Chapter 17:
THE KECKSBURG ACORN RINGS THE BELL
"When you started on the path that you
did, sooner or later the trail was going to lead you to Germany. "
Nick Cook
The Hunt for Zero Point
1
"This is a story of how key Nazis....
anticipated military disaster and laid plans to transplant Nazism, intact
but disguised, in havens in the West... "
Mae Brussel
Rebel Magazine
2
1 Nick Cook, The Hunt for Zero Point, p. 270.
2 Cited in Jonathan Vankin, Conspiracies. Crimes, and Cover-ups, p. 104.
A. The "Bell"
The most sensational piece of information on Nazi secret
research to come out since the reunification of Germany - indeed, since
the origins of the Nazi "UFO" Legend itself- is the story told
by Nick Cook in his Quest for Zero Point, which appeared in the U.K. in 2001. The story is, additionally, the only real
solid piece of corroboration of the Nazi UFO Legend to appear since the
war, based, as as it is, on a secret and recently declassified Polish
war crimes trial affidavit of a former SS general.
"The Bell" (German: die Glocke) represented
something at the very pinnacle of Kammler's grizzly and super-secret SS
"wonderweapons" empire. Cook's book represents the only publicly
accessible information on this bizarre object in the English language,
the equally macabre experimentation that surrounded it, and the stringent
security the SS held it under.
The following are the salient features
of The Bell, according to Cook:
-
(1)
The Bell was reportedly a metallic object, approximately
9' in diameter and 12-15' tall;
-
-
(2)
It looked like a "Bell", hence its codename
to the Germans, die Glocke;
-
-
(3)
It was comprised of two counter-rotating cylinders,
rotating a purplish liquid-metallic looking substance code-named "Xerum
525" by the Germans, at high speeds;3
-
(4)
"Xerum 525" was apparently highly radioactive,
being purple in color, and housed in cylinders with lead lining 3
cm thick;4
-
(5)
The Bell apparently required high amounts of electrical power in its
operation;5
(6)
During use, it could only be run for approximately
one to two minutes, as it apparently gave off strong radiation and/or
other electromagnetic or unknown field effects;6
-
(a)
Several scientist died on its first operation;7
(b)
Subsequent tests included various plants and animals,
all of which decomposed into a blackish goo and without normal putrefaction,
within a matter of a few minutes or hours after exposure to its field
effects when in operation;8
-
(c)
Technicians near the Bell during these experiments
reported metallic tastes in their mouths after being exposed to it;9
-
(d)
The chamber in which the Bell was tested was lined
with ceramic bricks and rubber mats, and had to have its rubber matting
removed and burned after each test, and it was subsequently washed
down with brine by inmates from nearby concentration camps;10
-
(6)
All the scientists and witnesses who saw or worked
on the Bell were murdered by the SS as the war neared its end;11
(7)
The Hell was transplanted out of Silesia to a destination
that has never been discovered. The Bell, along with General Kammler
himself, simply disappear entirely from history, never to be seen
again.
(8)
A strange "henge" like structure was constructed
by the Germans out of reinforced concrete near the facility where
the Bell was located and tested. This structure resembled a test rig
for the possible test of extremely powerful propulsion devices.12
3 Cook, op. cit., p. 192.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid., pp. 182, 197
6 Ibid., pp. 192-193
7 Ibid., p. 193.
8 Ibid., p. 192.
9 Ibid., p. 193.
10 Ibid., p. 192.
11 Ibid., p. 184. It is due to the fact that the Bell's scientists were
murdered that we know anything about it at all, for the chief executioner,
SS General Sporrenburg, who was tasked by Kammler with the murders, gave
the only known testimony and descriptions of the Bell in his affidavit
to a post-war Polish war crimes trial, for which he was convicted and executed.
12
Cook, op. cit, pp. 197-198.
Cook also notes that, at the end of the war,
Kammler
had special jurisdiction over a secret "SS evacuation command"
that had been personally established by Reichsleiter Martin Bormann in
great secrecy. This command included jurisdiction over all of Nazi Germany's
heavy-lift ultra-long range transport aircraft, including the Ju-290 and
the six engine monster, the Ju-390, that we encountered in part one.
These planes were based at the end of the war quite near the secret underground
facility where the Bell was being tested.
Before proceeding, it would be useful to note a few
things about this strange list of properties.
First, whatever the Bell was, Kammler's SS apparently
thought its secrets were so valuable, that anyone connected with its construction
and/or testing had to be executed at the end of the war to prevent these
from being leaked, presumably to the Russians, since the Bell was located
and tested in Silesia, in what would later become Poland and East Germany.
Second, we note again the use of concentration camp
inmates to perform the dangerous, and one can only presume, eventually
lethal, operation of cleaning the test chamber after each experimentation
with the Bell. This fact places this mysterious object firmly within Kammler's
SS secret weapons black projects empire. It is entirely possible that
the Bell represented something so sophisticated in terms of its principles
of operation, that the then existing technology could not offer a sufficient means
of protection for the important personnel involved in the experiments.
Hence, concentration camp inmates may have been used as fodder to enable
the experiments to go forward. Any breakthroughs the Bell represented
were thus accomplished by this means, at enormous human cost.
Finally, certain properties about the Bell should be
noted, since they constitute unusual data points that will be examined
in connection with the Kecksburg "UFO crash". These are:
-
Heavy electrical power consumption
-
Rotation of a radioactive liquid in two counter-rotating cylinders
-
An unusual radioactive liquid metal of unknown composition
-
Its location in a chamber lined with ceramic bricks and rubber
mats
The rotation of the object, and presumably the radioactive
liquid-metal called "Xerum 525", suggests that the Germans were
investigating the inertial and vortex properties of radioactive material
when subjected to high speed rotation, as well as the resulting field
effects. It is likely that this rotation was caused by passing a current
through the liquid - hence the high power consumption - but the possibility
of mechanical rotation should not be ruled out in addition to this, as
German progress in jet engine turbines and uranium centrifuges would have
given them the experience to construct very high speed turbines for rotating
such material for study.
In this sense, it is possible that the Bell was
nothing more than two counter-rotating ultra-high speed turbines That
is to say, the Bell may have been an ultra high speed electro- mechanical
turbine of some sort, an offshoot, perhaps, of German centrifuge technology
development.
The housing of this device in an underground chamber
lined with ceramic brick and rubber mats suggests that it gave off extremely
strong electro-magnetic or electro-static field effects as well as high
heat when in operation. The reporting of metallic tastes in the mouths of what few surviving personnel there are
suggests this. The quick decay without apparent putrefaction of organic
material within its field suggests effects that some would associate with
scalar waves.
But what was the mysterious "Xerum 525"? When
I first read of this strange material, I thought it might be some radioactive
isotope of mercury, or possibly a more radioactive substance in chemical
solution of some sort. It is perhaps worth noting that recently a strange
substance known as "red mercury", or mercury antominate oxide,
has been alleged to have strong neutron emitting properties when subjected
to sudden explosive stress, and is alleged to be a non-fissile method
of triggering the enormous fusion reactions of hydrogen bombs, as well
as being able, in its own right, of fission explosions in the small kiloton
range. Perhaps the Nazis had stumbled onto a similar such substance during
the war.
It was on the basis of certain features of the above
lists of the Bell's properties that I hypothesized in my previous book,
The Giza Death Star Deployed, that the object that crashed in the famous Kecksburg UFO crash retrieval case might have been the Bell itself. In
that book, I did not explore that hypothesis, leaving it for "another
book." Well, this is that "other book", and it is now necessary
to examine the odd data points that seem to connect these two mysterious
objects.
B. The UFO Crash and Retrieval at Kecksburg, Pennsylvania,December
1965
Twenty years after Kammler's "Bell" went missing,
a remarkably similar object reportedly crashed in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania,
in a wooded area in the country. The story of the Kecksburg incident begins
at approximately 4:45 PM, December 9, 1965. From northern Canada to western
Pennsylvania, thousands of witnesses described "an orange fireball
tearing across the evening sky towards the south east, followed by a trail
of smoke."13 Witnesses included pilots spread
throughout Ontario, Michigan, and Ohio that were along the flight path
of the object.
13 Michael Hesemann, UFOs Secret History,
p 167.
Once over Ohio, however, the object clearly demonstrated that it
was not a typical meteor, nor a crash in the ordinary sense of "space
debris," for according to witnesses, it stopped, stood still "for
a few seconds" and then changed its course towards Pennsylvania.14
At this point, the Kecksburg saga begins in earnest,
for at 4:47 PM, a Mrs. Jones called the local radio station WHJB in Greensburg
and told reporter John Murphy that "a huge fireball has crashed in
the woods about 1.5 miles from here."15 Her children
had been playing outside when they first saw it, describing it as a burning
star. Mrs. Jones, visiting a neighbor at that time on then porch, saw
blue smoke coming from the forest and a bright light hovering above the
area.16
In the meantime, the reporter John Murphy had already
driven to the site, finding already a beehive of activity there, with
two police cruisers and a fire engine from the local volunteer fire-department
parked at the wood's edge. After questioning Mrs. Jones and her children,
the local fire marshal and one of the policemen walked into the forest,
and reemerged sixteen minutes later. In response to reporter Murphy's
questions, the fire marshal directed him to his lawyer!17
What followed over the next few hours was genuinely bizarre,
as the US Army and Air Force, and apparently some NASA scientists and
technicians,18 literally moved in and placed the tiny
village and its environs under virtual martial law:
Whatever it was that had crashed in the forest, the Army
and Air Force marched up to deal with it. The military and state police
cordoned off the forest area, stationed armed guards at all the roads
and ways loading into the forest and transported a whole
lot of equipment to the crash site. The Air Force took over the premises
of the local voluntary fire station and set up a commando post there.
The firemen, now forbidden to enter the station, stood by watching while
persons in military uniform brought in more equipment into the station,
which included a huge radio transmitter. A little later, two large transport
trucks, one of them bearing the insignia of the army, were seen driving
into the forest. At about the same time, people living close to the nearby
Latrobe Airfield saw a jet plane landing there, although the airfield
itself had been closed to traffic for quite some time.19
14 Hesemann, op. cit, p. 167.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid., p. 168.
17 Ibid.
18 Q.v. Stan Gordon, Kecksburg: the Untold Story (DVD
video production. Gordon is considered the expert on the Kecksburg case,
and the video consists of a series of recorded interviews with surviving
witnesses to the event. According to Mrs. Lillian Hayes, wife of a local
farmer, and her son both stated that their house was visited several times
that night by military personnel, and she reports having overheard them
discussing the fact that NASA was already on the scene.
19 Hesemann,
op. cit., p. 168.
Later, television, newspaper, and radio reporters arrived
from Pittsburg, to be met with a wall of silence from the military.
But a police spokesman stated "there's an unidentified
flying object in the woods." When the US Air Force's Project Blue
book was contacted, Major Hector Quintanilla himself, then project head,
informed the reporters that the Air Force's investigators were already
at the site.20
If it were only for the official statements and peculiar
"overreaction" of the military in such a quick response to the
event, and in placing an entire town and considerable portion of its environs
under virtual martial law and placing a secure perimeter around a Pennsylvania
wood, little else would have been known of the Kecksburg crash. However,
a local who had been listening to the radio, Bill Bulebush, made his way
to the crash site, thinking to offer help to local authorities and the
presumed crash victims. When he arrived, however, he saw "something
that threw him for a loop":
A metallic bullet-shaped object was sticking in the
ground at the end of a trench, which it had obviously formed while landing.
"It looked like a big burned orange. It sparkled and twinkled, was
about 9 feet wide and 12 feet long. Somehow it gave me the creeps and
I got away quickly."
And when he read the Air Force explanation in
the papers the next day, he knew they were lying. What he had seen had
certainly not been a meteorite!21
20 Ibid., p. 169.
21 Ibid., emphasis in the original.
Suffice it to say, it strains credibility to have so
many witnesses attest that the military showed up, placed an area of U.S.
territory under martial law, and called in NASA specialists, to recover
a mere meteorite. The meteorite theory made no sense to local UFO researcher
Stan Gordon either, since UFOs ordinarily traveled at speeds in excess
of those calculated for the object, and meteorites do not stop, stand still,
and then change course.
Nonetheless, there the matter would have rested, until
James Romansky came forward as a witness 2 years later (1987). Romansky
had been 19 years old at the time of the incident, and a member of the
volunteer firefighting team that had arrived first and been instructed
to comb the woods for the wreckage of a crashed airplane.22
Romansky gave a description of the object that was slightly
different than Bulebush's in certain details:
It had the shape of an acorn, made of shining silvery
metal which had a light touch of gold in it. Its bottom was surrounded
by a kind of ring or, as Jim put it, a kind of metal bumper on which strange
writing could be seen. Romansky described it later.
"They looked
like Egyptian hieroglyphics, but without any animal signs. There were
straight and broken lines, dots, squares and circles." ....
There
was no glass, no propeller or jet nozzle, no burst tanks from which any
fuel had leaked out, and not even the sign of a hatch or entrance.23
22 Hesemann,
op. cit., p. 169.
23 Ibid., emphasis in the original.
After Romansky's story was aired on an episode of the
television show "Unsolved Mysteries", other witnesses emerged
with their own accounts of the incident, and substantially confirmed the
account, adding new details of their own.
One of these details was that a late-night convoy of
trucks, one including a large flatbed semi-trailer with an object covered
in a tarpaulin. Some witnesses report that the tarpaulin was pulled
tightly
around the object, and its "acorn" shape could clearly be seen.
The object was next seen by witnesses at its first apparent destination,
Lockborne Air Force base in Columbus, Ohio, where military police units were ordered to surround a hangar and shoot anyone
who attempted to enter that did not have a top secret clearance.24
It was next apparently seen by a witness, "Myron",
who contacted Stan Gordon, and described a similar object. Hesemann's
summary of Myron's story is worth citing in full, since it bears directly
on my hypothesis:
(Myron) worked as a truck driver for a cement factory
belonging to his family at Dayton, Ohio. Two days after the incident occurred
at Kecksburg, his firm received a large order for specially glazed bricks
from the Wright Patterson Air Field. A representative of the base had
had a look at the bricks in stock at the factory and finally ordered 6,500
double-glazed processed bricks, which, he said, "were for building
a double-walled shield around a recovered radioactive object. "
25
Myron later glanced inside the hangar to view what was
inside.
The object was silhouetted by floodlights behind large
silk -parachute-like screens. Myron described "the shadowy outlines
of a large bell-shaped object....perhaps about 9 feet wide and 12 feet
high. Through a small opening in the tent, Myron could see that it was
metallic, like some kind of whitish bronze."26
24 Ibid,
pp. 169-170.
25 Hesemann, pp. 179-170, emphasis added.
26 Ibid., p. 173.
C. Analysis
There are a number of curious data points that would
appear to connect Kammler's "Bell" with Kecksburg's "Acorn".
Hesemann's book, from which the above accounts and quotations were cited,
was published in 1998, before Nick Cook's Hunt for Zero Point, with its
summarization of SS General Sporrenberg's descriptions of the Bell were
first made known to an English speaking audience. This means that the Kecksburg witnesses record something that sounds eerily like
Kammler's
Bell.
Consider the following list:
-
(1)
Both objects arc described in very similar terms,
as "acorn" or "bell" shaped; the Pennsylvania
witnesses could just as easily be describing Kammler's Hell, and Sporrenberg
similarly, could just as easily be describing the Kecksburg Acorn;
-
-
(2)
Both objects are described as having similar, if
not identical, dimensions, being approximately 9 to 12 feet in diameter
and 12 to 15 feet in height;
-
-
(3)
Both objects had to be housed in a chamber made
of "glazed" or "ceramic" bricks, because,
-
-
(4)
Both objects apparently gave off strong radioactivity
or
other strong field effects.
-
In fact, it is on only one point that the two objects
differ, if indeed they are two distinct objects, and that is the consistent
testimony by witnesses who actually saw the Kecksburg "acorn"
UFO, that some strange form of writing existed around the "bumper"
of the object, resembling hieroglyphics to some, "but without the
animal and people pictures," as James Romansky puts it, and resembling
geometrical forms according to a few others. No similar statements exist
for Kammler's Bell.
But even this may not necessarily be a sufficient reason
to dismiss the possible connection. The kind of writing described may
have been a form of runes, a form of writing in which the occult-oriented
SS was also interested.27 These types of symbols can
sometimes resemble geometric objects that some witnesses associate with
the writing on the Kecksburg UFO. It is much more difficult, however,
to find a resemblance between them and "hieroglyphic" writing.
27 For SS rune research, see Dusty Sklar, The Nazis and
the Occult (Dorset Press, 1989), pp. 25-26, 28.
With regard to point (3), another significant question
occurs: why did the Air Force so quickly decide that ceramic, or glazed,
brick, would be the best means of shielding the object? There are other
more effective, though more costly means of shielding, and cost may have
been a leading factor in selection of this method. But the suddenness
with which the decision is taken to shield it at Wright Patterson Field with such bricks also suggests
a knowledge of and familiarity with the object, and, possibly, of its
history as a Nazi secret weapons project. In any case, the swiftness of
the military's reaction to assemble a recovery team at Kecksburg also
indicates that the object had been tracked by the military for sometime
as it flew over Canada and the eastern US. It is as if the military had
been expecting it.
And finally, there is yet another odd point that may
connect the Keckburg Acorn to the Kammler Bell. We have already seen that
some "Nazi survival myths" have a secret German base close to
the Arctic, operating at a remote location in Canada near Hudson Bay.
While I discount the idea, it is perhaps worth noting that the trajectory
of the Kecksburg Acorn as it tracked from Canada into the US to its final
crash site in Pennsylvania, would, if extended north into Canada, place
it along a line more or less where the "Arctic Nazi survival myth"
places the alleged secret German base.
The Trajectory of the Kecksburg UFO 341
Near the end of his book, Nick Cook, recounts a meeting
with a friend who had started him off on a quest that he knew would eventually
lead Cook back to Nazi Germany.
"Markus"' words are a chilling
warning:
When the Americans tripped over this mutant strain of
non-linear physics and took it back home with them, they were astute enough
to realize that their homegrown scientific talent couldn't handle it.
That it was beyond their cultural terms of reference. That's why they
recruited so many Germans. The Nazis developed a unique approach to science
and engineering quite separate from the rest of the world, because their
ideology, unrestrained as it was, supported a wholly different way of
doing things.... The trouble was, when the Americans took it all home
with them they found out, too late, that it came infected with a virus.
You take the science on, you take on aspects of the ideology, as well.28
28 Nick Cook, op. cit, p. 270.
In any case, it seems that there are enough points of
similarity between Kammler's Bell and the Kecksburg Acorn to at least
raise a third alternative as an explanation for it, in addition to the
two approaches previously taken, namely, that it was a crashed extra-terrestrial
craft or probe of some sort, or a crashed Soviet Cosmos satellite. It
may have been a Nazi secret weapons project, that inadvertently got away
from its testers, was brought back under control, and deliberately crashed,
only to be retrieved again.
The Kecksburg incident raises the horrifying
possibility that SS Obergruppenfuhrer Hans Kammler's Bell and his SS secret
weapons Sonderkommando survived the war intact, metastasizing throughout
the very secretive, and labyrinthine compartmentalization of America's
black projects world. This raises the specter that some of "our"
black projects may not be ours at all, but someone else's. We are just
footing the bill.
Myron's "Bell"
at Wright Patterson Air Force Base
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