Over the next few months, life at JDW went on pretty much as it had done since I'd joined the magazine in the mid-'80s; a routine made up of press conferences, air shows, defense exhibitions and weekly deadlines. But as I maintained a close watch on developments that were shaping the defense and security climate of the post-Cold War world, I found my mind on other things. Things I kept to myself.
Had the Germans developed a totally new form of propulsion, blended it with a radically different kind of air vehicle, and deployed it in the form of some new and secret weapon system in the latter stages of the war? I had to juggle this possibility with the fact that T.T. Brown had postulated the basis of an antigravity propulsion system as far back as the 1920s.
I decided to discover whether any of this wartime sightings data was reflected in work the Germans had been doing in their research facilities and factories.
In the late 1950s, a book written by a German who had served as the commanding officer of a German Army technical unit in the Second World War, Major Rudolf Lusar, went on to become an unlikely bestseller in Britain and the United States. The book was called German Secret Weapons of World War II. Seeking clues to the foo-fighter mystery, I discovered a copy in the reading room of the Imperial War Museum. In it, Lusar described in meticulous detail, in language that often made the depths of his bitterness clear, the technical achievements of "a small, industrious and honest nation which lost the war."
Secret Weapons made somber reading. Although German technical achievements were visible in developments such as the V-l flying bomb, a direct forerunner of the modern-day cruise missile, and the V-2 ballistic missile, it was the vast extent of Germany's underpinning technology base, as revealed by Lusar, which showed just how far ahead of the Allies the Nazis had been in certain key areas.
Jet engines, rocket engines, infrared and thermal-imaging systems, proximity fuses, missile guidance seekers … technologies that are integral to most modern aircraft and airborne weapon systems were all listed and described. In the late 1950s, when Lusar's book first appeared, these technologies were still in their infancy in Britain and America. Yet the Germans had been working on them a decade and a half earlier. But there was another side to the book, one which was so sensational that immediately on its appearance it had set alarm bells ringing in Washington.
This side of the book related to so-called German "wonder weapons" beyond the V-l and V-2.
One of these was the Fleissiges Lieschen, or "Busy Lizzie," a 150 m-long tube assembly of non-alloyed cast steel with chambers leading off it that lent it the appearance of a giant millipede. It was designed to fire 150 mm projectiles over distances of 170 km, more than enough to hit most British cities from sites deep within France. It never went into service, but 45 years after the war the components of an almost identical weapon, the "supergun," were intercepted by British customs officials on their way to Iraq.
Other esoteric developments detailed by Lusar showed that the Germans had been working on technologies for bringing down Allied aircraft with sound waves, air vortices, intensely focused beams of light and jets of compressed air.
In 1958, the U.S. Air Force commissioned a "special studies group" within Air Force Intelligence headed by an Austrian-born technical consultant called Dr. Stefan Possony to carry out a detailed appraisal of Lusar's book. The research effort was branded "secret" and has only recently come to light. I found it during a long, hard night's trawl in the basement when it popped out of cyberspace after an unusual combination of word commands fed through a high-power search engine.
A section in Lusar's book was devoted to "flying saucers" which he asserted, in no uncertain terms, were the product of German wartime inventors. "Experts and collaborators in this work confirm that the first projects, called 'flying discs,' were undertaken in 1941," Lusar wrote. He even went on to name the key individuals involved. These were "the German experts Schriever, Habermohl and Miethe, and the Italian Bellonzo."
Lusar described the craft in some detail. There were two principal centers of disc development: one, headed by Miethe in the vicinity of the Lower Silesian city of Breslau in modern-day Poland; the other centered on Prague in Czechoslovakia, then also an integral part of the Reich. The Miethe disc was described as a discus-shaped "plate" of 42 m diameter, fitted with "adjustable" jet engines. Shortly before the plant where the craft was being built was overrun by the Russians, the retreating Germans blew it up, destroying the disc inside. However, many of the "experts" who had worked on the project were captured and taken back to Siberia, where work on them "is being successfully continued," Lusar reported.
In the paranoid U.S. security climate of the late 1950s, it was this aspect of the account that had led to the commissioning of Possony's special intelligence report.
According to Lusar, the other disc, developed by Schriever and Habermohl, did achieve flightworthy status before the end of the war— on February 14, at a facility just outside Prague. "Within three minutes they climbed to an altitude of 12,400 m and reached a speed of 2000 km/h in horizontal flight," the author related.
At a time when the most advanced interceptors of the day (the late 1950s) struggled to achieve such velocities, this was an outrageous claim, but then it didn't have to be taken wholly at face value to contain an element of truth.
Having covered the Stealth Fighter story in the mid-1980s, when the aircraft was still deeply secret and witnesses were reporting things they couldn't square with any known aircraft development of the day, I trusted the old maxim about smoke and fire.
And in this assumption, I had an ally in Dr. Possony. Why else had he been tasked by the U.S. Air Force with writing a classified critique of Lusar's claims? Why else, according to one source I spoke to about him, a researcher by the name of Joel Carpenter who had devoted considerable time to studying Lusar and Possony, had the good doctor shredded his conclusions on the subject?
So, alongside wartime pilots' reports of flying objects that defied their understanding of aircraft performance were accounts of Germans having worked on projects that had no engineering counterpart, even within present-day aerospace knowledge. In Lusar's book were names, dates and places — crude data, admittedly, but usable nonetheless as jumpingoff points for a more rigorous search. And though Lusar's claims didn't point directly to evidence of antigravity propulsion technology, in his discussion of another taboo technology area in scientific circles, the flying saucer, he had outlined a pathway to an altogether different kind of aerospace platform. Just as T.T. Brown had done in the 1920s — and Trimble had in 1956. The task seemed so simple. Make the link between Germany and the flying saucer and here was an opportunity to solve not only the antigravity propulsion riddle, but, in the process, perhaps, one of the most baffling mysteries of the 20th century: the origins of the UFO. If machines like those in General Twining's memo were "within the present U.S. knowledge," no wonder Trimble and his colleagues had so quickly fallen silent on the subject of a new and exotic propulsion source.
The flying disc must have exhibited performance so in advance of its time that it had been super-classified, then hidden in plain sight — behind the UFO myth — for the best part of 60 years.
Perhaps, too, it explained why Trimble had sounded like he'd had the fear of God put in him when he had been approached by Lockheed's PR machine on my behalf. The spooks would have made it abundantly clear there would be no statute of limitations on this particular secret. That you never talked about it. Ever.