some fifteen years after the war he had become convinced that the large numbers of postwar UFO sightings were evidence that his designs had been built and developed. (33)
On 2 May 1980, another man claimed to the German press that he had worked on Project Saucer. Heinrich FleiBner, then 76 years old, told Neue Presse magazine that he had been a technical consultant on a jet-propelled, disc-shaped aircraft that had been built at Peenemunde from parts manufactured in a number of other locations. FleiBner also claimed that Goering had been the patron of the project and planned to use the disc as a courier plane, but that the Wehrmacht had destroyed most of the plans in the face of the Allied advance. (34) Nevertheless, some material did reach both America and Russia. According to Harbinson, ‘The notes and drawings for FleiBner’s flying saucer, first registered in West Germany on 27 March 1954, were assigned to Trans-Oceanic, Los Angeles, California on 28 March the following year and registered with the United States Patent Office on 7 June I960.’ (35)
According to Vesco, the Austrian inventor Viktor Schauberger, after being kidnapped by the Nazis, designed a number of disc-shaped aircraft for the Third Reich between 1938 and 1945. The saucers were powered by what Schauberger called ‘liquid vortex propulsion’: ‘If water or air is rotated into a twisting form of oscillation known as “colloidal”,’ he said, ‘a build-up of energy results, which, with immense power, can cause levitation.’ (36) Whether this bizarre form of propulsion is workable is, of course, open to debate. Once again, however, the Americans seem to have taken many of Schauberger’s documents at the end of the war, with the Russians taking what was left and blowing up his apartment when they had finished. Schauberger supposedly went to America in the 1950s to work on a top secret project in Texas for the US Government, although this unspecified project was apparently not particularly successful. Schauberger died in 1958, reportedly saying on his deathbed: ‘They took everything from me. Everything. I don’t even own myself.’ (37) There is no doubt that radical aeroform designs were being tested at this time. For example, the Messerschmitt 163A was powered by a liquid-fuel Walter rocket, and was given its first powered flight in August 1941. It achieved speeds of over 600 mph, nearly twice as fast as the average speed of a fighter aircraft at that time. A second version, the Me 163B, was built with a more powerful motor. The design was not perfected, however, until mid-1944, when approximately 370 were built and deployed throughout Germany in a last-ditch attempt to thwart the Allied forces. The RAF and USAAF air crews who encountered them commented in their reports on how fast and dangerous these craft were: on many occasions, the Me 163s were so fast that the Allied air gunners had no chance to deal with them. However, the Me 163 could only remain in a combat situation for 25 minutes, for most of which time it was unpowered, and their relatively small number prevented them from having much success against the Allied advance. (38)
If the Germans did succeed in producing a piloted flying disc, what became of it? As several researchers have noted, the answer may lie with SS Obergruppenfuhrer Dr Hans Kammler, who towards the end of the war had access to all areas of secret air-armaments projects. Kammler worked on the V-2 rocket project, along with Wernher von Braun (who would later head NASA’s Apollo Moon programme) and Luftwaffe Major General Walter Dornberger (who would later become vice-president of the Bell Aircraft Company in the United States). (39)
Heinrich Himmler planned to separate the SS from Nazi Party and state control through the establishment of a number of business and industrial fronts, making it independent of the state budget. Hitler approved this proposal early in 1944. (As Jim Marrs notes, this strategy would subsequently be copied by the CIA in America.) (40)
By the end of the war, Hans Kammler had decided to use V-2 rocket technology and scientists as bargaining chips with the Allies. On 2 April 1945, 500 technicians and engineers were placed on a train along with 100 SS troops and sent to a secret Alpine location in Bavaria. Two days later, von Braun requested permission from Kammler to resume rocket research, to which Kammler replied that he was about to disappear for an indefinite length of time. This was the last anyone saw of Hans Kammler. (41) In view of the undoubted advantage he held when it came to negotiating for his life with the Allies, Kammler’s disappearance is something of a puzzle, until we pause to consider the possibility that he possessed plans for a technology even more advanced than the V-2. ‘Did the Reich, or an extension of it, have the capability to produce a UFO or the clout to deal from a position of strength with one of the Allied nations?’ (42) Although it is assumed that Kammler committed suicide when about to be apprehended by the Czech resistance in Prague, there is no proof of this. What really happened to Kammler? In the final chapter, we will examine the theory that he, along with many other high-ranking Nazis, survived the end of the war and escaped to an unlikely location.
The opinion of orthodox history is that, while many highly advanced weapons designs were on the drawing board, with some actually being put into limited production in the final months of the war, nothing with the design or performance characteristics of flying saucers was ever built in Nazi Germany. And yet, in 1953, only eight years after the end of the war, the Canadian Toronto Star announced that a flying saucer was being developed by the A. V. Roe company (AVRO-Canada) at its facilities near Malton, Ontario. According to the report, apparently leaked by a well-informed source within the company, the machine would have a top speed of 1,500 mph.
This understandably provoked a sudden and intense interest in the subject from other members of the press, who asked for clarification from the Canadian Government. A statement was released, declaring: ‘The Defense authorities are examining all ideas, even revolutionary ones, that have been suggested for the development of new types of supersonic aircraft, also including flying discs. This, however, is still in the beginning phase of research and it will be a number of months before we are able to reach anything positive and seven or more years before we come to actual production.’ (43)
On 16 February 1953, C.D. Howe, the Minister of Defense Production, told the Canadian House of Commons that the government was studying new fighter-aircraft concepts ‘adding weight to reports that AVRO is even now working on a mock-up model of a “flying saucer” capable of flying 1500 miles per hour and climbing straight up in the air’. (44) Less than two weeks later, on 27 February, the AVRO President, Crawford Gordon, Jr., wrote in the company’s journal: ‘One of our projects can be said to be quite revolutionary in concept and appearance. The prototype being built is so revolutionary that when it flies all other types of supersonic aircraft will become obsolescent. This is all that AVRO-Canada are going to say about this project.’ (45)
This statement was followed by two months of silence, after which press interest was fired to an even greater degree by another revelation in the Toronto Star of 21 April:
Field Marshal Montgomery … became one of a handful of people ever to see AVRO’s mock-up of a ‘flying saucer,’ reputed to be capable of flying 1500 miles an hour. A guide who accompanied Montgomery quoted him as describing it as ‘fantastic.’ … Security precautions surrounding this super-secret are so tight that two of Montgomery’s escorts from Scotland Yard were barred from the forbidden, screened-off area of the AVRO plant. (46)
On 24 April, the Toronto Star added that the flying disc was constructed of metal, wood and plastics, and referred to it as a gyroscopic fighter, with a revolving gas turbine engine. Little more was written in the Canadian press until 1 November, when a brief report appeared stating: ‘A mock-up of the Canadian flying saucer, the highly secret aircraft in whose existence few believe, was yesterday shown to a group of twenty-five American experts, including military officers and scientists.’ (47) This $200 million-dollar prototype was also known as the AVRO Omega, probably because its shape was more like the Greek letter than a perfect circle.
The press claimed that the Canadian Government planned to deploy squadrons of flying saucers for the defence of the far north of the country, their VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) capabilities making them ideal for forested and snow-covered terrain. Once again, however, there followed a period of official and press silence on the matter, broken only by the revelation that the project’s principal designer was the aeronautical engineer J. C. M. Frost, and persistent rumours that the US military had become involved. Vesco quotes an unnamed press source, who stated enthusiastically:
This is a ship that will be able to take off vertically, to hover in mid-air and to move at a speed of about 1850 mph. That is, it would be capable of performing all the maneuvers that flying discs are said to be capable of. This astonishing craft is the brain child of the English aeronautical engineer John Frost, who worked for the large de Havilland factory in England during the war and who later went on to A. V. Roe, in Malton, Canada. The aircraft that will be built for the U.S. Air Force is not, however, the first of this type that Frost has designed. Two years ago he had designed and submitted to American experts an aircraft which was called the Flying Manta because of its behavior on take-off. It more or less resembled the present disc, but it could not take off vertically. In addition, its
