With RLM funding, the intention was to construct a full-scale piloted version capable of controlled vertical takeoff and landing. Construction of this full-size version, the V2, began at Marienehe in early 1943. The V2, which was known as the "Flugkreisel" or "Flightwheel," had a diameter of approximately 25 feet, its power generated by one or perhaps two Heinkel-Hirth jet engines, depending on which version of the Legend you want to believe. The V2 supposedly flew with Schriever at the controls, but as a piece of technology it was deemed to be heavily overengineered and was quickly scrapped. As a proof-of-concept vehicle, though, it seems to have served its purpose, because shortly afterward, Schriever and his team relocated to Czechoslovakia where they set about constructing a larger and altogether more sophisticated prototype known as the V3.
With the Allied aerial bombing campaign now at its height, their activities were dispersed around the Prague area to minimize the exposure to the relentless air attacks, by now penetrating deep into the Reich. But the bulk of the team's work was centered on a restricted area of a satellite facility outside Prague belonging to the Munich-based Bayerische Motorenwerke engine company, better known today as BMW. Despite the existence of Heinkel's own jet engines, the real cutting edge of German gas-turbine research was centered on BMW and in particular on its Bramo division, located at Spandau in Berlin. Bramo, the Brandenburgische Motorenwerke, had been bought by BMW from Siemens in 1939. By the middle of the war, BMW-Bramo had 5,000 staff working full-time on gas-turbine research alone — a discipline then barely a decade old — and was ultimately responsible for the BMW 003 jet engine, the best turbojet of the day, which powered the Me 262, the world's first operational jet fighter, and the Ar 234, the Luftwaffe's advanced jet-propelled reconnaissance-bomber, another aircraft far ahead of its time.
It was from Spandau, supposedly, that Klaus Habermohl, the second disc engineer mentioned by Lusar, was recruited to the Schriever team. Habermohl's job in Prague was to integrate the disc with a new and radical form of power plant called the radial-flow gas-turbine, or RFGT. Unlike Brown's electrogravitic motor, the RFGT was, at least, recognizable technology by modern standards, if extraordinary. It was essentially a jet engine. However, unlike a regular jet power plant, with its compressors, combustion chambers and turbines mounted one behind the other in what was basically a big tube, the RFGT formed part of the airframe itself, with the whirling turbomachinery rotating around the aircraft's centrally mounted cockpit. As such, "aircraft" did not adequately describe what the machine actually looked like. There was only one configuration to which an RFGT could possibly be adapted: that of a flying disc or saucer.
By the autumn of 1944, the V3 is said to have been completed. With German airfields under constant attack from Allied daylight bombing, the prospect of a fighter or bomber that could take off and land vertically from any dispersed site would have been exactly in line with Luftwaffe requirements. However, due to "an administrative change," the V3 program was abandoned in favor of a further prototype, the V7, propulsion coming from another experimental RFGT from BMW-Bramo. The V7 supposedly had a diameter of 60–70 feet and a crew of two or three.
Applying a crude rule of thumb, based on a rough estimate of the disc's weight, Habermohl's ingenious RFGT would have had to have generated around 10–15,000 pounds of thrust to have made the design of the disc in any way viable. This was the machine that supposedly test-flew on February 14 with Schriever and Habermohl at the controls, achieving 2,000 km/h in level flight.
The fastest aircraft of the day, the little rocket-powered Me 163, struggled to attain half this speed.
Lusar's third and last German saucer scientist, Dr. Richard Miethe, was supposedly working on another disc project at a subterranean facility near Breslau under the auspices of an altogether separate contract. Toward the end of the war, the legend stated that Miethe was drafted from his activities in Breslau to assist with the Schriever/Habermohl disc in Prague, an indication, perhaps, that the Schriever/Habermohl disc was the better bet in a procurement environment that was by now desperately short of money, skilled labor and raw materials. This streamlining coincided with the "administrative change" that had led to the abandonment of Schriever's V3 design for the altogether more viable V7.
The V7, then, seems to have been the result of a three-way endeavor, although there were reports that a Miethe disc — based, perhaps, on the project he abandoned at Breslau — was captured by the Russians, along with a number of engineers and scientists, when they drove the Germans out of Poland.
As for the V7, some say it, too, was acquired by the Russians when they took Prague; others that it was blown up by the Waffen-SS on May 9, 1945, the day hostilities in Europe ended. The Legend had it both ways.
The detail in the Schriever/Habermohl/Miethe legend was rich and impressive. Here were names, dates and places — minutiae even, that seemed to corroborate everything Rudolf Lusar had written down. The trouble was, the data was based heavily on the say-so of Schriever, who was long since dead; the rest had magically appeared out of thin air, just as Cross had said. No one knew where the detail emerged from. Over the years it had been passed down from one researcher to the next, with no apparent attribution. When I approached BMW's archivists, for example, they denied that there had been any BMW factory near Prague "engaged in advanced aircraft projects including design or advanced research during World War II."
I began to see what Cross meant. Cross and I were used to sourcing every piece of information we ever came by. This stuff was unverifiable. What I needed was hard, solid proof; and within the Schriever portion of the Legend there was nothing to hang a hat on, beyond the fact that the man himself had existed.
Unfortunately, the same could not be said of the other characters in the story. All attempts by researchers to trace Miethe and Habermohl had foundered, although there had been occasional "sightings" in the lore that had grown up around them.
Miethe is supposed to have escaped Czechoslovakia in early May and to have headed west, eventually making contact with U.S. technical intelligence teams operating inside Germany. Herded into a "pen" along with Wernher von Braun and his fellow rocket scientists, Miethe was said to have been taken to the United States, ending up at Wright Field, the USAAF's premier research and development center near Dayton, Ohio. If any of this actually happened, there is no trace of it.
Habermohl is said to have been captured by the Russians at the Letov factory, a German-administered aircraft plant outside Prague, and, after a period of detention, sent to work at a top secret Soviet aircraft design bureau east of Moscow. Again, no one could say for sure whether he had even existed at all. My research showed the Italian, Bellonzo, was real enough, except Lusar had misspelled his name. In 1950, Professor Giuseppe Belluzzo, a former industry minister in Mussolini's cabinet, started talking about disc-shaped "flying bombs" that he claimed to have worked on during the war and passed on to the Germans, who had subsequently developed them into working prototypes.
Belluzzo was also convinced that these weapons were the basis of the flying-saucer sightings that had gripped much of America for the best part of three years and that they were now under further development inside the Soviet Union. Beyond the fact that Belluzzo, like Schriever, was real, his claims also remain un verifiable. Interestingly, though, he started talking to the media just a few days before Schriever, leading some researchers to reason that Schriever, a man who like so many other Germans in 1950 was struggling to make ends meet, had invented his entire story.
In fact, the Legend lacked a single item of corroborating data. There was nothing in any archive or museum, no photograph, no indisputable piece of testimony, to say that any of it was true.