Nevertheless, some Ghost Rocket sightings remained puzzling. One of the objects was photographed near Stockholm by a Swede named Erik Reuterswaerd. When the Swedish authorities examined the photograph, they concluded that the object’s trail was not issuing from its rear but was actually enveloping it. The London Daily Telegraph, which published the photograph on 6 September 1946, opined that a new method of propulsion was being tested. (22)
For their part, the Swedish Government concluded in October 1946 that, of the 1,000 reports of Ghost Rockets they had received, 80 per cent could be attributed to ‘celestial phenomena’; the remaining 20 per cent, they stated, could not be either natural phenomena or the products of imagination. (23)
The conventional view of history is that, while the Germans possessed some remarkable and deadly weapons such as the V-l, the V-2 and the jet-engined Messerschmitt ME-262 fighter, their technological innovations did not extend much further than that. Indeed, serious historians treat claims of fantastic advances in Nazi technology with the utmost disdain. (We have already quoted Professor Jones’s assertion that the Nazi flying bomb trials of 1944 were only 90 per cent reliable.) Nevertheless, we must ask the question: are they right to do so? Having looked briefly at the mystery of the Foo Fighters, Ghost Rockets and UFOs, which many professional scientists admit (however reluctantly and anonymously) constitute a puzzle worthy of serious investigation, we must now examine the claims of some UFO researchers that the wonderful devices seen so frequently flitting through the skies are actually machines based on Nazi designs for ultra-high-performance disc-shaped craft, capable of travelling not only through our atmosphere but also in outer space. The reader who baulks at this idea may well be further outraged by the claims made by some that the Nazis themselves succeeded in building prototypes of these machines. However, since we are already deep within the Absolute Elsewhere, we must press on through that weird realm, bearing in mind Pauwels’s and Bergier’s perceptive assertion that ‘the historian maybe reasonable, but history is not’.
As we have already noted, Renato Vesco is a pioneer of the Nazi-UFO theory. A graduate of the University of Rome, he studied aeronautical engineering at the German Institute for Aerial Development and during the war was sent to work at Fiat’s underground installation at Lake Garda in northern Italy. In the 1960s, Vesco investigated UFO sightings for the Italian Air Ministry. (24) In 1971, he published the seminal work on the theory of man-made flying saucers; entitled Intercettateh Senza Sparare (roughly translated as ‘Intercept Without Firing’), the book examines in great detail the possible technology behind the UFOs and reaches the astonishing and highly controversial conclusion that UFO technology (seen in terms of the perceived flight characteristics of the objects) is well within the capabilities of human science — and was so even during the Second World War. Indeed, Vesco is quite certain that the origin of the UFOs still seen today by witnesses all over the world can be placed firmly in Nazi Germany in the early 1940s. In addition, the technological principles behind these craft were, he believes, divided between the United States and the Soviet Union at the end of the war, with both superpowers going on to develop and refine the designs for their own ends.
According to Vesco, Luftwaffe scientists in Oberammergau, Bavaria conducted extensive research into an electrical device capable of interfering with an aircraft engine up to a distance of about 100 feet. Through the generation of intense electromagnetic fields, this device could short-circuit the target aircraft’s ignition system, causing total loss of power. This short range, however, was considered impractical for a successful weapon, so they attempted to increase it to 300 feet. These plans were still only on the drawing board by the end of the war, so the weapon was never put into production. Nevertheless, these researches yielded a by-product that was put to use by Albert Speer and the SS Technical General Staff. They produced a device capable of ‘proximity radio interference’ on the delicate radar systems of American night-fighters. (25)
Thus a highly original flying machine was born; it was circular and armored, more or less resembling the shell ? of a tortoise, and was powered by a special turbojet engine, also flat and circular, whose principles of operation recalled the well-known aeolipile of Hero, which generated a great halo of luminous flames. Hence it was named Feuerball (Fireball). It was unarmed and pilotless. Radio-controlled at the moment of take-off, it then automatically followed enemy aircraft, attracted by their exhaust flames, and approached close enough without collision to wreck their radar gear. (26)
The fiery halo around the craft’s perimeter was generated by a combination of the rich fuel mixture and chemical additives causing the ionisation of the atmosphere around the Feuerball. As it approached the target aircraft, this ionisation would produce powerful electrostatic and electromagnetic fields that would interfere with its H2S radar. ‘Since a metal arc carrying an oscillating current of the proper frequency — equal, that is, to the frequency used by the radar station — can cancel the blips (return signals from the target), the Feuerball was almost undetectable by the most powerful American radar of the time, despite its night-time visibility.’ (27)
Vesco goes on to state that this night-time visibility had an additional advantage for the Feuerball: in the absence of daylight, the halo produced by the engine gave the impression of an enormous size, which had the effect of unnerving Allied pilots even more. As the Feuerballe approached, the pilots refrained from firing on them for fear of being caught in a gigantic explosion. (28) In fact, the devices did carry an explosive charge that would destroy them in the event of capture, in addition to an ingenious feature that would ensure a quick escape in the event of an attack by Allied aircraft. Underneath its armoured outer shell, each Feuerball contained a thin sheet of electrically insulated aluminium. Should a bullet pierce the armour, contact would be made between it and the aluminium sheet, thus closing a circuit, activating a vertical maximum acceleration device and taking the craft out of weapons range in a matter of seconds. (29)
The Feuerballe were constructed at the Henschel-Rax aeronautical establishment at Wiener Neustadt. According to one (unnamed) witness who saw them being test-flown, in daylight the craft looked like shining discs spinning on their vertical axes, and at night like huge burning globes. Hermann Goering inspected the progress of the Feuerball project on a number of occasions, hoping that the mechanical principles could be applied to a much larger offensive saucer-shaped aircraft. His hopes were to be quickly realised.
Vesco calls the Kugelblitz (Ball Lightning) automatic fighter ‘the second authentic antecedent [after the Feuerball] of the present-day flying saucers’, and the first example of the ‘jet-lift’ aircraft. (30) In 1952, a former Luftwaffe engineer named Rudolph Schriever gave a series of interviews to the West German press in which he claimed to have designed an aircraft strikingly similar to Vesco’s Kugelblitz. Schriever had been an engineer and test pilot for the Heinkel factory in Eger. In 1941, he began to toy with the idea of an aircraft that could take off vertically, thus eliminating the need for runways, which were vulnerable to enemy bombing.
By June the following year, he had built and test-flown a working model of his design, and work immediately began on a full-size fifteen-foot version. In mid-1944, Schriever was transferred to the BMW plant near Prague, Czechoslovakia, where he was joined by an engineer from the rocket site at Peenemunde named Walter Miethe, another engineer named Klaus Habermohl and an Italian physicist from the aeronautical complex at Riva del Garda, Dr Giuseppe Belluzzo. Together, they built an even larger, piloted version of the disc, featuring a domed pilot’s cabin sitting at the centre of a circular set of multiple wings driven by a turbine engine mounted on the disc’s vertical axis.
The German disc programme went under the title ‘Project Saucer’ (which W. A. Harbinson also took as the title for his excellent five-novel series inspired by the Nazi-UFO theory). According to the military historian Major Rudolph Lusar, Schriever’s disc consisted of ‘a wide-surface ring which rotated around a fixed, cupola-shaped cockpit’. The ring contained ‘adjustable wing-discs which could be brought into appropriate position for the take-off or horizontal flight’. (31) The Model 3 flying disc had a diameter of 138 feet and a height of 105 feet.
According to Schriever, the finished disc was ready for test-flying early in 1944, but was destroyed by its builders to prevent it from falling into the hands of the advancing Allies. Schriever and his colleagues fled as the BMW plant was taken by Czechoslovakian patriots. In spite of Schriever’s claim, Renato Vesco states that a highly advanced supersonic disc-shaped aircraft called the Kugelblitz was indeed test-flown near the Nordhausen underground rocket complex in February 1945. (32) Also known as the V-7, this machine was said to have climbed to a height of 37,600 feet in just three minutes, and reached a speed of 1,218 mph. This craft and the technicians who built it were apparently seized by the Russians and taken to Siberia, where the disc project continued under Soviet control.
While Vesco concedes that the hard evidence for a German flying-disc programme is ‘very tenuous’, he notes that ‘the senior official of a 1945 British technical mission revealed that he had discovered German plans for “entirely new and deadly developments in air warfare” ‘. Vesco continues:
These plans must obviously have gone beyond normal jet aircraft designs, as both sides already had jet- powered aircraft in production and operational service by the end of the war. Moreover, before Rudolf Schriever died
