fact kept secret until now — inside the disc, there was a very earthly hallmark: Russian writing. Block letters from the Cyrillic alphabet had been stamped, or embossed, in a ring running around the inside of the craft.
In a critical moment, the American military had its worst fears realized. The Russian army must have gotten its hands on German aerospace engineers more capable than Ernst Steinhoff and Wernher Von Braun — engineers who must have developed this flying craft years before for the German air force, or Luftwaffe. The Russians simply could not have developed this kind of advanced technology on their own. Russia’s stockpile of weapons and its body of scientists had been decimated during the war; the nation had lost more than twenty million people. Most Russian scientists still alive had spent the war in the gulag. But the Russians, like the Americans, the British, and the French, had pillaged Hitler’s best and brightest scientists as war booty, each country taking advantage of them to move forward in the new world. And now, in July of 1947, shockingly, the Soviet supreme leader had somehow managed not only to penetrate U.S. airspace near the Alaskan border, but to fly over several of the most sensitive military installations in the western United States. Stalin had done this with foreign technology that the U.S. Army Air Forces knew nothing about. It was an incursion so brazen — so antithetical to the perception of America’s strong national security, which included the military’s ability to defend itself against air attack — that upper-echelon Army intelligence officers swept in and took control of the entire situation. The first thing they did was initiate the withdrawal of the original Roswell Army Air Field press release, the one that stated that a “flying disc… landed on a ranch near Roswell,” and then they replaced it with the second press release, the one that said that a weather balloon had crashed — nothing more. The weather balloon story has remained the official cover story ever since.
The fears were legitimate: fears that the Russians had hover-andfly technology, that their flying craft could outfox U.S. radar, and that it could deliver to America a devastating blow. The single most worrisome question facing the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time was: What if atomic energy propelled the Russian craft? Or worse, what if it dispersed radioactive particles, like a modern-day dirty bomb? In 1947, the United States believed it still had a monopoly on the atomic bomb as a deliverable weapon. But as early as June 1942, Hermann Gцring, commander in chief of the Luftwaffe, had been overseeing the Third Reich’s research council on nuclear physics as a weapon in its development of an airplane called the Amerika Bomber, designed to drop a dirty bomb on New York City. Any number of those scientists could be working for the Russians. The Central Intelligence Group, the CIA’s institutional predecessor, did not yet know that a spy at Los Alamos National Laboratory, a man named Klaus Fuchs, had stolen bomb blueprints and given them to Stalin. Or that Russia was two years away from testing its own atomic bomb. In the immediate aftermath of the crash, all the Joint Chiefs of Staff had to go on from the Central Intelligence Group was speculation about what atomic technology Russia might have.
For the military, the very fact that New Mexico’s airspace had been violated was shocking. This region of the country was the single most sensitive weapons-related domain in all of America. The White Sands Missile Range was home to the nation’s classified weapons-delivery systems. The nuclear laboratory up the road, the Los Alamos Laboratory, was where scientists had developed the atomic bomb and where they were now working on nuclear packages with a thousand times the yield. Outside Albuquerque, at a production facility called Sandia Base, assembly-line workers were forging Los Alamos nuclear packages into smaller and smaller bombs. Forty-five miles to the southwest, at the Roswell Army Air Field, the 509th Bomb Wing was the only wing of long-range bombers equipped to carry and drop nuclear bombs.
Things went from complicated to critical at the revelation that there was a second crash site. Paperclip scientists Wernher Von Braun and Ernst Steinhoff, still under review over the Juбrez rocket crash, were called on for their expertise. Several other Paperclip scientists specializing in aviation medicine were brought in. The evidence of whatever had crashed at and around Roswell, New Mexico, in the first week of July in 1947 was gathered together by a Joint Chiefs of Staff technical services unit and secreted away in a manner so clandestine, it followed security protocols established for transporting uranium in the early days of the Manhattan Project.
The first order of business was to determine where the technology had come from. The Joint Chiefs of Staff tasked an elite group working under the direct orders of G-2 Army intelligence to initiate a top secret project called Operation Harass. Based on the testimony of America’s Paperclip scientists, Army intelligence officers believed that the flying disc was the brainchild of two former Third Reich airplane engineers, named Walter and Reimar Horten— now working for the Russian military. Orders were drawn up. The manhunt was on.
Walter and Reimar Horten were two aerospace engineers whose importance in seminal aircraft projects had somehow been overlooked when America and the Soviet Union were fighting over scientists at the end of the war. The brothers were the inventors of several of Hitler’s flying-wing aircraft, including one called the Horten 229 or Horten IX, a wing-shaped, tailless airplane that had been developed at a secret facility in Baden-Baden during the war. From the Paperclip scientists at Wright Field, the Army intelligence investigators learned that Hitler was rumored to have been developing a faster-flying aircraft that had been designed by the brothers and was shaped like a saucer. Maybe, the Paperclips said, there had been a later-model Horten in the works before Germany surrendered, meaning that even if Stalin didn’t have the Horten brothers themselves, he could very likely have gotten control of their blueprints and plans.
The flying disc that crashed at Roswell had technology more advanced than anything the U.S. Army Air Forces had ever seen. Its propulsion techniques were particularly confounding. What made the craft go so fast? How was it so stealthy and how did it trick radar? The disc had appeared on Army radar screens briefly and then suddenly disappeared. The incident at Roswell happened just weeks before the National Security Act, which meant there was no true Central Intelligence Agency to handle the investigation. Instead, hundreds of Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) officers from the U.S. Army’s European command were dispatched across Germany in search of anyone who knew anything about Walter and Reimar Horten. Officers tracked down and interviewed the brothers’ relatives, colleagues, professors, and acquaintances with an urgency not seen since Operation Alsos, in which Allied Forces sought information about Hitler’s atomic scientists and nuclear programs during the war.
A records group of more than three hundred pages of Army intelligence documents reveals many of the details of Operation Harass. They were declassified in 1994, after a researcher named Timothy Cooper filed a request for documents under the Freedom of Information Act. One memo, called “Air Intelligence Guide for Alleged ‘Flying Saucer’ Type Aircraft,” detailed for CIC officers the parameters of the flying saucer technology the military was looking for, features which were evidenced in the craft that crashed at Roswell.
Extreme maneuverability and apparent ability to almost hover; A plan form approximating that of an oval or disc with dome shape on the surface; The ability to quickly disappear by high speed or by complete disintegration; The ability to group together very quickly in a tight formation when more than one aircraft are together; Evasive motion ability indicating possibility of being manually operated, or possibly, by electronic or remote control.
The Counter Intelligence Corps’ official 1947–1948 manhunt for the Horten brothers reads at times like a spy novel and at times like a wildgoose chase. The first real lead in the hunt came from Dr. Adolf Smekal of Frankfurt, who provided CIC with a list of possible informants’ names. Agents were told a dizzying array of alleged facts: Reimar was living in secret in East Prussia; Reimar was living in Gцttingen, in what had been the British zone; Reimar had been kidnapped “presumably by the Russians” in the latter part of 1946. If you want to know where Reimar is, one informant said, you must first locate Hannah Reitsch, the famous aviatrix who was living in Bad Hauheim. As for Walter, he was working as a consultant for the French; he was last seen in Frankfurt trying to find work with a university there; he was in Dessau; actually, he was in Russia; he was in Luxembourg, or maybe it was France. One German scientist turned informant chided CIC agents. If they really wanted to know where the Horten brothers were, he said, and what they were capable of, then go ask the American Paperclip scientists living at Wright Field.
Neatly typed and intricately detailed summaries of hundreds of interviews with the Horten brothers’ colleagues and relatives flooded the CIC. Army intelligence officers spent months chasing leads, but most information led them back to square one. In the fall of 1947, prospects of locating the brothers seemed grim until November, when CIC agents caught a break. A former Messerschmitt test pilot named Fritz Wendel offered up some firsthand testimony that seemed real. The Horten brothers had indeed been working on a flying saucer-like craft in Heiligenbeil, East Prussia, right after the war, Wendel said. The airplane was ten meters long and shaped like a half-moon. It had no tail. The prototype was designed to be flown by one man lying down flat on his stomach. It reached a ceiling of twelve thousand feet. Wendel drew diagrams of this saucerlike aircraft, as did a second German informant named Professor George, who described a latermodel Horten as being “very much like a round cake with a large sector cut out” and that had been developed to carry more than one crew member. The later- model Horten could travel higher and faster— up to 1,200 mph — because it was propelled by rockets rather than
