Hitler's Terror Weapons, Brooks, Geoffrey [cat reading book .txt] 📗

Edward J Powers, Captain USMC, assumed the lead of Flight 19.” Nevertheless Taylor was still quite certain that east was best:

Taylor to Powers: “We may just as well turn around to go east again.”

From now on, reception of the transmissions from the mad hatters of Flight 19 began to deteriorate. The last message was heard at 7.04. Powers was mentally in no better state than Taylor or he would have got back on the westerly heading for Fort Lauderdale which Taylor had abandoned. It seems possible from the reconstructed records that he was heading west, but the strengthening crosswind from the SW would have pushed them 50 miles further north every hour. It was a dark, moonless night with cloud and rain. The flight was never once picked up on radar, which suggests that the aircraft themselves had undergone some structural change while in the anomaly, making them invisible to radar. According to researcher Gian Quasar, Air Training Command informed Banana River at 8.50 pm on 5 December 1945 that five aircraft, never subsequently identified, were spotted visually bearing 245 degrees 32 miles from Brunswick, Georgia, heading 150 degrees SSW. He theorized that a landing was attempted in the Okefenokee Swamps. It need hardly be added that such a proceeding in this sparsely populated region of wet forest and alligator-infested swamp on a dark night would have been utter madness.

When we speak of another ‘dimension’ as the possible origin of UFOs, we really have no understanding of what this word may imply. It may be that Dr Carstoiu is right, that there are two gravity fields and one is the domain of UFOs, the Underworld of mythology, so to speak. There can be no doubt that the SS experimented into the matter, and in the concluding chapters a look at the evidence of their developments provides us with a very disturbing picture.

CHAPTER 15

The “Foo-Fighter”

THERE ARE NO natural flying discoidal objects in Einstein’s time-space continuum. So far as we know from declassified documents, for a great investment of time and money modern engineers could design a flying disc for subsonic speeds with a range of about 7,000 miles, but it would lack the advantages of modern aircraft. It is apparently a concept simply not worthwhile developing.

In Hitler’s Germany aeronautical designer Rudolf Schriever began design work on an unmanned flying disc on 15 July 1941. The model was completed on 2 June 1942 and made its maiden flight the following day, astonishing observers with its excellent flying qualities. It was remote-controlled and propelled by a hydrogen peroxide engine. Apparently it could take off and land vertically, but nothing further is known.

Towards the end of 1942 the Waffen-SS laboratory at Wiener Neustadt began trials with a strange ‘anti-aircraft weapon’. This project, details of which remain a top secret in Allied archives, was known as Feuerkugel and also Kugelblitz (ball of fire/ball-lightning) by the Germans. The extremely scanty information which can be gleaned about this mysterious development links it to Rudolf Schriever’s unmanned flying saucer design.

The only known official US report152 about the Kugelblitz states that it was an experimental anti-aircraft rocket designed by Richard Haass and developed by the Verwertungsgesellschaft Salzburg. The object sought its target automatically and was expected to enter service in January 1945. This is all they will let us know and it is a pretty terse description for an obsolete flak weapon.

A British report153 reviewed various documents prepared by the SS and work centres of the Henschel and Zeppelin aircraft companies, the latter towards the end of the war installed in underground factories in the Black Forest. These documents refer specifically to the propulsion unit built for the Kugelblitz by Professors Kamm and Ernst at the Kreislaufbetrieb Motor D.W. in 1943 for FFKF Stuttgart Untertürkheim. The British investigators described the principle of the motor as a recycled oxygen system. It was later abandoned in favour of the Walter turbine using hydrogen peroxide, although the documents discuss the feasibility of using both systems in a composite unit.

Therefore the sum total of knowledge about the system available from Allied archive sources is that the missile was a target seeker propelled by a Walter turbine. The remaining information usually available regarding the configuration, length, diameter, warhead, speed of climb, operational altitude and so on remain highly classified.

Renato Vesco154 had not seen a Kugelblitz but he had pieced together sufficient information to know that it was stabilized gyroscopically, had a missile guidance system developed by the Flugfunkforschungsanstalt of the Reichspost at Oberpfaffenhofen and a homing system. It was unmanned and rose vertically at a very fast speed. It was rumoured that it might have obtained its effect by discharging and instantaneously igniting a blue plasma “based on the firedamp gas found in coal-mines”, and most sources said it had no offensive capability at all, which would be a strange thing for a flak rocket. It had first been tried out successfully against Allied bombers over Lake Garda. Vesco said it was known as die fliegende Schildkröte – the flying turtle – to German sources, who seem unanimous that its shape resembled a turtle-shell, but that was only when it was not in motion, for in flight by day it resembled “a luminous disc spinning round its own axis” and “looked like a burning balloon” by night.

The word ‘flying saucer’ did not come into use until the term was coined by headline writers in the United States after the war and so the description “turtle-shell” gives us a certain image. On Christmas Eve 1944, over the Rhine Valley, RAF crew Flight-Lts Gibbin and Cleary were surprised by a flaming red ball that “suddenly turned into a sort of airplane whose upper half was built like a wing”. The remainder is censored. Now we begin to suspect a sinister reason for the reticence of Allied Governments to provide information about the Kugelblitz, for what sort of weapon is a fiery ball which not only has no firm shape but