THE NAZI UFO MYTHOS
An Investigation by Kevin McClure

CORE 6. Unnamed Soldiers
  The term 'unnamed soldier' is one which I - I think - coined to describe the anonymous supposed ex-forces personnel who purveyed such nonsense about alien abductions and secret military activities over the last decade or so. But the phenomenon is nothing new, as is evidenced by a few typical reports which I've selected here.

Redfern and Downes have reprinted some accounts volunteered to the US intelligence services. The nature of intelligence collection is, of course, that it involves collecting every scrap of nonsense, every wild claim that can be collected, and then sifting through it for what might be important. I don't think that any of these reports could be said to be important, or even truthful, but it is always useful for authors to present material like this as 'intelligence reports'. This is, it seems, from a letter from 1947, the writer have been inspired by early flying saucer accounts

"Recently I have heard and read about reports of disc-shaped aircraft or whatever they are, in our Western regions. They reminded me of a nearly-forgotten incident in Germany, after the war. I report this to you because I feel this may be of international scope.

My buddy and I went on pass to see a friend of his. One evening the three of us were driving along some back roads when I sighted strange-looking object in the sky from eight to ten miles to our front and approximately 5,000 feet high. I immediately stopped the jeep for a better look The object rapidly came toward us, descending slowly. About a mile away it stopped its horizontal motion but continued a slow-oscillating descent similar to a descending parachute. Then it stopped in a spiral motion.

Immediately I drove to where it had dropped. It took almost five minutes to reach the place but we saw nothing. After ten minutes of cruising around the area it became too dark to see so we went back to town.

I am not sure my companions saw this because it happened so quickly it could easily have been missed, but I described what I had seen so vividly that they were as excited as I was . . The locale of this incident was approximately 120 miles north-west of Ubberbishophiem." [51]

Redfern and Downes continue

"What were perhaps two of the most persuasive accounts positing a direct link between the Nazi war machine and unidentified flying objects came via two individuals interviewed by FBI agents, in 1957 and 1967 respectively.

In the 1957 case, agents at Detroit recorded that they had spoken with a man who was...

'...born February 19,1926, in the State of Warsaw, Poland, and was brought from Poland as a Prisoner of War to Gut Alt Golssen approximately 30 miles east of Berlin, Germany, in May1942, where he remained until a few weeks after the end of World War II. According to the man, during 1944, month not recalled, while enroute to work in a field a short distance north of Gut Alt Golssen, their tractor engine stalled on a road through a swamp area. No machinery or other vehicle was then visible although a noise was heard described as a high-pitched whine similar to that produced by a large electric generator.

An 'SS' guard appeared and talked briefly with the German driver of the tractor, who waited five to ten minutes, after which the noise stopped and the tractor engine was started normally. Approximately 3 hours later in the same swamp area, but away from the road where the work crew was cutting hay, he surreptitiously, because of the German in charge of the crew and 'SS' guards in the otherwise deserted area, observed a circular enclosure approximately 100 to 150 yards in diameter protected from viewers by a tarpaulin-type wall approximately 50 feet high, from which a vehicle was observed to slowly rise vertically to a height sufficient to clear the wall and then to move slowly horizontally a short distance out of his view, which was obstructed by trees.

'This vehicle, observed from approximately 500 feet, was described as circular in shape, 75 to 100 yards in diameter, and about 14 feet high, consisting of dark gray stationary top and bottom sections, five to six feet high. The approximate three foot middle section appeared to be a rapidly moving component producing a continuous blur similar to an aeroplane propeller, but extending the circumference of the vehicle so far as could be observed. The noise emanating from the vehicle was similar but of somewhat lower pitch than the noise previously heard. The engine of the tractor again stalled on this occasion and no effort was made by the German driver to start the engine until the noise stopped, after which the engine started normally."

The next report comes from 1967

'On April 26,1967 [the witness] appeared at the Miami Office and furnished the following information relating to an object, presently referred to as an unidentified flying object, he allegedly photographed during November, 1944.

'Sometime during 1943, he graduated from the German Air Academy and was assigned as a member of the Luftwaffe on the Russian Front. Near the end of 1944, he was released from this duty and was assigned as a test pilot to a top secret project in the Black Forest of Austria. During this period he observed the aircraft described above. It was saucer-shaped, about twenty-one feet in diameter, radio-controlled, and mounted several jet engines around the exterior portion of the craft. He further described the exterior portion as revolving around the dome in the center which remained stationary. It was his responsibility to photograph the object while in flight. He asserted he was able to retain a negative of a photograph he made at 7,000 meters (20,000 feet).

According to him, the above aircraft was designed and engineered by a German engineer whose present whereabouts is unknown to him. He also assumed the secrets pertaining to this aircraft were captured by Allied Forces. He said this type of aircraft was responsible for the downing of at least one American B-26 airplane.

He has become increasingly concerned because of the unconfirmed reports concerning a similar object and denials the United States has such an aircraft. He feels such a weapon would be beneficial in Vietnam and would prevent the further loss of American lives which was his paramount purpose in contacting the Federal Bureau of Investigation.' [52]

Paul Stonehill of the Russian Ufology Research Centre has presented some unlikely tales from the former Soviet Union, but few are as dramatic as the anonymous account apparently told to "Konstantin Tiouts, an engineer in Moscow, Russia" who passed it on to Stonehill. Stonehill is "convinced of the authenticity of the document". The witness - "X" - was in the Red Army when, in 1941

"The Germans took him and his comrades to a POW camp. X was then immersed into living hell. He starved. He was betrayed. He was dying of typhus, but he managed to survive and attempted an escape. But they caught him and sent him to Auschwitz. There he was "employed" as a medical orderly, until he again contracted typhus.

X was sent to the ovens. He recalls the nauseating smell of the burning human flesh as he stood in line to be dispatched into a crema-torium oven. But X did again survive. In August of 1943, X and some other prisoners were moved to a camp in the vicinity of Peenemunde, where the Nazis' camp was designated as "KZ-A4," and located in Trassenhede. The camp's purpose was to carry out the programs of the Hochdrukpumpe Project: removal of the consequences of British bombing raids. Hangman of Auschwitz, SS Brigadenfuhrer Hans Kampler ordered prisoners to be transferred to the Peenemunde testing grounds. Major General Dehrenberger, head of the testing ground, had little time for the reconstruction work, and therefore sanctioned the use of concentration camp prisoners.

In September of 1943. X inadvertently became a witness to something that is of great interest to UFO researchers. X was with a group of prisoners engaged in demolishing a reinforced concrete wall. During the lunch break, the group was driven away. under guard. However, X remained at the demolition site, because of a dislocated foot. Later he set the bone himself, but the truck with his fellow prisoners had already left. Sud-denly, four workers rolled out on a concrete landing strip next to a nearby hangar a weird looking apparatus. X described it as round in parameter with a drop-shaped cockpit in the center with small inflatable wheels. He said it looked like an upside down washbasin. After a hand signal from a short, stout man, quiver-ing in the wind, the strange apparatus. the color of heavy silvery metal, made a hissing sound and took off.

It hovered at an altitude of approximately five meters over the landing strip, the hissing sound reminding X of a blowlamp. He noted that the outline of the apparatus clearly showed through on its silvery surface. For a short while the device rocked, like a tilting doll. and then the borders of the outline slowly began to blur as if it were going out of focus. Then it jumped up sharply like a humming top and gained altitude in a snakelike motion. The flight, judging by the rocking of the apparatus, advanced erratically. A sudden gust of wind from the Baltic Sea turned the craft upside down, and it began to lose altitude rather sharply. X was enveloped in a mixture of smells-burning, hot air and ethyl alcohol. He heard the apparatus impacting with the ground, the crunching and breaking of compo-nents. It hit the ground not far away from X. Instinctively, the inmate ran toward the crashed apparatus, thus revealing himself. But he had only one thought in his mind-to try to save the pilot, a human being . . . [53]

And so it goes on, a man who makes Indiana Jones look like Thomas the Tank Engine, and sees flying saucers as well. Another classic - and amazingly brave except when giving his name - 'unnamed soldier' comes from an Internet posting also, as often happens, published by Nexus magazine. This is, supposedly, an account of the real secrets of the 'foo fighters', told by a former Italian Resistance member who became so close to the SAS in Southern Italy from 1943 to 1945 that he was able to see films taken of them shot by allied planes but (and does this seem familiar?) could only show "Italian researcher Fabio Di Rado" stills taken from these. In a particularly modern twist this nameless witness did not, however, say that he believed that they were of German manufacture. Instead, he supposedly told Di Rado

"Those machines, if we can call them that, could perform such quick and agile movements that they were unlikely to have been built by human beings. You can believe me - foo-fighters couldn't be Nazi - otherwise they could have won the war easily. The more likely hypothesis . . an Air Force coming from other worlds was among us."

The absolute giveaway to this tale lies in the beginning of the account

"During the Spring of 1998 I went with another person to an inland village of Sicily to meet an 80-year-old man who claimed to have some unknown documents about foo fighters.

When we arrived at a farmhouse in the heart of the countryside, our witness showed us into a room which seemed to be his private study . . We were ordered not to take pictures; we could only make notes. To our disappointment, we had to accept this. I was given a copy on high-resolution CD-ROM of the pictures and documents that I saw there in the original version, with some censored parts." [54]

Whatever would we do without the contribution of these rural Italian 80-year-olds and their high resolution CD-ROMs?

Prague-Kbely

Probably the most influential of the original 'unnamed soldier' accounts formed, in the late 1980s, an input to the mythos which led to the identification of a specific aerodrome as the location for a test flight of a substantial flying disc. This seems to have come from an anonymous, untested press account, here summarised (in translation) in an excerpt titled The Reich's Flying Saucers by Manuel Carballal, excerpted from his book Saucers Unveiled!.

"In its February 1989 issue, the German magazine Flugzeug published the following report made by a German aviation official who, allegedly, been the protagonist of the astonishing sighting involving a "flying saucer" at the Prag-Gbell (formerly Praha-Kbely) aerodrome in 1943. The controversial report follows:

Place of Sighting: C 14 Flight School at the Prag-Gbell aerodrome. Date of Event August/September 1943, supposedly on a Sunday (I seem to recall there were no services on that day. The weather was good, dry and sunny. Kind of Observation: "I was with my flight comrades on the air strip, more precisely, near the school buildings, some 2000 meters away from the arsenal (located to the extreme left). See adjoining diagram. The device was inside the hangar: a disk some 5-6 meters in diameter. Its body is relatively large at the center. Underneath, it has four tall, thin legs. Color: Aluminum. Height: Almost as tall as a man. Thickness: some 30 - 40 cm., with an rim of external rods, perhaps square orifices. The upper part of the body (almost a third of the total height) was shrunken over the upper half of the disk. It was flat and rounded. See the attached sketch for the lower half.

Along with my friends, I saw the device emerge from the hangar. It was then that we heard the roar of the engines, we saw the external side of the disk begin to rotate, and the vehicle began moving slowly and in a straight line toward the southern end of the field. It then rose almost 1 meter into the air. After moving around some 300 meters at that altitude, it stopped again. Its landing was rather rough. We had to leave the area while some custodians pushed the vehicles toward the hangar. Later on, the "thing" took off again, managing to reach the end of the aerodrome this time.

Afterwards, I made a note in my flight log of the members of the FFS C14 who were present at the moment: Gruppenfluglehrer (group flight instructor) Ofw. Michelsen; Fluglehrer Uffz. Kolh und Buhler; Flugschüler (flight students): Ogefr, Klassmann, Kleiner, Müller, Pfaffle, Schenk, Seifert, Seibert, Squarr, Stahn, Weinberger, Zoebele, Gefr, Hering, Koza, Sitzwohl, Voss, and Waluda."

Certainly, even Flugzeug's editors treat the report cautiously: "the device described by these observers is antithetical to those described by Schreiver, Habermohl, Miethe, and Bellonzo with their vast basic dimensions." And these German experts cannot be mistaken, since it is known to all of those who are well-versed in aeronautics that during the history of Nazi aviation at least two circular-wing aircraft were built, and fifteen others were designed, although there remains the possibility that the object supposedly tested at Prag-Gbell was one of the prototypes destroyed by the Nazis in order to keep it from falling into Allied hands after the fall of the Third Reich." [55]
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