Secrets of the Third Reich

Part III

Another scientist who brought new knowledge to America was Viktor Schauberger. Although there is no evidence that Schauberger had Nazi sympathies, he was viewed by the Americans as a collaborator and put ‘into protective custody’ for six months at the end of the war.

Dr Walter Miethe, and Rudolph Schriever also entered America under Operation Paperclip, however it is believed that their colleague Habermohl fell into Russian hands.

Whilst in the US, Miethe continued his ‘flying disk’ work working primarily for the US Air Force, however he was sub-contracted to A. V. Roe and Company.

In 1959 Jack Judges, a freelance cameraman was flying over this company’s plant in Canada when he saw and photographed this picture (left) of a disk shaped craft sitting on the ground.

After the photograph was published in the papers, speculation grew that the disk was a secret weapon, and one that may have accounted for many of the UFO sightings during previous years.

In response to the speculation, the US Air Force released the following official photograph of the craft. It was called the ‘Avro’ and had first been launched in 1955.

A CIA memo of that year confirmed that the craft was based work undertaken by German scientists, notably Miethe, during WWII. The design was later abandoned in the late 1960s with the Air Force maintaining it was still at an experimental stage when abandoned. The 1990s were to reveal the craft was part of the secret ‘Project Silver Bug’, a project to develop a craft that had VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) capabilities that would dispense with the need for runways – and reduce the risks of such runways been targets of attack thus immobilizing any aircraft that may rely on it.

Other German scientists similarly brought their expertise – and designs – into the US after the war. ‘America’s Aircraft Year Book’ notes how many of them worked at Ft. Bliss (von Braun et al above) and Wright Field: the first and second homes of the Roswell wreckage. Among those in the German group at Wright Field were Rudolph Hermann, Alexander Lippisch, Heinz Schmitt, Helmut Heinrich, Fritz Doblhoff and Ernst Zundel.

Hermann was attached to the Peenemunde Research Station for Aerodynamics where Germany’s V-2 rockets were hatched and launched against England. A specialist in supersonics, he was in charge of the supersonic wind tunnel at Kochel in the Bavarian Alps. He was also a member of the group entrusted with Hitler’s futuristic plans to establish a space-station rocket-refueling bases revolving as a satellite about the Earth at a distance of 4,000 miles – a scheme which he and certain high ranking AAF officers in 1947 still believed possible."

One of these scientists Dr. Alexander Lippisch had designed another German craft that could be mistaken at the time for a flying disc, certainly at least when viewed from the side.

Lippisch had developed a number of projects leading up to the war, having been inspired by witnessing a flight by Orville Wright in September 1909 when a boy of 14. By November 1944, Lippisch, along with his students, had constructed the DM-1 (left), a delta with 60° swept leading edges. This craft was later to be flown at a speed of 497mph under the power of a rocket motor, and was shipped back to the US at the end of the war along with its creator. The DM-1 was to inspire the design of many US delta-wing aircraft such as the F-102 and F-104.

Lippisch joined Collins Radio Company as an expert on special aeronautical problems and in 1966 founded the ‘Lippisch Corporation’. He went on to develop the X-113A Aerofoil Boat before dying in 1976 at the age of 81.

Another craft that looked suspiciously like a ‘flying disk’ was the AS-6 (click right image). This craft was built by Arthur Sack following encouragement from Ernst Udet, Germany’s Air Minister in 1939.

Constructed at the Mitteldeutsche Motorwerke Company, and completed at the Flugplatz-Werkstatt at the Brandis Air Base in early 1944, the plane was not a success, and not further developed.

A similar craft to the AS-6, the V-173, was built by ‘Chance-Vought’, and known as the ‘flying pancake’. The V-173 has the honour of being the one occasion that the US authorities actually ‘admitted’ that technologies developed in Germany during the war years could account for the wave of UFOs seen over America in the 1940s.

The Navy released this picture of a V-173 in 1947 during the wave of UFO excitement generated by Kenneth Arnold’s sighting and the headline of the saucer crash at Roswell.

The Navy stated that the V-173 (click image left) was the only craft in operation at that time that could in any way come close to the flying disks being sighted everywhere.

Certainly the V-173, or another development at Chance-Vought was mistaken for a UFO by a local resident Thomas C. Smith whilst working for the company a year before the famous Roswell incident.

In 1997 Smith disclosed his story which appeared in the Lancaster New Era newspaper in Lancaster, Pennsylvania on 12th July, 1997. In the article Smith stated he had seen a flying saucer, but not a visitor from another planet but one that "was a human-engineered, experimental aircraft nestled in a Connecticut hangar.

"‘My God, what is that?’ the 20-year-old Smith wondered. ‘It was standing there on these stilts.’ It reminded Smith of something out of Orson Welles' 1938 radio broadcast ‘The War of the Worlds,’ about a Martian invasion of Earth. Armed with U.S. government security clearance, Smith watched, he says, as the 40-foot-wide elliptical craft hovered 10 feet off the ground and flew away, driven by twin propellers. A pilot lying in a cramped cockpit guided the craft. Smith, now a retired 72-year-old executive, recalled the experience during the UFO frenzy created by the 50th anniversary of the Roswell episode this month. Does he have proof that a craft like the one he saw crashed in Roswell during a test flight? No, but he says he believes that theory is more probable than visitors from outer space.

At the time, Smith was a mechanical-engineering graduate just out of Penn State University. He was working for Chance-Vought Aircraft in Stratford, Conn., which was building planes for the U.S. Navy. Smith was testing the high-altitude bonding of a composite material: wood sandwiched between two layers of metal.

He says he was curious about what would be built with the material, and since he had security clearance, a supervisor led him into a guarded hangar. He was shown a new jet the company was developing, but his attention was attracted to the other craft in the hangar, a flying saucer made of the material he had been testing.

‘It was very streamlined,’ Smith recalls. The khaki-coloured saucer was a few inches thick at the edges to about two feet thick at the pilot's cockpit, which had a bubble window allowing the pilot to look forward and down at the ground. ‘I saw him get in, and he lay down flat,’ Smith says. The craft had two propellers and rudders in the back. Smith went back at night to watch test flights. The saucer, he says, would float straight up, then fly off.

‘They'd get it off the ground and it would disappear’ into the darkness, he says. He says there were reports in the area of unidentified flying objects. About the time he left Chance-Vought in 1947, it moved operations to Texas, where it would have better conditions for test flights, Smith says." (24) Thus, Chance-Vought moved to a state next to New Mexico the year of the Roswell crash.

Other aircraft, at the time, seemed equally unconventional. In the 1930s and 1940s in Germany, the Horten brothers, Walter and Reimar, built a range of planes that they called the ‘Ho’ series. The first of this series, the Ho I, was a simple flying-wing sail plane.

By the end of that decade the brothers had developed the Ho III, a metal framed glider that was fitted with a folding blade propeller for flight. Then in 1944 they finished the prototype HO IX (click left), their first combat intended design, powered by the Junkers Jumo 004B turbojets, the craft had a metal frame and plywood exterior (Appendix I) It made its maiden flight on 2nd February 1945 and satisfied with its performance, the Air Ministry ordered forty of the craft to be built by the Goetha Waggonfabrik under the designation Ho-229.

When the US Third US Army Corps reached the Goetha plant on 14th April 1945 they took over the factory, and shipped back to the US the near completed HO IX V3.

Another similar looking craft was this ‘airplane’ photographed in Germany at the end of the war.

In fact, many of these German designs seemingly account for many of the reports of Unidentified Flying Objects seen over the US after the war.

Kenneth Arnold himself described what he saw as a flying disc, yet when Arnold actually drew a picture of what he had seen, it looked little like the popularly conceived silver-round disc that readily springs to mind.

In fact, the diagram Kenneth Arnold actually drew of what he had seen that fateful day in 1947 looks remarkably like the German HO IX or other craft developed during the war.

George Adamski’s UFOs also have a similar Nazi connection. This light enhanced frame from a 8mm cine film taken by George Adamski in the presence of Madeleine Rodeffer (Picture credit: Madeleine Rodeffer) and other witnesses at Silver Spring, Maryland in February 1965, looks remarkably like the drawings for the Nazi Haunebu II during the second world war.

Notice the bubble effects under the diagram of the Nazi craft and those captured in the alleged Adamski UFO. Indeed, it obviously is the Haunebu craft.

Again, this object photographed in February 1954 by Stephen Darbishire and his cousin Adrian Myers in the Lake District of England looks suspiciously like the German craft.

Its contours and design are too much like the Haunebu craft to be a coincidence, and on the bottom left hand side can be seen one of the ‘bubbles’.

This following picture was drawn following an alleged UFO touchdown near Kofu City, Yamanshi Prefecture in Japan on 23rd February 1975 – thirty years after cessation of hostilities in Europe. According to the artist, an occupant came out of the craft and touched a child on the shoulder, temporarily paralyzing him. (Well, wouldn’t you be startled if an alien touched you?)

The idea of such flying disks should come as no surprise for after the war there were a number of such designs in existence. This craft was developed by the Lockheed Skunk Works in Palmdale, California.

An unmanned aerial reconnaissance vehicle, it had a saucer shaped body with long wings and could easily be mistaken for a flying disk when seen at certain angles.

This craft (click below right image), is the prototype of a giant ‘flying saucer’ designed to revolutionize air transport. Designed by British firm, Airship Industries, the Skyship was planned to cruise at about 100 miles an hour at an altitude of 5000 feet.

It seems likely, therefore, that many of the UFO sighting reports made after the war can be accounted for by misidentified or unrecognized German/US designs that were being developed in a secrecy necessitated by firstly the Cold War and secondly by the fact that most of the technologies were the result of works undertaken by former Nazi scientists secretly and often illegally brought into the US.

Yet this cannot account for all of the sightings, for it is inconceivable that the CIA, NSA, FBI etc. would have been in such a blind panic as described in previous chapters had the sightings simply been known terrestrial if unconventional aircraft. (Each agency may not always have been aware of all developments at all times, but the official investigation into the UFO phenomena in the US went on officially for over twenty years, it would not be unrealistic to have expected a terrestrial explanation to have been circulated within that time frame.)

So if unconventional but terrestrial craft cannot account for many of the sightings – and the official interest – then what can. There have certainly been rumors circulating for many years that the German designs were actually man-made attempts to reproduce crashed real ‘flying saucers’ - attempts that failed because the engineers and scientists involved were unable to recreate the steering and propulsion systems of the alleged crashed craft.

As bizarre as this sounds, this claim certainly better explains the number of sightings over hundreds if not thousands of years and the inability of the major governmental agencies to account for much of the activity in the skies after the war. And it is a claim that is backed by some major players on the world stage.

One of the most impressive of those backing this claim is Colonel Philip J. Corso (Ret.) (left with Edwards O’Connor, Corso, Lt. Gen. Arthur Trudeau and Victor Fediay).

Corso published a book entitled ‘The Day After Roswell: A Former Official Reveals the US Government’s Shocking UFO Cover-up’ in which he makes a number of revelations.

Corso’s background itself is formidable. He was Chief of the US Army’s Foreign Technology Division, and was a member of President Eisenhower’s National Security Council. He later went on to work for Senator Strom Thurmond after retiring from the army in 1963. Corso was interviewed by Michael Lindemann of CNI News on 5th July 1997 and asked:

ML: There have been rumours and speculations that Roswell, and what came from Roswell – the way we exploited Roswell technology – might not have been the very first time such a thing happened. There have been indications or speculations that the Nazis had done such a thing, that some of their extraordinary technological developments may have come from a similar source. What do you think of that?

PC: Yes. True. I had German scientists on my team. I discussed this with them. I discussed this with Oberth, von Braun. I was part of ‘Project Paperclip’ with General Trudeau… There were crashes elsewhere, and they [the Germans] gathered material too. The Germans were working on it. They didn’t solve the propulsion system. They did a lot of experiments on flying saucers. They had one that went up to 12,000 feet. But where all, we and they, missed out was on the guidance system. In R&D we began to realize that this being [a captured alien] was part of the guidance system, part of the apparatus himself, or itself, as it had no sexual organs."

In his book Corso also describes the UFO that crashed at Roswell and noted General Twinning’s observations regarding the design:

"The crescent-shaped craft looked so uncomfortably like the German Horten wings our flyers had seen at the end of the war that he had to suspect the Germans had bumped into something we didn’t know about. And his conversations with Wernher von Braun and Willy Ley at Alamogordo in the days after the crash confirmed this. They didn’t want to be thought of as verruckt but intimated that there was a deeper story about what the Germans had engineered." (25)

Certainly this ‘deeper story’ was confirmed by the father of the modern rocket, Hermann Oberth. He independently confirmed that during the war years there was a Nazi-Extra-terrestrial connection when he stated,

"we cannot take credit for our record advancement in certain scientific fields alone. We have been helped."

When asked by whom, he replied, "the peoples of other worlds." (26)

Wernher von Braun was equally frank about the issue and did not doubt that extraterrestrials were visiting the Earth nor that many of the advancements he was involved in were a result of back engineering alien technology. Indeed, he talked openly about the issue following an incident on 3rd June 1959 when the ‘Discoverer III’ failed to achieve orbit, having been deflected whilst travelling. Von Braun commented,

"We find ourselves faced by powers, which are far stronger than we had hitherto assumed, and whose base is at present unknown to us. More I cannot say at present. We are now engaged in entering into closer contact with those powers, and in six or nine months it may be possible to speak with some precision on the matter." (27)

If these reports from Oberth and Von Braun are to be believed, then clearly the Germans held a knowledge not previously available to the Western allies.

 

And it appears that the scientists entering the US after the war under the auspices of Operation Paperclip shared this knowledge with the US military who within weeks set in place one of the fastest but little known invasions of the Twentieth Century.


References:

(24) Lancaster New Era newspaper, 12th July 1997.
(25) Corso, Philip, ‘The Day After Roswell’ p. 79 Pocket Books, New York 1997
(26) Collyns, Robin, ‘Did Spacemen Colonize the Earth?’ p. 236, Pelham Books, London 1974.
(27) ‘News Europa’ Jan 1959