8 - The cloud Reich - Nazi Flying Discs

So far in this book we have looked at some extremely strange notions, many of which were held by the Nazis themselves and many by certain writers who have, over the years, attempted to prove that the Third Reich was ruled by men who were, quite literally, practitioners of Black Magic.

 

We now come to a subject that, at first sight, might seem somewhat out of place in our survey, and yet the suggestion has been frequently made that the UFOs (unidentified flying objects) first reported in the late 1940s were the products of experimental aircraft designs that were developed towards the end of the Second World War.

 

Most (if not all) serious historians would throw up their hands in horror at the very mention of such a seemingly ludicrous idea, particularly when one considers the associated claims that, since sightings of UFOs are still reported today by thousands of people around the world, these radical aircraft designs must have been captured, copied and further developed by the victorious powers; and, what is more, that some UFOs may even be piloted by escaped Nazis operating out of one or more hidden bases.

As will surely be apparent from the material we have examined so far, the Nazi occultist idea is both bizarre and complicated, not least because it encompasses several additional fields of arcane knowledge and speculation.

 

We have already seen how the Nazi elite were fascinated by the concepts of the Holy Grail and the Knights Templar, by Eastern mysticism and the Hollow Earth theory, by odd cosmological concepts and the hidden legacies of fabulous, long-vanished civilizations. In fact, the notion of the secret transmission of esoteric information through history (as discussed in Chapter Three, concerning the story of the Knights Templar following their suppression) can also be applied to the Nazis themselves and their awful legacy of racial hatred.

 

While many would think that this legacy is confined to the demented ravings of a few groups of neo-fascists in Europe and America, there is some evidence to suggest that the truth may be far more sinister and frightening.

This evidence, which has been gathered and presented over the years by investigators of the UFO phenomenon, as well as by those with an interest in the more unusual German weapons designs of the Second World War, points to the possibility that some extremely advanced aircraft designs did actually reach the prototype stage in 1944 and 1945.

 

Those researchers who have uncovered this evidence, and whom we shall meet in this chapter, have also taken the logical next step of suggesting that the Americans and Russians captured a number of designs at the end of the war and continued their development throughout the post-war years. In addition, they suggest that many leading Nazis (including, according to some accounts, Hitler himself) were able to escape the ruins of the Third Reich and continue their nefarious plans for world domination in the icy fastnesses of the Arctic and Antarctic.

Could there possibly be any truth to these incredible speculations?

 

Could UFOs actually be man-made air- and spacecraft? Could some of them belong to a hidden 'Fourth Reich' that represents a cancer that was not, after all, cut from the body of humankind? To deal with these questions, we must, once again, enter the curious realm of crypto-history, where the line between reality and fantastic rumor becomes blurred and indistinct; in short, we must return to Pauwels's and Bergier's 'Absolute Elsewhere'. In this realm, science and occultism meet, as do theories of vast historical conspiracies and outrageous cosmological speculations.

 

The claims about the survival of the Nazis are connected to all these fields, and depend to a great extent on the use of highly advanced technology and resources by secret forces.
 

The Mystery of the UFOs
Although human beings have been seeing strange things in the skies since the dawn of history, the idea that some of them are actually technological devices (called by some 'X Devices', although that term is now obsolete) is relatively recent.

 

The first person to suggest that mysterious objects and lights in the sky might be machines from another planet was probably the great American anomalist Charles Fort (1874-1932); however, it was not until the late 1940s that the idea began to gain a wider currency, following the famous sighting by pilot Kenneth Arnold over the Cascade Mountains in Washington State on 24 June 1947.

The UFO mystery has never gone away, and has certainly never been explained to universal satisfaction: indeed, it is now more deeply ingrained in the public consciousness than ever before, and the 'flying saucer' can truthfully be described as one of the great cultural icons of the twentieth century. While skeptics would argue that the reason for this is a mixture of wishful thinking, the misidentification of mundane phenomena and out-and-out hoaxes, the truth of the matter is more subtle and complex.

 

It is certainly true that approximately 95 per cent of sightings can be attributed to stars, planets, meteorites, satellites, aircraft and so on; yet there remains the tantalizing five per cent that cannot be explained so easily.

In order to illustrate this fact, we can look very briefly at one of the classic UFO sightings from the early days of modern ufology. (Although there are many impressive sightings from the 1990s, they are still the subject of intense debate and I believe it is more prudent to choose a sighting that has stood the test of time and is still regarded as almost certainly genuine.)

 

At about 7.45 on the evening of 11 May 1950, Mr and Mrs Paul Trent watched a large object fly over their farm near McMinnville, Oregon, USA. Mrs Trent had been out feeding their rabbits when she noticed the UFO. She called her husband, who was able to take two black-and-white photographs of it. The photographs show a circular object with a flat undersurface and a beveled edge; extending from the upper surface of the object is a curious structure reminiscent of a submarine conning tower, which is offset slightly from the vertical axis.

The bright, silvery object was tilted slightly as it moved across the sky in absolute silence, and presently was lost to view. The Trents later said that they had felt a slight breeze from the underside of the UFO. The Trents sought no publicity following their sighting (in fact, they waited until they had used up the remainder of the camera's film before having the UFO photographs developed!); they mentioned the incident to only a few friends.

 

However, news of the sighting quickly spread to a reporter from the local McMinnville Telephone Register who visited the Trents and found the photographic negatives under a writing desk where the Trent children had been playing with them. ⁽¹⁾

 

A week later, the photographs appeared in Life magazine and became world-famous.

Seventeen years later, the McMinnville UFO sighting was investigated by William K. Hartmann and was included in the famous (and, in the UFO community, widely despised) Condon Report produced by the US Air Force-sponsored Colorado University Commission of Enquiry. The Condon Report (named after the enquiry's leader, the respected physicist Dr Edward U. Condon) was dismissive of the UFO phenomenon, which it considered to be of no interest to science. However, the report contained a number of cases that it conceded were not amenable to any conventional explanation. One of these cases was the McMinnville sighting. The photographs were submitted to extremely rigorous scientific analysis, after which Hartmann concluded:

This is one of the few UFO reports in which all factors investigated, geometric, psychological, and physical, appear to be consistent with the assertion that an extraordinary flying object, silvery, metallic, disk-shaped, tens of meters in diameter, and evidently artificial, flew within sight of two witnesses. It cannot be said that the evidence positively rules out a fabrication, although there are some physical factors such as the accuracy of certain photometric measures of the original negatives which argue against a fabrication. ⁽²⁾

In the 50 or so years since the Trents had their strange encounter, the photographs have been repeatedly subjected to more and more sophisticated analyses, and have passed every test. This case is just one of a large number of sightings of highly unusual, apparently intelligently guided objects, seen both in the skies and on the ground, that have been occurring for decades. There are, of course, various theories to account for these sightings, aside from the skeptical notion that all are, without exception, hoaxes, illusions or misidentifications of ordinary phenomena.

The most widely accepted theory is, of course, the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (ETH), which holds that genuine UFOs are spacecraft piloted by explorers from another planet. This theory has the greatest currency in the United States.

 

In Europe, more credence is given to an alternative theory known as the Psycho-social Hypothesis, which suggests that encounters with UFOs and 'aliens' may be due to subtle and ill-understood processes occurring within the mind of the percipient. Inspired by the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl G. Jung, who examined UFOs in his book Flying Saucers A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky (1959), the psycho-sociologists see such encounters as similar to waking dreams that fulfill an undefined psychic need.

 

(To Jung, the circular shape of the UFO suggested a psychic need for wholeness and unity, represented by the mandala, a circular symbol identified by Jung as one of the archetypes residing in humanity's collective unconscious.)

There are a number of secondary theories for UFOs, including the idea that they are time machines from the future, that they are actually living beings indigenous to interplanetary space, that they originate in other dimensions of existence and so on, all of which are beyond the scope of this book. The idea that UFOs are man-made, and based on plans captured by the Allies in the ruins of Nazi Germany at the end of the Second World War, has been put forward by a number of writers and researchers.

 

Outlandish as it may sound, it is actually well worth examining the evidence for 'Nazi flying saucers'.
 

The Foo Fighters
Although it set the stage for the drama of modern ufology, Kenneth Arnold's 1947 sighting of nine anomalous objects flitting between the peaks of the Cascade Mountains was not the first twentieth-century UFO encounter. In the closing stages of the Second World War, Allied pilots on night-time bombing raids over Europe frequently reported strange flying objects.

 

These objects were christened Foo Fighters', after a catchphrase in the popular Smokey Stover comic strip. 'Where there's foo, there's fire.' ('Foo' was also a play on the French word feu, meaning fire.) The aircrews suspected that the objects might be some kind of German secret weapon. On 2 January 1945, the New York Herald Tribune carried the following brief Associated Press release:

Now, it seems, the Nazis have thrown something new into the night skies over Germany. It is the weird, mysterious Foo fighter' balls which race alongside the wings of Beaufighters flying intruder missions over Germany. Pilots have been encountering this eerie weapon for more than a month in their night flights. No one apparently knows what this sky weapon is. The 'balls of fire' appear suddenly and accompany the planes for miles. They seem to be radio-controlled from the ground, so official intelligence reports reveal. ⁽³⁾

In their book Man-Made UFOs (1994), Renato Vesco (a pioneer of the Nazi-UFO hypothesis) and David Hatcher Childress cite the testimony of a former American flying officer who had worked for the intelligence section of the Eighth Air Force towards the end of the war.

 

Wishing to remain anonymous, the officer said to the New York press:

'It is quite possible that the flying saucers are the latest development of a "psychological" anti-aircraft weapon that the Germans had already used. During night missions over western Germany I happened to see on several occasions shining discs or balls that followed our formations. It was well known that the German night fighters had powerful headlights in their noses or propeller hubs - lights that would suddenly catch the target, partly in order to give the German pilots better aim but mostly in order to blind the enemy tail gunners in their turrets.

 

They caused frequent alarms and continual nervous tension among the crews, thereby lowering their efficiency. During the last year of the war the Germans also sent up a number of radio-controlled bright objects to interfere with the ignition systems of our engines or the operation of the on-board radar. In all probability American scientists picked up this invention and are now perfecting it so that it will be on a par with the new offensive and defensive air weapons.' ⁽⁴⁾

Unfortunately, Vesco and Childress are not forthcoming with a detailed reference for this statement.

The British UFO investigators Peter Hough and Jenny Randies make the interesting point that the Second World War saw more people in the skies than any other prior period, and that it was therefore no great surprise that UFOs should have been spotted in abundance. ⁽⁵⁾

 

Of course, this statement carries the implication of a likely nonhuman origin of the objects, which advocates of the Nazi-UFO hypothesis hotly dispute: for them, the large number of Foo Fighter sightings, coupled with the obvious interest the objects showed in Allied aircraft, strongly implies that they were built specifically to interact in some way with those aircraft.

As is so often the case with the UFO mystery, genuine sightings generated various rumors of official interest in the phenomenon.

 

For instance, there was, allegedly, a secret British government investigation into the Foo Fighter reports called the Massey Project.

'However,' write Hough and Randies, 'Air Chief Marshal Sir Victor Goddard - who was an outspoken believer in alien craft during the 1950s -flatly denied this and said that Treasury approval for such a minor exercise at a time when Britain was fighting for its survival would have been ludicrous.' ⁽⁶⁾

Some encounters undoubtedly had mundane explanations. For example, during a bombing raid on a factory at Schweinfurt, Germany on 14 October 1943, flight crews of the American 384th Squadron observed a large cluster of discs, which were silver in color, one inch thick and about three inches in diameter.

 

They were floating gently down through the air directly in the path of the American aircraft, and one pilot feared that his B17 Flying Fortress would be destroyed on contact with the objects. However, the bomber cut through the cluster of discs and continued on its way undamaged. It is quite possible that encounters such as this were actually with 'chaff, pieces of metal foil released by German Aphrodite balloons to confuse radar by returning false images. ⁽⁷⁾

Nevertheless, many aircrews reported events that were not so easy to explain, including the harassment of their aircraft by small, glowing, disc-shaped and spherical objects that were highly maneuverable. On 23 November 1944, Lieutenant Edward Schlueter of the 415th US Night Fighter Squadron was flying a heavy night fighter from his base at Dijon towards Mainz.

 

Twenty miles from Strasbourg, Lieutenant Fred Ringwald, an Air Force intelligence officer who was on the mission as an observer, glanced out of the cockpit and noticed about ten glowing red balls flying very fast in formation. Schlueter suggested that they might be stars, but this explanation was proved wrong when the objects approached the plane.

Schlueter radioed the American ground radar station, informing them that they were being chased by German night fighters, to which the station replied that nothing was showing on their scope. Schlueter's radar observer, Lieutenant Donald J. Meiers, checked his own scope, but could detect nothing unusual. Schlueter then decided to make for the objects at full throttle. The response from the Foo Fighters was instantaneous: their fiery red glow rapidly dimmed, until they were lost to sight. Less than two minutes later, however, they reappeared, although they seemed to have lost interest in the American aircraft and glided off into the night towards Germany. ⁽⁸⁾

 

Upon the objects' departure, the fighter's radar began to malfunction, forcing the crew to abandon their mission.

In an encounter of 27 November 1944 over Speyer, pilots Henry Giblin and Walter Cleary reported a large orange light flying at 250 mph about 1,500 feet above their fighter. The radar station in the sector replied that there was nothing else there. Nevertheless, a subsequent malfunction in the plane's radar system forced it to return to base. An official report was made - the first of its kind - which resulted in many jokes at the pilots' expense.⁽⁹⁾

 

After the 27 November encounter, pilots who saw the Foo Fighters decided not to include them in their flight reports.

This self-imposed censorship was broken by two pilots named McFalls and Baker of the 415th, who submitted a flight report on their mission of 22 December 1944.

 

In part, the report reads:

At 0600, near Hagenau, at 10,000 feet altitude, two very bright lights climbed toward us from the ground. They leveled off and stayed on the tail of our plane. They were huge bright orange lights. They stayed there for two minutes. On my tail all the time. They were under perfect control. Then they turned away from us, and the fire seemed to go out. ⁽¹⁰⁾

The Foo Fighters were not only witnessed by air crews. Hough and Randies cite a report from a former prisoner of war at the Heydebreck camp in Upper Silesia, Poland.

At 3 p.m. on 22 January 1945 a number of men were being paraded by the Germans before being marched away to evade the liberating Russian Army. A bomber appeared overhead, flying at about 18,000 feet, and the men gazed in horror at what seemed to be fire pouring from its rear end.

 

Then they thought it might be a flare caught up in the slipstream of the aircraft. Finally, they realized it was neither of these things: the object was a silvery ball hugging the bomber, which was desperately trying to evade it. The foo fighter was still right on the tail of the aircraft as both passed into the distance. ⁽¹¹⁾

On 1 January 1945, Howard W. Blakeslee, science editor of the Associated Press, claimed that the mysterious Foo Fighters were nothing more than St Elmo's Fire, spontaneous lights produced by an electrostatic discharge on the fuselages of the Allied aircraft. According to Blakeslee, this explanation also accounted for the fact that the Foo Fighters did not show up on radar.

 

The pilots who actually encountered the objects were unimpressed with Blakeslee's solution: most of them had been flying for a number of years, and knew St Elmo's Fire when they saw it. The Foo Fighters were something entirely different: the light they produced went on and off at intervals that seemed to be related to their speed; their shape was often clearly discernible as either discoid or spherical; and they were frequently reported as spinning rapidly on their vertical axis. ⁽¹²⁾

 

No Allied aircraft were ever brought down by Foo Fighters (which seemed more content to pace them and interfere with their radar), and so it was considered likely that the objects were dangerous German secret weapons, perhaps a radical development of V-weapon technology. The V-ls were already causing carnage in London, and it was known that German scientists were desperately trying to develop a ballistic missile that could hit America.

According to Vesco and Childress, several Foo Fighter stories were leaked in December 1944 to the American Legion Magazine, which then published the personal opinions of several US Intelligence officers that the Foo Fighters were radio-controlled radar-jamming devices sent up by the Germans. ⁽¹³⁾ Vesco and Childress go on to cite the testimony of another (unnamed) B-17 pilot who decided to intercept a Foo Fighter and succeeded in getting within a few hundred yards of the shining sphere. He reported hearing 'a strange sound, like the "backwash of invisible planes"'. ⁽¹⁴⁾

 

The last reported encounter with Foo Fighters occurred in early May 1945, near the eastern edge of the Pfalzerwald.

 

A pilot, once again from the 415th Squadron, saw five orange balls of light flying in a 'V formation in the distance. ⁽¹⁵⁾
 

Ghost Rockets Over Scandinavia
In the two years between the end of the Second World War and the Kenneth Arnold sighting, strange unidentified aerial objects invaded the skies over Finland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark (and were later reported as far afield as Morocco and India).

 

Nicknamed 'Ghost Rockets' because of their long, thin profile and occasional fiery exhaust, these objects were reported to perform astonishing maneuvers such as diving and climbing rapidly at enormous speeds. ⁽¹⁶⁾

The British UFO investigator Timothy Good cites the following confidential Department of State telegram from the American Embassy in Stockholm, dated 11 July 1946:

For some weeks there have been numerous reports of strange rocket-like missiles being seen in Swedish and Finnish skies. During past few days reports of such objects being seen have greatly increased. Member of Legation saw one Tuesday afternoon. One landed on beach near Stockholm same afternoon without causing any damage and according to press fragments are now being studied by military authorities. Local scientist on first inspection stated it contained organic substance resembling carbide.

 

Defense staff last night issued communiqué listing various places where missiles had been observed and urging public report all mysterious sound and light phenomena. Press this afternoon announces one such missile fell in Stockholm suburb 2:30 this afternoon. Missile observed by member Legation made no sound and seemed to be falling rapidly to earth when observed. No sound of explosion followed however.

Military Attaché is investigating through Swedish channels and has been promised results Swedish observations. Swedes profess ignorance as to origin, character or purpose of missiles but state definitely they are not launched by Swedes. Eyewitness reports state missiles came in from southerly direction proceeding to northwest. Six units Atlantic Fleet under Admiral Hewitt arrived Stockholm this morning.

 

If missiles are of Soviet origin as generally believed (some reports say they are launched from Estonia), purpose might be political to intimidate Swedes in connection with Soviet pressure on Sweden being built up in connection with current loan negotiations or to offset supposed increase in our military pressure on Sweden resulting from the naval visit and recent Bikini [atomic] tests or both.⁽¹⁷⁾

The suspicion voiced in this telegram that the Soviets might be responsible for the Ghost Rocket sightings was natural enough, given that the Cold War was then just getting under way.

 

Both the Americans and Russians, of course, captured German weapons technology at the end of the war, and it was assumed by many in authority that the Russians were experimenting with V-l and V-2 rocket designs. (Actually, a German V-2 rocket had already crashed in Sweden in the summer of 1944.) The fact that both the United States and the Soviet Union carried out extensive experiments with captured Nazi technology will gain yet more significance as we examine the claims of the Nazi-UFO proponents.

A number of British scientists were sent to Sweden to examine the Ghost Rocket reports, among them Professor R. V. Jones, the then Director of Intelligence of Britain's Air Staff and scientific advisor to Section IV of MI6.

 

In Most Secret War, his account of his involvement with British Scientific Intelligence between 1939 and 1949, Professor Jones writes of the fears that the rockets were Russian:

The general interpretation ... was that [the Ghost Rockets] were long-range flying bombs being flown by the Russians over Sweden as an act of intimidation. This interpretation was accepted by officers in our own Air Technical Intelligence, who worked out the performance of the bombs from the reported sightings in one of the incidents, where the object appeared to have dashed about at random over the whole of southern Sweden at speeds up to 2,000 mph.

 

What the officers concerned failed to notice was that every observer, wherever he was, reported the object as well to the east. By far the most likely explanation was that it was a meteor, perhaps as far east as Finland, and the fantastic speeds that were reported were merely due to the fact that all observers had seen it more or less simultaneously, but that they had varying errors in their watches, so that any attempt to draw a track by linking up observations in a time sequence was unsound. ⁽¹⁸⁾

Professor Jones considered it extremely unlikely that the Ghost Rockets could be Russian missiles based on German V-2 designs: he stated that the rockets seen over Scandinavia had more than twice the range of the V-2, an increase in performance that was too great given the short time since the capture of the German designs.

For myself, I simply asked two questions. First, what conceivable purpose could it serve the Russians, if they indeed had a controllable flying bomb, to fly it in great numbers over Sweden, without doing any more harm than to alert the West to the fact that they had such an impressive weapon? My second question followed from the first: how had the Russians succeeded in making a flying bomb of such fantastic reliability?

 

The Germans had achieved no better than 90 per cent reliability in their flying bomb trials of 1944, at very much shorter range. Even if the Russians had achieved a reliability as high as 99 per cent over their much longer ranges, this still meant that one per cent of all sorties should have resulted in a bomb crashing on Swedish territory. Since there had been allegedly hundreds of sorties, there ought to be at least several crashed bombs already in Sweden, and yet nobody had ever picked up a fragment.

 

I therefore said that I would not accept the theory that the apparitions were flying bombs from Russia until someone brought a piece into my office. ⁽¹⁹⁾

Professor Jones goes on to relate an amusing incident that followed his challenge. When a substance that had allegedly fallen from a Ghost Rocket was collected and sent, via the Swedish General Staff and the British Air Staff, to the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) at Farnborough, the scientists who analyzed the fragments claimed that over 98 per cent of their mass consisted of an unknown element.

 

Jones had already seen the samples, and had quickly concluded that they were lumps of coke,

'four or five irregularly shaped solid lumps, none of which looked as if it had ever been associated with a mechanical device'.⁽²⁰⁾

When he telephoned the head of chemistry at the RAE, enquiring whether they had thought to test for carbon, the chemist literally gasped.

'No one had stopped to look at the material, in an effort to get the analysis made quickly, and they had failed to test for carbon. The other lumps had similarly innocent explanations.' ⁽²¹⁾

Nevertheless, some Ghost Rocket sightings remained puzzling.

 

One of the objects was photographed near Stockholm by a Swede named Erik Reuterswaerd. When the Swedish authorities examined the photograph, they concluded that the object's trail was not issuing from its rear but was actually enveloping it. The London Daily Telegraph, which published the photograph on 6 September 1946, opined that a new method of propulsion was being tested. ⁽²²⁾

For their part, the Swedish Government concluded in October 1946 that, of the 1,000 reports of Ghost Rockets they had received, 80 per cent could be attributed to 'celestial phenomena'; the remaining 20 per cent, they stated, could not be either natural phenomena or the products of imagination. ⁽²³⁾
 

Radical Aircraft Designs: Feuerball and Kugelblitz
The conventional view of history is that, while the Germans possessed some remarkable and deadly weapons such as the V-l, the V-2 and the jet-engined Messerschmitt ME-262 fighter, their technological innovations did not extend much further than that. Indeed, serious historians treat claims of fantastic advances in Nazi technology with the utmost disdain.

 

(We have already quoted Professor Jones's assertion that the Nazi flying bomb trials of 1944 were only 90 per cent reliable.)

 

Nevertheless, we must ask the question: are they right to do so? Having looked briefly at the mystery of the Foo Fighters, Ghost Rockets and UFOs, which many professional scientists admit (however reluctantly and anonymously) constitute a puzzle worthy of serious investigation, we must now examine the claims of some UFO researchers that the wonderful devices seen so frequently flitting through the skies are actually machines based on Nazi designs for ultra-high-performance disc-shaped craft, capable of travelling not only through our atmosphere but also in outer space.

 

The reader who baulks at this idea may well be further outraged by the claims made by some that the Nazis themselves succeeded in building prototypes of these machines. However, since we are already deep within the Absolute Elsewhere, we must press on through that weird realm, bearing in mind Pauwels's and Bergier's perceptive assertion that 'the historian maybe reasonable, but history is not'.

As we have already noted, Renato Vesco is a pioneer of the Nazi-UFO theory. A graduate of the University of Rome, he studied aeronautical engineering at the German Institute for Aerial Development and during the war was sent to work at Fiat's underground installation at Lake Garda in northern Italy. In the 1960s, Vesco investigated UFO sightings for the Italian Air Ministry. ⁽²⁴⁾

 

In 1971, he published the seminal work on the theory of man-made flying saucers; entitled Intercettateh Senza Sparare (roughly translated as 'Intercept Without Firing'), the book examines in great detail the possible technology behind the UFOs and reaches the astonishing and highly controversial conclusion that UFO technology (seen in terms of the perceived flight characteristics of the objects) is well within the capabilities of human science - and was so even during the Second World War.

 

Indeed, Vesco is quite certain that the origin of the UFOs still seen today by witnesses all over the world can be placed firmly in Nazi Germany in the early 1940s. In addition, the technological principles behind these craft were, he believes, divided between the United States and the Soviet Union at the end of the war, with both superpowers going on to develop and refine the designs for their own ends.

According to Vesco, Luftwaffe scientists in Oberammergau, Bavaria conducted extensive research into an electrical device capable of interfering with an aircraft engine up to a distance of about 100 feet. Through the generation of intense electromagnetic fields, this device could short-circuit the target aircraft's ignition system, causing total loss of power. This short range, however, was considered impractical for a successful weapon, so they attempted to increase it to 300 feet.

 

These plans were still only on the drawing board by the end of the war, so the weapon was never put into production. Nevertheless, these researches yielded a by-product that was put to use by Albert Speer and the SS Technical General Staff. They produced a device capable of 'proximity radio interference' on the delicate radar systems of American night-fighters. ⁽²⁵⁾

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 radar gear. ⁽²⁶⁾

The fiery halo around the craft's perimeter was generated by a combination of the rich fuel mixture and chemical additives causing the ionisation of the atmosphere around the Feuerball.

 

As it approached the target aircraft, this ionization would produce powerful electrostatic and electromagnetic fields that would interfere with its H2S radar.

'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 night-time visibility.' ⁽²⁷⁾

Vesco goes on to state that this night-time visibility had an additional advantage for the Feuerball: in the absence of daylight, the halo produced by the engine gave the impression of an enormous size, which had the effect of unnerving Allied pilots even more. As the Feuerballe approached, the pilots refrained from firing on them for fear of being caught in a gigantic explosion. ⁽²⁸⁾

 

In fact, the devices did carry an explosive charge that would destroy them in the event of capture, in addition to an ingenious feature that would ensure a quick escape in the event of an attack by Allied aircraft. Underneath its armored outer shell, each Feuerball contained a thin sheet of electrically insulated aluminium. Should a bullet pierce the armor, contact would be made between it and the aluminium sheet, thus closing a circuit, activating a vertical maximum acceleration device and taking the craft out of weapons range in a matter of seconds. ⁽²⁹⁾

The Feuerballe were constructed at the Henschel-Rax aeronautical establishment at Wiener Neustadt. According to one (unnamed) witness who saw them being test-flown, in daylight the craft looked like shining discs spinning on their vertical axes, and at night like huge burning globes. Hermann Goering inspected the progress of the Feuerball project on a number of occasions, hoping that the mechanical principles could be applied to a much larger offensive saucer-shaped aircraft. His hopes were to be quickly realized.

Vesco calls the Kugelblitz (Ball Lightning) automatic fighter 'the second authentic antecedent [after the Feuerball] of the present-day flying saucers', and the first example of the 'jet-lift' aircraft. ⁽³⁰⁾ In 1952, a former Luftwaffe engineer named Rudolph Schriever gave a series of interviews to the West German press in which he claimed to have designed an aircraft strikingly similar to Vesco's Kugelblitz. Schriever had been an engineer and test pilot for the Heinkel factory in Eger. In 1941, he began to toy with the idea of an aircraft that could take off vertically, thus eliminating the need for runways, which were vulnerable to enemy bombing.

By June the following year, he had built and test-flown a working model of his design, and work immediately began on a full-size fifteen-foot version. In mid-1944, Schriever was transferred to the BMW plant near Prague, Czechoslovakia, where he was joined by an engineer from the rocket site at Peenemunde named Walter Miethe, another engineer named Klaus Habermohl and an Italian physicist from the aeronautical complex at Riva del Garda, Dr Giuseppe Belluzzo.

 

Together, they built an even larger, piloted version of the disc, featuring a domed pilot's cabin sitting at the centre of a circular set of multiple wings driven by a turbine engine mounted on the disc's vertical axis.

The German disc program went under the title 'Project Saucer' (which W. A. Harbinson also took as the title for his excellent five-novel series inspired by the Nazi-UFO theory). According to the military historian Major Rudolph Lusar, Schriever's disc consisted of 'a wide-surface ring which rotated around a fixed, cupola-shaped cockpit'. The ring contained 'adjustable wing-discs which could be brought into appropriate position for the take-off or horizontal flight'. ⁽³¹⁾ The Model 3 flying disc had a diameter of 138 feet and a height of 105 feet.

According to Schriever, the finished disc was ready for test-flying early in 1944, but was destroyed by its builders to prevent it from falling into the hands of the advancing Allies. Schriever and his colleagues fled as the BMW plant was taken by Czechoslovakian patriots. In spite of Schriever's claim, Renato Vesco states that a highly advanced supersonic disc-shaped aircraft called the Kugelblitz was indeed test-flown near the Nordhausen underground rocket complex in February 1945. ⁽³²⁾

 

Also known as the V-7, this machine was said to have climbed to a height of 37,600 feet in just three minutes, and reached a speed of 1,218 mph. This craft and the technicians who built it were apparently seized by the Russians and taken to Siberia, where the disc project continued under Soviet control.

While Vesco concedes that the hard evidence for a German flying-disc program is,

'very tenuous', he notes that 'the senior official of a 1945 British technical mission revealed that he had discovered German plans for "entirely new and deadly developments in air warfare" '.

Vesco continues:

These plans must obviously have gone beyond normal jet aircraft designs, as both sides already had jet-powered aircraft in production and operational service by the end of the war. Moreover, before Rudolf Schriever died some fifteen years after the war he had become convinced that the large numbers of post-war UFO sightings were evidence that his designs had been built and developed. ⁽³³⁾

On 2 May 1980, another man claimed to the German press that he had worked on Project Saucer. Heinrich FleiBner, then 76 years old, told Neue Presse magazine that he had been a technical consultant on a jet-propelled, disc-shaped aircraft that had been built at Peenemunde from parts manufactured in a number of other locations.

 

FleiBner also claimed that Goering had been the patron of the project and planned to use the disc as a courier plane, but that the Wehrmacht had destroyed most of the plans in the face of the Allied advance. ⁽³⁴⁾ Nevertheless, some material did reach both America and Russia.

 

According to Harbinson,

'The notes and drawings for FleiBner's flying saucer, first registered in West Germany on 27 March 1954, were assigned to Trans-Oceanic, Los Angeles, California on 28 March the following year and registered with the United States Patent Office on 7 June 1960.' ⁽³⁵⁾

According to Vesco, the Austrian inventor Viktor Schauberger, after being kidnapped by the Nazis, designed a number of disc-shaped aircraft for the Third Reich between 1938 and 1945.

 

The saucers were powered by what Schauberger called 'liquid vortex propulsion':

'If water or air is rotated into a twisting form of oscillation known as "colloidal",' he said, 'a build-up of energy results, which, with immense power, can cause levitation.' ⁽³⁶⁾

Whether this bizarre form of propulsion is workable is, of course, open to debate. Once again, however, the Americans seem to have taken many of Schauberger's documents at the end of the war, with the Russians taking what was left and blowing up his apartment when they had finished. Schauberger supposedly went to America in the 1950s to work on a top secret project in Texas for the US Government, although this unspecified project was apparently not particularly successful.

 

Schauberger died in 1958, reportedly saying on his deathbed:

'They took everything from me. Everything. I don't even own myself.' ⁽³⁷⁾

There is no doubt that radical aeroform designs were being tested at this time. For example, the Messerschmitt 163A was powered by a liquid-fuel Walter rocket, and was given its first powered flight in August 1941. It achieved speeds of over 600 mph, nearly twice as fast as the average speed of a fighter aircraft at that time. A second version, the Me 163B, was built with a more powerful motor.

 

The design was not perfected, however, until mid-1944, when approximately 370 were built and deployed throughout Germany in a last-ditch attempt to thwart the Allied forces. The RAF and USAAF air crews who encountered them commented in their reports on how fast and dangerous these craft were: on many occasions, the Me 163s were so fast that the Allied air gunners had no chance to deal with them.

 

However, the Me 163 could only remain in a combat situation for 25 minutes, for most of which time it was unpowered, and their relatively small number prevented them from having much success against the Allied advance. ⁽³⁸⁾
 

Hans Kammler
If the Germans did succeed in producing a piloted flying disc, what became of it? As several researchers have noted, the answer may lie with SS Obergruppenfuhrer Dr Hans Kammler, who towards the end of the war had access to all areas of secret air-armaments projects.

 

Kammler worked on the V-2 rocket project, along with Wernher von Braun (who would later head NASA's Apollo Moon program) and Luftwaffe Major General Walter Dornberger (who would later become vice-president of the Bell Aircraft Company in the United States). ⁽³⁹⁾

Heinrich Himmler planned to separate the SS from Nazi Party and state control through the establishment of a number of business and industrial fronts, making it independent of the state budget. Hitler approved this proposal early in 1944. (As Jim Marrs notes, this strategy would subsequently be copied by the CIA in America.) ⁽⁴⁰⁾

By the end of the war, Hans Kammler had decided to use V-2 rocket technology and scientists as bargaining chips with the Allies. On 2 April 1945, 500 technicians and engineers were placed on a train along with 100 SS troops and sent to a secret Alpine location in Bavaria. Two days later, von Braun requested permission from Kammler to resume rocket research, to which Kammler replied that he was about to disappear for an indefinite length of time. This was the last anyone saw of Hans Kammler. ⁽⁴¹⁾

 

In view of the undoubted advantage he held when it came to negotiating for his life with the Allies, Kammler's disappearance is something of a puzzle, until we pause to consider the possibility that he possessed plans for a technology even more advanced than the V-2.

'Did the Reich, or an extension of it, have the capability to produce a UFO or the clout to deal from a position of strength with one of the Allied nations?' ⁽⁴²⁾ Although it is assumed that Kammler committed suicide when about to be apprehended by the Czech resistance in Prague, there is no proof of this.

 

What really happened to Kammler?

 

In the final chapter, we will examine the theory that he, along with many other high-ranking Nazis, survived the end of the war and escaped to an unlikely location.
 

The Avrocar
The opinion of orthodox history is that, while many highly advanced weapons designs were on the drawing board, with some actually being put into limited production in the final months of the war, nothing with the design or performance characteristics of flying saucers was ever built in Nazi Germany.

 

And yet, in 1953, only eight years after the end of the war, the Canadian Toronto Star announced that a flying saucer was being developed by the A. V. Roe company (AVRO-Canada) at its facilities near Malton, Ontario. According to the report, apparently leaked by a well-informed source within the company, the machine would have a top speed of 1,500 mph.

This understandably provoked a sudden and intense interest in the subject from other members of the press, who asked for clarification from the Canadian Government.

 

A statement was released, declaring:

'The Defense authorities are examining all ideas, even revolutionary ones, that have been suggested for the development of new types of supersonic aircraft, also including flying discs. This, however, is still in the beginning phase of research and it will be a number of months before we are able to reach anything positive and seven or more years before we come to actual production.' ⁽⁴³⁾

On 16 February 1953, C.D. Howe, the Minister of Defense Production, told the Canadian House of Commons that the government was studying new fighter-aircraft concepts,

'adding weight to reports that AVRO is even now working on a mock-up model of a "flying saucer" capable of flying 1500 miles per hour and climbing straight up in the air'. ⁽⁴⁴⁾

Less than two weeks later, on 27 February, the AVRO President, Crawford Gordon, Jr., wrote in the company's journal:

'One of our projects can be said to be quite revolutionary in concept and appearance. The prototype being built is so revolutionary that when it flies all other types of supersonic aircraft will become obsolescent. This is all that AVRO-Canada are going to say about this project.' ⁽⁴⁵⁾

This statement was followed by two months of silence, after which press interest was fired to an even greater degree by another revelation in the Toronto Star of 21 April:

Field Marshal Montgomery ... became one of a handful of people ever to see AVRO's mock-up of a 'flying saucer,' reputed to be capable of flying 1500 miles an hour. A guide who accompanied Montgomery quoted him as describing it as 'fantastic.' ... Security precautions surrounding this super-secret are so tight that two of Montgomery's escorts from Scotland Yard were barred from the forbidden, screened-off area of the AVRO plant. ⁽⁴⁶⁾

On 24 April, the Toronto Star added that the flying disc was constructed of metal, wood and plastics, and referred to it as a gyroscopic fighter, with a revolving gas turbine engine.

 

Little more was written in the Canadian press until 1 November, when a brief report appeared stating:

'A mock-up of the Canadian flying saucer, the highly secret aircraft in whose existence few believe, was yesterday shown to a group of twenty-five American experts, including military officers and scientists.' ⁽⁴⁷⁾

This $200 million-dollar prototype was also known as the AVRO Omega, probably because its shape was more like the Greek letter than a perfect circle.

The press claimed that the Canadian Government planned to deploy squadrons of flying saucers for the defense of the far north of the country, their VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) capabilities making them ideal for forested and snow-covered terrain.

 

Once again, however, there followed a period of official and press silence on the matter, broken only by the revelation that the project's principal designer was the aeronautical engineer J.C. M. Frost, and persistent rumors that the US military had become involved. Vesco quotes an unnamed press source, who stated enthusiastically:

This is a ship that will be able to take off vertically, to hover in mid-air and to move at a speed of about 1850 mph. That is, it would be capable of performing all the maneuvers that flying discs are said to be capable of. This astonishing craft is the brain child of the English aeronautical engineer John Frost, who worked for the large de Havilland factory in England during the war and who later went on to A. V. Roe, in Malton, Canada.

 

The aircraft that will be built for the U.S. Air Force is not, however, the first of this type that Frost has designed. Two years ago he had designed and submitted to American experts an aircraft which was called the Flying Manta because of its behavior on take-off. It more or less resembled the present disc, but it could not take off vertically. In addition, its top speed did not exceed 1430 mph.

 

The Manta had interested the American General Staff, but in view of these operating deficiencies, it was decided not to build it. ⁽⁴⁸⁾

These high hopes for US-Canadian flying discs were dashed when, on 3 December 1954, the Canadian Defense Ministry suddenly announced that the project was to be abandoned on the grounds that the technology required to make it work was too expensive and speculative.

Nearly a year later, however, on 25 October 1955, US Air Force Secretary Donald Quarles made an intriguing statement through the Department of Defense press office.

We are now entering a period of aviation technology in which aircraft of unusual configuration and flight characteristics will begin to appear ... The Air Force will fly the first jet-powered vertical-rising airplane in a matter of days. We have another project under contract with AVRO Ltd., of Canada, which could result in disc-shaped aircraft somewhat similar to the popular concept of a flying saucer ...

 

While some of these may take novel forms, such as the AVRO project, they are direct-line descendants of conventional aircraft and should not be regarded as supra-natural or mysterious ... Vertical-rising aircraft capable of transition to supersonic horizontal flight will be a new phenomenon in our skies, and under certain conditions could give the illusion of the so-called flying saucer.

 

The Department of Defense will make every effort within the bounds of security to keep the public informed of these developments so they can be recognized for what they are ... I think we must recognize that other countries also have the capability of developing vertical-rising aircraft, perhaps of unconventional shapes.

 

However, we are satisfied at this time that none of the sightings of so-called 'flying saucers' reported in this country were in fact aircraft of foreign origin. ⁽⁴⁹⁾

Quarles's surprising statement notwithstanding, the AVRO company was in fact going through something of a bad patch following the cancellation by the Canadian Government of the contract for the CF-105 Arrow heavy bomber, on the pretext of the diminished air threat from Russia which had only a limited number of intercontinental bombers.

 

This decision resulted in 10,000 people being laid off, most of them specialists working on the saucer project, renamed the AVRO-Car.

It was not until August 1960 that American authorities decided to allow the press to see the prototype of the AVRO-Car. Its performance was less than impressive: it managed to do little more than hover a few feet above the ground, prompting an official statement that,

'even for this type of VTOL plane ... the principal problem is low-speed stability. Tests with a full-scale model have been made at the large forty-by-eighty-foot wind tunnel at the Ames Research Center, belonging to NASA, but they were not completely successful. It became clear, however, that the various problems inherent in a circular aircraft of this type are not insurmountable.' ⁽⁵⁰⁾

Just over a year later, it was announced that the US Department of Defense would be withdrawing from the AVRO-Car project, on the grounds that it was unlikely that the design could ever be made to work successfully.

The lamentable story of the AVRO-Car (and its illustration of the problems besetting disc-shaped aircraft) has done nothing to dissuade Nazi-UFO proponents from maintaining that their basic thesis is correct. However, British ufologist Timothy Good quotes a CIA memorandum from W. E. Lexow, Chief of the Applied Science Division, Office of Scientific Intelligence, dated 19 October 1955, which may lend weight to this idea.

 

According to the memorandum, John Frost, the designer of the AVRO-Car,

'is reported to have obtained his original idea for the flying machine from a group of Germans just after World War II. The Soviets may also have obtained information from this German group'. ⁽⁵¹⁾

The Problem of the UFO Occupants
Any theory of the origin of UFOs must, of course, take into account all the available evidence, and this includes reported encounters with and descriptions of UFO occupants. Having looked at the idea that UFOs are man-made aircraft inspired by designs developed by Nazi scientists in the Second World War, we now find ourselves confronting material that would, at first sight, be sufficient to make the Nazi-UFO theory completely untenable.

 

For as soon as the UFO lands and opens its hatches, we meet a variety of creatures that are anything but human. (To be sure, some UFO occupants are described as being completely human-looking but they seem to be very much in the minority.)

 

This has naturally led the majority of UFO researchers and investigators to conclude that UFOs are extraterrestrial devices. Before dealing with this problem, let us illustrate it by examining briefly some of these alleged contacts with UFO occupants.

Over the decades since the modern era of ufology began with the Arnold sighting in 1947, people all over the world have claimed to have encountered an astonishing variety of creatures linked with UFOs on the ground. In the 1950s and 1960s these people were known as 'contactees' and, according to their testimony, humanity had nothing whatsoever to fear from the ufonauts.

 

They were almost invariably described as being tall and strikingly attractive, with long, sandy-colored hair and blue eyes, a description which resulted in their being classified as 'Nordic' aliens. (In the present context, this description has obvious and sinister connotations but, as we shall see, is almost certainly coincidental.)

The most famous of the 1950s contactees was George Adamski who, on 20 November 1952, encountered a man claiming to come from Venus. Adamski, a self-styled philosopher and mystic, was running a hamburger stand a few miles from the Mount Palomar Observatory in California when he had his encounter. He was having lunch with several friends near Desert Center when they allegedly saw a gigantic cigar-shaped object in the sky.

 

Telling his friends to remain behind, Adamski drove into the desert, where he witnessed the landing of a disc-shaped 'scout craft'. When the ship's single occupant appeared, Adamski was able to communicate with him through a combination of hand signals and telepathy and learned that the Venusians (together with other intelligent races throughout the Solar System) were deeply concerned at humanity's misuse of nuclear energy (a theme that would be repeated again and again by the contactees).

In common with the other contactees, Adamski's claims suffered from egregious scientific inaccuracies, not least of which was the utter inability of all the other planets in the Solar System to support intelligent humanoid life. In Adamski's case, this difficulty was somewhat compounded by a comment he made to two followers regarding Prohibition.

 

During this period, he had secured a special license from the government to make wine for religious purposes (he had founded a monastery in Laguna Beach), with the result that he claimed to have made 'enough wine for all of Southern California'. If it had not been for the repeal of Prohibition, he told his friends, 'I wouldn't have had to get into this saucer crap'. ⁽⁵²⁾

The contactee claims of the 1950s are rightly regarded as extremely dubious by most ufologists; however, in the decades since there have been a number of contact claims that demand more serious attention. Before proceeding, it is necessary for us to look briefly at some of the most impressive reports, since they form the backdrop to an increasingly popular conspiracy theory regarding Nazi activities in the post-war period.

When we examine reports of encounters with UFO occupants (particularly since the early 1960s), we see that the defining characteristic reveals itself to be what has come to be known as 'abduction', in which witnesses are taken from their normal environment against their will and are forced to interact in various ways with apparently non-human entities.

One of the most famous abduction cases occurred on 11 October 1973 on the shores of the Pascagoula River in Mississippi, USA. Charlie Hickson, 45, and Calvin Parker, 18, were fishing in the river when they witnessed the approach of a UFO.

 

The following day, the United Press International news service carried the following report:

PASCAGOULA, Miss. Two shipyard workers who claimed they were hauled aboard a UFO and examined by silver-skinned creatures with big eyes and pointed ears were checked today at a military hospital and found to be free of radiation.

... Jackson County chief deputy Barney Mathis said the men told him they were fishing from an old pier on the west bank of the Pascagoula River about 7 p.m. Thursday when they noticed a strange craft about two miles away emitting a bluish haze.

They said it moved closer and then appeared to hover about three or four feet above the water, then 'three whatever-they-weres came out, either floating or walking, and carried us into the ship,' officers quoted Hickson as saying.

'The things had big eyes. They kept us about twenty minutes, photographed us, and then took us back to the pier. The only sound they made was a buzzing-humming sound. They left in a flash.'

'These are reliable people,' Sheriff Diamond said. 'They had no reason to say this if it had not been true. I know something did happen to them.'

The sheriff said the 'spacecraft' was described as fish-shaped, about ten feet long with an eight-foot ceiling. The occupants were said to have pale silvery skin, no hair, long pointed ears and noses, with an opening for a mouth and hands 'like crab claws.'

 

Inside the UFO, the two men were placed on a table and examined with a device that resembled a huge eye. They were later interviewed by Dr J. Allen Hynek, the astronomer whose work as a consultant for the US Air Force's UFO investigation project, Blue Book, turned him from skeptic to cautious advocate of UFO reality.

 

Hynek concluded that Hickson and Parker were in a state of genuine fright. Dr James A. Harder, a consultant for the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) who also investigated the case, described the UFO occupants as 'automata', or 'advanced robots', judging from the witnesses' descriptions.

Many people who are skeptical of UFO and alien abductions state, quite reasonably, that an advanced spacefaring civilization would not need to conduct the highly intrusive and traumatic experiments on human beings that their representatives are reported to conduct. The repeated taking of samples of blood, flesh, sperm and ova from unwilling subjects implies a curiously primitive medical technology for beings allegedly capable of building interstellar spacecraft.

 

However, there is an intriguing correlation between the atrocities committed by 'aliens' on their human victims and those committed by Nazi 'doctors' (I use the term loosely) in the concentration camps during the Second World War. As we shall see later in this chapter, proponents of the Nazi-UFO Theory, such as W. A. Harbinson, have suggested that this may be due to an ongoing (and for the moment highly secret) Nazi plot to create a master-race from the raw material of humanity in its present form.

One of the most impressive and carefully investigated abduction cases occurred on 26 August 1976. Four art students, Charlie Foltz, Chuck Rak and brothers Jack and Jim Weiner were on a camping trip on the Allagash River in Maine, USA. While fishing in a boat on East Lake, they watched the approach of a large spherical light that frightened them considerably.

 

The next thing they knew, they were standing on the shore of the lake, watching the object shoot up into the sky. There was nothing left of their blazing camp fire but a few glowing embers, implying that they had been away for several hours although they only remembered being on the lake for about twenty minutes.

Several years later, the case came to the attention of the respected UFO researcher Raymond E. Fowler, who investigated on behalf of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), the largest civilian UFO organization in the world.

 

Fowler arranged for the four witnesses to undergo hypnotic regression to recover their lost memories of the evening. Each of the men (who had promised not to discuss with each other their individual hypnosis sessions) recalled being taken into the UFO through a beam of light. Once inside, they encountered several humanoid entities who forced them (apparently through some form of mind control) to undress and sit in a mist-filled room.

 

Their bodies were examined and probed with various instruments, and samples of saliva, blood, skin, sperm, urine and feces were taken. When the examination had been completed, the men were forced to walk through a circular doorway, whereupon they found themselves floating back down to their boat through the light beam.

Fowler later discovered that Jack Weiner had had an 'anomalous lump' surgically removed several years earlier. The pathologist who examined it had been somewhat mystified and had sent it on for analysis to the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia. At Fowler's request, Jack Weiner asked for his medical records and discovered that the lump had been sent to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) in Washington, D.C., instead of the Center for Disease Control.

 

When Fowler telephoned the AFIP for an explanation, he was told by the public information officer that the AFIP occasionally assisted civilian doctors.

'When Jack asked why the lump was sent to the AFIP rather than the Center for Disease Control, he was told by his surgeon's secretary that it was less costly even though Jack was covered by insurance!' ⁽⁵³⁾

The Pascagoula and Allagash encounters display many of the hallmarks of the typical UFO abduction, the principal elements of which can be listed as follows:

1. the initial appearance of the entities and the taking of the percipient

2. medical probing with various instruments

3. machine examinations and mental testing

4. sexual activity, in which the percipient is sometimes forced to 'mate' with other humans or even with the entities themselves

5. the returning of the percipient to his or her normal environment. ⁽⁵⁴⁾

Although an extremely wide variety of 'alien' types has been encountered by people all over the world, one type in particular has become more and more commonly reported (particularly in the United States). The so-called 'Grey' is now regarded as the quintessential alien being and is one of the most immediately recognizable images in today's world.

In the unlikely event that the reader is unfamiliar with this image, we can briefly describe the Greys' physical characteristics as follows: they are usually described as approximately four feet tall (although some are as tall as eight feet), with extremely large craniums and enormous jet-black, almond-shaped eyes.

 

They have no nose or ears to speak of, merely small holes where these should be; likewise, their mouths are usually described as no more than lipless slits. The torso and limbs are described as being very thin, almost sticklike, and more than one abductee has reported the impression that they seem to be made of an undifferentiated material, with no bone or muscular structure.

 

Their hands are long and thin, sometimes with three fingers, sometimes with four. In addition, the Greys are frequently reported to be rather uncaring in their attitude towards humans, treating us much as we treat laboratory animals. Indeed, they have been described by some as militaristic and by others as hivelike in their demeanor, as if they had no individual consciousness of their own but were carrying out commands from some higher source.

It is clear that any claims of a Nazi origin of modern UFO encounters must take account of the bizarre creatures associated with the discs. This problem might seem insurmountable in view of the fact that, while we may not expect the UFO pilots to be strutting around in black leather trench coats and jackboots, they would surely nevertheless be recognizable as human beings.

 

However, the research undertaken by W. A. Harbinson may offer a way around this apparent impasse, as well as providing us with some extremely unsettling food for thought.
 

Nazi Cyborgs?
Harbinson's thesis, that UFO occupants may well be cyborgs - biomedically engineered amalgamations of human and machine - is supported to a certain extent by medical research conducted since the 1960s.

 

Although this research was at the time highly secret, the gruesome details have since come to light in the form of books and articles that describe not only the nature of the experiments conducted but also the frightening attitude of some members of the medical profession.

 

According to David Fishlock:

'Even today there are people who believe that convicts, especially the criminal lunatic, and even conscientious objectors, should be compelled to lend themselves to science.' ⁽⁵⁵⁾

Referring to The People Shapers (1978) by Vance Packard, Harbinson reminds us of the direction in which medical research was heading more than 30 years ago.

[I]n the Cleveland Clinic's Department of Artificial Organs, not only medical specialists, but 'mechanical, electrical, chemical, and biomedical engineers, as well as biochemists and polymer chemists', were, in their busy operating theatres, enthusiastically engaged in 'surgery connected to the development of artificial substitutes for ... vital organs such as the liver, lungs, pancreas, and kidneys'.

 

Conveniently within walking distance of the Cleveland Clinic's Department of Artificial Organs are the Neurosurgical Research Laboratories of the Cleveland Metropolitan General Hospital, where great interest was being expressed, as far back as 1967, in the possibility of transferring the entire head of one human being to another.

 

Switching human brains from one head to another would be complicated and costly, but, as Packard explains: 'By simply switching heads, on the other hand, only a few connections need to be severed and then re-established in the neck of the recipient body.' ⁽⁵⁶⁾

This procedure was successfully carried out on monkeys at the Cleveland Clinic, with each head apparently retaining its original mental characteristics when attached to its new body.

 

In other words, if a monkey had been aggressive before the operation, it would remain so when its head was transplanted to another body. The eyes of the monkeys followed people as they walked past, implying that the heads retained some level of awareness. The unfortunate subjects of these procedures only lived for about one week.

Of course, the main problem in a procedure of this kind would be the regeneration of the severed spinal cord so that the brain could send nerve impulses to its new body; and yet even this feat seems not to be outside the bounds of possibility.

 

In June 1976, a Soviet scientist named Levon A. Matinian,

'reported from the fourth biennial conference on Regeneration of the Central Nervous System that he had succeeded in re-growing the spinal cords of rats'. ⁽⁵⁷⁾

Harbinson suggests, almost certainly with some justification, that this area of research must have been continued 'behind closed doors' at military and scientific establishments since then.

 

It is surely reasonable to suppose that, if this is the case, scientists have progressed well beyond the level of rats.

One can be forgiven for wondering what conceivable use such barbaric experiments could possibly have for humanity. While it is mercifully unlikely that head transplants will ever be in vogue, such research undoubtedly holds much potential for the enhancement of human beings who will eventually conduct routine work in hostile environments, such as the ocean floor and outer space.

 

Fusion of a sort between human and machine has already been achieved, in the form of the so-called Cybernetic Anthropomorphous Machine System (CAMS), 'slave' machinery that mimics the movement of its human operators.

 

According to Harbinson:

In an aerospace conference given in Boston in 1966, engineer William E. Bradley, who developed the idea of cable-less man-machine manipulator systems for the US Defense Department's Institute for Defense Analysis, stated his belief that man and machine would eventually be linked in such a way that by performing the maneuvers himself, the man would cause them to take place, through the machine, at a distance of thousands of miles.

 

This concept soon led to the weapon-aiming system devised by the Philco Corporation for the US Air Force, in which the pilot's helmet is coupled with a servo-system that enables him to aim and fire his weapons automatically by merely swivelling his head until a camera located in his helmet shows the target. ⁽⁵⁸⁾

In addition, as early as 1967 US Air Force scientists had succeeded in transmitting thought impulses to a computer using a variation on Morse code composed of long and short bursts of alpha waves ⁽⁵⁹⁾ (alpha waves are produced by the brain when it is at rest). This technology has developed to the point where today we have the potential for amputees to control their prosthetic limbs by means of nerve impulses directly from the brain.

In the field of organ transplantation, we have seen astonishing progress over the last 30 years and it is surely not rash to suggest that we will soon see artificial hearts and other organs routinely replacing those damaged through illness or accident. Likewise, in spite of concerns regarding the ethical implications of human cloning, we may also see the day when human organs are produced in the laboratory, ready for transplanting when the need arises.

 

In view of the fact that research conducted under the aegis of national security is between ten and twenty years ahead of what is made public at any particular time (work on the Stealth fighter began in the mid-1970s, although the public were not made aware of its existence until the late 1980s), it is possible - perhaps likely - that advances in the field of medical and bioengineering research have already extended into the realm of what the public would consider science fiction.

Harbinson believes that what the public knows is merely the tip of the iceberg, and reminds us that,

'the US Navy, Air Force, Army and government agencies such as NASA - all with top-secret research establishments in the White Sands Proving Ground and similar areas - have a particular need for advanced man-machine manipulations or cyborgs'. ⁽⁶⁰⁾

He adds that the creatures seen in and around landed UFOs could be such cyborgs: human beings radically augmented by sophisticated mechanical prosthetics.

Theoretically, the lungs of such creatures would be partially collapsed and the blood in them artificially cooled. The cyborgs' respiration and other bodily functions would then be controlled cybernetically with artificial lungs and sensors which maintain constant temperature, metabolism and pressure, irrespective of external environmental fluctuations - thus, even if not protected by an antigravity (or gravitic) propulsion system, they would not be affected by the extraordinary accelerations and direction changes of their craft.

 

The cyborgs would have no independent will, but could be remote-controlled, both physically and mentally, even across great distances, by computer-linked brain implants. Since this operation would render the mouth and nose superfluous, these would be sealed ... and completely non-functioning. ⁽⁶¹⁾

If we remember the basic description of the Greys noted earlier, with their slit-like and apparently useless mouths, vestigial noses and thin torsos, we can begin to see a frightening correspondence with the theoretical human-built cyborg, a nightmarish combination of genetically engineered human and highly sophisticated machine. To a startled, disorientated and terrified UFO witness, such a creature would surely look like nothing on earth ... would look, in fact, like an extraterrestrial alien.

Interestingly, many people claiming to have encountered UFO crews mention the presence of normal-looking humans alongside the bizarre entities. Some ufologists suggest that these human types are the Nordic aliens mentioned earlier, working alongside the Greys and perhaps forming part of some interplanetary federation; other, more conspiracy-minded researchers believe that the human types are just that: human beings who are in league with a hostile alien occupation force.

 

There is, however, another possibility, based on the information we have just considered. It is conceivable that the humans seen on board UFOs are actually the controllers of the Greys/cyborgs.

 

It is also conceivable that these humans are members of an ultra-secret group, existing completely independently of any nation on Earth, and perhaps hostile to all nations and all other humans.
 

Conceivable, yes - but true?
These suggestions, of course, raise a number of serious and difficult questions. If the controllers of the UFOs and their not-quite-human crew members really are from Earth, who are they? If they place their allegiance with no known nation, with whom does their allegiance lie? Why do they abduct what is apparently an enormous number of ordinary humans, some of whom are never returned?

 

Such an organization or society could not operate without a well-supplied, protected and highly secret home base. Where is it?

In the final chapter of our survey, we will examine some of the theories that have been put forward to account for the origin and activities of this sinister group of humans. But first, we can attempt to answer one of the questions we have just posed.

 

The answer, if true, is terrifying, and leads us inevitably to the final stage of our journey through the Absolute Elsewhere.
 

Telemetric Mind Control
What is the secret of so-called UFO abductions? Are hostile alien beings responsible, or is the solution to the mystery to be found right here on Earth?

 

For a possible answer to these questions, we must look at the history of a subject that most people would assume lies firmly within the boundaries of science fiction and that has no place in the world of everyday experience. The subject is the control of the human mind from a distance and, as we shall now see, it is frighteningly practicable.

According to the US Air Force Scientific Advisory Board in its 1996 study of weapons technology, New World Vistas Air and Space Power for the 21st Century, it is possible to achieve the coupling of human and machine through what is known as Biological Process Control.

'One can envision the development of electromagnetic energy sources, the output of which can be pulsed, shaped, and focused, that can couple with the human body in a fashion that will allow one to prevent voluntary muscular movements, control emotions (and thus actions), produce sleep, transmit suggestions, interfere with both short-term and long-term memory, produce an experience set, and delete an experience set.'

Researcher David Guyatt informs us that 'experience set' is jargon for one's life's memories: this technology is quite literally capable of deleting one's memories and replacing them with an entirely new set. ⁽⁶²⁾

 

Those who believe that such technology must still be decades away from perfection may be surprised to learn that Dr Jose Delgado, a neurophysiologist at the Yale University School of Medicine, has been experimenting with Electronic Stimulation of the Brain (ESB) since the late 1940s. Perhaps his most impressive experiment was conducted in 1964, with the financial backing of the US Office of Naval Research. An electronic probe was implanted in the brain of a bull and a small radio receiver strapped to its head.

 

The animal was then placed in a bullring, along with Dr Delgado who was equipped with a remote-control handset. As the bull charged him, Delgado flipped a switch on the handset and the one-ton animal stopped dead in front of him, clearly in a state of confusion. This process was repeated several times.

 

Guyatt writes:

'Speaking two years later, in 1966, Delgado stated that his experiments "support the distasteful conclusion that motion, emotion, and behaviour can be directed by electrical [means] and that humans can be controlled like robots by push buttons".' ⁽⁶³⁾

According to Delgado, this would eventually result in a 'psycho-civilized' society, whose citizens' brains would be computer-controlled through the use of implanted 'stimoceivers'. Guyatt informs us that in 1974 neurophysiologist Lawrence Pinneo of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) developed a computer system capable of reading a person's mind by correlating brain waves on an electroencephalograph (EEC) with specific commands. ⁽⁶⁴⁾

Eighteen years earlier, in 1956, at the National Electronics Conference in Chicago, Curtiss Shafer, an electrical engineer for the Norden-Ketay Corporation, had stated that,

'The ultimate achievement of biocontrol may be man himself. He continued: The controlled subjects would never be permitted to think as individuals. A few months after birth, a surgeon would equip each child with a socket mounted under the scalp and electrodes reaching selected areas of brain tissue'.

 

The subject's 'sensory perceptions and muscular activity could be either modified or completely controlled by bioelectric signals radiating from state-controlled transmitters'. ⁽⁶⁵⁾

Among the horrors perpetrated at Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps were frequently fatal experiments in mind control, conducted mainly with hypnosis and narcohypnosis, using drugs such as mescaline and various barbiturates.

 

After the war, many Nazi scientists, doctors, engineers and intelligence personnel were secretly taken to the United States in the operation known as Project PAPERCLIP.

 

Thirty-four Nazi scientists were sent to Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas to continue their narcohypnosis experiments on non-volunteer subjects, including prisoners, mental patients and members of ethnic minorities. ⁽⁶⁶⁾ The results of the narco-hypnosis experiments suggested that the technique was unreliable (the main intention being to produce a programmable assassin), and greater emphasis was placed on electronic technology to erase a person's personality (a process known as 'depatterning') and replace it with a new personality devised by the experimenter (a technique called 'psychic driving'). ⁽⁶⁷⁾

As might be expected, the CIA has always been extremely interested in the concept of mind control. One of their experimental facilities was contained within the Allen Memorial Institute, the psychiatric division of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, directed by Dr Ewen Cameron MD on a grant from the Rockefeller and Gerschickter Foundations. Cameron established a Radio Telemetry Laboratory in which experiments were conducted on non-volunteer subjects.

 

Mind control researcher Alex Constantine provides us with a glimpse of the nature of these experiments, which included depatterning and psychic driving.

The psychotronic heart of the laboratory was the Grid Room, with its verticed, Amazing Tales interior. The subject was strapped into a chair involuntarily, by force, his head bristling with electrodes and transducers. Any resistance was met with a paralyzing dose of curare. The subject's brain waves were beamed to a nearby reception room crammed with voice analyzers, a wire recorder and radio receivers cobbled together by [Cameron's assistant] Rubenstein.

 

The systematic annihilation, or 'depatterning' of a subject's mind and memory, was accomplished with overdoses of LSD, barbiturate sleep for 65 days at a stretch and ECT shocks at 75 times the recommended dosage. Psychic driving, the repetition of a recorded message for 16 hours a day, programmed the empty mind. ⁽⁶⁸⁾

The CIA has, over the years, established a number of secret projects to study and experiment with methods of mind control, using drugs and various forms of electromagnetic (EM) radiation. The notorious MKULTRA behavior-control program is merely the best-known of these projects.

 

The others include: Project CHATTER, a US Navy program aimed at the elimination of free will in subjects through the use of drugs and psychology; Project BLUEBIRD, a CIA/Office of Scientific Intelligence program to develop behavioral drugs for use in 'unconventional warfare'; and Project PANDORA, which was established as a result of the Soviet bombardment of the US embassy in Moscow with low-intensity microwaves during the 1960s and 1970s. ⁽⁶⁹⁾

 

PANDORA was set up to study the health effects of microwave radiation and experimented with the induction of hallucinations and heart seizures. According to Richard Cesaro, the director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the initial goal of PANDORA was to 'discover whether a carefully controlled microwave signal could control the mind'. ⁽⁷⁰⁾

According to Constantine, CIA researchers conducted further experiments with radio waves, which resulted in their subjects experiencing various emotions, sensations and visions.

 

At the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA),

'Dr Ross Adey (who worked closely with émigré Nazi technicians after WW II) rigged the brains of lab animals to transmit to a radio receiver, which shot signals back to a device that sparked any behavior desired by the researcher'. ⁽⁷¹⁾

The use of electronic 'stimoceivers' inside the brains of subjects to control thought and behavior is paralleled by one of the most disturbing aspects of UFO abduction: the so-called 'alien implants' which, it is claimed, are inserted into the bodies of abductees for unknown purposes. Alien implants first came to widespread public attention with the publication of Communion (1987) by Whitley Strieber and Missing Time (1981) by Budd Hopkins.

 

One of the defining characteristics of alien abduction is the introduction into the abductee's body of one or more small devices, frequently through the top of the nasal cavity and into the brain but also beneath the skin of arms, hands and legs. Some researchers speculate that the mysterious, so-called 'unknown bright objects' that occasionally show up on X-rays and CAT scans of the head are actually alien implants.

In the last few years, intensive efforts have been made by researchers and investigators to retrieve these objects from the body for scientific study. They have met with a good deal of success, with many alleged 'implants' having been surgically removed. The results of analysis, however, have been inconclusive, with no absolute proof of an extraterrestrial origin forthcoming to date. Indeed, the objects (which are typically two or three millimeters in length) have been shown to be composed of earthly materials such as carbon, silicon, oxygen and other trace elements.

 

(Supporters of an extraterrestrial origin for implants state, quite reasonably, that these substances are common throughout the Universe and that this should not be taken as proof of their earthly origin. Nevertheless, one would expect a genuine alien artifact, even if constructed of materials found on Earth, to show utterly unusual combinations or methods of construction.)

While the exact purpose of the implants is unknown, it has been suggested by various researchers that they may be tracking devices, by which the 'aliens' can keep tabs on humans they wish to abduct (in much the same way as zoologists tag animals in the wild). Alternatively, they may function as monitors of metabolism and other physical processes within the body.

 

Some investigators, fearful of a possible alien invasion of our planet, suggest that the implants are mind-control devices that will be activated if and when the aliens finally come out into the open, thus turning what may be millions of humans into a gigantic army of alien-controlled robots.

Although these ideas might seem rather paranoid and far-fetched, the last one raises the intriguing and extremely unsettling possibility that what are assumed by many to be alien implants are actually human implants - electromagnetic microwave devices giving the controllers direct access to the minds of the abductees.

 

Naturally, in this scenario, the abductions themselves have nothing to do with alien activity: as the French-American ufologist Jacques Vallee has noted, ⁽⁷²⁾ many apparent 'alien abductions' give every indication of being carefully engineered hoaxes - hoaxes, moreover, not perpetrated by the witnesses themselves but rather by a human agency with access to high technology and vast resources.

To illustrate this possibility, let us look at the case of an unfortunate man named Leonard Kille. A talented and successful electronics engineer, Kille was the co-inventor of the Land camera (named after Edwin Land of the Polaroid Corporation, who founded the Scientific Engineering Institute [SEI] on behalf of the CIA). ⁽⁷³⁾

 

Alex Constantine writes:

'At South Vietnam's Bien Hoa Hospital ... an SEI team buried electrodes in the skulls of Vietcong POWs and attempted to spur them into violence by remote control. Upon completion of the experiments, the POWs were shot and cremated by a company of "America's best," the Green Berets.' ⁽⁷⁴⁾

In 1966, Kille suspected his wife of having an affair with a lodger. He did not believe her denials, and a psychiatrist interpreted his resultant anger as a 'personality pattern disturbance'. He was referred to CIA psychiatrists for neurological tests. They concluded that Kille was a paranoid and a mild psychomotor epileptic. Kille was admitted to the Massachusetts General Hospital and his wife threatened to divorce him if he did not submit to brain surgery. In fact, his wife had been conducting an affair with their lodger, and did divorce Kille after his surgery. ⁽⁷⁵⁾

The surgery conducted on Leonard Kille consisted of four electrical strands, each containing twenty electrodes, being implanted in his brain. The insertion of these stimoceivers totally disabled Kille and left him terrified that he would be operated on again. According to Constantine, 'in 1971 an attendant found him with a wastebasket on his head to "stop the microwaves"'. ⁽⁷⁶⁾

 

When he was transferred to Boston's VA Hospital, his doctors were not informed that he had been implanted with electrode strands and therefore assumed that his claims were those of a delusional paranoiac.

 

Kille's moods were controlled with electronic stimulation.

'The "haunting fear" left by Kille's ordeal, a psychiatrist wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine, is that "men may become slaves, perhaps, to an authoritarian state".' ⁽⁷⁷⁾

Constantine believes that UFO activity is conducted by human intelligence agencies:

UFOs are strictly terrestrial, as one UFO abductee recognized. She phoned Julianne McKinney at the [Electronic] Surveillance Project in Washington to report her abduction, aware that it was government-directed.

 

'Her house is being shot at,' McKinney says, 'and they are harassing her viciously, the target of massive microwave assault.'

 

The abuse of psychoactive technology is escalating, unbeknownst to the American public. Recurrent hypno-programmed stalkers, ritual and 'alien' outrages and psychotronic forms of political persecution are on the upswing at the hands of the DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency], CIA, FBI, NSA [National Security Agency] and other covert branches of government. Hired guns in media, law enforcement and psychiatry protect them by discrediting the victims.

 

In effect, an ambitious but meticulously concealed, undeclared war on American private citizens is in progress - a psywar. ⁽⁷⁸⁾

More and more people in America are coming forward with complaints of psychotronic harassment. One of their greatest champions was Julianne McKinney (mentioned above), a CIA-trained military officer who decided to do something to help the victims and used her retirement bonus to finance the Electronic Surveillance Project (ESP), based in the offices of the Association of National Security Alumni in Washington, D.C. The running of the organization eventually drained all her savings, and in late 1995 McKinney left Washington.

 

She has not been seen since, although she is rumored to be still alive. ⁽⁷⁹⁾

Microwave harassment and mind control experiments are not confined to the United States. Following a routine operation in a Stockholm hospital, Swede Robert Naeslund discovered that he had been implanted with a radio-hypnotic intracerebral control device and had become the target of directed microwave radiation. He subsequently claimed that he was unable to receive corrective treatment from any doctor in Sweden due to interference from SAPO, the Swedish security service.

 

Naeslund travelled to Indonesia and succeeded in finding a surgeon willing to remove the implants; however, the operation was allegedly halted midway by the CIA. Although he has made numerous attempts to focus public awareness on his plight and that of others in his position, this has merely resulted in more electromagnetic harassment. ⁽⁸⁰⁾

In the United Kingdom, it has been claimed that the women who began protesting against the stationing of tactical nuclear weapons at the Greenham USAF base on Greenham Common in 1981 were also the victims of electromagnetic harassment. 'Protestors complained of severe headaches, temporary paralysis, nausea, palpitations and other classic symptoms of microwave poisoning. Tests revealed microwave radiation up to 100 times greater than background readings taken around the base.' ⁽⁸¹⁾

In addition, targeted electromagnetic radiation has been implicated in the deaths of 25 British scientists who were working on secret electronic warfare projects for NATO, including the Strategic Defense Initiative ('Star Wars') in the mid-1980s.

 

According to Alex Constantine:

A pattern to the killings in Great Britain begins with the fact that seven of the scientists worked for Marconi, a subsidiary of General Electric. At the time, Marconi was under investigation for bribing and defrauding ministers of government. But Britain's MoD found 'no evidence' linking the deaths. Blame for the sudden outbreak of suicides among Marconi engineers was laid on stress. (Another unlikely explanation was given for the 'hum' in Bristol, home of Marconi, a low-frequency noise ... blamed on 'frogs'.)

 

Jonathan Walsh, a digital communications specialist at Marconi, was assigned to the secretive Martlesham Heath Research Laboratory under a General Electric contract. (GE has long led the field in the development of anti-personnel electronic weapons, an interest that gestated with participation in Project Comet, the Pentagon-based research program to explore the psychological effects of frequencies on the electromagnetic spectrum.) Walsh dropped from his hotel window in November 1985. ⁽⁸²⁾

It has been suggested that these scientists, one of whom killed himself by chewing on live electrical wires, were driven to their deaths through electromagnetic mind control.

Alex Constantine and other mind control researchers firmly believe that American and European intelligence services are to blame not only for barbaric mind control experiments but also for staging UFO sightings and 'alien' encounters as a cover for their activities. As we have seen, there is much evidence to support these assertions.

 

However, we have also noted that there is evidence to suggest that modern UFOs are based on highly secret designs that were drawn up by Nazi engineers towards the end of the Second World War.

 

Taken together, these claims have led some UFO researchers and conspiracy theorists to turn their backs on the concept of alien visitation and to suggest that innocent people throughout the world are being victimized and abused by a sinister, ultra-secret society - a society having little or nothing to do with the United States, Russia or any other country.

The outrageous suggestion put forward by these researchers is that this society is actually composed of Nazis who escaped from the ruins of Germany at the end of the Second World War, and who are continuing their pursuit of world domination from the icy fastness of Antarctica.

Back to Contents