gradually sloping tunnel that was dug into a red, clay-type dirt. It was not the smooth, laser-cut rock walls that Erich von Daniken had claimed to have seen in Equador in his book Gold of the Gods, but it was just as incredible.
It wouldn’t have taken some space-age device to make this tunnel, just simple tools; yet, it was clearly a colossal undertaking. Why would anyone build such a tunnel? Was it an ancient mine that went deep into the earth, searching for an elusive vein of gold or merely red clay for the long-gone ceramic kilns? Was it an elaborate escape tunnel used in the horrific wars that were said to have been fought in South America — and around the world — in the distant past? Or was it some bizarre subterranean road that linked up with other tunnels in the Andes and ultimately could be used to journey safely to such places as Machu Picchu, Cuzco or the Atacama Desert? (75)
In the event, the answers to these questions evaded the small party: after an hour, they arrived at a point where the floor dropped approximately one metre, and decided that this was a convenient place to turn back, since the tunnel seemed to continue endlessly on, and they were not equipped for a lengthy exploration. Although the group did not encounter any fabulous wonders of the subterranean realm, the very existence of the tunnel proves that the legends associated with South America have some basis in fact.
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 civilisations. 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 postwar 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 rumour 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.
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 sceptics 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 tantalising 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 bevelled 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
