'Projekt Saucer'. The first article, written from a neo-Nazi standpoint, included a suggestion that West Germany should claim back their right to Queen Maud Land in the Antarctic, which the Nazis stole from the Norwegians during World War II and renamed Neu Schwabenland. The second article, which asserted that the German scientists were the first, but not the only ones, to construct highly advanced saucer-shaped aircraft, was accompanied by reproductions of technical drawings 6f a World War II flying saucer. The unnamed author failed to name the designer of the flying saucer and claimed that the drawings had been altered by the West German government to render them 'safe' for publication. Adding weight to his claim, he also pointed out that during World War II all such inventions, whether civilian or military, would have been submitted to the nearest patent office where, under paragraphs 30a and 99 of the Patent-und Straffezetsbuch, they would have been routinely classified as 'secret.' After being confiscated and passed on to one of Himmler's many 55 research establishments, at the end of the war they would perhaps have disappeared into secret Soviet files, or into equally secret British and US files, or lost with 'missing' German scientists and SS troops. The rest of the article was just as intriguing. It claimed that throughout the course of World War II the Germans sent ships and planes to Queen Maud Land, or Neu Schwabenland, in the Antarctic, with equipment for massive underground complexes, similar to those they had constructed in Thuringia and the Harz Mountains in Germany. It said that at the end of the war some of the scientists and engineers who had worked on Projekt Saucer escaped from Germany by submarine and ended up in an underground base in the Antarctic, where they continued to construct even more advanced flying saucers, and that the Americans and Soviets, upon learning about this, then used their captured German scientists and technical papers for the secret construction of their own flying saucers." [23]

Mark Ian Birdsall, in his paper "The Ultimate Solution" ,asserts that it was Harbinson himself who found 'Brisant', though Harbinson doesn't make that claim "Harbinson while researching 'Genesis' paid a visit to the semi-Northern city of Hannover in the late 70's. It was here that he reportedly attended a science lecture exhibition at the 'Hannover Messe Hall'. Whilst looking around the hall, Harbinson arrived at stand number 111, it was here that he was handed a magazine called 'Brisant'." [24]

I wrote to Harbinson via his publishers to ask for further information about 'Brisant', because it is clearly - if it ever actually existed - a key document in the development of the mythos. Henry Stephens of the German Research Project (see below) offers copies of what he says are some pages, and claims that the originals of 'Brisant' were lost by Harbinson's publishers: so I asked about that, too. Unfortunately, I received no response, so the authority and provenance of 'Brisant' remain unknown.

Harbinson seems to have been inspired by the content of the paper, despite the implausibility of the bit about the patent office and the plans having been "altered by the West German government to render them 'safe' for publication". That sounds more like an excuse for the technical infeasibility which afflicts every diagram of discs in the mythos. Undeterred, Harbinson continues: "This theory would explain why, even before glasnost, all the nations of the world - even the Soviets and the Americans - had cooperated with one another only in the Antarctic. In short, the flying saucers seen by so many people since World War II are not extraterrestrial space-craft, but are, in fact, extraordinarily advanced, top secret, man-made machines. They come from right here on Earth… During my two years of intensive research, I uncovered written and photographic evidence which proved beyond doubt that Nazi Germany had in fact initiated a research program for the development of saucer-shaped aircraft. I found that at the close of the war seasoned Allied pilots were submitting official reports about harassment by 'balls of fire' that tailed them and made their aircraft and radar mal-function. In addition, one of the leading members of Germany's Projekt Saucer development team disappeared into the Soviet Union and another went to work with German rocket expert, Wernher von Braun, for NASA in the United States … My research also uncovered articles about man-made flying saucers, including the German Kugelblitz and the Canadian AVRO-Car prototype published not only by the 'lunatic' fringe but by highly respected aeronautical magazines such as Lufthahrt International, the Royal Air Force Flying Review, and the US News and World Report. So, flying saucers, whether primitive or highly advanced, were certainly constructed in Nazi Germany and post-war Canada, in the latter case with the aid of the United States … In 1980, my 615-page novel, Genesis, based on a mass of research material, including that mentioned above, was published. It became a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, eventually becoming a 'cult' book, and is still in print ten years after its publication..."

Reviewing the novel on its publication in the United States, Publishers Weekly said: 'Harbinson has drawn so heavily on factual material and integrated it so well into the text that the book begins to read like non-fiction...' [25]

That Publishers Weekly was so impressed, says much for the quality of Harbinson's writing, but little for his research. In his chapter 'Technology and Sightings of World War II' we find a familiar statement, with a few added details: "Renato Vesco was an aircraft engineer specializing in aerospace and ramjet developments. Educated before World War II at the University of Rome, he then studied aeronautical engineering at the German Institute for Aerial Development. During the war, he was sent to work with the Germans at Fiat's immense underground installations at Lake Garda, near Limone in northern Italy, where he helped in the production of aeronautical devices that were tested at the Hermann Goering Institute of Riva del Garda. After the war, in the 1960s. Vesco worked for the Italian Air Ministry of Defence as an undercover technical agent, investigating the UFO phenomenon." [26]

Harbinson accepts Vesco's claims without further ado, and then goes on, in his chapter 'Division of the Scientific Spoils of War', to accept Lusar, too, saying: An article about 'Projekt Saucer' was later published in the indispensable volume, German Secret Weapons of the Second World War (1959) by Major Rudolph Lusar, and included reproductions of the flying saucer drawings of Schriever and Miethe." [27]

Harbinson sets out more of Lusar's material, and then reports, helpfully, some research of his own:"Schriever's recollection of the test flight date is contradicted in certain details by alleged eye witness Georg Klein, a former engineer with Albert Speer's Ministry for Armament and Ammunition, who told the press that he had actually seen the test flight of the Schriever disc, or one similar, near Prague on 14 February 1945. A certain doubt may be cast on Klein's date, since according to the War Diary of the 8th Air Fleet, 14 February 1945 was a day of low cloud, rain, snow and generally poor visibility - hardly the conditions for the testing of a revolutionary new kind of aircraft…"One of those who may have been involved in the actual Projekt Saucer is Heinrich Fleischner, of Dasing, Augsburg in the Federal German Republic. Interviewed for the 2 May 1980 edition of Neue Presse magazine, Fleischner, who was then seventy-six, claimed that he had been a technical consultant on a jet-propelled, disc-shaped aircraft that had been constructed by a team of technicians in Peenemunde, though the parts had been built in many other places. According to Fleischner, Hermann Goering had been the patron' of the aircraft and had planned to use it as a courier plane. At the end of the war, the Wehrmacht destroyed most of the plans and a few of the 'unimportant' drawings fell into the hands of the Russians. Hermann Klaas, from Muhlheim, West Germany, a bio-technician specializing in aerodynamic phenomena, was another who claimed to have worked on various remote-controlled models for disc-shaped aircraft during World War II. The most common model was 2.4 metres in diameter and propelled by an electro-engine supplied by the Luftwaffe. According to Klaas, these models were similar to those then being developed by Schriever, Habermohl, Miethe, and Belluzzo in Bohmen (Czechoslovakia) and Breslau (now Wrocklaw, Poland). [28]

Overall, bearing in mind the quality of most of his sources, Harbinson's research is better than most: it takes a while to realize that the world of ufology is full of dreams, misapprehensions and outright lies. For me, though, why the Germans would have called their enterprise 'Projekt Saucer' is a mystery in itself. The drawings produced during the 1950s, and even in the hypothetical 'Brisant', in no way resemble saucers, 'saucer' is not a German word, and the term 'flying saucers' didn't appear until 1947 when a journalist mistook Kenneth Arnold's description of the way unidentified objects moved in the air over the Cascade Mountains for a description of what they looked like.

Maybe this is what they call "artistic license", fine for fiction, but distinctly out of place if it's conveyed as the truth. I have no hesitation in concluding that there was no 'Projekt Saucer' in the real world, and that Harbinson has, presumably quite inadvertently, made a major contribution to the development of the mythos.

Vladimir Terziski

One of the few references that I haven't managed to find before writing this piece is a book, probably from 1993, called Close Encounters of the Kugelblitz Kind, by Vladimir Terziski.

Terziski first appeared in or around that year, claiming to be the "President, American Academy of Dissident Sciences, 10970 Ashton Ave. # 310, Los Angeles, CA 90024, USA.

When I wrote to the Academy asking for further information, my letter was returned, the Academy not being known at the address. He also claims that he is "a Bulgarian born engineer and physicist, graduated Cum Laude from the Master of Science program of Tokai University in Tokyo in 1980. Served as a solar energy researcher, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, before immigrating to the US in 1984." [29]

Terziski seems - with a little help from Al Bielek of the completely loopy 'Montauk Project', who was co-founder of the Academy - to have introduced a completely new strand of 'Nazi UFO' material. It also appears in one of the series of Montauk Project books. It is so outrageously unbelievable, implausible, and devoid of supporting evidence that it has proved to be very popular among those who believe in an Illuminati conspiracy, the New World Order, and the links between our rulers and Reptilian Aliens.

The last trace I've found of Terziski is as speaker at a 'patriot' meeting in 1998, but his influence lives on, creating an alternative, revised history in which the Nazis won in the end. Terziski describes Renato Vesco as "the Italian Wernher von Braun, the research scientist in charge of the Italian Air Force and Space Research and Development program during the war", which says much for the thoroughness of his research. But then, research isn't really what Terziski is (or was) about.

Brad Steiger quotes him as telling of: "an 'alien tutor race' that secretly began cooperating with certain German scientists in the late 1920s in underground bases and began to introduce their concepts of philosophical, cultural, and technological progress" . . "(he) maintains that antigravity research began in the 1920s with the first hybrid antigravity circular craft, the RFZ-1, constructed by the secret Vril society. In 1942-43 a series of antigravity machines culminated in the giant 350-foot-long, cigar-shaped Andromeda space station, which was constructed in old Zeppelin hangars near Berlin by E4, the research and development arm of the SS." [30]

He is also quoted (by Branton - see below) as making comments about the continued use of slave labor by the 'pure-bred Aryan S.S.' who live underground, conducting genetic experiments continuing those of WW2, in pursuance of the "Germans-Nazis-Illuminati pact", which was established "with the serpent races long years before the American 'secret/conventional' hybrid government had done so." [31]

Nor has Terziski's account of the trips to the Moon or Mars proved as unbelievable as we might hope. He says:"The Germans landed on the Moon as early as probably 1942, utilizing their larger exo-atmospheric rocket saucers of the Miethe and Schriever type. The Miethe rocket craft was built in diameters of 15 and 50 meters, and the Schriever Walter turbine powered craft was designed as an interplanetary exploration vehicle. It had a diameter of 60 meters, had 10 stories of crew compartments, and stood 45 meters high... Ever since their first day of landing on the Moon, the Germans started boring and tunneling under the surface, and by the end of the war there was a small Nazi research base on the Moon. The free energy tachyon drive craft of the Hanebu-1 and 2 type were used after 1944 to haul people," materiel and the first robots to the construction site on the Moon. When Russians and Americans secretly landed jointly on the Moon in the early fifties with their own saucers, they spent their first night there as guests of the ... Nazi underground base...

According to the authors of the underground German documentary movie from the Thule society (presumably 'UFO Secrets of the Third Reich', which Terziski is alleged to have produced himself - KM), the only produced craft of the Hanebu - 3 type - the 74 meter diameter naval warfare dreadnought - was chosen for the most courageous mission of this whole century - the trip to Mars. The craft was of saucer shape, had the bigger Andromeda tachyon drives, and was armed with four triple gun turrets of large naval caliber (three inverted upside down and attached to the underside of the craft, and the fourth on top of the crew compartments)… A volunteer suicide crew of Germans and Japanese was chosen, because everybody knew that this journey was a one-way journey with no return. The large intensity of the electro-magnetogravitic fields and the inferior quality of the metal alloys used then for the structural elements of the drive was causing the metal to fatigue and get very brittle only after a few months of work of the drive. The flight to Mars departed from Germany one month before the war ended - in April 1945 . . The radio message with the mixed news was received by the German underground space control center in Neu Schwabenland and by their research base on the Moon." [32]

By March 2000, the Vril and Hanebu craft had become real in many minds, not least that of the author of William Bacon's Home Page/Nordic Saucer Report. In addition to the Feuerball and Kugelblitz, and assorted Schreiver, Belluzzo, Miethe and Habermohl creations, he included in his list, 'Reported German Disc Aircraft Types January 28, 2000 (updated to March 2000)

Electrogravitic Craft Based on Currently Unknown Physics
1. Original Vril Society Craft. Said to be a "time machine", it underwent two years of experiment. Dismantled early in 1924 (!) and shipped to Augsburg. The design was said to have been based on channeled information from a supposed planet orbiting the star Aldebaran (Alpha Tauri). Disposition unknown

2. RFZ-1 (RFZ=runflugzeug=round aircraft). Disc created in mid 1934 by Vril Society. Crashed from low altitude on first test.

3. RFZ-2. Completed at the end of 1934 by the Vril Society. length was 16 feet, and it was the first with "magnetic field impulse steering". It was operational in 1940 as seen in a photograph taken over an ocean, said to be the South Atlantic.

4. RFZ-4. A test craft driven by propeller to study the aerodynamics of a disc-shaped craft. associated with Schutzstaffel (SS) unit E4.

5. RFZ-5. Also known as Hanebu I (note: nebel=haze or smoke). Flew 08/1939. Diameter 83 feet. Photograph exists, said to have been taken over Prague. With a crew of eight, said to have reached 12,000 mph and upper atmosphere. Claimed to have been equipped with two laser (apparent anachronism) guns.

6. RFZ-6 (Hanebu II). Work began before the end of 1942. Various shapes, 85 feet to 100 feet in diameter and 30 to 36 feet high, were produced. A 3200 knot speed is assigned, making for near-space capability. One plan shows a Donar Ray Gun (!) in a turret on the underside. Some had sleeping quarters. a deep-space variant was said to be 234 feet in diameter. At least one side-view drawing with data survives and it bears an uncanny resemblance to an orthographic projection which has been made from the famous Adamski and Darbishire UFO photographs.

7. Hanebu III. An SS E4-planned deep-space disc craft. Various photographs show design variations. Over 400 feet in diameter. A side view drawing with data survives. Reportedly, U.S. found none. A Haunebu IV also is reported.

8. Andromeda Project A large craft planned by SS E4 for interstellar travel, Over 100 ton capacity. 360 feet long.

Other Crafts

These types may have combined what we now consider known and unknown physics. The Vril craft were of 20 to 40 feet in diameter:

1. RFZ7T. Work began in 1942 on a discus craft by Miethe, Joined by Bellonzo then Schreiver and Habermohl. A "reliable, functional light craft".

2. Vril I. A 36 foot single seat craft, which was armed and tested before the end of 1942. Flew 7000 mph from its Brandenburg test site. Could instantly change direction.

3. Vril II. An air-water motor in the center of the craft spun rapidly like a tornado, thus according to Schauberger's implosion principle, neutralizing gravity, as with the Vril I craft. diameter also similar. Vril VII and Vril IX also reported.

4. V7. Possibly numbered as one of theVergeltungswaffen(retaliation weapons). Fitted with 12 BMW jet engines. Reached 78,000 feet, later 80,000 feet on first tests over the Baltic sea, 04/17/1945. A spherical glass like-dome surrounded by a rotating wing of turbine blades." [33]

This presentation of completely fictitious data as historical and technical data makes it that much more credible, but Bacon is by no means the most extreme of believers.

BRANTON

The imaginary history invented or presented (or both) by Terziski has itself been carried forward by others, for reasons that continue to baffle me. Probably the most high-profile, and perhaps the most productive of these is 'Branton', whose 'Omega Files' material in various areas of conspiracy and that peculiar neo-fascism that exists among 'patriots' who also believe in the intervention of alien beings is all too easy to find on the Net.

I had been wondering who Branton was, and an answer seems to have come recently from an Alan DeWalton, under the title 'Branton's Testimony': "Branton is a guy who has been involved in abductions since he was a child [generational family stuff], many of which involved Alien/CIA agendas in the underground bases. He was "programmed" as an alternate personality or a “sleeper agent” by the CIA and has interacted with underground bases and especially Dulce while in the altered state of consciousness.

Many abductees will tell you that during abductions their "conscious mind" seems to switch off and another "personality" that is programmed by the alien agenda kicks in. These alternate identities are individuals in a sense, but also are linked to the alien collective which is how Branton gets much of his information, literally "hacking the hive"... having spent years being manipulated by the alien group-mind he has now turned it around with God's help and is using it as a weapon against them, although you'll never know how painful it has been for him... a literal hell... but having taken up the "cross" as his sword and shield he is prevailing against the "beast", just like "Saint" George the Dragon slayer of old you might say. Branton was "saved" [born again] in 1985 and "Branton the alter ego" is apparently still involved with the underground scenarios on a nocturnal basis, trying to put together a literal "underground resistance" movement, both in the underground bases and above. This resistance movement involves freedom fighter forces within certain military bases, several "hybrids" [many his own 'kids'], Nordics, Telosians, several of "the orange" group, and even some of the Sasquatch type aliens..." [34]

These biographical details may make Branton's willingness to accept Terziski's claims as true. Branton reports: "Although it may sound rather incredible, Terziski alleges that he possesses confirming information such as the "... first video expose of Nazi UFOs. German/Japanese saucer landings on the moon and Mars in 1944-46, Marconi group's landing on Mars in 1956... video footage of Nazi interplanetary dreadnoughts and of secret Soviet-American saucer landing on Mars." Although many of the 'Greys' have been described as being of neo-saurioid configuration, other 'Greys' pose a different mystery as to their origin and seem to be more of a bio-synthetic or 'manufactured' configuration.

Vladimir Terziski suggests that some of these greys may be "...a product of the US government's biogenetic cyborg R&D program." [35]

The Omega File titled 'Nazi History' is another example of the presentation of the incredible as if it were fact. This is just an excerpt, and I have excised some of the rambling about rich industrialists and the Illuminati:

370000 - Germans recover crashed disk. Work begins on German disk program based on recovered 'alien' technology.
380000 - Standard [EXXON] Oil sends I.G. Farben 500 tons of lead additives for gasoline.
390000 - Germans working on mini-television for bomb / rocket guidance.
390901 - Germany invades Poland.
390901 - Soviets invade Poland.
410000 - Germans test Schriever-Habermohl Model I prototype flying disk or lenticular aircraft Model II in 1944.
410600 - Germany successfully tests Schriever disk design.
410800 - I.G. Farben tests Zyklon B gas.
420000 - German 'fireballs' harass allied pilots and aircraft.
420225 - [German?] UFOs appear over Los Angeles. 1,430 rounds fired against them. Some on the ground killed or wounded by unexploded anti-aircraft shells.

430000 - CIA's Allen Dulles [Bavarian Illuminati] cuts a deal with Nazi SS intelligence. This would eventually lead to a massive infiltration of the CIA by Nazi S.S. agents, who would in turn begin a global program of toppling third world governments and replacing them with their own fascist puppet dictatorships. Germans complete research on alloy of magnesium and aluminum.
440000 - OSS agent Douglas Bazata receives contract on General George Patton's life. Feuerball aircraft constructed at aeronautical factory at Wiener Neustadt. Germans test Bellonzo-Schriever-Meithe designs based on Coanda disk.
440300 - Wilson* replaces German saucer [rotor] propulsion with advanced jet propulsion. *('Wilson' is presumably the fictional character in the 'Project Saucer' novels of W. A. Harbinson, who has somehow crossed over into Branton's version of reality)
441123 - Allied pilots run into 'fireballs' over Strasbourg.
450000 - Both L.F.A. at Volkenrode and center at Guidonia working on disk craft. Soviets gain some German disk data [and apprehend?] Dr. Guenther Bock. United States captures some German disk technology and scientists. British technical advisor discovers German plans for advanced lenticular aircraft.
450200 - Kugelblitz [crew-carrying Fireball] test flown in Thuringia, reached speeds of 1250 mph.
450216 - Kugelblitz tested near Kahla, disk-shaped, 1250 mph. Germans begin to transfer saucer projects to South Polar underground bases.
450223 - Perfected engines removed from Kugelblitz and sent to polar base. Kugelblitz, minus engines, blown up by SS personnel to prevent the design from falling into the hands of the Allies.
450225 - Workers at Kahla complex brought to Buchenwald and gassed so as not to reveal secret of Nazi disk projects. Kahla closed. Slavian slave-laborers from various underground facilities also taken to Karshagan and other camps and killed.
450400 - General Hans Kammler disappears from Germany
.450425 - Gen. Kammler joins Wilson and Gen. Nebe on U-977 bound for South Pole.
450507 - Germany 'surrenders'.
460000 - America turns 2/3rds of Germany's aircraft manufacturing over to Soviets. Nazis help form CIA operations division with Rockefeller assistance. Imported SS intelligence officers help form Radio Liberty and Voice of America. Gen. Hoyt Vandenburg becomes director of CIA. U.S. and Canada begin joint disk development programs in underground plants.
460726 - Truman signs National Military Establishment Act. Creates NSC, CIA
.470000 - CIA Mind-Control drug project begins at Bethesda Naval Hospital. German disks start flyovers over United States. National Security Act. CIA begins to monitor UFOs.
470100 - Operation Highjump begins at South Pole to find the German Bases. Military Commander Admiral Richard E. Byrd leads 4000 troops in reconnaissance over Antarctica, and encounters resistance from 'Aryan' [German/Austrian] saucer fleets. Apparent casualties on both sides. [36]

I've begun to be accustomed to dealing with extreme beliefs and outlooks, without ever getting immured to the moral and intellectual desert that inevitably underpins them. Yet there is something almost uniquely twisted about the statement, "Workers at Kahla complex brought to Buchenwald and gassed so as not to reveal secret of Nazi disk projects." In that there were no construction projects for Nazi discs, there were no slave workers building Nazi discs, and therefore no workers could have been taken to Buchenwald and gassed for the reasons Branton gives.

He also asserts that huge numbers of slave workers were taken to build the Nazi bases under the South Pole. What sort of need is fulfilled by simply making up these demented distortions of the miserable truths of the Holocaust is quite beyond my understanding. If we actively resist no other element of the Nazi UFO mythos, perhaps we can at least make our rejection of this one as obvious, and effective, as is possible. Other 'false histories' follow.

Project Uranus

In another careful analysis of a dubious element of UFO history, Andy Roberts says:"We have at least one outright hoax in foo-fighter lore. For years rumours had been flying round that the Germans had been fully aware of the foo-fighter phenomenon and that they had a special study group formed to look into the problem under the name of "Project Uranus", backed by a shadowy group by the name of Sonderburo 13.

This was first detailed in La Livres Noir De Soucoupes Volantes (The Black Book of Flying Saucers - 1970) by French ufologist Henry Durrant. The rumour spread in Europe and eventually took physical form in the English language in Tim Good's acclaimed book Above Top Secret where it is used to help substantiate further vague rumours of an Anglo/American foo-fighter study. Good had not checked his facts and had in fact just copied the information direct from Durrant's book. When I checked this out with Durrant he informed me that the whole "Project Uranus" affair was a hoax which he had inserted in his book precisely to see who would copy it without checking. The hoax apparently had been revealed in France some years before but hadn't percolated its way through to English speaking ufologists. Perhaps other foo hoaxes await discovery." [37]

The 'Schweinfurt Raid'

This tale involves, well, little flying saucers, in a B-17 raid on October 14 1943, aimed at the ball-bearing factories at Schweinfurt in Germany. It was publicized by popular US author Frank Edwards in Flying Saucers - Here and Now [38] in 1967, but I understand that the original glamorized version comes from one Martin Caidin, in his book Black Thursday, published in 1960. Caidin reports that:"During the bomb run of several groups, starting at about the time the Fortresses approached the Initial Point, there occurred one of the most baffling incidents of World War II, and an enigma that to this day defies all explanation." "As the bombers of the 384th Group swung into the final bomb run after passing the Initial Point, the fighter attacks fell off. This point is vital, and pilots were queried extensively, as were other crew members, as to the position at that time of the German fighter planes. Every man interrogated was firm in his statement that "at the time there were no enemy aircraft above." "At this moment the pilots and top turret gunners, as well as several crewmen in the Plexiglas noses of the bombers, reported a cluster of discs in the path of the 384th's formation and closing with the bombers. The startled exclamations focused attention on the phenomenon and the crews talked back and forth, discussing and confirming the astonishing sight before them." "The discs in the cluster were agreed upon as being silver colored, about one inch thick and three inches in diameter. They were easily seen by the B-17 crewmen, gliding down slowly in a very uniform cluster." "And then the `impossible' happened. B-17 Number 026 closed rapidly with a number of discs; the pilot attempted to evade an imminent collision with the objects, but was unsuccessful in his maneuver. He reported at the intelligence debriefing that his right wing "went directly through a cluster with absolutely no effect on engines or plane surface." "The intelligence officers pressed their questioning, and the pilot stated further that one of the discs was heard to strike the tail assembly of his B-17, but that neither he nor any member of the crew heard or witnessed an explosion." "He further explained that about twenty feet from the discs the pilots sighted a mass of black debris of varying sizes of clusters of three by four feet." "The SECRET report added: `Also observed two other A/C flying through silver discs with no apparent damage. Observed discs and debris two other times but could not determine where it came from." "No further information on this baffling incident has been uncovered, with the exception that such discs were observed by pilots and crew on missions prior to, and after, Mission 115 of October 14, 1943." [39]

Caidin's account is footnoted "1 Memorandum of October 24, 1943, from Major E.R.T. Holmes, F.L.O., 1st Bombardment Division, Reference FLO/IBW/REP/126, to M.I.15, War Office, Whitehall, London, SW (copy to Colonel E.W. Thomson, A-2, Pinetree)", but Andy Roberts actively investigated the reference, and reports that:

"a letter to the M.O.D at their Air Historical Branch 5 came to nothing, suggesting that either of the documents may be held at the Public Records Office at Kew, London. A professional researcher was dispatched to try to find the document. She searched all relevant Air Force records available (some are still bound by various `rules' with embargoes on viewing of up to 100 years) but could find nothing; despite the help of staff there and noting that "the reference FLO etc. does not correspond with any references at the record office.

In the USA, Dennis Stacy (then MUFON UFO Journal editor) had taken an interest in the case and followed up several leads, aided by the Freedom of Information Act. Firstly the A.F. Historical Research centre at Maxwell AFB searched their 8th A.F. files but could come across no documentary record of the event (interestingly enough I tried the same source and whilst they gave me squadron histories of the 415th Night Fighter squadron and their documented foo-fighter sightings, they could provide nothing on the Schweinfurt raid -- odd if the Schweinfurt events were real). The National Archives (Washington) searched their files but drew a blank.

A letter written to French researcher J. M. Bigorne from the National Archives stated "A search in records of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS), European War, Target Damage File, 11a (2606), Schweinfurt, failed to disclose any documentation or information regarding little flying discs by B-17 pilots." All this presents us with a quandary. If the Archives are quite free about some foo-fighter info why, if it exists at all, should they be that bothered about concealing the Schweinfurt material? So far three independent researchers over the past ten years have had the same answer -- none of the flight records for that day record the event in Caidin's book. As I have seen other pilots' logs which mention unusual UFO-type sightings during missions it would be inconceivable for at least a few aircrew on that raid to have mentioned it even in passing - especially as in this case it was obviously something of an item at de-briefing.

Letters in numerous aircrew magazines (UK & US) requesting info on the raid were placed and despite many replies no-one knew anything. Aviation writers Martin Middlebrook and Chaz Bowyer who have written many highly detailed books about the air war, and have interviewed thousands of aircrew, wrote to say they had never heard of the incident, despite having had foo-fighters mentioned to them in other contexts. Dennis Stacy contacted the 384th Bombing Group survivors association and with no account of the UFO sighting forthcoming from them was put onto General Theodore Ross Milton who led the raid that day and went in first with the 91st Group Formation. He wrote; "I don't recall seeing black discs or hearing about any strange phenomena from any of my group." [40]Roberts and Stacy pursued the source further:Martin Caidin, originator of the rumour also presents problems. His book Black Thursday was first published in 1960 and yet quotes an alleged SECRET report. How did he get hold of it then and why has it not been seen since? As for Caidin himself, several people have tried to get in touch with him without success.

Both I and (then) MUFON Journal editor Dennis Stacy have tried to track him down via his publishers and a UFO magazine he has written for, but to no avail. He last appeared in the dodgy US magazine UFO Universe where he was featured on the front page as having 'chased bogies at 20,000 feet,' (an astonishing spectacle no doubt!), but whilst the article gave details of UFOs he'd seen post-WWII, government film of UFOs, cover-ups, and you name it (along with much promotion for his many books, including UFO based novels) the Schweinfurt raid was never mentioned. Funny that, really." [41]

However, with the terrier-like tenacity for which he is renowned, Roberts kept searching, and in September 2000 finally found, in the Records Office at Kew the document which Caidin obviously based his account on. It reads as follows. All spelling and punctuation is in the original. The file in which the document can be found is: AIR 40/464. At the top right of the document is a rubber stamp giving details of circulation to:

1. Col Kingman Douglas

2. A.I.3. ? (W/Cdr Smith)

3. A.I. 2. ? (W/Cdr Heath)

(Author's note: the ? refers to a squiggle or letter I cannot decipher, although it could well be 'to'. Also the background of the stamp on which the above was written says:"Received 17 Oct 1943""Copies sent to A.I.8 (USA))

The rest of the document is as follows:

EKG. TELEGRAM EN CLAIR 4112Recd. AMCS. 171129a hrs Oct.43

To- OIAWW, OIAJX, OISHL, HBC, AMY.

From - OIPNT

IMPORTANT - CONFIDENTIAL8 BC 0-1079-E

Annex to Intelligence Report Mission Shweinfurt 16 October 1943

306 Group report a partially unexploded 20mm shell imbedded above the panel in the cockpit of A/C number 412 bearing the following figures 19K43. The Group Ordnance Officer believes the steel composing the shell is of inferior grade. 348th Group reports a cluster of disks observed in the path of the formation near Schweinfurt, at the time there were no E/A above. Discs were described as silver colored - one inch thick and three inches in diameter. They were gliding slowly down in very uniform cluster. A/C 026 was unable to avoid them and his right wing went directly through a cluster with absolutely no effect on engines or plane surface. One of the discs was heard striking tail assembly but no explosion was observed. About 20 feet from these discs a mass of black debris of varying sizes in clusters of 3 by 4 feet. Also observed 2 other A/C flying through silver discs with no apparent damage. Observed discs and debris 2 other times but could not determine where it came from.

Copies to:-P.R. & A.I.6.D.B.OpsWar RoomD.A.T.A.I.3. (USA) (Action 2 copies)

Presumably Caidin must have seen a copy of this document from one of the American recipients... The Rubber stamp clearly states it was received on 17 October, pre-dating Caidin's reference by seven days. But the sheer number of channels through which documents went could be the reason for this confusion and now the original document has been located I don't think we need get hung up on the original reference any more. I have found no record of most of the personnel listed. However a Squadron Leader Heath was involved in the UK's investigations of the Scandinavian 'ghost rockets' in 1946.

He concludes: "At least we now know Caidin's reference exists! Besides that there is little to say really. The objects reported are intriguing but not completely mystifying. There were many types of flak being used by the Germans in W.W.II and several files in the PRO refer to colored flak, flak which threw off unusual fragments, and so on. This explanation is made more likely by the fact that the 'F.L.O.' in Caidin's reference stands for 'Flak Liaison Officer', at least suggesting that the Air Ministry were treating it within a flak context. The objects could also have been some kind of 'window' dropped by the Germans in an attempt to disrupt radar or radio communication among air crew. The explanation as to what the small objects were is now more of a task for the air historian than it is for the ufologist.

What is clear from the original account is that the discs, whilst unusual, were clearly not any type of 'craft', under intelligent or purposeful control or dangerous to the air craft or crew. In my opinion these objects do not belong in the category of sightings referred to as 'foo-fighters', both by their physical description and by their behavior and characteristics. Although often lumped in with foo-fighter reports they are clearly different.

This story has been a staple of UFO writers for the past three four decades. Now we have further clarification and I believe that this particular mystery is more or less laid to rest. Andy Roberts is more charitable to Caidin's exaggerated and redefined version of the report than I, but Caidin is nowhere near as foolish as those who put together the second block (1998 release) of 'Majestic 12' documents.

Nevertheless, Nick Redfern and Jonathan Downes present a copy of a section of these silly documents, which says: "Aerial interference with military aircraft has demonstrated the ability to observe our air operations in war and peacetime conditions. During the war over 900 near-miss incidents were reported by allied pilots and crews in all theater of operations. One of the most dramatic near-miss encounters occurred on 14 October 1943, 8th AF Mission 115 over Schweinfurt, Germany, B-17 crews reported many formations of silvery discs flying down into the B-17 formations. Several times during the bombing mission, large objects were seen following the discs descent into the formations. Unlike previous reports, no engine failures or airframe damage was reported. After the surrender of Nazi Germany, GAF fighter pilots were interrogated by AF intelligence concerning Mission 135. GAF did not have any aircraft above our bombers at that time." [42]

I've never found the whole 'MJ-12' idea credible, but at least the first release of documents was prepared with sufficient care to provoke meaningful discussion. This ridiculous exaggeration of an already elaborated tale makes the second release of documents look absurd. I would also point out that the Nazi UFO mythos and MJ-12 are essentially incompatible: if the Americans had already gained the ability to build high-performance flying discs from the Germans, why would they have become so excited about crashed ET discs? And why didn't all those portentous 'first-release' documents mention them at all?

The Massey Project

Redfern and Downes continue to publicize another claim made by Frank Edwards, just before his account of the Schweinfurt Raid. Despite being aware of the negative outcomes of research conducted by both Andy Roberts and Tim Good, they say: "As far as the British Government is concerned, there is strong evidence to show that extremely rigorous investigations were made into the Foo Fighter phenomenon by an elite team of Air Ministry and Royal Air Force operatives." [43]

They quote Edwards: "As early as 1943, the British had set up a small organization to gather information on these objects. It was under the direction of Lieutenant General Massey, and it had been inspired to some extent by the reports of a spy who was in reality a double agent, working under the directions of the Mayor of Cologne. He had confirmed that the Foo Fighters were not German devices, which of course the British knew they were not. The British Air Ministry, in 1966, told me that the Massey project was officially terminated in 1944. Perhaps it is only coincidence that the double agent was exposed and executed in the spring of 1944." [44]

Three problems arise immediately. Tim Good has established, from a dependable source, that there was no Lieutenant General Massey. Almost all the foo fighter reports date from 1944 onwards, so it's not clear why "extremely rigorous investigations" should start in 1943 and end in 1944. And what on earth was a spy doing being controlled by the Mayor of Cologne? On the evidence, the 'Massey Project' sounds like a complete, and deliberate, fabrication.

Crashed saucers and back-engineering

Nick Redfern makes a great deal of limited evidence in suggesting that there has ever been one extra-terrestrial flying craft crash on Earth since 1900, let alone more than one. He has not, however, been unwilling to suggest that the Nazis had access to one or more crashed flying saucers, and back-engineered technology from them. This, supposedly, was how they were able to develop such sophisticated flying discs! Of course, he is not alone in making suggestions of this kind, but I hardly need point out that when the evidence suggests that Germany had no sophisticated flying discs, then there is nothing to explain. Anyway, Redfern concludes from the rather desperate, and generally quite implausible intelligence reports that he has collected: "If ... the data related in official FBI memoranda of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s is accurate, how were the Nazis able to develop technology that, years later, was still defying America's finest" As I will later show, there are firm grounds for believing that a number of extra terrestrial vehicles crashed to earth on US soil in the late 1940s. Is it stretching the bounds of possibility to speculate that a similar event may have occurred on Nazi territory several years previously? If such an event did take place, and the Germans were able to grasp the rudiments of the technology, this would perhaps go a long way towards explaining their pressing desire to perfect a man-made flying saucer. The truth may ultimately turn out to be far stranger than has previously been realized." [45]

Well, yes, it really does stretch the bounds of possibility, but that doesn't stop Corso from reporting, in 'The Day After Roswell', what he and General Twining had wondered about after inspecting the crashed saucer at Roswell:"At the very least, Twining had suggested, 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 Wehrner von Braun and Willy Ley at Alamogordo in the days after the crash confirmed this. They didn't want to be thought of as verruckt but intimated that there was a deeper story about what the Germans had engineered. No, the similarity between the Horten wing and the craft they had pulled out of the arroyo was no accident. We always wondered how the Germans were able to incorporate such advanced technology into their weapons development in so short a time and during the Great Depression. Did they have help? With an acceleration capability and maneuverability we'd never seen before, this craft would keep American aircraft engineers busy for years just incorporating what you could see into immediate designs." [46]

While we're in a corner of reality that accepts the reality of the Roswell crash, and its cargo of dead or possibly living entities, I have to mention the analysis of Polish writer Zbigniew Blania-Bolnar in Alien Encounters for April 1998. Telling us that " ... the post-war American Army had at its disposal a considerable number of V2 rockets, several V3 and V4 prototypes, and about 30 kugelblitzes of different kinds", he concludes that the dead entity in the Laredo crash (the Laredo crash?) was "a laboratory monkey used by the Air Force in a secret experiment." And, of course, "if a tested kugelblitz crashed at Laredo, then a similar object could have crashed at Roswell." [47]

None of the suggestions that the Germans back-engineered crashed alien craft pre-date the Lazar and Lear back-engineering stories. Three more have come to light already. In her book 'Sightings: UFOs' Susan Michaels reports that writer Jan Van Helsing (a contact of the inner circle of the 'Montauk Project') "describes the discovery of a crashed saucer in the Black Forest in 1936 and says that this technology was taken and combined with the information the Vril Society had received through channeling and was made into a further project called the Haunebu." [48]

There is also a report of a crash in Italy in 1933, the details and information of which were made known to Mussolini, and which assisted Belluzzo in his design and development. [49]

And at the 'Gdansk UFO-Marathon' in October 1997, it was announced that there had been a crash in Poland in the summer of 1938, in Czernica. Evidence and wreckage recovered from the crash was seized by Nazi Germany after the invasion of Poland the next year, and the information so gathered was used in the building of the 'Haunebu' and 'Vril' craft. [50]

The current popularity of back-engineering is such that I expect to see more such reports.

The term 'unnamed soldier' is one which I - I think - coined to describe the anonymous supposed ex-forces personnel who purveyed such nonsense about alien abductions and secret military activities over the last decade or so. But the phenomenon is nothing new, as is evidenced by a few typical reports which I've selected here.Redfern and Downes have reprinted some accounts volunteered to the US intelligence services. The nature of intelligence collection is, of course, that it involves collecting every scrap of nonsense, every wild claim that can be collected, and then sifting through it for what might be important. I don't think that any of these reports could be said to be important, or even truthful, but it is always useful for authors to present material like this as 'intelligence reports'. This is, it seems, from a letter from 1947, the writer have been inspired by early flying saucer accounts:"Recently I have heard and read about reports of disc-shaped aircraft or whatever they are, in our Western regions. They reminded me of a nearly-forgotten incident in Germany, after the war. I report this to you because I feel this may be of international scope. My buddy and I went on pass to see a friend of his. One evening the three of us were driving along some back roads when I sighted strange-looking object in the sky from eight to ten miles to our front and approximately 5,000 feet high. I immediately stopped the jeep for a better look. The object rapidly came toward us, descending slowly. About a mile away it stopped its horizontal motion but continued a slow-oscillating descent similar to a descending parachute. Then it stopped in a spiral motion.Immediately I drove to where it had dropped. It took almost five minutes to reach the place but we saw nothing. After ten minutes of cruising around the area it became too dark to see so we went back to town.I am not sure my companions saw this because it happened so quickly it could easily have been missed, but I described what I had seen so vividly that they were as excited as I was ... The location of this incident was approximately 120 miles north-west of Ubberbishophiem." [51]

Redfern and Downes continue:"What were perhaps two of the most persuasive accounts positing a direct link between the Nazi war machine and unidentified flying objects came via two individuals interviewed by FBI agents, in 1957 and 1967 respectively.In the 1957 case, agents at Detroit recorded that they had spoken with a man who was...'...born February 19,1926, in the State of Warsaw, Poland, and was brought from Poland as a Prisoner of War to Gut Alt Golssen approximately 30 miles east of Berlin, Germany, in May1942, where he remained until a few weeks after the end of World War II. According to the man, during 1944, month not recalled, while enrooted to work in a field a short distance north of Gut Alt Golssen, their tractor engine stalled on a road through a swamp area. No machinery or other vehicle was then visible although a noise was heard described as a high-pitched whine similar to that produced by a large electric generator. An 'SS' guard appeared and talked briefly with the German driver of the tractor, who waited five to ten minutes, after which the noise stopped and the tractor engine was started normally. Approximately 3 hours later in the same swamp area, but away from the road where the work crew was cutting hay, he surreptitiously, because of the German in charge of the crew and 'SS' guards in the otherwise deserted area, observed a circular enclosure approximately 100 to 150 yards in diameter protected from viewers by a tarpaulin-type wall approximately 50 feet high, from which a vehicle was observed to slowly rise vertically to a height sufficient to clear the wall and then to move slowly horizontally a short distance out of his view, which was obstructed by trees.'This vehicle, observed from approximately 500 feet, was described as circular in shape, 75 to 100 yards in diameter, and about 14 feet high, consisting of dark gray stationary top and bottom sections, five to six feet high. The approximate three foot middle section appeared to be a rapidly moving component producing a continuous blur similar to an airplane propeller, but extending the circumference of the vehicle so far as could be observed. The noise emanating from the vehicle was similar but of somewhat lower pitch than the noise previously heard. The engine of the tractor again stalled on this occasion and no effort was made by the German driver to start the engine until the noise stopped, after which the engine started normally." The next report comes from 1967'On April 26,1967 [the witness] appeared at the Miami Office and furnished the following information relating to an object, presently referred to as an unidentified flying object, he allegedly photographed during November, 1944.'Sometime during 1943, he graduated from the German Air Academy and was assigned as a member of the Luftwaffe on the Russian Front. Near the end of 1944, he was released from this duty and was assigned as a test pilot to a top secret project in the Black Forest of Austria. During this period he observed the aircraft described above. It was saucer-shaped, about twenty-one feet in diameter, radio-controlled, and mounted several jet engines around the exterior portion of the craft. He further described the exterior portion as revolving around the dome in the center which remained stationary. It was his responsibility to photograph the object while in flight. He asserted he was able to retain a negative of a photograph he made at 7,000 meters (20,000 feet).According to him, the above aircraft was designed and engineered by a German engineer whose present whereabouts is unknown to him. He also assumed the secrets pertaining to this aircraft were captured by Allied Forces. He said this type of aircraft was responsible for the downing of at least one American B-26 airplane.He has become increasingly concerned because of the unconfirmed reports concerning a similar object and denials from the United States to have such an aircraft. He feels such a weapon would be beneficial in Vietnam and would prevent the further loss of American lives which was his paramount purpose in contacting the Federal Bureau of Investigation.' [52]

Paul Stonehill of the Russian Ufology Research Centre has presented some unlikely tales from the former Soviet Union, but few are as dramatic as the anonymous account apparently told to "Konstantin Tiouts, an engineer in Moscow, Russia" who passed it on to Stonehill. Stonehill is "convinced of the authenticity of the document". The witness - "X" - was in the Red Army when, in 1941"The Germans took him and his comrades to a POW camp. X was then immersed into living hell. He starved. He was betrayed. He was dying of typhus, but he managed to survive and attempted an escape. But they caught him and sent him to Auschwitz. There he was "employed" as a medical orderly, until he again contracted typhus.X was sent to the ovens. He recalls the nauseating smell of the burning human flesh as he stood in line to be dispatched into a crematorium oven. But X did again survive. In August of 1943, X and some other prisoners were moved to a camp in the vicinity of Peenemunde, where the Nazis' camp was designated as "KZ-A4," and located in Trassenhede. The camp's purpose was to carry out the programs of the Hochdrukpumpe Project: removal of the consequences of British bombing raids. Hangman of Auschwitz, SS Brigadenfuhrer Hans Kampler ordered prisoners to be transferred to the Peenemunde testing grounds. Major General Dehrenberger, head of the testing ground, had little time for the reconstruction work, and therefore sanctioned the use of concentration camp prisoners.In September of 1943, X inadvertently became a witness to something that is of great interest to UFO researchers. X was with a group of prisoners engaged in demolishing a reinforced concrete wall. During the lunch break, the group was driven away under guard. However, X remained at the demolition site, because of a dislocated foot. Later he set the bone himself, but the truck with his fellow prisoners had already left. Suddenly, four workers rolled out on a concrete landing strip next to a nearby hangar a weird looking apparatus. X described it as round in parameter with a drop-shaped cockpit in the center with small inflatable wheels. He said it looked like an upside down washbasin. After a hand signal from a short, stout man, quivering in the wind, the strange apparatus - the color of heavy silvery metal - made a hissing sound and took off. It hovered at an altitude of approximately five meters over the landing strip, the hissing sound reminding X of a blowlamp. He noted that the outline of the apparatus clearly showed through on its silvery surface. For a short while the device rocked, like a tilting doll and then the borders of the outline slowly began to blur as if it were going out of focus. Then it jumped up sharply like a humming top and gained altitude in a snakelike motion. The flight, judging by the rocking of the apparatus, advanced erratically. A sudden gust of wind from the Baltic Sea turned the craft upside down, and it began to lose altitude rather sharply. X was enveloped in a mixture of smells-burning, hot air and ethyl alcohol. He heard the apparatus impacting with the ground, the crunching and breaking of components. It hit the ground not far away from X. Instinctively, the inmate ran toward the crashed apparatus, thus revealing himself. But he had only one thought in his mind-to try to save the pilot, a human being... [53]

And so it goes on, a man who makes Indiana Jones look like Thomas the Tank Engine, and sees flying saucers as well. Another classic - and amazingly brave except when giving his name - 'unnamed soldier' comes from an Internet posting also, as often happens, published by Nexus magazine. This is, supposedly, an account of the real secrets of the 'foo fighters', told by a former Italian Resistance member who became so close to the SAS in Southern Italy from 1943 to 1945 that he was able to see films taken of them shot by allied planes but (and does this seem familiar?) could only show "Italian researcher Fabio Di Rado" stills taken from these. In a particularly modern twist this nameless witness did not, however, say that he believed that they were of German manufacture. Instead, he supposedly told Di Rado: "Those machines, if we can call them that, could perform such quick and agile movements that they were unlikely to have been built by human beings. You can believe me - foo-fighters couldn't be Nazi - otherwise they could have won the war easily. The more likely hypothesis ... an Air Force coming from other worlds was among us. "The absolute giveaway to this tale lies in the beginning of the account:"During the Spring of 1998 I went with another person to an inland village of Sicily to meet an 80-year-old man who claimed to have some unknown documents about foo fighters.When we arrived at a farmhouse in the heart of the countryside, our witness showed us into a room which seemed to be his private study ... We were ordered not to take pictures; we could only make notes. To our disappointment, we had to accept this. I was given a copy on high-resolution CD-ROM of the pictures and documents that I saw there in the original version, with some censored parts." [54]

Whatever would we do without the contribution of these rural Italian 80-year-olds and their high resolution CD-ROMs?

Prague-Kbely

Probably the most influential of the original 'unnamed soldier' accounts formed, in the late 1980s, an input to the mythos which led to the identification of a specific aerodrome as the location for a test flight of a substantial flying disc. This seems to have come from an anonymous, untested press account, here summarized (in translation) in an excerpt titled The Reich's Flying Saucers by Manuel Carballal, excerpted from his book Saucers Unveiled!. "In its February 1989 issue, the German magazine Flugzeug published the following report made by a German aviation official who, allegedly, been the protagonist of the astonishing sighting involving a "flying saucer" at the Prag-Gbell (formerly Praha-Kbely) aerodrome in 1943. The controversial report follows:Place of Sighting: C 14 Flight School at the Prag-Gbell aerodrome. Date of Event August/September 1943, supposedly on a Sunday (I seem to recall there were no services on that day. The weather was good, dry and sunny. Kind of Observation: "I was with my flight comrades on the air strip, more precisely, near the school buildings, some 2000 meters away from the arsenal (located to the extreme left). See adjoining diagram. The device was inside the hangar: a disk some 5-6 meters in diameter. Its body is relatively large at the center. Underneath, it has four tall, thin legs. Color: Aluminum. Height: Almost as tall as a man. Thickness: some 30 - 40 cm., with an rim of external rods, perhaps square orifices. The upper part of the body (almost a third of the total height) was shrunken over the upper half of the disk. It was flat and rounded. See the attached sketch for the lower half. Along with my friends, I saw the device emerge from the hangar. It was then that we heard the roar of the engines, we saw the external side of the disk begin to rotate, and the vehicle began moving slowly and in a straight line toward the southern end of the field. It then rose almost 1 meter into the air. After moving around some 300 meters at that altitude, it stopped again. Its landing was rather rough. We had to leave the area while some custodians pushed the vehicles toward the hangar. Later on, the "thing" took off again, managing to reach the end of the aerodrome this time. Afterwards, I made a note in my flight log of the members of the FFS C14 who were present at the moment: Gruppenfluglehrer (group flight instructor) Ofw. Michelsen; Fluglehrer Uffz. Kolh und Buhler; Flugschüler (flight students): Ogefr, Klassmann, Kleiner, Müller, Pfaffle, Schenk, Seifert, Seibert, Squarr, Stahn, Weinberger, Zoebele, Gefr, Hering, Koza, Sitzwohl, Voss, and Waluda."Certainly, even Flugzeug's editors treat the report cautiously: "the device described by these observers is antithetical to those described by Schreiver, Habermohl, Miethe, and Bellonzo with their vast basic dimensions." And these German experts cannot be mistaken, since it is known to all of those who are well-versed in aeronautics that during the history of Nazi aviation at least two circular-wing aircraft were built, and fifteen others were designed, although there remains the possibility that the object supposedly tested at Prag-Gbell was one of the prototypes destroyed by the Nazis in order to keep it from falling into Allied hands after the fall of the Third Reich." [55]

ASHTAR

Perhaps we should start at the top, in worlds other than ours, and then work our way back, very much, down to the depths. You can always be sure that wherever two or three are gathered together to listen to channeling, Ashtar will be there too. Here is a message channeled by 'Lady Nada' in 1996, under the title 'Home Questions From Our Visitors'. The presentation and spelling are verbatim!

Ques: What is the Relation of the Ashtar Command & the Human Race?

Ans: The Ashtar Command are among many entities that come to Earth and have been circled above the Earth - for the most part invisible to the naked eye - since early 1950's A.D. . . There have been many people who were contacted by Extra-Terra-Astrals. Some of their stories were fabricated and some were authentic. These Beings from Aldebaran were insulted after they were labeled untrustworthy. They went back in time and had a meeting of psychics with the Thule Society who were a secret society. The meeting of the Thule Society led to what is called the Third Rite (Reich). The Ashtar Command was also in contact with two psychics, named Maria Austish and Zigrum who were in contact with Hitler. Hitler and Nazi Germany were building crafts during WWII. Hitler assembled a team of elite and intelligent scientist and engineers who were experts in the field of Aerodynamics. They began designs for the flying disc in 1941 A.D. During the year 1945-47 three German experts Schriver, Habermohl, and Meithe and an Italian A. Bellonzo were involved in R&D of a saucer-shaped craft. On February 14,1945 A.D. Shriver & Habermohl flew a disc that within 3 minutes climb to an altitude of 12,400 meters and reached a speed of 2,000 km/h in horizontal flight. This technology was given to them by the Ashtar Command. [56]

Billy Meier and P'taah

Billy Meier, the Swiss contact and photographer of beings, and craft, from the Pleiades, has never really convinced me of the objective reality of either his contacts or his photos. I am certainly not alone in taking that view, and my opinion has not been improved by a conversation that Meier reports in Volume 1, No 6 of his FIGU Bulletin, published in English in October 1997. A reader - "Til Meisterhans, Germany" - quotes from a balanced, and quite skeptical, article "article in the January 1980 edition of UFO magazine", and asks:

"What should one think of the claim that during World War II the Germans built flying disks, respectively flying "Foo Fighters," and actually flew them?

Those of you who are accustomed to the staking of claims for responsibility for anomalous objects and events will not be surprised to find that Meier cannot resist responding with "information" to which only he has access. He writes:

"The following is worth mentioning: According to the Pleiadians/Plejarans, such "Foo Fighters" or disks were constructed in Germany but were never test flown, let alone put into service. Anyone claiming such flying devices reached speeds of several thousand kilometers per hour, flew at altitudes of 12.000 meters [36,000 ft.], and actually reached Mars, is talking complete nonsense.

The authentic story about these events is discussed in the 254th contact conversation with P'taah on November 28, 1995:

Billy: You know, my dear friend, now and then one hears strange things regarding the German flying disks. Is it true that the Germans actually attempted to fly them, and did the disks reach altitudes of up to 12,000 meters?

Ptaah: Such claims are absurd. The "Flying Tops," as they were called, were never finalized in Germany. However, flying disks were eventually built some time later in other countries, e.g., in South America. In the former Soviet Union and in America attempts were also made to construct such flying devices after pertinent blueprints fell into the hands of Germany’s occupying forces. These blueprints were incomplete in that those who held the plans needed to input a great deal of effort to construct the flying disks. These units were and are flown in terrestrial air space only to this day, excluding, of course, a particular group of people in South America of which you are well aware.

Billy: Can you also tell me whether the blueprints for this type of flying disks secured by the occupying forces were the same ones you people telepathically transmitted to the Germans via impulses? Who was actually in charge in Germany?
Ptaah: The transmissions were directed to two men, Schriever and Miethe who, on their own, had drawn up plans for the "Flying Tops." These blueprints fell into the hands of the Americans and Soviets who began studying and constructing the units. Also, through theft, the group in South America obtained copies of the same "Flying Tops."

Billy: One can say with certainty that this group consisted of high-ranking Nazis who fled from Germany after the war ended and disappeared in South America.
Ptaah: You should not mention any more about this subject.

Billy: Of course not. - On account of World War II, disk-shaped flying objects were observed also in Germany, indeed, worldwide . . .

Ptaah: You are correct in this, yes. However, these flying objects were not of terrestrial origin. They belonged to us and to our allies from the federation.

Billy: This would mean that the flying disks which had been observed were not related to the flying disks, respectively "Flying Tops" disks, or Foo Fighters, of the Germans. Claims to the contrary, therefore, are actually foolish assertions by liars, fantasists, and know-it-alls. We've wanted to know about this for a long time.
Ptaah: What I have told you only refers to the Schriever and Miethe Foo Fighters.

Billy: You mean there were others?

Ptaah: Yes, others did exist. However, they were part of a private research program conducted by power hungry Nazis who drew upon Schriever's and Miethe's blueprints. Efforts to develop and test fly their Foo Fighters were underway with positive results in Germany at that time.

Billy: By the group now in South America?
Ptaah: Your conjecture is correct.Billy: And all of this took place right under the nose of the Gestapo?

Ptaah: Many influential members of the Gestapo and its SS-leadership were secret, active participants who attempted to prevent the rest of the world from gleaning any information about the construction, test flights, and other matters. When the war ended, they fled Germany and went to South America, taking with them all of their material and staff. This was not a difficult task, for the Foo Fighters had reached a point were they had the capability of circling the Earth non-stop and transporting all required personnel and materials to South America before the Allied Forces could seize them - or prior to the Allied Forces finding out anything about these secrets.

Billy: So that's how this all happened. How far did the construction of Schriever's and Miethe's Foo Fighters progress?

Ptaah: The prototype for the first test flight was available on July 15, 1941. We monitored this very closely. The Foo Fighter was, however, not constructed according to the data we had transmitted, for we had intentionally made them ineffective by then, as we could foresee the grave danger they would present for terrestrial mankind...

[Comments by Billy: The Pleiadians/Plejarans transmitted data for the construction of flying disks to the Germans Schriever and Miethe at the end of the 1920s and beginning of 1930s with the intent to produce an aeronautical technology that would help prevent the looming warfare conflicts. Unfortunately, they soon realized that this technology would be used for the exact opposite purposes. For this reason, the Pleiadians/Plejarans counteracted the undertaking again.]

... We did not attempt to interfere in the development of Schriever's and Miethe's Foo Fighter until we suddenly recognized that the units also posed an immense threat to mankind. Once we realized the flight was going to be a full success, and that mass production of the Foo Fighter would result, we intervened during the preparations to the first test flight."

This 'dialogue' continues on for some time, until Meier concludes: " ... fantastic stories were concocted about flying disks/Foo Fighters which were said to have reached altitudes of 12,000 meters [7_ miles] and Mach 2 or more during their first test flight (which never did take place). Additionally, a fairy tale tells of the Germans having flown to Mars, landing and performing studies there, so that they could inhabit the planet one day. Complete nonsense, all of it. Billy" [57]

Henry Stephens

Henry Stephens runs the 'German Research Project', and sells copies both of much of the pro-mythos material, and of more identifiably Nazi and arguably anti-Semitic material. In an article in 'The Probe', referring to the work supposedly done on a flying disc by A.V. Roe in Canada, he claims that one of the recorded contributors to the project is shown as "Miethe-Designer 1950(?)"

Spinning off into the realms of imagination, Stephens continues: "The reference is obviously about Dr Heinrich (Heinrich? How many names does this man have?) Richard Miethe, who was the designer and builder of the wartime German saucer project, the V-7. Dr Miethe worked during the war at a German facility in Breslau, now part of modern Poland. After the war, he was recruited by the Americans and Canadians to recapitulate his earlier work for Germany in America. Renato Vesco, an Italian engineer who worked with the Germans during the war and who afterwards held a cabinet position with the Italian government, states that Kahla was the location where a turbo-jet powered German saucer lifted off in its maiden flight in February of 1945. Vesco later wrote a book about his experiences, originally titled 'Intercept but Don't Shoot'" [58]

Actually, for all his wild speculation, Vesco never claimed that he was writing from his own experience, but details like that simply don't bother Stephens, as he spirals off into wild assertions about German free energy, atom bombs, Vril, Haunebu, Tesla, Montauk, the New World Order and the rest. And all this from the man whose mail-order business makes him one of the more influential figures in this strange field. His 1998 catalogue outlines the purposes of the GRP.German Research Project is an organization devoted to distributing information concerning flying saucer-type devices made by the Germans during the Second World War. Beyond this goal, we also hope to distribute information concerning other German weaponry and technology, such as free-energy technology, which is still kept secret and classified by the former Allied Powers. We also hope to explore the reasons for this secrecy. Part of this technology now comprises the research being done by the Americans at Area 51. Much of this technology was retained by a German organization which did not surrender at the cessation of hostilities. These groups and their histories will be explored also.The Germans built several types of flying craft which today we would designate "UFOs". Some were conventionally powered, that is with jet and rocket power, and some were powered electromagnetically. They were built in different places throughout the greater German Reich by different organizations within the government. They were kept under the tightest secrecy. Near the close of the War some of these devices were disassembled and transported by U-boat or simply flown to secure areas outside Germany.Today, especially since the unification of Germany, more and more information is surfacing concerning these developments in spite of the efforts by our government and its media to discredit divert and confuse the issue. For those individuals new to this topic, we suggest first reading item number 16 in our catalogue, "Introduction To Secret German Flying Discs Of World War 2" and any title from our video offerings." [59]

Len Kasten

The incidence of disinformation with relation to Nazi achievements in general, and flying discs in particular, is high. Here are some parts of an article by "Len Kasten" from the New Age glossy Atlantis Rising. As usual, he adopts Vesco as an authority, and introduces Viktor Schauberger into the myth. It may be that he actually produces the most detailed account of disc-propulsion, too!"The more important anti-gravity weapons research was carried on near Prague primarily by Viktor Schauberger and Richard Miethe. In 1944 Miethe, in cooperation with the Italians, developed the large helium powered V-7 and the small one-man Vril models which achieved a speed of 2,900 km/hr in flight tests ... Captain Hans Kohler developed the Hanibu 2 with a diameter of 25 metres which carried a complete flight crew and was powered by a simple electro gravitation motor called the Kohler Converter ... Kasten describes the (totally fictional) Kugelblitz as an "explosive gas weapon", having:"a 50-50 mixture of butane and propane, which was ignited by the exhaust of the bombers . . direct gyroscopic stabilization, television-controlled flight, vertical take-off and landing, jam-free radio control combined with radar blinding, infrared search 'eyes', electrostatic weapon firing, hyper-combustible gas combined with a total reaction turbine, and last, but not least, anti-gravity flight technology. This was the incredible Kugelblitz or 'lightning ball'. If it had emerged even six months earlier, could the war have turned out differently? We will never know, because by this time the Allied armies were rapidly converging on Berlin. So the Kugelblitz puffed out a formation of bombers, and flew off into history - or did it?" [60]

We'll return to the 'formation of bombers' when we come to Wendelle Stevens.

David Hatcher-Childress

Those of you familiar with the fields of both pseudo-science and pseudo-history - and pseudo pretty much anything, really - will already know of the boundless imagination of Hatcher-Childress. In his publication 'Man-Made UFOs 1944 - 1994, 50 Years of Suppression', by "Renato Vesco and David Hatcher-Childress", Hatcher-Childress actually republishes the whole of Vesco's first book (without really making clear that's what it is), adds some early UFO photos that might look like the ones he appears to believe were built in Germany during the war, and speculations of his own. His "Summary of the Claims and Evidence" has some familiar elements . . ."After various experimental prototypes, including the rocket powered Miethe and Schriever discs, production began on the small ten meter diameter interceptor-fighters of the Vril series. The larger Haunibu series began with the 25 meter Haunibu 1 & 2. These craft had canons mounted underneath and were designed as "tank Killers".The 74 meter Haunibu-3, designed as an anti-shipping craft for use over long distances, was actually built and tested. It had inflatable rubber cushions on the underside for landing. The 300 meter Haunibu-4 was on the design board for interplanetary travel. It was disc shaped and could also carry several of the smaller Vril craft. Also reportedly in the design stage was an immense 330 meter cigar-shaped battleship.Towards the end of the war, the Germans had developed interplanetary craft with no moving parts which were capable of going to the Moon or even Mars." [61]

In 'The Thesis of This Book', he also asserts that: "Some German divisions removed themselves to South America and Antarctica in the few months and weeks before the end of the war ... the Americans, British and Russians began to build test discoid aircraft in the late 40s and 5Os. Isolated German pockets in South America have intense UFO activity. Antarctic bases are probably vacated or captured by Americans and Russians. Today, a seven-story or more underground base run jointly by America and Russia exists at the South Pole." [62]

I have no idea whether Hatcher-Childress actually believes this nonsense. I suppose he must, because otherwise he'd be knowingly misleading his many readers. Unfortunately, this concoction of a book has created something of a new generation of believers, including the UK author Alan Baker. In spite of his publisher's confident assertion of his "meticulous research" for his book 'Invisible Eagle', Baker accepted Hatcher-Childress without question, and now a new readership is stuck with Vesco developing flying discs at Lake Garda and investigating UFOs for the Italian Air Ministry, the reality of the Feuerball and Kugelblitz, and the top-secret Projekt Saucer. One man's research is another man's trip to the bookshop.

Wendelle Stevens

Wendelle Stevens, veteran ufologist and Billy Meier supporter has, he says, been privy to a unique range of experiences pertaining to Nazi UFOs. As well as having been "sent to Alaska to supervise the installation of special equipment onboard B-29 bombers" to look for "mysterious flying objects known as 'fire balls' or 'foo fighters'", he claims in 'Alien Encounters' issue 25 that the Vril and Haunebu discs "were used just once against the Allies, in which they devastated a vast 800 bomber raid over Germany, shooting down an unprecedented 200 in just one night". [63]

Bomber Command clearly missed this tragedy when compiling its records. David Icke, who in 'The Biggest Secret' takes the Nazi UFO mythos as true along with hundreds of other nonsensical beliefs, reports Stevens as saying that: "the Foo Fighters were sometimes grey-green, and sometimes red-orange. They approached his aircraft as close as five meters and then just stayed there, he said. They could not be shaken off or shot down and caused many squadrons to either turn back or land." [64]

Stevens also purports that while working at the Air Technical Intelligence Center he saw a map of Germany which was marked with nine Saturn-shaped symbols. He later found out from Vladimir Terziski that these were where Nazi research centers were located, "By the end of the war the Nazis had nine secret research facilities where they built two types of disc: the smaller 'Vril' craft, and the much bigger 'Haunebu' Both of these were powered by a 'gravity null field'. In test flights the craft rose 60,000ft in just six and a half minutes, which radically outstripped the performance of any allied aircraft." [65]

Vanguard Science/Keely-Net/Al Pinto

Any Internet search for 'Nazi UFOs' and similar subjects is likely to produce links to material by "Al Pinto" or "Tal", apparently "Sponsored by Vanguard Sciences, PO Box 1031, Mesquite, TX 75150, USA" which depends heavily on the article written under Vesco's name in 'Argosy'. [66]

Additional material re Nikola Tesla and Viktor Schauberger is added to quotes from Vesco and Lusar, particularly a claim that Schauberger had developed the 'Schriever, Habermohl, Miethe and Bellonzo Flying Disc' at Malthausen Concentration Camp, using prisoners to do the work. I still don't really know quite who "Al Pinto" and "Tal" are, or what the underlying intention of 'Vanguard Sciences' may be. The coincidence of the name 'Vanguard' with a prominent neo-Nazi organization has been mentioned to me on several occasions. I did receive, through a friend who had published some earlier findings on Nazi UFOs, a message from a Jack Veach who said (inter alia) that: "Mr. McClure makes some very positive statements debunking a great deal of untruths about Nazi UFOs, however I would like to offer him a website and an email whereby he might find more information about Mr. Renato Vesco.I am a member of Vanguard Science, not Vangard Science, as he has listed. This is a civilian group of folk, here in the Dallas-Ft Worth area that are open-minded about the verity of science and have taken it upon ourselves to study Tesla, Keely, and a host of others we feel have been given the short-end of the stick with respect to technology and applications thereof. Mr. Jerry Decker and Mr. Chuck Henderson could much better avail you of information about Mr. Vesco and his work. I personally had an English translation of one of his works I gave away about ten years ago pursuant the German V-7.My father and his C.O. both saw Foo Fighters over Europe during WWII, so that much is real. Neither my dad nor Col. Lasly knew anything about UFOs, nor had any interest in them. What they did say was that between the Foo Fighters and the Me-262s they encountered, they felt they would be killed before the war was over in Europe. I hope that will clear some things up for Mr. McClure with respect to Vanguard Science and Mr. Vesco and hopefully all of us can clear the riddle of the Nazi UFOs from all the smoke and mirrors that unfortunately come to the fore on something of this nature."My friend sent an e-mail back to Mr. Veach, expressing my interest in receiving further information about Vesco, but no response was forthcoming. The post-mortem involvement of both mainstream and fringe scientists in the development of flying discs has raised a variety of names, including Marconi, Einstein, Tesla, Schauberger, Keely and others. I am unaware of any real evidence that Schauberger worked at Malthausen using slave labour. If that suggestion is no more than wishful thinking, then I am left wondering why anybody should wish for it. Mark Ian BirdsallBirdsall has long been an influential figure in ufology. Currently Editor of the newsstand magazine Unopened Files - Access a Number of Well Kept Secrets and Features Editor of UFO Magazine, he has an established interest in wartime UFO events.

In his 1998 book Alien Base', Tim Good says:"Interestingly, there is circumstantial evidence that at least one of the V~7 project aircraft was prototyped. According to the researcher and author Mark Ian Birdsall, several projects involving a circular-wing aircraft were conceived during the war, the most elaborate of which was constructed by Dr. Richard Miethe at facilities in Breslau (Wroclaw), Poland, and in Prague. A small prototype was rumored to have flown over the Baltic Sea in January 1943, and two full-scale aircraft with a diameter of 135 feet were eventually built. Also, reports Birdsall, another V-7 project was a 'spinning saucer', based on helicopter principles, about 35 feet in diameter, designed by Rudolf Schriever, a small prototype of which was allegedly first flown in 1943." [67]

Good's reference for these comments is given as "Birdsall, Mark Ian, Flying Saucers of the Third Reich: The Legacy of Prague-Kbely (pending publication). That book has not, as I write, yet been published.In, I think, 1988, Birdsall had published the unfortunately-titled booklet 'The Ultimate Solution' which, in just 29 pages, presented three different pictures of Hitler. It also includes copies of US intelligence documents reporting the newspaper accounts of George Klein's claims of the test-flight on 14 February 1945, diagrams of assorted Miethe-Schreiver-Bellonzo discs, and some probably avoidably uncritical material about 'secret' Antarctic exploration and the escape of Nazis from Germany at the end of the war. [68]

In 1992, in Vol.7 No.4 of the US 'UFO Magazine', he wrote an article titled 'Nazi Secret Weapon - Foo Fighters of WWII', and included illustrations of a supposed 'Schriever-Habermohl' disc. [69]

The introduction to the article says that Birdsall "just completed a hefty manuscript which enlarges considerably the scope of the available source material". It would be interesting to see what material Birdsall has found, and whether his views might be influenced by what is being published in this piece.

Ernst Zundel/Mattern Friedrich

Ernst Zundel, also known as Mattern Friedrich (the name under which he authored UFOs - Nazi Secret Weapon? [70]) and Christof Friedrich (how he has signed the copy of that book which I have) has had considerable involvement in the distribution of material regarded as Holocaust revisionism.

He has often been described as an anti-Semite. Zundel sustained the 'Nazi UFO' myth through much of the 1970s, presenting a mixture of Lusar, Schauberger, and the 'Hitler survived/Nazi Antarctica' material, illustrated with vague photos of uncertain provenance, and the usual diagrams from the European press. He seems to have been unaware of Vesco, but could well have introduced the idea that Schauberger worked actively on disc development with slave labor. While not doubting the underlying sincerity of Zundel in promoting German wartime achievements, a report of comments he allegedly made to Frank Miele may well reflect his attitude to his readers. Miele quotes Zundel as saying:"I realized that North Americans were not interested in being educated. They want to be entertained. The book was for fun. With a picture of the Fuhrer on the cover and flying saucers coming out of Antarctica it was a chance to get on radio and TV talk shows. For about 15 minutes of an hour program I'd talk about that esoteric stuff. Then I would start talking about all those Jewish scientists in concentration camps, working on these secret weapons. And that was my chance to talk about what I wanted to talk about." [71]

Whatever else may be true of Zundel, I think I can safely say that his work has no factual contribution to make to the 'Nazi UFO' debate. But that doesn't mean that he hasn't influenced its development, or that others less canny than he, but with similar beliefs, have not involved themselves in the subject because they believe what he said.

The publication of Lusar's book in 1957 not surprisingly provoked both military and intelligence interest. From the New Britain Herald for Thursday, March 14 1957 comes a media-friendly response to the publicity the book had been given.

No Flying Saucer Built by Hitler

WASHINGTON (AP) James H. Doolittle says it "just ain't so" that Nazi Germany developed a flying saucer and a bomber that could attack the United States and return without refueling.The veteran airman, chairman of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, gave a House Appropriations subcommittee his estimate of reports published in Germany of great aviation accomplishments under Hitler. These were contained in a book by Rudolf Lusar, former German War Ministry special weapons chief.Doolittle's testimony was published today, along with that of Hugh L. Dryden, director of the advisory committee. Dryden said "there is no truth" in a statement that German engineers designed a flying saucer which attained a height of 40,000 feet and speed of 1,250 miles an hour."This is an advertisement for a book which includes material discovered by our groups who went into Germany after the war", he said.Dryden said also the man supposed to have designed the bomber that could cross the Atlantic without refueling had written a book of his own with no mention of any such invention.Doolittle, asked about the saucer and the bomber, said, "It just ain't so." [72]

A report dated 29 March 1957, declassified in 1978, from Robert E O'Connor of the Air Technical Intelligence Center to the Director of Intelligence is considerably more specific. It has become very common in the past few years to publish 'intelligence' documents on the pretext that they all have equal value, but this report records the outcome of genuine research by those competent to conduct it. I've quote the relevant sections - perhaps it isn't too surprising that those who want us to believe in the Saucer Builders haven't given it much publicity!

Subject: (Unclassified) Review of Book by Rudolf Lusar

1.Reference is made to conversations between Colonel W. O. Farrier and Dr. S. T. Possony on the above subject (Unclassified)

2. This office basically concurs with your review of the book 'The German Weapons and Secret Weapons of World War II and their subsequent development' (Unclassified)

3. There is no evidence in AFOIN-4 files of German development of 'Flying Discs', nor is there any indication of Soviet development of such a vehicle. A check of available biographical files reveals no information on Miethe. The A. V. Roe engineering staffs were contacted and they have no knowledge of Miethe in their organization." [73]

There seems to be no reason to believe that these comments were at any stage designed to be misleading, or were based on inadequate or inaccurate research. What the Air Technical Intelligence Center found seems to have been the truth: that there were no high-performance flying discs, and that nobody had a clue about 'Miethe', whatever his first name may have been, becoming involved in disc or rocket development anywhere, at any time.

Ufologists, especially - I suspect - those who want to believe that the Nazis flew high-performance UFOs - can take life dreadfully seriously. Unfortunately, this failing extends to not being able to spot a genuine mistake, or recognize a fantasy or a fiction that was never intended to be anything but that. Two classic blunders involved taking Lusar far too seriously, and undermining the credibility of otherwise serious and respectable books.

German Jet Genesis

The first is in a Jane's publication - a publisher with a fine reputation of dealing with all kinds of arms and armaments. However, in German Jet Genesis by David Masters, published in 1982, the author not only reprints Lusar's claims re flying performance, but also what appear to be pre-Harbinson details from 'Brisant'. Particularly absurd are the three apparently freehand drawings, depicting a 'Miethe flying disc', a 'Schriever flying disc' and a 'Schriever and Habermohl flying disc. Masters sets out some of the traditional array of excuses for the absence of evidence, saying: "Information on this aspect of German jet aircraft development is very sketchy. The project was always highly secret, and documents that may have existed were probably either destroyed, lost or taken by the Russians when the war ended. A last possibility is that the Allies discovered Schriever's work and considered it too important to reveal", [74]

But in reality I'd guess this was one of the publisher's most embarrassing moments.

Robert Jungk

Jungk's 1956 book "Brighter than a Thousand Suns" was first published in English in 1958. An impressive history of the development of the atomic bomb, it contains (at page 87 in my 1965 Pelican edition) a curious footnote, which has been used to add credibility to the 'Saucer Builder' legends. Referring to a sentence in the text where Jungk says: "The indifference of Hitler and those about him to research in natural science amounted to positive hostility". The footnote says:"The only exception to the lack of interest shown by authority was constituted by the Air Ministry. The Air Force research workers were in a peculiar position. They produced interesting new types of aircraft such as the Delta (triangular) and 'flying discs'. 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 14 February 1945 over Prague and reached in three minutes a height of nearly eight miles. They had a flying speed of 1250 mph which was doubled in subsequent tests. It is believed that after the war Habermohl fell into the hands of the Russians. Miethe developed at a later date similar 'flying saucers' at A. V. Roe and Company for the United States." [75]

It is clear that this footnote derives from Lusar, and should therefore not be taken as true. I note that the original book was written in 1956 and I wonder whether, in fact, the footnote was added by someone other than Jungk at the translation stage in 1957 or 1958. It would be interesting to know whether the original, “Heller als tausend Sonnen “(Alfred Scherz Verlag 1956) had this footnote, too. Either way, Jungk - of whose book the Spectator said: "He tells the story brilliantly; no intelligent man or woman can afford to miss it ... Should be compulsory reading for every budding scientist in every sixth form and every university in the world" may be forgiven this lapse, which should not be exploited in order to provide support for the nonsense that Lusar concocted.

The Miethe Legend
In 'Projekt UFO', Harbinson asserts that, of the 'rocket scientists' involved in flying disc development"at the close of the war, Walter Miethe went to the US with Wernher von Braun, Dornberger, and hundreds of other members of the Peenemunde rocket programme . . . Miethe, though initially working under Wernher von Braun for the United States' first rocket centre in the White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico, joined the A.V. Roe (AVRO-Canada) aircraft company in Malton, Ontario, reportedly to continue work on disc-shaped aircraft, or flying saucers just as Habermohl was thought to be doing with the Russians." [76]

These assertions, presumably based on Lusar's, seem to have led to the development of an impressive, but entirely false, history for the elusive Miethe, covering many years. I think we can now dispose of them... Tim Matthews, in his book UFO Revelation, refers to the "three years of painstaking research by UK astronomy, aviation and photographic specialist Bill Rose, which included on-site research in Germany, Canada and the USA ... he was able to discover that Dr. Walter Miethe who all sources agree was involved with Schriever, Klaus Habermohl and Guiseppe Belluzzo (an Italian engineer) had been the director of the saucer programme at two facilities located outside Prague. In May 1945, after testing of the prototype had taken place, both Miethe and Schriever were able to flee in the direction of allied forces. Rose learned not only that test-flights had taken place but that there was film footage of them ... Rose was shown some stills taken from the original 16mm film and, given his expert photo-technical background, concluded, after careful consideration, that this was probably real and historical footage . . We know a little more about Dr Miethe. One of the important pieces of information came in the form of a rare group photograph showing various young German scientists in 1933. The photograph shows Werner von Braun and Walter Miethe (or Richard Miethe - different sources mention different first names). It would seem that these two knew each other well” [77]

Rose and Matthews claimed that Miethe worked with von Braun in 1933, and that the photo provided by the person who responded to an advert Rose had placed showed them together with other rocket scientists in that year. Fortunately, this is a well-researched and well-recorded period of history, and it should be no more difficult to find records of Miethe than it is that of von Braun. Indeed, von Braun was born in 1912 and if Miethe was 40 in 1952, they should have been absolute contemporaries.

"The Rocket and the Reich" by Michael J Neufeld [78] covers this period, and von Braun's activities, in detail, as well as detailing rocket and 'secret weapon' development right through to the end of the war. Yet it makes no mention at all of Miethe (Walter or Richard), Habermohl, Schreiver, or Belluzzo, Klein or Klaas. Nor, for that matter, does Philip Henshall in "Vengeance - Hitler's Nuclear Weapon Fact or Fiction" [79], which covers a similar range in rather less detail.

You might think that these people never existed or that, if they did, they played no part in the development of any German flying disc. Since his book was published I've spoken to Tim Matthews about this matter, and corresponded with Bill Rose. I don't think either would disagree if I were to say to that it seems that, while Rose is not in a position to disclose details of the elderly West German from whom it appears that both the photos and the surrounding information derived, those photos did not depict a craft in flight or, indeed, fully constructed.

In view of the 1952 'France-Soir' interview, the 1957 intelligence report, and the complete absence of anyone called Miethe in the mainstream history of rocketry, I think we can safely set any contrary evidence aside. In view of the considerable influence 'UFO Revelation' and its effective and communicative author have had, particularly in the USA, I hope that the full story behind Rose's source(s) will be made public. In the meantime, if what was published wasn't exactly a mistake, it may be fair to say that somebody got hold of the wrong end of the stick, but I'm not sure who was holding the stick at the time.

Balls

I strongly suspect that a supposed AP release of December 1944 about the Germans having "a secret weapon in keeping with the Christmas season" which "resembles the glass balls which adorn Christmas trees", "are colored silver and are apparently transparent", and "have been seen hanging in the air over German territory, sometimes singly, sometimes in clusters", was actually a light-hearted bit of fun designed for Christmas. The phenomenon described certainly doesn't bear any resemblance at all to the 'foo fighter' reports. This item was apparently only published - in similar but not identical versions - in the South Wales Argus for 13 December 1944 and the New York Herald Tribune for 2 January 1945. Any competent historian will be aware that in wartime, censorship ensures that the existence of mysterious, enemy secret weapons is not announced by AP, and published openly by the newspapers of combatant nations. Mainstream history has taken no notice of these reports, and in the absence of any evidence to the contrary I suggest they were no more than slight, seasonal jokes, published by just two newspapers out of the thousands that, if the information really derived from a serious AP report, would have taken it up.

An extensive search in the mainstream, 'consensus' historical record of this, the most researched and chronicled period in history, found no mention of even the most prominent features of the mythos. Putting these two findings together, the only reasonable conclusion on the available evidence is that the long-held belief that high-performance, German, disk-shaped craft actually flew during the Second World War can be shown to be a false belief. I hope that this investigation into the 'Nazi UFO' mythos has demonstrated that the evidence presented to date - at least, that of which I am aware - is irrevocably flawed.

Of course, there is much more to investigate, particularly the links between the 'flying discs' and the supposed survival of the Third Reich in - or under - South America and the Antarctic. Joscelyn Goodwin's book Arktos [80] has set out some useful information in this respect, but misses the drama of the creation of New Berlin, the trips to the Moon and Mars, the belief in the dramatic US-Nazi battles in Operation Highjump, and the links that those making these claims may have with particular cultural and political groups.I don't want to try to direct the responses that readers may have to the material I've put together here.

My opinions of fascism and those who use their authority - real or false - to mislead others for their own profit or other advantage are pretty obvious. I hope that readers will also have appreciated that I have tried to distinguish between materials that harms, and that which does not.

However, I'd like to set out a couple of points that arise from the inconsistencies between the mythos version of history, the 'consensus' version of history, and the somewhere-in-between history of ufology.

Operation Paperclip

Operation Paperclip was a secret, now well-documented initiative by the US government to enable the Western Allies in the war to benefit from the knowledge of former Axis scientists who were, nominally, forbidden to enter the USA because of their previous affiliations. Even before the defeat of the Germans, it was apparent to both politicians and military leaders in the West that the Soviet Union was now the enemy of choice, and Paperclip was one of the steps seen as necessary to deal with that enemy. Overall, it appears to have been a sound policy decision, apparently (though reports are not entirely consistent) bringing the talents of luminaries like Werner von Braun to work in, and for, the West. Paperclip was, if nothing else, carefully organized. It was a secret operation, being run for high stakes, and there is no reason to believe that it failed to target the best and most skilled scientists available. In the field of rocketry, certainly, it succeeded, laying the foundations for the US space program in general, and the US successes of the Sixties in particular.Most detailed Nazi UFO accounts refer to Operation Paperclip, using it to support the argument for the extent of German wartime technical achievements with flying discs by implying that the development of US technology - up to and including the present generation of 'Stealth' aircraft - depended on the importation and input of German scientists. Yet the very German 'scientists' who were supposedly responsible for the development of those wonderful discs seem to have been completely ignored by Paperclip, and to have ended up in inappropriate employment in Europe, with only popular newspapers showing an interest in their skills.

Either the saucer builders were also 'the men that Paperclip forgot', or because there were no saucers, Paperclip didn't make a mistake in not taking them off to the USA.

Early ufology

In a recent disagreement I had with Tim Good and his publishers over the provenance of photographs printed in his book 'Alien Base' [81], I raised what I thought was a valid point. Many of the photographs - the ones which didn't depict faked alien corpses - were from Fifties ufology, supposedly taken by George Adamski, Paul Villa, Daniel Fry, Howard Menger and Hugo Vega. These have attracted both belief and ridicule over the years, and Good had not addressed various doubts about their provenance, such as possible associations with kitchen equipment, string, the use of perspective to make small objects look larger, and the simple tactic of throwing things in the air.

Tim Good agreed, honorably, to have these photographs examined by a university expert using modern techniques at his own expense, and although hampered by the copies being some generations from the original, these reports were published. The expert was not convinced that the photos depicted independently airborne craft of the size and at the distance claimed by the photographer. The point I had raised was whether, even if the photographs showed no evidence of deliberate faking, it was likely that these craft - mostly chubby, awkward, tinny and lacking any visible method of propulsion or steering - were actually aerodynamically viable. Could they fly over short distances here on Earth, let alone between planets in our solar system or beyond? As it happened, there was sufficient doubt about the provenance of the photos, and the reality of what they purported to show, that the wider question didn't have to be answered, but I'd suggest that the answer should be a resounding 'No'. If these craft were real, and of the size and in the place that those who took the photographs suggested, then there isn't the slightest chance that they had flown from Venus or Mars, let alone any further away. They couldn't.

They look as though they'd been made out of the bits left over in the average suburban garage, and that they would fall to bits if the string holding them up were to break: whether that's what they actually were you might well ask, but I couldn't possibly comment. An alternative explanation has been given for the inadequacy of these 'craft'. It's always lurked somewhere in the background of extra-terrestrial ufology, as a fall-back position to take where interplanetary flight seems a deeply unlikely explanation for a UFO photograph, but nobody wants, or dares, to cry 'fake'. In recent years this second-best explanation has been adapted into an explanation of choice, eagerly adopted by David Hatcher-Childress and others, in books and in videos.

No longer are these clumsy aggregations of household waste even supposed to be extra-terrestrial craft. Instead, they are prime evidence of the might of Nazi UFO technology, either imported by the US after the war, or by the Russians, who were using them for reconnaissance or, even more wonderfully, by the Nazis themselves, flying to prove that the Third Reich never died, but lives and fights on in secret bases in South America or Antarctica.

As you can imagine, if there was no wonderful flying disc technology in Germany during the war, then it could never have been exported. And if that was the case, then fakes are pretty well all the close-up photos of that era could have been.

That said, one hopefully simple conclusion - moral, even - does come to mind. Ufology has always sought for respectability. It has sought scientific respectability and, trying to explain away the absurdly sudden beginning it had in 1947, has also looked for a history going back before that date.

The 'foo fighter' material is certainly interesting in this respect, but those sightings bear no real resemblance to the craft of early ufology: I'd suggest that for research purposes it should be regarded as an entirely separate subject from the tinny close-up saucers and Nordic occupants of just a few years later.

If my approach to the wartime flying disc material is correct, then 1947 look more sudden - and inexplicable - than ever, and the contact experience even more isolated. Far from achieving any kind of respectability, by accepting so readily the existence of high-performance wartime German flying discs without, with a handful of honorable exceptions, bothering to make even the simplest of enquiries, ufology has again made itself look amateur, gullible, and easily manipulated. So no change there, then.

Thanks

Thanks, at least, are due to David Sivier, Dave Newton, Peter Brookesmith, Peter Williams, Wayne Spencer, Andy Roberts, Eugene Doherty, Hilary Evans, Martin Kottmeyer, James Moseley, JC Carbonel, Peter Rogerson, Maurizio Verga, Tim Matthews, Jeff Lindell, Claude Mauge and Eduardo Russo for their thoughtful and intelligent assistance in putting this investigation together.

Endnotes

[1] Lusar, Rudolf (1959) Trans Heller, R P and Schindler, M German Secret Weapons of the Second world War Philosophical Library New York p.165

[2] Vesco, Renato (1971) Intercept UFO Grove Press New York p.85

[3] Kasten, Len (1996) 'Nazi UFOs' in Atlantis Rising No.7

[4] Stephens, Henry (1998) 'UFOs and the Third Reich' in The Probe Vol 3 #4[5] Terziski

[6] Stevens, Wendelle, interviewed in 'The Godfather of UFOs' in Alien Encounters #25

[7] Redfern, Nicholas (1998) The FBI Files Pocket Books London p.210

[8] Chamberlin, Jo 'the Foo Fighter Mystery' in the American Legion Magazine, December 1945

[9] Roberts, Andy Foo Fighters - the Story So Far Project 1947 website

[10] Lindell, Jeff A. 'The Foo Fighter Mystery Revised' I.U. Folklore Institute

[11] Ibid

[12] Vesco, Renato 'Aerospace expert claims Flying Saucers are Canada's Secret Weapon' in Argosy Magazine August 1969.

[13] Vesco, Renato (1971) Intercept UFO Grove Press New York p.85

[14] Ibid p.86

[15] Ibid (back cover)

[16] Correspondence with author

[17] Lusar op cit p.

[18] www.ufo.it/german

[19] 'Sightings' website

[20] Redfern, N and Downes, J (2000) Weird War Tales 1 - UFOs: 1939-45 Weird War Tales Library

[21] Published by New English Library, London

[22] Harbinson, W A (1995) Projekt UFO - The Case for Man-Made Flying Saucers Boxtree London (back cover)

[23] Ibid (Foreword)

[24] Birdsall, Mark Ian (1988?) The Ultimate Solution Self-published p.13

[25] Harbinson op cit p.5

[26] Ibid p.61

[27] Ibid p.72

[28] Ibid p.74

[29] Interview with Terziski on Sam Russell's 'Open Mind Forum' radio programme on June 5 1993.

[30] Steiger, B and SH (1994) The Rainbow Conspiracy Windsor Publishing Corp New York p.62

[31] Branton - Omega Files

[32] Branton - Omega Files

[33] Website - William Bacon's Home Page/Nordic Saucer Report.

[34] Brantons Testimony http://www.ufomind.com/ufo/media/mailing/archive/iufo/msg18723.shtml[35] Branton - Omega Files

[36] Branton - Omega Files - 'Nazi History'

[37] Roberts, Andy Ibid

[38] Edwards, Frank (1967) Flying Saucers - Here and Now! Lyle Stuart

[39] Caidin, Martin (1960) Black Thursday

[40] Roberts, Andy 'In search of "Foo-Fighters"' in UFO Brigantia No.66 July 1990

[41] Roberts, Andy Ibid

[42] Redfern, N and Downes, J Ibid p.62

[43] Ibid

[44] Edwards, Frank (1967) Ibid

[45] Redfern op cit p.210

[46] Corso, Col. Philip J., with Birnes, William J. (1997) The Day After Roswell Pocket Books London and New York p.73

[47] Blania-Bolnar, Z (1998) 'Monkey Business' in Alien Encounters April 1998[48] Susan Michaels (1997) Sightings: UFOs Fireside Books

[49] "L'UFO Crash di Mussolini" Unknown website

[50] UFO Magazine May/June 1998 p.49

[51] Redfern, N and Downes, J p.16

[52] Redfern, N and Downes, J p.18

[53] Stonehill, Paul 'Nazi UFOs: A Russian Eyewitness' in UFO Magazine (California) Vol 10, No.2, 1995.

[54] Di Rado, Fabio (allegedly) Unattributed Net posting.

[55] Carballal, Manuel (1995) from Saucers Unveiled!

[56] From: "ladynada"

[57] Meier, Billy and P'taah in FIGU Bulletin Vol1, No 6

[58] Stephens, Henry (1998) 'UFOs and the Third Reich' in The Probe Vol 3 #4[59] Stephens, Henry (1998) German research Project catalogue

[60] Kasten, Len Op cit

[61] Hatcher-Childress, D and Vesco, R (1994) Man-Made UFOs 1944-1994 - 50 Years of Suppression Adventures Unlimited Press 1994 p.366

[62] Ibid p.370

[63] Stevens ibid

[64] Icke, David (1999) The Biggest Secret Bridge of Love Scottsdale p.254

[65] Stevens op cit

[66] Vesco (1969) ibid

[67] Good, Timothy (1998) Alien Base Century London p.23

[68] Birdsall, Mark Ian op cit p

[69] Birdsall, Mark (1992) 'Nazi Secret Weapon - Foo Fighters of WWII' in UFO Magazine (California) Vol 7 #4

[70] Friedrich, M (1975) UFOs - Nazi Secret Weapon? Samisdat Toronto

[71] Miele, Frank in an article 'Giving the Devil His Due'. Found on Zundel's Flying Saucers Index website.

[72] 'No flying saucer built by Hitler', New Britain Herald for Thursday, March 14 1957

[73] Air Technical Intelligence Center Memorandum T57-7999, 29 March 1957[74] Masters, David (1982) German Jet Genesis Jane's London p.135

[75] Jungk, Robert (1965) Brighter Than A Thousand Suns Pelican Middlesex [76] Harbinson op cit

[77] Matthews, Tim (1999) UFO Revelation - The Secret Technology Exposed Blandford London

[78] Neufeld, Michael J (1995) Peenemunde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era Harvard University Press Massachusetts

[79] Henshall, Philip (1995) Vengeance - Hitler's Nuclear Weapon Fact or Fiction Alan Sutton

[80] Godwin.Joscelyn (1996) Arktos - The Polar Myth Adventures Unlimited Illinois

[81] Good op cit Various illustrations