During the final months of the war, several B-17 bombers returned to their bases in England with unexplained damage, mainly in the wing and tail sections, after reported contact with “foo fighters.” A classified US Air Force report likened the damage to “the effect of a hot wire on a block of cheese.”
The Rheotron was not the only energy-beam weapon developed under Kammler’s patronage. Widerøe’s rival Ernst Schiebold created the X-ray Cannon (Röntgenkanone), which produced a focused beam of hard X-rays. A prototype was used to disable the magnetos of Allied bombers and force them down to a lower altitude where they were more vulnerable to flak.
By powering a Röntgenkanone with the Vril Triebwerk motor, SS E-IV scientists were able to produce a weapon for the Haunebu III whose output was sufficient to burn out all electrical systems in an enemy aircraft. During Operation High Jump, personnel aboard the command ship USS Mount Olympus experienced severe radio and radar interference during the air battle of February 6, and both the Mount Olympus and several other ships were forced to undertake extensive repairs to their electrical systems before leaving Antarctica two and a half weeks later.
The Kraftstrahlkanone (KSK) has been incorrectly described as a laser weapon, but in fact it uses a focused energy beam. Power is channeled through spherical cascade oscillators to a transmission rod wrapped in a tungsten coil which acts as the “barrel” of the weapon.
The first KSK weapons were 60mm weapons tested in the Haunebu I prototypes, which projected an energy beam capable of penetrating 4 inches of conventional armor — more than an inch thicker than the frontal armor of a Sherman tank and equal to that of the dreaded Tiger II. As part of the Haunebu II project, 80mm and 110mm versions were developed, with correspondingly higher performance. A smaller 50mm weapon was also developed as secondary armament for the Haunebu IV.
The KSK could have been a war-winning tank or aircraft weapon except for one thing: its extremely high energy demands. No conventional generator could power even the smallest KSK weapon, and with the Glocke (Bell) vril energy source still in development in 1945, only a very few KSKs could be mounted in fortified emplacements. In fact, Kammler issued an order in January 1945 recalling all available KSKs to keep them out of enemy hands. Only the Haunebu craft had the energy to power them and the mobility to avoid capture.
Continuing development of the Vril Triebwerk motor reduced the power drain problem, but it was not until the Haunebu IV was fitted with a small Glocke that it was eventually overcome. Only the Glocke could provide enough energy to fire the weapons without affecting flight functions.
While von Braun and his fellow rocket scientists were shipped to New Castle Army Air Field near Wilmington, Delaware to continue the work that would result in the Apollo Moon rockets and America’s arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles, another facility was set up at Groom Lake, deep in the Nevada desert.
Codenamed Area 51, this base was devoted to collecting and studying German advanced aircraft captured during the war. Among the captured aircraft sent there were Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighters, an incomplete Gotha Go 229 flying-wing jet bomber, and a handful of documents and parts recovered from the abandoned Haunebu facilities in the West.
Over the following decades, research at Area 51 produced a number of advanced designs based on German prototypes. The Northrop YB-49 flying-wing bomber was a straightforward development of the existing YB-35 design dating back to 1941, fitted with jet engines and incorporating several improvements based on the captured Gotha aircraft. Although the design never entered service, it is considered an early ancestor of the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber.
Several experiments with disk-shaped aircraft were less successful. Working from anecdotal accounts of Thule and Haunebu saucers and lacking reliable information on the Thule Triebwerk propulsion system, engineers at Area 51 tried to reproduce German saucer craft from first principles. The Vought XF5U “Flying Flapjack,” developed from an earlier design by Charles H. Zimmerman, was a conventional aircraft with a disk-shaped wing rather than a true flying saucer. It was canceled in March 1947 due to disappointing performance.
Other disk designs were carefully kept out of the public eye — so carefully, in fact, that some commentators have claimed that the “Flying Flapjack” program was never intended as anything more than a smokescreen to explain sightings of disk-shaped aircraft over the continental United States from 1947 onward, leading to the great “saucer scare” of the late 1940s.
While some progress was made in replicating the Victalen alloy used in German saucer craft, the Americans encountered serious problems with propulsion and control. On June 24, 1947, pilot Kenneth Arnold saw a half-moon-shaped aircraft leading a formation of nine disks near Mount Rainier, Washington, and reported their flight as “like a saucer if you skip it across water.” As the rumor spread that these craft came from another world, later UFO sighting reports of disk-shaped craft performing extreme maneuvers were generally attributed to advanced alien aeronautics rather than control problems.
On July 8, 1947, a small experimental disk aircraft crashed on a ranch outside Roswell, New Mexico. Eyewitness descriptions of the wreckage and the crew, and the military’s efforts to suppress the incident, have combined to fuel an almost endless stream of conspiracy theories. Today, the incident is written off as the crash of a high-altitude balloon launched as part of Project Mogul, whose purpose was to detect Soviet nuclear tests using sound waves. In fact, the Roswell wreckage did come from a crashed saucer — but not from an alien spacecraft.
In an effort to understand and overcome the stability and control problems encountered by their experimental saucer aircraft, the engineers at Area 51 had constructed a series of scaled-down, radio-controlled craft. Some of these were “crewed” by rhesus monkeys — also used in the NASA rocket program — to study the effects of saucer flight on primate physiology. One such craft, with 16 monkeys on board, was shot down near Aztec, New Mexico in March 1948 after drifting over the Los Alamos National Laboratory: despite official attempts at a cover-up, the sight of their charred corpses led to rumors of “childlike” aliens which persisted for many years.
Following the saucer sightings of early 1947, the US Air Force was commissioned to produce a study of UFO reports for publication. The resulting Project Sign was active for most of 1948 before being shut down — allegedly for classifying too many reports as “unknown” — and replaced by Project Grudge, which sought to quash any theories about extraterrestrial origin. In August 1949, Project Grudge issued a 600-page report that concluded quite firmly that there was no such thing as flying saucers.