UFOs and World War II: The Nazi Saucer Connection (with a Cameo by Imperial Japan)
An especially stimulating aspect of Nazi Germany’s employment of airpower during World War II, and its place in the larger discussion of UFOs, revolves around German interest in flying discs. The notion that wartime Germany (and postwar German holdouts) filled the skies with flying discs began to take hold as soon as the war ended, and now permeates Western culture, in broad strokes if not in specific detail. It is well known that wartime Germany developed startlingly sophisticated avionics and aircraft. Further, because of an interest in the occult pursued by SS chief Heinrich Himmler and some others in the Nazi hierarchy, many latter-day saucer enthusiasts posit that German saucer technology is linked to “lost science,” the secrets of ancient runes, and other occult things. The secret, and possibly apocryphal, Vril Society—introduced to American thought in 1935 by refugee German science writer, and rocket and spaceflight enthusiast, Willy Ley—supposed that mankind’s origins were in the hollow Earth, with scientific and biologic connections to aliens.
The substance Vril was described as a life-giving energy force, an “all-permeating fluid” that conferred unimaginable power on those that could be its master. Some writers and amateur historians wonder if the Vril Society had links to Germany’s far- right Thule Society, an occult-based volk-and Fatherland group established in Munich around 1917. Thule sponsored Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP), the small political group that Adolf Hitler—who chose Munich as the base for his formative political agitation—eventually spun off into the NSDAP (Nazi Party).
Although some latter-day claims are fanciful, Germany’s advanced wartime work with rocket propulsion and unorthodox aerodynamics is well known. Tales of the “Vril Saucer” encompass science, fascist politics, and mysticism. The schematic seen here dates from September 1944
In 1935, Himmler sanctioned the establishment of the Deutsches Ahnenerbe (German Ancestral Heritage), a science-and-culture society. The group initially focused on German folklore and anthropological history (appropriating many private and institutional libraries along the way), linguistics, and classical philology. After 1939, Ahnenerbe activity shifted to explorations of genetics (hoping, for instance, to breed a horse capable of surviving the withering winters of Eastern Europe), and combat-related medicine, usually in cahoots with the heartless Institute of Applied Research, which experimented on unwilling human subjects. Other wartime Ahnenerbe research explored astrology, ancient astronauts and hollow Earth, channeling, reincarnation, mass mind control, and the so-called Cosmic Ice Theory (by which titanic clashes of suns and “ice planets” account for earthquakes and other natural disasters on Earth, as well as provide a physical rationale for Atlantis and other lost civilizations).
Some UFO-centric sources claim that the Ahnenerbe’s ultimate function was as the framework supporting a two-part German goal: to contact extraterrestrials and mine alien technology; and locate ancient Earth technology—which may have been left by ETs in the first place. These undisciplined cultural correlations and wealth of odd notions combined to form a quasi-scientific Nazi stew of the Aryan “master race” and other crackpot eugenics, the durable hollow-Earth idea, and the demented 1939 journey of Himmler’s SS into the mountains of Tibet to find the origins of the “Indo-Germanic” people. As the foolishness played out, Nazi occultists kept so firm a grip on the concept of Vril that the magic liquid, postwar, flowed into American and other Western pop culture right along with the swastika, the black-garbed SS, and iconic images of Hitler. Some people today are convinced that Germany used Vril to power its flying saucers.
Other present-day theorists are acolytes of Austrian naturalist and inventor Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958), who developed a special interest in the properties of water and air, particularly as those elements related to motive travel. He believed that fish, for instance, do not swim, but rather “are swum” by the water. Similarly, birds are “flown” by the air. In essence, the creatures do not push themselves along, but are pulled. Schauberger believed he found ancient references to this kind of propulsion: like some in Nazi government, Schauberger examined ancient Indian manuscripts, where he found what he believed to be lessons in the practical use of what he referred to as “flowing magnetism,” a force that negated the effects of gravity. Original Sanskrit documents, Schauberger said, show flying craft called vimanas. Sometimes, the vimanas played roles in ancient aerial warfare.
Schauberger’s innovation for powered flight involved what he called a biological vacuum, a dynamic field that, when manipulated with air directed through various chambers of a unique imploder motor, would create centripetal movement, and an implosive effect rather than the familiar explosive one. He felt that vertical takeoff and continual thrust were possible.
Schauberger and Hitler met in 1934, ostensibly to discuss challenges of irrigation; by 1944, Schauberger was working, possibly under duress, on his “Repulsine” engine. Objective: a flying saucer for German military use.
Surviving prototypes of the imploder engine survive. They are shaped like beefy saucers measuring about two feet across. When activated, they spin in place (to create the vacuum effect), inadvertently mimicking one “classic” style of flying saucer. Schauberger, though, simply intended his saucer-shaped motor to be mounted inside traditional vehicles, including submarines.
Riding the Rockets
World War II film footage of German V-1 rocket bombs and V-2 guided ballistic missiles, the experimental Me 163B Komet rocket plane, and the Horten brothers’ “flying wing,” as well as Allied pilots’ startling aerial encounters with the remarkable Messerschmitt Me-262 jet fighter, has been widely seen and recalled for some seventy years. Because these rocket weapons existed—and led directly to American and Soviet successes in space—they suggest a plausible larger scenario involving Nazi flying saucers and (in even more expansive scenarios) secret German bases in Antarctica or on the Moon.
German tests of manned and unmanned experimental rocket fighters began early in 1944. Some, like the Bachem 8-349 A1, aka the Natter, were directed by remote control. Because the Germans faced dramatic materials shortages as early as 1942–43, engineers designed the Natter on the cheap. Tools with low tolerances machined the Natter’s entirety, and final construction incorporated wood, inexpensive sheet steel, nails, and glue. Only one manned test of the Natter was made, and it was disastrous. At five hundred feet, the rocket plane lost its cockpit cover and headrest, assumed an unacceptable fifteen-degree angle of climb, and finally tilted over onto its back at five thousand feet before spiraling downward. Plane and pilot smashed into the Earth, leaving what historian Brian Ford described as “fragments.” Alexander Lippisch’s stubby, swept wing Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet rocket fighter prototype was a piloted, climb-and-descend terror that touched six hundred mph during its first unfettered (non-towed) test flight in May 1941. The Walter HWK 509A rocket engine developed thirty-eight hundred pounds of continuous thrust, and sent the nine-thousand-pound Me 163 careening along the ground like a wobbly bullet. When the lightweight wheel carriage fell away, the rocket plane abruptly tipped back on its tail and accelerated straight up at some ten thousand feet per minute. Attainable top speed: 585–595 mph. Abrupt directional change and ferocious acceleration later became common elements of UFO reports from around the world.
Deltas and Discs
Mysterious, triangle-shaped craft, which comprise a significant portion of UFO accounts, have real-world antecedents in Luftwaffe research. The aforementioned Alexander Lippisch had a special preoccupation with delta-shaped “flying triangle” jet fighters, and designed a series of them. The Lippisch DM 1 had a vaguely delta-shaped fuselage, a classic “UFO” form that was considerably more pronounced on another German experimental aircraft, the Ho-IX Series rocket plane designed by brothers Walter and Reimar Horten. This fighter concept mounted a pair of Jumo 004 jet engines in twin nacelles that began at the leading edge of the fuselage, swept aft on either side of the tube-shaped cockpit, and culminated just forward of the plane’s pointed, manta-like tail. Thrust from each Jumo engine was projected at 1,960 pounds. (The Horten ideal came to practical, if short-lived, fruition with the Northrop YB-49 “Flying Wing” heavy bomber of 1947.)
Extreme high altitude was another German fixation. At war’s end, a dozen prototypes of the DFS-228 Mk 1 rocket plane existed; this was a reconnaissance aircraft designed to be towed to about twenty-five thousand feet and then released, whereupon it would climb to survey the battlefield from heights as great as sixty thousand feet. Test flights clocked the DFS-228 Mk 1 at 560 mph at level flight. The Germans destroyed every prototype, so the aircraft exists today only in drawings and test results.
Rocket-to-Saucer Evolution
The sophisticated, if doomed, German aeronautical activity still tickles the imagination today, partly as a “what if?” scenario (could the Germans have prevailed if they had had the resources to create such craft earlier in the war?); and partly as a presumed signpost on the road to working, practical German flying saucers. The SS allegedly maintained Sonderburo 13 (sometimes called SS–E IV) to collate, and keep secret, flying-disc research. Hitler may have hoped to send a manned disc into the stratosphere, or even for a brief flare into space. (The Black Book of Flying Saucers, a 1970 book by a French writer named Henry Durrant [real name, Didier Serres] first revealed the existence of Sonderburo 13; Durrant later claimed Sonderburo as a mischievous figment of his imagination.) Although ignored, minimized, or dismissed by formally educated scholars of World War II, the German saucer program existed, and progressed well beyond wishful thinking. Much of the work culminated only in drawings, formulae, and small models, but some of the research went all the way to full-sized models and even working prototypes. The German rocket center at Peenemünde, for instance, functioned not only as the center of V-1 and V-2 development, but of flying-disc research. Nazi archives held in Europe have revealed schematics and strategic plans for a variety of disc-shaped aircraft. The Haunebu, for instance, is startlingly similar to the three-ball saucer photographed in the early 1950s by American contactee George Adamski. (Or perhaps Adamski’s craft is similar to the Haunebu.) Another craft, the lightly armed prototype “Vril 1” disc (also known as the Jager), thirty-eight feet in diameter and fitted with a Schauberger imploder engine, may have flown in late 1942.
Hangars purpose-built to house enormous discs—some as large as 460 feet in diameter—are described in some historical sources; likewise a test of a Schauberger-powered disc, the Belluzzo-Schriever-Mietha, in Prague in February 1945. The B-S-M reportedly ascended above nine miles in three minutes, and achieved 760 mph. As the Allies closed in (Soviet troops liberated Prague on May 9), General Keitel (according to accounts) ordered the B-S-M destroyed, partly because some of its more sophisticated labor came from skilled inmates removed from the state-owned Mittelwerk GmbH underground factory in the Harz Mountains, near the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp.