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

physical and paraphysical at different times: the other two were paraphysical throughout the encounter. It may now be becoming clearer why London and Washington will not even hypothesize the existence of UFOs for discussion. Late in 1942, at the stage of the conflict when the German leadership had accepted that the planned objectives of the war were no longer unattainable, the Waffen-SS began trying out aerial machines which acted just like the four mysterious vehicles quoted above. Who in London would want to talk about the implications of that?

The Kugelblitz/Feuerkugel was an experimental stage of the German flying disc project. What must have been learned by chasing and homing-in on Allied aircraft across another dimension over Reich and Axis Pacific airspace during 1943 and 1944 was to be put into practice aboard the real thing at a later time. Meanwhile German aeronautical engineers had worked around the clock on the project for which the Foo Fighters were the preliminary stage and next came the search for the perfect aerodynamic shape.

Germany was the world pioneer in helicopter development and in 1942 the Flettner 282 Kolibri became the first helicopter anywhere to enter operational military service. It was the most advanced orthodox helicopter development of the war. The German supersonic helicopter had a system in which the fuel was piped to combustion chambers at the rotor bladetips where it exploded, whirling the blades around at a fantastic speed.158

Germany thus led the world in helicopter knowledge and design.

Within thirty months from July 1942 German aeronautical engineers designed and built several giant circular aircraft which were basically sophisticated autogyros and first flew in early 1945.

The 1919 Treaty of Versailles had so drastically restricted German aircraft production that glider flying became important for pilot training and research. The Horten brothers transformed the living room of their parents’ house into a workshop and in 1933 test-flew their first glider, Ho I, at Bonn-Hagelar. All three brothers were Luftwaffe officers and Nazi Party members. During the Battle of Britain their Ho II and Ho III designs formed part of a special glider unit for Operation Sea Lion. In 1942 at the request of the Luftwaffe they built a stronger and larger version of the Ho V to take a Schmitt-Argus pulse-jet. The variant was designated Ho VII. At about the same time as Schriever’s autogyro blueprint, they were designing a strange crescent-shaped glider, the Ho VI Parabola. Everything regarding this development was destroyed in a mysterious fire at Hellegenberg that year and we hear no more about it until 1947, when the USAF were most anxious to interview Reimar Horten, who by then had escaped to Argentina and was unfortunately incommunicado.

CHAPTER 16

German Flying Crescents and Discs

THE FLYING DISC Project in Hitler’s Germany was one of three most secret research programmes and was classified Geheime Reichssache, the highest possible top secret. Nowhere, in any academic history of the Second World War, nor in any memoir of a military or political leader of any of the nations involved, Allied or German, will the researcher find the mention of a German flying disc. It is as if the project never existed. Here is the greatest mystery of the Second World War: why a flying vehicle held in such low regard for modern commercial and military purposes should have merited not only Hitler’s but, postwar, the Allies’ highest secrecy rating for it. Very recently the CIA archive has released documents full of accounts by German engineers of their work on circular aircraft capable of astonishing speeds, but useful information on the craft themselves remains elusive.

Had it not been for the spate of UFO sightings by US Air Force personnel over a twelve-day period in 1947 which led the US Army and Air Force to mount a combined project to investigate the phenomenon, the existence of the documentary evidence for the German project would have remained a secret in perpetuity. The confirmatory paper was not declassified until 1969, and only then as an appendix to a fatuous report of 964 pages issued by a University of Colorado committee under the chairmanship of Dr Edward U. Condon, and under contract to the Office of Scientific and Technical Research of the US Air Force.159 This outfit spent two years and $600,000 of US Air Force appropriation to conduct an in-depth investigation of the UFO problem. The study was a total farce and, while having nothing useful to say about UFOs, it did, unintentionally one suspects, confirm the existence of a successful Nazi flying disc programme, and so was not a complete waste of time and money.

The official report prepared on 23 September 1947 remained classified until 8 January 1969 when it was published as Appendix R to the Condon Report. The matter enquired into had begun on the night of 28 June 1947 when two pilots and two intelligence officers at Maxwell Air Force base watched an illuminated UFO perform “impossible aerobatics”. On 29 June a naval rocketry expert watched a silvery disc above the White Sands Testing Grounds. On 8 July three officers at the Muroc supersecret USAF test centre in the Mojave Desert reported three silver-coloured objects heading westwards, and ten minutes later a pilot test flying the new XP-84 reported a yellowish-white spherical object resembling nothing being currently tested or flown heading west into the wind at a fantastic speed. Two hours later a crew of technicians filed a report regarding an object interfering with a seat ejection experiment at 20,000 feet. It appeared to be of white aluminium oval construction with two projections on the upper surface which might have been fins. These crossed each other at intervals suggesting slow rotation or oscillation. No obvious means of propulsion was seen. The following day an F-51 pilot at 20,000 feet about 40 miles south of Munroc sighted a flat object of light-reflecting nature with no vertical fin or wings. He attempted to pursue but it outclimbed him.160

This investigation concluded that UFOs are real and not