Across multiple satellite relays, I heard the anguished shrieks of his three-month-old, the background clatter of his older children as they ran wild in the tiny apartment and finally relief in Lawrence Cross' voice as he realized it was me; a moment's respite in a whirl of copy deadlines, late-night feeds and trips to theme parks.
The baby's crying faded into the static as Cross took the handset into another room.
I thanked him for the tip about LaViolette and Valone, as a result of which I had pieced together the essential elements of T.T. Brown's life and work. Without elaborating on how I'd arrived there, I asked him what he knew about the Germans' purported development of flying saucers in World War Two.
"Oh Jesus," Cross said, and I formed a mental picture of him rubbing his eyes and reaching for a cigarette, "where do I begin?"
I prompted him. One minute the Nazis were tinkering with this technology, the next people were reporting sightings of these objects, first in Gemany, then in America…? "It's not as simple as that," Cross said. "Come on, Lawrence. A book called German Secret Weapons of World War II, by Rudolf Lusar details names, dates and places. Has anyone ever dug into this stuff? Have you? The story must be fit to bust wide open."
"It's been around for decades," he said, "long enough to have been given a name." "What do you mean?" "In the trade, we call it 'the Legend.' It looks so straightforward, doesn't it? A story with a solid trail. But it's not like that at all. When you get into this stuff the trail goes everywhere and nowhere. The people who really did exist are long dead and others probably never existed at all. I know. I've been there and I've looked for them. So have dozens of other investigators. The detail is fantastic, but it's all uncorroborated. By that I mean there isn't a shred of evidence in any archive — no official word, no plans, nothing — that any of these projects ever existed." "Have you got anything on it?" He laughed and it caught in his throat. Cross smoked for the entire journalistic profession. He hacked the cough into the room, away from the receiver.
"Sure. How much time have you got? I'll email it to you. There's another book you should get ahold of. It's by an Italian. Guy by the name of Vesco — Renato Vesco. The book's called Intercept — But Don't Shoot. There's an English translation. I think it was first published in the late 1960s. Vesco's well up there, right in the heart of the Legend. Maybe you should try and track him down — that is, if he really existed." I said nothing. Cross continued. "Take nothing at face value and you're off to a better start than me. Lusty was real enough, but that's all I know. Everything else is up for grabs." I thought I must have heard him wrong. "Lusty?Did you say, Lusty?" "It stands for Luftwaffe Secret Technology. The U.S. Army Air Forces' official file on the state of the German Air Force's secret weapons work at the end of the war. The Air Force Historical Research Agency has a copy in its archives at Maxwell Air Force Base. It's raw data. That is to say, it's never been processed by anyone, so it's uncorrupted and verifiable, but I have no idea what's in it. In all these years, doing what we do, I've never had an excuse to go there. Maybe you do." "Where is Maxwell Air Force Base?" "It's in Alabama. Where the skies are so blue. A distant memory for you, I guess." I thanked him, hung up and knew that I wouldn't be tapping Cross for any more advice. He'd made it abundantly clear, more in tone than anything else, that for him this was the end of the road.
I thought about the months ahead. I had no legitimate business in the States except for a trip to Washington to cover an Air Force symposium — and that wasn't until later in the year. Stretching the trip to include a visit down to Alabama was simply out of the question.
I called the Air Force Historical Research Agency at Maxwell Air Force Base to see if I could get a copy of Lusty sent to me. In theory I could, but the files were held on a number of microfilm reels and, I was told, it could take months, perhaps years, for the release forms to plow through the system and for the report to reach me. Not only that, but the
Lusty files were old and corrupted, making repros difficult. The best, probably only way to view them, the administrator there told me, was in situ.
I put the phone down, kneaded my eyes and thought about smoking a cigarette again; something I hadn't done in years. I had just hit another pluperfect dead end.
Chapter 5
Flugkapitän Rudolf Schriever, one of the four saucer engineers cited in Lusar's book, began talking to the West German media in 1950 about a truly fantastic flying machine he had worked on for the Nazis — one that would have changed the course of the war had it gone into full-scale production. It stemmed from work that he had allegedly undertaken for the Heinkel Aircraft Company at Marienehe, near Rostock on the Baltic coast.
Schriever was one of the four "scientists" mentioned in Lusar's book as having worked on the Nazi flying discs. He was also, I found out through the massively detailed file that my former journalistic colleague Cross sent me via email, central to the Legend.
Though he started out as a pilot in the Luftwaffe, Schriever appeared to have developed some highly advanced ideas about aircraft that could take off and land vertically and it was in this capacity, after he had been drafted to Heinkel's design section, that he soon came to the attention of company chairman Professor Ernst Heinkel, who in early 1940 encouraged him to construct a small flying prototype.
So far so good. Though best-known for its lumbering He 111, the Luftwaffe's mainstay bomber during the Blitz against London in 1940 and for much of the rest of the war, Heinkel was one of the most pioneering and innovative aircraft companies within Germany at the time. Whatever the Legend said, this much was fact. In 1936, Ernst Heinkel began funding experiments that three years later would lead to Germany's successful construction of the world's first jet-powered aircraft, despite the fact that it was the British designer, Frank Whittle, who had first invented and patented the concept. The tiny, one-off Heinkel He 178 first flew on August 27, 1939, five days before the German Army marched into Poland. Eighteen months later, Heinkel would again eclipse all other aircraft companies by flying the world's first jet-powered fighter, the He 280. If anyone was to develop something as radical as Schriever's idea, therefore, Heinkel was the company to do it. The Legend then takes over.
In the spring of 1941, Schriever's blueprints were being used to construct a "proof-of-concept" model in a "garage" away from prying eyes. Officially known as the VI (V for "Versuchs" or "experimental version 1"), informally it was referred to as the "Flying Top." It was probably no more than two or three feet in diameter and powered by an electric motor or a small two-stroke engine. It is not known where this garage was, but within the sprawling complex of buildings at Marienehe, set in three square kilometers of the Mecklenburg State Park, there was ample room for Schriever's esoteric little engineering project to be hidden from view. Furthermore, it fitted into the Heinkel way of doing things. During the development of the world's first turbojet, Ernst Heikel had installed Dr. Hans-Joachim Pabst von Ohain, a gifted graduate of the University of Göttingen, in the same kind of environment— a converted garage at the university — before transferring the fruits of von Ohain's labors, the revolutionary HeS 3A turbojet, to a secure facility within the Marienehe site.
By June 1942, Schriever's Flying Top had been test-flown and the results deemed sufficiently interesting to secure top secret funding from the RLM, the Reichsluftfahrtministerium or State Air Ministry.