Les soucoupes nazies

McClure, Kevin: 'Phoney Warfare', Fortean Studies 7, publié par la suite sur le site Magonia

L'hypothèse de soucoupes nazies est apparue au début des années 1950s.

La relation entre l'histoire du paranormal et l'histoire "consensuelle", sur laquelle la plupart d'entre nous, informés par les historiens et les principaux media, s'accordent comme étant la réalité, est généralement assez éloignée. Le Fortéanisme peut être décrit comme reposant quelque part entre ces deux histoires, de par le fait qu'il consigne les récits supposés factuels, mais possiblement anormaux, enregistrés par les media de l'histoire "consensuelle", tout en rejettant souvent les explications "consensuelles" données pour réduire l'étrangeté de ces événements, ainsi que la raison et le raisonnement adoptés pour le faire. Fort eut la chance de vivre et travailler avant qu'apparaissent les pires excès de l'ufologie et du New Age. Sa méthode d'approche de faits existants, déjà enregistrés, avec un esprit ouvert et large aurait souvent été été en butte au fin manque de faits et à la prédominance d'éléments imaginaires, dans ces 2 disciplines. Il était généralement capable - et souhaitait - croire les rapports que dévoilaient ses recherches. Suivre cette approche aujourd'hui appelerait le ridicule.

Les enquêtes que j'ai mis en place durant les 20 étranges dernières années ont généralement trouvé leurs origines dans mon inconfort par rapport aux interprétations sauvages faites de rapports qui n'avaient jamais été correctement étudiés. Les "lumières d'Egryn" de l'évangéliste Mary Jones et d'autres furent being turned into evidence for the 'earthlights' lobby. Les visions de Fatima et la "Danse du Soleil" devinrent un "événement ufologique classique", étendant artificiellement l'histoire des ovnis 30 ans avant 1947. Les légendes de "Angels of Mons", à l'opposé, furent remise en question avec trop de simplicité. L'explication sceptique habituelle était trop banale, et je pense erronée.

De la même manière, la plupart de mes recherches s'appliquèrent à des domaines où, bien que le phénomène en question ait été visible - audible, tangible même - pour certains individus, sa visibilité avait été sélective. Il y avait toujours une place pour un débat sur la raison pour laquelle certains personnes percevaient subjectivement des observations, des événements, des informations extraordinaires, alors que d'autres non. La situation présente, où de grands disques métalliques fulgureraient dans le ciel de l'Europe avant l'été 1945, est complètement différente. Soit ils étaient là soit ils n'y étaient pas.

Ce qui me fit remettre en question l'idée acceptée des "OVNIs nazis" fut cette horrible période de l'histoire fortéenne, il y a 2 ou 3 années de cela, où des magazines en kiosques de qualité relative et aux intentions douteuses fleurirent dans tout le Royaume-Uni. En plus de Fortean Times lui-même et UFO Magazine, soudain Alien Encounters, Sightings, UFO Reality et toutes sortes d'autres titres à courte durée de vie, se battaient pour remplir leurs pages de choses appetissantes et vendeuses. Des rédacteurs putrides commencèrent à soumettre des articles half-heartedly strung together from a handful of second-hand sources, et quelques heures passées sur l'Internet. Les éditeurs acceptèrent ces articles avec les bras ouverts et peu d'argent, et les vieux mythes furent ravivés et de nouveaux mythes naquirent. Parmi eux étaient les mythes basés sur la création et le vol d'OVNIs nazis.

Plus je regardais les histoires émergentes de réalisations techniques nazies effarantes, et les comparais avec la défaite ignominieuse et ruiseuse de l'Allemagne, moins cette contradiction avait de sens. Ce n'est pas - et je sais que je dois être clair là-dessus - que je croie que l'Axe n'avait pas de plans, de designs, ni d'espérance de production de disques volants de haute-performance. L'Allemagne nazie était efficace en planification, conception, et - peut-être heureusement pour le reste du monde - passa beaucoup de temps en spéculations et rêves d'achèvement et de pouvoir. Mais il semble qu'aucun disque de haute-performance n'ait quitté le sol, et si cette proposition est vraie alors le mythe des OVNIs nazis, célébrant aujourd'hui un demi-siècle d'existence vivace, est le canular le plus soutenu, répandu, et multi-facettes jamais conçu dans notre domaine. Un canular, assez étrangement, dans lequel quelques-uns des principaux participants se connaissaient mutuellement, mais qui en avait attiré des centaines pour jouer leur rôle dans son développement et de nombreux, nombreux autres individus à croire que tout ou partie de ces déclarations étaient véridiques. Tentative as some of my findings of fact may be as yet, what is published here is what I've established so far.

Ce n'est pas l'histoire avec un début, un milieu et une fin. Comme tous les meilleurs mythes elle commence quand quelqu'un se met, soit à y penser, soit raconte publiquement pour la première fois une histoire existante. Elle regarde vers le passé pour y trouver un soutien à ses déclarations puis, le temps passant, spiralled hors de contrôle au fur et à mesure que d'autres éléments y sont ajoutés. Mon intention 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.

Je commencerais par donner une vue d'ensemble substantielle de ce qui est probablement le seul réel mystère non résolu de l'ensemble des spéculations sur la technologie aéronautique du temps de la guerre. 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 !

Foo fighters - Un harent rouge (et jaune, et bleu)

Le phénomène "foo fighter" semble avoir obtenu ce nom après qu'une BD américaine du temps de la guerre ait présenté un personnage nommé Smokey Stover, dont la phrase fétiche était Where there's foo there's fire. Aucun doute que cela sembla drôle à l'époque, mais cela donne en cela un nom mémorable et appealing à une variété très disparate et peu documenté de rapports de phénomènes aériens que Stover has found lasting fame. Sans ce nom, des rapports aussi différents d'auraient probablement jamais été reliés entre eux.

D'une certaine manière, les éléments liés aux "foo fighter" ne nous aident pas beaucoup. Il est assez clair que, quoi qui fut observé, les récits sont rares, quand ils existent, d'objets solides métalliques. Nombre d'entre eux viennent en fait des cieux japonais ou des pays d'Extrême Orient. Néanmoins, des rapports de l'existence et du comportement des "foo fighters" au-dessus de l'Europe pendant la guerre soutiennent les key strands du mythe des "ovnis nazis", and while this can't be the thorough examination that the subject deserves to receive one day, toute enquête doit démarrer quelque part. 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.

Deux chercheurs complets et crédibles ont enquêté le phénomène de guerre des "foo fighter". L'un est le chercheur britannique et ufologique iconoclaste Andy Roberts, et l'autre est le diplômé en folklore américain Jeff Lindell. Tous deux ont, heureusement, publié des résumés de leurs travaux sur le net, et il serait juste de dire qu'ils ont abouti à des conclusions plutôt différentes. Avant de nous plonger dans leur analyse plus prudente, et d'ignorer les éléments douteux présentés dans des éditions après-guerre du largement fictionnel Amazing Stories de Ray Palmer, il est tout d'abord interressant d'examiner l'article clé populaire et sur le sujet qui, comme le dit Roberts, forme la substance de presque tout ce qui a été écrit sur le sujet des foo-fighters. Il paraît dans le American Legion Magazine de décembre 1945, dont Renato Vesco - qui a travaillé aux USA - était familier, mais dont l'Allemand Rudolf Lusar n'était apparemment pas.

L'article était intitulé Le mystère Foo Fighter, et fut écrit par un certain Jo Chamberlin. Ce récit est ravivé de "citations" de la part de témoins de l'époque, making it that much more immediate and appealing. Il commence avec un récit de rapports provenant du Japon, apparemment après la défaite de l'Allemagne :

Durant les derniers mois de la guerre les équipages de nombreux B-29s au-desus du Japon virent ce qu'ils décrirent comme des "boules de feu" qui les suivaient, parfois montaient et s'asseyaient quasiment sur leurs queues, changeaient de couleur de l'orange au rouge et au vert et en arrière à nouveau, et qui malgré cela ne se rapprochèrent jamais pour attaquer, ou s'écraser comme dans une attaque suicide...

Les boules de feu continuent à être un mystère - tout comme elles l'étaient lorsqu'elle furent observées pour la première fois à l'autre bout du monde -- au-dessus de l'Allemagne de l'Est. C'est ainsi qu'elle commençèrent.

A 22 h lors d'une soirée de Novembre, à la fin 1944, le lieutenant Ed. Schlueter décolle dans son chasseur nocturne depuis Dijon (France), pour ce qu'il pense être une mission de routine pour le 415ème Escadron de Chasseurs de Nuit. Le lieutenant Schlueter est un pilote jeune, grand et compétent de Oshkosh (Wisconsin), dont le travail risqué est de rechercher dans le ciel de nuit les avions allemands et de les descendre. Il a fait cela plusieurs fois et a été décoré pour cela. En tant que l'un de nos meilleurs chasseurs de nuit, il était habitué à gérer toutes sortes d'urgences. Avec lui en tant qu'observateur radar se trouvait le lieutenant Donald J. Meiers, et le lieutenant Fred Ringwald, officier de renseignement du 415ème, qui vole en tant qu'observateur.

Le 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?"
"Je suis catégorique."
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 1000 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.

Les vendredi 22 décembre 1944 à vendredi 22 décembre 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 2000 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.

Le dimanche 31, le journaliste de l'AP Bob Wilson est avec le 415ème et entend parler des foo-fighters. Il interroge l'homme jusqu'à 4 h du matin dans la meilleure tradition journalistique jusqu'à ce qu'il ait eu tous les faits. Son histoire passa la censure, et apparut dans les journaux américains le lundi 1 janvier 1945, juste à temps pour 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 lundi 1, 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 s1[Jo Chamberlin, The Foo Fighter Mystery, American Legion Magazine, Décembre 1945].

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 dramatised accounts, and to make informed judgments about the possible causes underlying the reports.

Jeff Lindell

Le folkloriste américain Jeff A. Lindell est un analyste de systèmes électroniques militaires de l'USAF à la retraite. Il a mené des interviews détaillées d'aviateurs qui avaient vu des phénomènes lumineux durant la 2ᵉ guerre mondiale, and tends towards a rationalist explanation of all such reports, utilising the possible misinterpretation of different kinds of natural events. Dans son article The Foo Fighter Mystery: Revised' in the context of historical accounts identified as 'Jack o'Lantern et 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. Au début d'Octobre 1944, des pilotes du 422ᵉ Escadron de Chasseur de Nuit (Night Fighter Squadron ou NFS), basés près de Florennes (Belgique) commencèrent à signaler des "boules de lumière" volant avec leurs chasseurs au-dessus de l'Allemagne de l'Ouest. Au début de Novembre quelques pilotes et opérateurs radar du 422ᵉ avaient signalé des rencontres avec des chasseurs à réaction Me163 et Me262 lors de missions de nuit au-dessus du Reich. Le 7 Novembre 1944 le Associated Press Corps à Paris publia ceci :

Paris (AP) -- Les allemands utilisent des avions propulsés par réacteur et fusée et divers autres gadgets 'newfangled' contre les chasseurs nocturnes alliés," a dit aujourd'hui le lieutenant-colonel B. Johnson, Natchitoches, La., commandant d'un groupe P-61 Black Widow." Ces dernières nuits nous avons compté entre 15 et 20 avions à réaction," dit Johnson. "Ils volent parfois en formation de quatre, mais plus souvent seuls."s2 [The Day, New London, Connecticut, p.1]

Dans une interview avec Philip Guba, Officier Adjoint au Renseignement du 422 NFS, celui-ci déclare :

Au début nous avons pensé qu'ils (les pilotes) voyaient des choses, et ils continuaient à dire que ces choses les prenaient en chasse autour d'eux. S'il furent en fait identifiés... pas pendant que j'étais en service, ils n'identifièrent pas de jet comme tel. Mais je pense que c'était la seule conclusion à laquelle nouis puissions aboutir... c'était un jet. Ca ne pouvait pas être un Will-o'-wisp ou quelque chose comme çà. Ce qu'ils signalaient avoir vu était juste la tuyère, vous voyez. Ils indiquèrent que ces gars (les jets) semblaient jouer autour d'eux. Ils mentionnèrent que ces gars (les jets) ne leur avait jamais tiré dessus et je ne peux me souvenir si l'observateur Radar les avait effectivement vus sur l'écran. C'était plutôt visuel en d'autres mots.

Dans le même temps, le 415ème N. F. S. basé à Dijon (France) commença à signaler les "boules de feu" qu'ils avaient affectueusement surnommées "foo fighters." Le 27 Novembre le premier foo fighter fut observé au-dessus de l'Allemagne de l'Ouest par Ed Schleuter et Don Meiers pilotant un Beaufighter, voici le récit de Don :

Un foo fighter me picked up à 700 pieds et me pris en chasse 20 miles down de la Vallée du Rhin," dit Meiers. "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 s3New York Times, 2 Janvier 1945, pp. 1, 4.

Eh bien, pour compliquer encore plus les choses, le 416ème N. F. S. stationné à Pisa (Italie) commençà aussi à voir des "foo fighters" en Février 1945. Voici des extraits respectifs des données historiques et archives des opérations du 416ème N.F.S :

17 Février 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 Belgiums4 [17 Février 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. s5[17 Feb.1945. Daily Operations Report, 416th NFS, 12th AF-SCU-01].

L'observation ci-dessus fut faite par George Shultz et Frankie Robinson.

Lindell présente un cas convainquant pour accepter que, quelle que fut la cause des rapports, en raison de leur faible nombre et de leur localisation géographique limitée, les chasseurs à réaction Me163 et Me262 ait rarement pu en être responsables. Il indique :

Kurt Welter fut nommé pour former le premier détachement d'essai de Chasseur Nocturne Me 262 (Erprobungs-Kommando) le 2 Novembre 1944. Ce fut le seul Jet Night Fighting allemand outfit de la 2nde guerre mondiale jusqu'au la dernière semaine de Février, Kurt Welter était le seule pilote volant à bord de l'appareil Me 262 de nuit. Le détachement de Welter ne devint pas opérationel avant mi-Décembre 1944, avec seulement deux Me 262 Al-a's. Ses ordres étaient d'intercepter les attaques de nuit des bombardiers Mosquito touchant Berlin , connu comme le "Berlin Express". Cela laissait à Welter très peu de temps pour organiser, recruter, équiper et piloter l'ensemble des missions que les pilotes Alliés disent avoir faitess6 [Hugh Morgan, Me262, Stormbird Rising].

Cela nous laisse avec la question du chasseur à réaction Me 63. Le Second Escadron de Jagdgeschwader (JG) 400, la première et seule Escadrille de Combat de Me 63, était stationnée à la base aérienne de Venlo dans les Pays-Bas et 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 it's 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 s7[Jeff A. Lindell, The Foo Fighter Mystery Revised, I.U. Folklore Institute].

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 sceptical 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', ie 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 nightflying. 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 écrit :

Les pilotes n'ont pas assez d'information sur le phénomène de désorientation, et, comme corollaire, reçoivent des informations particulièrement désorganisées, incomplètes et imprécises. Ils ne peuvent en majeure partie compter que sur leur propre expérience, 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.

Une note finale au sujet des "foo fighters". Il existe diverses photos d'avions semblant accompagnées de boules, ou leurs brillantes, ou de petits appareils ou quoi que ce soit. On les présente régulièrement — Mark Ian Birdsall du UFO Magazine britannique semble fou d'eux — comme une preuve de la réalité physique du phénomène. A ce jour, je n'ai trouvé aucun élement quant à la spécificité de la provenance de ces photos — qui les a prises, quand, où, avec quel appareil photo, dans quelles circonstances, etc. Dans le cas de la photo la plus couramment reproduite, il n'est même pas clair quel type d'appareil est montré. D'autres images semblent avoir pu facilement être manipulées. Pour l'instant, ces photos ne prouvent rien d'autre que la volonté d'accepter des éléments inappropriés pour soutenir une croyance étayée de manière innapropriée. Bien sûr, si une provenance significative pouvait être établie, mon opinion pourrait bien changer.

Renato Vesco, Feuerball et Kugelblitz

Une personne - ne réalisant qu'en partie ce qu'il faisait - transforma les signalement de presse au sujet des 'foo fighters' en disques volants armés de haute-performance. Son nom est Renato Vesco, un italien qui écrivit 3 livres dans sa propre langue, dont un seul fut traduit en anglais. On publia également un de ses articles dans le numéro de Août 1969 du magazine pour hommes américain Argosy, qui fut probablement un peu plus que a hack writer's rendering of material in the book. L'article était intitulé Un expert Aérospatial déclare que les Soucoupes Volantes sont une Arme Secrète du Canada, et 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. Il dit :

Renato Vesco est un ingénieur en appareils fully licensed et un spécialiste en aérospatiale et développement de ramjet. Il a été à l'Université de Rome et, avant la 2nde guerre mondiale, étudia à l'Institut Allemand pour le Développement Aérien. Pendant la guerre, Vesco travailla avec les allemands aux installations secrètes de Fiat Lake Garda en Italie. Dans les années 1960s, il travailla pour le Ministère de la Défense Aérienne italien en tant qu'agent technique undercover, enquêtant sur le mystère OVNI s8[Renato Vesco, Aerospace expert claims Flying Saucers are Canada's Secret Weapon, Argosy Magazine, Août 1969].

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 overionising 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 antishock and antiheat 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 inspecta la progression du travail de nombreuses fois, for he hoped, as in fact happened, that the mechanical principle could also later be used to produce an offensive weapon capable of revolutionising 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 formations9 [Renato Vesco, Intercept UFO, Grove Press New York, 1971, p.85].

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 :

Les Foo Fighters contenaient une charge explosive importante pour les détruire en vol au cas où un dégât sérieux du système de guidage automatique aurait empêché les opérateurs de les contrôler. Il semble cependant qu'à l'époque où on les vit pour la dernière fois, au moins un aviateur américain ouvrit le feu sur un Foo Fighter, à une distance sûre, sans arriver à le descendre, bien qu'il l'ait eu clairement en ligne de mire. 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. Lorsqu'une balle perçait la coque externe, un contact entre les deux couches était établi et la fermeture de circuit ainsi causée déclenchait une accélération maximale du dispositif ou de l'appareil (géneralement en direction verticale) qui faisait partir le Foo Fighter, l'emmenant hors de portée de tout autre tir ennemi s10[Renato Vesco, Intercept UFO, Grove Press New York 1971, p.86].

Now and then, Vesco includes references which support his claims, but he never does so with regard to the Feuerball. Analysons ce qu'il dit en fait ici, et dans quelle mesure cela est censé (si ça l'est) parce que, grâce à Vesco, et à Vesco seul, nous savons que cet appareil était conçu pour réaliser une “interférence radio de proximité” :

I don’t want to labour 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 antishock and antiheat 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 10000 to 25000 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. Following aircraft travelling 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 armoured wingless tortoise can be accurately described as flight) was controlled or determined.

D'autres questions surviennent. Comment la feuerball distinguait-elle un appareil ennemi d'un ami ? Comment s'arrêtait-elle de suivre les flammes de tuyère ? Où allait-elle lorsqu'elle s'arrêtait ? Pourquoi, when it was travelling 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 overionising 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, 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 realised 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 behaviour 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 summarised 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 naquit à Arona, Italie, en 1924. Pilote diplômé, en 1944 il commanda la section technique de la Force Aérienne Italienne. En 1946-47 il servit dans le Reparto Tecnico Caccia. M. Vesco a été membre sénior de l'Association Italienne d'Aérotechnique à partir de 1943, et étudie les problèmes aéronautiques, en particulier dans le domaine de la propulsion à réaction. Il contribue à diverses publications aéronautiques. [15]

Il est clair que quelque chose est complètement faux ici. Né en 1924, Vesco aurait eu 14 ou 15 ans lorsque la 2nde guerre mondiale éclata. A coup sûr, à cet âge, il n'a pas étudié à l'Université de Rome ni à l'Institut Allemand pour le Développement Aérien. 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 existe, absolument ! ... C'est un vieil homme maintenant, né en 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 considère les histoire de Schriever & Co comme de simple conneries, tandis que Vril et Haunebu comme de la 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 popularise 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.

Major Lusar, les constructeurs de soucoupe, et le vol d'essai

Le livre Armes secrètes allemandes de la seconde guerre mondiale de Rudolf Lusar contient moins de 2 pages de texte dans la section titrée "Soucoupes volantes", mais son influence a été pour le moins remarquable. Voici, dans son intégralité, le texte de cette brêve section :

Les soucoupes volantes have been whirling round the world depuis 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. Elles ont été localisées par radar, poursuivies par des chasseurs et personne encore n'a réussi jusqu'ici à établir l'existence de ces "soucoupes volantes" ou parvenu à ram or shoot one down. Le public, et même les experts, are perplexed by an ostensible mystery or a technical miracle. Mais lentement la vérité sort que même durant la guerre les chercheurs et scientifiques allemands firent les premiers pas dans la direction de ces "soucoupes volantes". Ils construisirent et testèrent such near-miraculous contraptions. Des experts et collaborateurs de ce travail confirment que les premiers projets, appelés "disques volants", furent entrepris en 1941. Les concepts de ces "disques volants" furent dessinés par les experts allemands Schriever, Habermohl et Miethe, et l'italien Bellonzo. Habernohl et Schriever choisirent un anneau de grande surface qui tournait autour d'un habitacle fixé, en forme de coupole. L'anneau consistait ailes-dicoïdales ajustables qui pouvaient être amenés en position appropriée pour le décollage ou vol horizontal respectivement. Miethe développa une assiette en forme de disque d'un diamètre de 42 m dans laquelle des réacteurs ajustables étaient insérés. Schriever et Habermohl, qui travaillaient à Prague, décollèrent avec le premier "disque volant" le 14 Février 1945. En 3 mn ils montèrent à une altitude de 12400 m et atteignirent une vitesse de 2000 km/h en vol horizontal (!) Il était prévu à terme d'atteindre des vitesses de l'ordre de 4000 km/h.

Des essais et recherches complets étaient nécessaires avant qu'une construction puisse commencer. En raison de la grande vitesse et du stress de chaleur extraordinaire, des matériaux spéciaux résistant à la chaleur special devaient être trouvés. Le développement, qui coûta des millions, était presque terminé à la fin de la guerre. Les modèles existants furent alors détruits mais l'installation de Breslau où Miethe travailla tomba dans les mains des russes qui emmenèrent tout le matériel et les experts en Sibérie, où le travail sur ces "soucoupes volantes" se poursuit avec succès.

Schriever s'échappa de Prague à temps; Habermohl, cependant, est probablement en Union Soviétique, rien n'étant connu de son destin. L'ancien concepteur Miethe est aux Etats-Unis et, autant que l'on sache, construit des "soucoupes volantes" pour les Etats-Unis et le Canada aux travaux A. V. Roe. Il y a des années, l'U.S. Air Force reçut l'ordre de ne pas tirer sur les "soucoupes volantes". Ceci est une indication de l'existence des "soucoupes volantes" américaines qui ne doivent pas être mises en danger. Les formes volantes observées jusqu'ici sont décrites comme ayant des diamètres de 16, 42, 45 et 75 m respectivement et atteindre des vitesses allant jusqu'à 7000 km/h. (?). En 1952 des "soucoupes volantes" were definitely established over Korea and Press reports said they were seen also during the NATO manœuvres in Alsace in the autumn of 1954. On ne peut plus contester que les "soucoupes volantes" existent. 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 recognise 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 maneouvrability and thereby make them obsolete s11[Lusar op cit p.].

Les constructeurs de soucoupe

I am grateful to the carefully-presented information provided by Maurizio Verga on the UFO Online website s12[www.ufo.it/german] () for much of the material I have used, in this section, to try and answer the questions raised by Lusar.

Belluzzo

La plus ancienne déclaration d'un individu décrivant la construction d'un disque volant en temps de guerre est faite par Guiseppe Belluzzo le ou vers le 27 Mars 1950, à une époque où apparaissent un certain nombre de signalements de soucoupes volantes dans les media italiens, et où l'intérêt européen est élevé. A cette date le journal Italien Il Mattino dell'Italia Centrale publie, avec un dessin 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 metres 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, nor 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 latterday 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 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 - Février 1945

Harbinson notes que le témoin visuel Georg Klein, un ancien ingénieur du Ministère pour l'Armement et les Munitions de Albert Speer... déclara à la presse avoir effectivement vu un vol d'essai du disque Schriever, ou un semblable, près de Prague le 14 Février 1945.

Redfern et Downes citent un rapport de la CIA daté du 27 Mai 1954, qui indique :

Un journal allemand (pas plus identifié que cela) a récemment publié une interview de George Klein, célèbre ingénieur allemand et expert d'appareils aériens, décrivant la construction expérimentale de "soucoupes volantes" qu'il mena de 1941 à 1945. Klein a déclaré avoir été présent lorsque, en 1945, la première "soucoupe volante" pilotée décolla et atteignit la vitesse de 1,3000 miles par heure en 3 minutes. Les expériences résultèrent en trois conceptions : une conception de Miethe fut un appareil en forme de disque, de 135 pieds de diamètre, qui n'effectuait pas de rotation; une autre de Habermohl et Schriever, consistait en un grand anneau rotatif, au centre duquel était un habitâcle rond et stationnaire pour l'équipage. Lorsque les soviétiques occupèrent Prague, les allemands détruirent toute trace des "soucoupes volantes" et on entendit plus parler de Habermohl et de ses assistants s13[Redfern, N and Downes, J (2000) Weird War Tales 1 - UFOs: 1939-45 Weird War Tales Library].

Le journal allemand semble avoir été le Welt am Sonntag des (des dates différentes sont données) 25 et 26 Avril 1953. L'Article est intitulé Erste 'Flugscheibe' flog 1945 in Prag, et il y a une photo de "George Klein"' montrant le même vague diagramme que les reproductions de Lusar.

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.

La question Lusar - résolue

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 further afield. 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 !

W. A. Harbinson et le Projekt Saucer

L'Auteur de S.-F. W. A. Harbinson a écrit une série de 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 s14[Published by New English Library, London]. 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 :

Pendant près d'un demi-siècle, depuis même les premières observations d'OVNIs de Juin 1947, on a considéré que les soucoupes volantes, si elles existent, sont d'origine extraterrestre. Projekt UFO: The Case for Man-Made Flying Saucers prouve de manière concluante que ce n'est pas le cas s15[Harbinson, W A (1995) Projekt UFO - The Case for Man-Made Flying Saucers Boxtree London (back cover)].

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 :

En Mai 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 seem-ingly unrelated articles: one on the scientific and ecological value of the Antarctic, the other about a Ger-man World War II flying saucer construction project, nommé "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 Straf8ezetsbuch, 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 Schwa-benland, in the Antarctic, with equipment for massive underground complexes, similar to those they had con-structed 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 s16[Harbinson, W A (1995) Projekt UFO - The Case for Man-Made Flying Saucers Boxtree London, Foreword].

Mark Ian Birdsall, dans son article La solution ultime, considère que c'est Harbinson lui-même qui trouva 'Brisant', bien que Harbinson ne fasse pas de telle déclaration :

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 s17[Mark Ian Birdsall, 1988? The Ultimate Solution Self-published p.13].

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 :

Cette théorie expliquerait pourquoi, même avant la glasnost, l'ensembles des nations du monde - y compris les Soviétiques et les Americains - n'avaient coopéré l'un avec l'autre qu'en Antarctique. En résumé, les soucoupes volantes vues par de si nombreuses personnes depuis la 2nde guerre mondiale ne sont pas des vaisseaux spatiaux extraterrestres, mais, en fait, des machines extraordinairement avancées, top secrètes, faites de la main de l'homme. Elles viennent simplement d'ici sur Terre...

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 programme for the development of saucer-shaped aircraft. I found that at the close of the war seasoned Allied pilots were sub-mitting 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 Ger-man rocket expert, Wernher von Braun, for NASA in the United States...

My research also uncovered articles about man-made flying saucers, in-cluding 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... s18[Harbinson op cit p.5].

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 tech-nical agent, investigating the UFO phenomenon s19[Harbinson op cit p. 61].

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 in-cluded reproductions of the flying saucer drawings of Schriever and Miethe s20[Harbinson op cit p. 72].

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 contra-dicted 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 des-troyed 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 simi-lar to those then being developed by Schriever, Haber-mohl, Miethe, and Belluzzo in Bohmen (Czechoslovakia) and Breslau (now Wrocklaw, Poland) s21[Harbinson op cit p. 74].

Overall, bearing in mind the quality of most of his sources, Harbinson's research is better than most: it takes a while to realise 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 licence, 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.

Vril, Haunebu et le voyage interplanétaire

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 at a 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 décrit Renato Vesco comme le Wernher von Braun italien, le chercheur scientifique en charge du programme de Recherche et Développement de la Force Aérienne et Spatiale italienne durant la guerre, ce qui en dit beaucoup sur le haut niveau de ses recherches. But then, research isn't really what Terziski is (or was) about. Brad Steiger le cite parlant de :

une "race d'extraterrestres enseignants" qui commença à coopérer en secret avec certains scientifiques allemands à la fin des années 1920s dans des bases souterraines et commença à introduire leurs concepts de progrès philosophique, culturel, et technologicque... (il) maintient que la recherche sur l'antigravité commença dans les années 1920s avec le premier appareil circulaire hybride à antigravité, le RFZ-1, construit par la société secrète Vril. En 1942-43 une série de machines à antigravité culmine avec la station spatiale géante Andromeda en forme de cigare et de 350 pieds de long, qui fut construite dans les vieux hangars Zeppelin près de Berlin par le E4, la branch de recherche et développement des SS s22[Steiger, B and SH (1994) The Rainbow Conspiracy Windsor Publishing Corp New York p.62].

Il est également cité (par Branton - voir ci-dessous) commentant l'utilisation continue d'ouvriers esclaves par les S. S. de pure race aryenne qui vivent underground, conduisant des expériences génétiques prolongeant celles de la 2nde guerre mondiale, dans la lignée du pacte allemands-nazis-Illuminati, qui fut établi avec les races reptiles de longues années avant que ne le fasse le gouvernement américain "secret/conventionnel" hybride s23Branton, Omega Files.

Nor has Terziski's account of the trips to the Lune ouMars proved as unbelievable as we might hope. He says :

Les allemands se posèrent sur la Lune probablement dès 1942, utilisant leurs plus grandes soucoupes à réaction exoatmosphériques de type Miethe et Schriever. 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, les allemands commencèrent à boring et tunneling sous la surface, et à la fin de la guerre il y avait une petite base de recherche nazie sur la Lune. The free energy tachyon drive craft of the Haunibu-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...

D'après les auteurs du film documentaire allemand underground de la Société de Thule (presumably "UFO Secrets of the Third Reich", que Terziski aurait produit lui-même - KM), le seul appareil produit de type Haunibu-3 - the 74 meter diameter naval warfare dreadnought - fut choisit pour la mission la plus courageuse de tout le siècle - le voyage vers 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).

Une équipe suicide de volontaires allemands et japonais fut choisie, parce que tout le monde savait que cet expédition était à un seul sens et sans retour. La grande intensité des grands électro-magnétogravitiques et la piètre qualité des alliages métalliques alors utilisés pour les éléments structurels du drive, was causing the metal to fatigue and get very brittle only after a few months of work of the drive. Le vol vers Mars partit d'Allemagne un mois avant la fin de la guerre - en Avril 1945. Le message radio with the mixed news was received by the German underground space control center in Neu Schwabenland and by their research base on the Moon s24Branton, Omega Files.

Haunebu 2En Mars 2000, les appareils Vril et Haunebu sont devenus une réalité dans de nombreux esprits, not least that of the author of William Bacon's Home Page/Nordic Saucer Report. En plus des Feuerball et Kugelblitz, et de l'assortiment des créations de Schreiver, Belluzzo, Miethe et Habermohl, il inclut dans sa liste, Types d'appareils discoïdaux allemands signalés du 28 Janvier 2000 (mis à jour en Mars 2000) :

Appareils électrogravitiques basé sur une physique actuellement inconnue :

  1. Appareil d'origine de la société Vril. Décrit comme une "machine à remonter le temps", il a demandé 2 ans d'expérimentation. Démantelé dès 1924 (!) et livré à Augsburg. La conception est décrite comme basée sur des informations channeled depuis une planète supposée orbitant autour de l'étoile Aldebaran (Alpha Tauri). Disposition inconnue.
  2. RFZ-1 (RFZ = runflugzeug = appareil rond). Disque créé au milieu de 1934 par la société Vril. Ecrasé depuis une basse altitude lors de son premier vol d'essai.
  3. RFZ-2. Achevé à la fin de 1934 par la société Vril. Long de 16 pieds, et le premier avec un "magnetic field impulse steering". Il est opérationnel en 1940 comme on le voit sur une photographie prise au-dessus d'un océan, décrit comme l'Atlantique Sud.
  4. RFZ-4. Un appareil d'essai driven by propeller to study the aerodynamics of a disc-shaped craft. associated with Schutzstaffel (SS) unit E4.
  5. RFZ-5. Egalement connu comme Haunebu I (note: nebel = brouillard ou fumée). Vol 08/1939. Diamètre 83 pieds. Une photographie existe, décrite comme prise au-dessus de Prague. Avec un équipage de huit personnes, décrit comme ayant atteint 12000 miles/h et la haute atmosphère. Déclaré avoir été équippé de 2 armes laser (anachronisme apparent).
  6. RFZ-6 (Haunebu II). Travail commence avant la fin de 1942. Des formes diverses, de 85 à 100 pieds de diamètre et 30 à 36 pieds de haut, sont produites. 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. Haunebu 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

Autres appareils :

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 the Vergeltungswaffen(retaliation weapons). Fitted with 12 BMW jet engines. Reached 78000 pieds, plus tard 80000 pieds lors des premiers essais en mer Baltique, le 17/04/1945. A spherical glass like-dome surrounded by a rotating wing of turbine blades s25[Site web - William Bacon's Home Page/Nordic Saucer Report].

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

L'Histoire imaginaire inventée ou présentée (ou les 2) par Terziski a elle-même été diffusée par d'autres, pour des raisons qui continuent de me baffle. Le plus high-profile, et peut-être le plus productif d'entre eux est "Branton", dont les "Dossiers Omega" dans divers domaines de conspiration et de cet étrange neo-facisme qui existe parmi des "patriotes" qui croient aussi en l'intervention d'êtres extraterrestres sont tellement faciles à trouver sur le Net. Je me suis demandé qui était Branton, et une réponse semble être arrivée récemment d'un certain Alan DeWalton, sous le titre Le témoignage de Branton :

Branton est un gars qui a été impliqué dans les enlèvements depuis son enfance [generational family stuff], MANY of which involved Alien/CIA agendas in the underground bases. Il fut "programmé" EN TANT qu'une personalité altérée, ou un "agent dormant" par la 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 fut "saved" [renaissance] en 1985 et le "Branto alter ego" est apparemment toujours impliqué dans les 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... s26Branton's testimony

These biographical details may make Branton's willingness to accept Terziski's claims as true. Branton reports :

Bien que cela puisse paraître assez incroyable, Terziski déclare posséder des informations confirmant, telles que "...la première exposition video d'ovnis Nazi. Des atterrissages de soucoupes allemandes/japonaises sur la Lune et Mars en 1944-46, l'atterrissage du coup de Marconi sur Mars en 1956... une séquence video de Nazi interplanetary dreadnoughts et de soucoupe américano-soviétique atterrissant sur 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 s27[Branton - Omega Files].

Le Dossier Omega intitulé Histoire Nazie est un autre exemple de présentation de l'incroyable comme s'il s'agissait d'un fait. Il s'agit juste d'un extrait, et j'ai enlevé une partie du rambling concernant de riches industriels et l'Illuminati :

J'ai commencé à m'habituer à faire face à des croyances et perspectives extrêmes, sans jamais m'emmurer dans le désert moral et intellectuel inévitablement sous-jacent. Encore qu'il y ait quelque chose d'absolument tordu dans la phrase Les ouvriers du complexe de Kahla sont amenés à Buchenwald et gazés afin de ne pas révéler le secret des projets de disques nazis. Dans cela on trouve le fait s'il n'y a jamais eu de projets de construction de disques nazis, alors il n'y a jamais eu d'ouvriers éclavagisés à construire les disques nazis, et donc aucun ouvrier n'aurait été amené à Buchenwald et gazé pour les raisons que fournit Branton. Il fait également l'assertion qu'un très grand nombre d'ouvriers esclaves aient été emenés construire les bases nazis sous le Pôle Sud. Le type de besoin satisfait par le simple fait de faire ces distorsions démentes des tristes vérités de l'Holocauste dépasse de loin ma compréhension. 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. D'autres "fausses histoires" suivent.

Histoires fausses

Projet Uranus

Dans une autre analyse prudente d'un élément douteux de l'histoire des ovnis, Andy Roberts indique :

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 Le Livre Noir Des Soucoupes Volantes (1970) par l'ufologue français 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 il m'indiqua que la totalité de l'affaire du "Projet Uranus" était un canular qui avait été inséré dans son livre précisément pour voir qui le recopierai sans vérifier. Le canular avait apparemment été révélé en France des années auparavant mais n'avait pas exfiltré chez les ufologues anglophones. Peut-être d'autres canulars attendent-ils d'être découverts s29[Roberts, Andy Ibid].

Le "Raid Schweinfurt"

Cette histoire met en scène quelques soucoupes volantes lors d'un raid de B-17 le 14 Octobre 1943, aimed at the ball-bearing factories at Schweinfurt in Germany. Elle fut publiée par l'auteur américain populaire Frank Edwards dans Flying Saucers - Here and Now s30[Edwards, Frank (1967) Flying Saucers - Here and Now! Lyle Stuart] en 1967, mais je comprends que la version romancée d'origine vient d'un certain Martin Caidin, dans son livre Black Thursday, publié en 1960.

Caidin raconte que :

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 s31[Caidin, Martin (1960) Black Thursday].

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, et rapporte que :

Une lettre au MoD à leur Branche Historique de l'Air n'aboutit à rien, suggérant que either of the documents may be held at the Public Records Office at Kew, London. Un chercheur professionnel fut despatched 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.

Aux USA, Dennis Stacy (alors rédacteur-en-chef du UFO Journal du MUFON) 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).

Les Archives Nationales (Washington) searched their files but drew a blank. Une lettre écrite au chercheur français J. M. Bigorne des Archives Nationales indiquait "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 s32[Roberts, Andy 'In search of "Foo-Fighters"' in UFO Brigantia No.66 July 1990].

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 myself 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 20000 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 mucho promotion for his many books, including UFO based novels) the Schweinfurt raid was never mentioned. Funny that, really s33[Roberts, Andy Ibid].

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 4112
Recd. AMCS. 171129a hrs Oct.43

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

From - OIPNT

IMPORTANT - CONFIDENTIAL

8 BC 0-1079-E
Annex to Intelligence Report Mission Shweinfurt 16 October 1943

306 Group reporta 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 coloured - 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.Ops
War Room
D.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."

Il conclut :

At least we now know Caidin's reference exists! Besides that there is little to say really. Les objets signalés sont intriguants mais pas complètement mystifying. There were many types of flak being used by the Germans in W.W.II and several files in the PRO refer to coloured 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 behaviour 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 s34[Redfern, N and Downes, J Ibid p.62].

Je n'ai jamais trouvé l'idée du "MJ-12" crédible, mais au moins la première diffusion des documents avait été préparée avec suffisamment de précaution pour provoquer une discussion significative. Cette exagération ridicule d'une histoire déjà élaborée fait appaître cette seconde version des documents comme absurde. Je voudrais aussi mettre en avant que le mythe des OVNI nazis et le MJ-12 sont incompatibles par essence : si les américains avaient déjà acquis des allemands la capacité de construire des disques volants hautement performants, pourquoi auraient-ils été si excités concernant les crashs de disques ET ? Et pourquoi tous ces portentous documents de "première version" ne les mentionnent-ils pas ?

Le projet Massey

Redfern et Downes continuent de publier une autre déclaration de Frank Edwards, juste avant son récit du raid de Schweinfurt. Bien qu'étant au courant des résultats négatifs des recherches menées par Andy Roberts et Tim Good, ils indiquent :

En ce qui concerne le gouvernement britannique, il y a de fortes preuves 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 s35[N. Redfern et J. Downes, Ibid p.62].

Ils citent Edwards :

Dès 1943, les britanniques avaient mis en place une petite organisation pour collecter de l'information sur ces objets. Elle était sous la direction du lieutenant-général Massey, et avait été inspirée en partie des rapports d'un espion qui était en réalité un agent double, travaillant sous les auspices du maire de Cologne. Il confirma que les Foo Fighters n'étaient pas des appareils allemands, ce que bien sûr les britanniques savaient. Le Ministère de l'Air britannique, en 1966, me dit que le projet Massey fut officiellement terminé en 1944. Peut-être est-ce seulement une coincidence que l'agent double fut révélé et exécuté au Printemps de 1944 s36[Frank Edwards (1967) Ibid].

Trois problèmes surviennent immediatement. Tim Good a établi, de source sûre, qu'il n'y avait pas de lieutenant-général Massey. Presque tous les signalements de foo fighters remontent jusqu'à 1944, et il n'est donc pas clair pourquoi des enquêtes très rigoureuses auraient débuté en 1943 et finit 1944. And what on earth was a spy doing being controlled by the Mayor of Cologne? A l'évidence, le "Projet Massey" sonne comme une fabrication complète et délibérée.

Soucoupes écrasées et rétro-ingénierie

Nick Redfern makes a great deal of limited evidence en suggérat qu'il has ever been one extra-terrestrial flying craft crash on Earth since 1900, let alone more than one. Il n'a pas, cependant, been unwilling à suggérer que les nazis eurent accès à 1 ou plusieurs soucoupes volantes écrasées, et rétro-ingéniéré leur technologie. Ceci, censément, fut la manière dont ils purent développer de tels disques volantes sophistiqués ! Bien sûr, il n'est pas le seul à faire des suggestions de ce type, mais I hardly need point out que lorsque les éléments suggèrent que l'Allemagne n'avait pas de disques volants sophistiqués, alors il n'y a rien à expliquer. Quoi qu'il en soit, Redfern conclut d'après les rapports de renseignement plutôt désespérés, et généralement plutôt invraisemblable qu'il a rassemblés :

Si... les données relatées dans les memoranda officiels du FBI des années 1940s, 1950s et 1960s sont exactes, how were the Nazis able to develop technology that, years later, was still defying America's finest" As I will later show, il y a firm grounds à croire qu'un certain nombre de véhicules extra-terrestries écrasés sur terre sur le sol des US à la fin des années 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 realised s37[Redfern op cit p.210].

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 designss38 [Corso, Col. Philip J., with Birnes, William J. (1997) The Day After Roswell Pocket Books London and New York p.73].

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 de fusées V2, 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 s39[Blania-Bolnar, Z (1998) 'Monkey Business' in Alien Encounters April 1998].

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 "Projet Montauk")

décrit la découverte d'une soucoupe écrasée en Forêt Noire en 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 s40[Susan Michaels (1997) Sightings: UFOs Fireside Books].

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 s41["L'UFO Crash di Mussolini" Unknown website]. 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 s42[UFO Magazine May/June 1998 p. 49]. The current popularity of back-engineering is such that I expect to see more such reports.

Soldats anonymes

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 locale of this incident was approximately 120 miles north-west of Ubberbishophiem s43[Redfern, N and Downes, J p.16].

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.

Dans un cas de 1957, agents at Detroit recorded that they had spoken with a man who was...

...né le 19 Février 1926, dans l'état de Warsaw (Pologne), and was brought from Poland as a Prisoner of War to Gut Alt Golssen approximately 30 miles east of Berlin, Germany, en Mai 1942, where he remained until a few weeks after the end of World War II. According to the man, during 1944, month not recalled, while enroute 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 aeroplane 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.

Le rapport suivant vient de 1967 :

Le 26 Avril 1967 [le témoin] 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 the United States has 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 s44[Redfern, N and Downes, J p.18].

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 crema-torium 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. Sud-denly, 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, quiver-ing 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 compo-nents. 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... s45[Stonehill, Paul 'Nazi UFOs: A Russian Eyewitness' in UFO Magazine (California) Vol 10, No.2, 1995].

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 s46[Di Rado, Fabio (allegedly) Unattributed Net posting].

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 summarised (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 s47[Carballal, Manuel (1995) from Saucers Unveiled!].

Autorités de la Terre et d'ailleurs

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: Quelle est la relation entre le commandement Ashtar Command et la race humaine ?

Rép: Le commandement Ashtar est une des nombreuses entités qui viennent sur Terre et have been circle 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. Ces êtres de Aldebaran were insulted after they were labeled untrustworthy. They Went back in time and had a meeting of psychics avec la Société de Thule qui était une société secrète. The meeting of the Thule Society led to what is Called the Third Rite (Reich). Le commandement Ashtar était aussi en contact avec deux psychics, nommés Maria Austish et Zigrum, qui étaient en contact avec Hitler. Hitler et l'Allemagne nazie construisaient des appareils durant la 2nde guerre mondiale. Hitler réunit une équipe de scientifiques et d'ingénieur d'élite et intelligents qui étaient des experts dans le domaine aérodynamique. Ils commencèrent à concevoir le disque volant en 1941 A.D. Durant les années 1945-47 trois experts allemands, Schriver, Habermohl, et Meithe et un italien A. Bellonzo furent impliqués dans la R&D d'un appareil en forme de soucoupe. Le 14 Février 1945 A.D. Shriver & Habermohl firent voler un disque qui pendant 3 minutes monta à une altitude de 12400 mètres et atteignit une vitesse de 2000 km/h en vol horizontal. Cette technologie leur fut donné par le commandement Ashtar s48[From: "ladynada" <ur-valhalla!usa1.com!ladynada>].

Billy Meier et 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 sceptical, 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. Il écrit :

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 12000 meters [36000 pieds], 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 12000 mètres ?

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 et 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. Billys49 [Meier, Billy and P'taah in FIGU Bulletin Vol1, No 6].

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 ant--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 s50[Stephens, Henry (1998) 'UFOs and the Third Reich' in The Probe Vol 3 #4].

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 organizations 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 s51[Stephens, Henry (1998) German research Project catalogue].

Len Kasten

The incidence of disinformation with relation to Nazi achievements in general, and flying discs in particular, is high. Here's 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 electrogravitation 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 stabilisation, 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 ? s52[Kasten, Len Op cit].

Nous reviendrons sur la formation de bombardiers lorsque nous en viendrons à 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 s53[Hatcher-Childress, D and Vesco, R (1994) Man-Made UFOs 1944-1994 - 50 Years of Suppression Adventures Unlimited Press 1994 p. 366].

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 s54[Hatcher-Childress, D and Vesco, R (1994) Man-Made UFOs 1944-1994 - 50 Years of Suppression Adventures Unlimited Press 1994 p. 370].

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, ufologue vétéran et supporter de Billy Meier a, dit-il, eut le privilège d'une gamme unique d'expériences touchant aux ovnis nazis. Tout comme le fait d'avoir été envoyé en Alaska pour superviser l'installation d'équipements spéciaux à bord de bombardiers B-29 pour rechercher des objets volants mystérieux connus sous le nom de boules de feu" ou "foo fighters, il déclare dans le n° 25 de Alien Encounters que les disques Vril et Haunebu ne furent utilisés qu'une seule fois contre les Alliés, où ils dévastèrent un grand raid de 800 bombardiers au-dessus de l'Allemagne, en descendant un chiffre sans précédent de 200 en une seule nuit s55[Stevens ibid]. Le Commandement des Bombardiers a clairement oublié cette tragédie en compilant ses archives.

David Icke, qui dans The Biggest Secret prend le mythe des ovnis nazis comme vrai ainsi que des centaines d'autres croyances insensées, présente Stevens disant que :

les Foo Fighters étaient parfois gris-verts, et parfois rouges-orangés. Ils approchaient son appareil aussi près que 5 m puis restaient simplement là, a-t-il dit. On ne pouvait pas s'en débarasser ni les descendre et amenèrent de nombreux escadrons à faire rebrousse-chemin ou atterrir s56Icke, David: The Biggest Secret, Bridge of Love Scottsdale, 1999, p.254.

Stevens prétend aussi que, alors qu'il travaillait au Centre du Renseignement Technique de l'Air, il vit une carte de l'Allemagne marquée de 9 symboles en forme de saturne. Il découvrit plus tard par Vladimir Terziski qu'il s'agissait des endroits où étaient situés les centres de recherche nazis :

Vers la fin de la guerre les nazis avaient 9 installations de recherche secrètes où ils construisirent 2 types de discques : l'appareil "Vril" plus petit, et le bien plus gros "Haunebu". Tous 2 étaient propulsés par un "champ gravitationnel nul". Lors de vols d'essais l'appareil s'éleva à 60 000 pieds en simplement 6 mn 1/2, ce qui dépassait radicalement la performance de tout appareil allié s57[Stevens op cit].

Vanguard Science/KeelyNet/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 organisation 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 Renate 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 Birdsall

Birdsall a longtemps été une figure d'influence en ufologie. Aujourd'hui rédacteur-en-chef du magazine de kiosque Unopened Files - Access a Number of Well Kept Secrets et Rédacteur de UFO Magazine, il a un intérêt établi pour les événements ovnis en temps de guerre. Dans son libre de 1998 Alien Base, Tim Good indique :

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 rumoured 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 s58[Timothy Good (1998) Alien Base Century London p.23].

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.

En, je pense, 1988, Birdsall publie le livret malheureusement intitulé La solution ultime qui, en seulement 29 pages, présente 3 images différentes de 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. s59[Mark Birdsall (1992) 'Nazi Secret Weapon - Foo Fighters of WWII' in UFO Magazine (California) Vol 7 #4] 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, également connu sous le nom de Mattern Friedrich (le nom sous lequel il écrivit UFOs - Nazi Secret Weapon? s60[Friedrich, M (1975) UFOs - Nazi Secret Weapon? Samisdat Toronto]) et 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 labour. 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 cite Zundel disant :

Je réalisai qu'être éduqués n'intéressai pas les Nord-Américains. Ils voulaient être divertis. Le livre était pour le plaisir. Une image du Fuhrer sur la couverture et des soucoupes volantes venant d'Antarctique donnaient une chance de l'avoir à la radio sur dans les talk shows télévisés. Durant 15 minutes environ sur une heure de programme je parlerai de ces choses ésotériques. Alors je commencerai à parler de tous ces scientifiques juifs dans les camps de concentration, travaillant sur ces armes secrètes. Et ce serait ma chance de parler de ce dont je voulais parlers61 [Frank Miele, Giving the Devil His Due, trouvé sur le Zundel's Flying Saucers Index website].

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.

Commentaires et renseignement officiels

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

Pas de soucoupe volante construite par Hitler

WASHINGTON (AP) James H. Doolittle dit qu'il "n'y a tout simplement pas" de soucoupe volante et de bombardier développé par l'Allemagne nazie qui pourrait attaquer les Etats-Unis et revenir sans ravitaillement.

L'Aviateur vétéran, président du National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, a donné au sous-comité des House Appropriations son estimation des rapports publiés en Allemagne sur de grands accomplissements d'aviation sous Hitler. Ils faisaient partie d'un livre de Rudolf Lusar, ancien directeur des armes spéciales du Ministère de la Guerre allemand.

Le témoignage de Doolittle a été publié aujourd'hui, avec celui de Hugh L. Dryden, directeur du comité de conseil. Dryden a déclaré qu'il "n'y avait aucune vérité" dans la déclaration selon laquelle des ingénieur allemands aient conçu une soucoupes volante qui atteignit l'altitude de 40000 pieds et la vitesse de 1250 miles par heure.

C'est un advertisement for a book which includes material discovered by our groups who went into Germany after the war", a-t-il déclaré.

Dryden dit également que l'homme supposé avoir conçu le bombardier qui pourrait traverser l'Atlantique sans ravitaillement a écrit lui-même un livre sans aucune mention d'une telle invention.

Doolittle, interrogé sur la soucoupe et le bombardier, a déclaré "Il n'y en a tout simplement pas. s62[No flying saucer built by Hitler, New Britain Herald for Thursday, 14 Mars 1957].

Un rapport daté du 29 Mars 1957, déclassifié en 1978, de Robert E. O'Connor de l'Air Technical Intelligence Center au Directeur du Renseignement est largement plus spécifique. 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!

Sujet: (Déclassifié) Examen du livre de Rudolf Lusar

1. Il est fait référence à des conversations entre le colonel W. O. Farrier et le docteur S. T. Possony sur le sujet ci-dessus (Déclassifié)

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' (Déclassifié)

3. Il y a aucune preuve dans les archives AFOIN-4 d'un développement allemand de "disques volants", pas plus qu'il n'y a une quelconque indication d'un développement soviétique d'un tel véhicule. A check of available biographical files reveals no information on Miethe. L'équipe d'ingéniérie de A. V. Roe fut contactée et il n'ont pas connaissance de Miethe dans leur organisation. s63[Air Technical Intelligence Center Memorandum T57-7999, 29 March 1957].

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.

CORE 10. Erreurs et fantaisies

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 recognise 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 s64[Masters, David (1982) German Jet Genesis Jane's London p.135].

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 s65[Jungk, Robert (1965) Brighter Than A Thousand Suns Pelican Middlesex].

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.

La légende Miethe

Dans 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 Prov-ing Ground, New Mexico, joined the A.V. Roe (AVRO-Canada) aircraft company in Malton, Ontario, re-portedly to continue work on disc-shaped aircraft, or flying saucers just as Habermohl was thought to be doing with the Russianss66 [Harbinson op cit].

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, dans son livre 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” s67[Matthews, Tim (1999) UFO Revelation - The Secret Technology Exposed Blandford London].

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 s68[Neufeld, Michael J (1995) Peenemunde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era Harvard University Press Massachusetts] 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 s69[Henshall, Philip (1995) Vengeance - Hitler's Nuclear Weapon Fact or Fiction Alan Sutton], 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 coloured 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.

Conclusions

Une recherche étendue dans the mainstream, 'consensus' historical record of this, the most researched and chronicled period in history, n'a trouvé aucune mention de même les caractéristiques les plus proéminentes du mythe. En rassemblant ces deux découvertes, la seule conclusion raisonnable sur les preuves disponibles est que la croyance longtemps entretenue selon laquelle un appareil de haute performance, allemand, en forme de disque ait effectivement volé durant la 2nde guerre mondiale peut être présentée comme une croyance infondée. 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. Le livre de Joscelyn Goodwin, Arktos s70[Godwin Joscelyn (1996) Arktos - The Polar Myth Adventures Unlimited Illinois] 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 material 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.

Opération Paperclip

L'Opération Paperclip était une initiative secrète, aujourd'hui parfaitement documentée du gouvernement américain pour permettre aux alliés occidentaux de bénéficier de la connaissance des anciens scientifiques Axis qui étaient, nommément, interdit de territoire américain de par leurs précédentes affiliations. Même avant la défaite des allemands, il apparaissait évident aux politiques comme aux militaires de l'Ouest que l'Union Soviétique était maintenant l'ennemi de choix, et Paperclip était l'une des étapes considérées comme nécessaires pour s'occuper de cet ennemi. 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 organised. 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.

Débuts de l'ufologie

In a recent disagreement I had with Tim Good and his publishers over the provenance of photographs printed in his book Alien Base s71[Good op cit Various illustrations], 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, honourably, 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 is 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 looks 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 honourable 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.

Remerciements

Des remerciements, enfin, sont à adresser à 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 et Eduardo Russo pour leur assistance thoughtful and intelligent in putting this investigation together.

Références :

[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
[9] Roberts, Andy Foo Fighters - the Story So Far Project 1947 website
[11] Ibid
[14] Ibid p.86
[15] Ibid (back cover)
[16] Correspondence with author
[19] 'Sightings' website
[23] Ibid (Foreword)
[29] Interview with Terziski on Sam Russell's 'Open Mind Forum' radio programme on June 5 1993.
[66] Vesco (1969) ibid
[68] Mark Ian Birdsall, op cit p