There were splits and schisms in the Legend, just as there are orthodox and unorthodox branches within major religions. The other strand to the myth that I had to pay attention to was Vesco's. I had managed to obtain a copy of his book, Intercept — But Don't Shoot (published 1971), and scrutinize it. What was beguiling about Vesco's account was the certainty with which he presented his case. Vesco, who was 22 years old when the war ended and said to have been well connected with technical experts within the Italian Air Force at the time he wrote Intercept, claimed that he pieced together his account of the top secret development effort behind the foo-fighter program from sources inside the Italian military and from Allied intelligence reports published after the war.
What also made Vesco's account worth more than a cursory glance was the fact that it "detailed" a completely different development effort from the Schriever/Lusar account. Vesco claimed that there were two kinds of foo-fighters. One was unpiloted and remotely controlled; in effect, a flying bomb designed to knock down enemy aircraft. The other was manned, but flew in anger only once before hostilities ended.
The unpiloted version was called the Feuerball (Fireball) and it blended a number of highly advanced technologies.
"In the autumn of 1944," Vesco wrote, "in Oberammergau in Bavaria, the OBF — an experimental center run by the Luftwaffe — had completed a series of researches into electrical apparatus capable of interfering with the operation of an engine up to a maximum distance of about a hundred feet by producing intense electromagnetic fields."
In parallel, a separate effort was under way by the Germans to produce a "proximity radio interference" device capable of jamming or spoofing Allied radio and radar systems. Put these two technologies into a small, circular, armored airframe "powered by a special turbojet engine, also flat and circular and more or less resembling the shell of a tortoise" and "a highly original flying machine was born."
Radio-controlled at the moment of takeoff, the machine was steered toward Allied bomber streams by a ground operator, whereupon it automatically latched onto their slipstreams, "attracted by their exhaust flames, and approached close enough without collision to wreck their radar gear."
And then came the detail. The Fireball was first constructed at an aircraft plant at Wiener Neustadt, south of Vienna, with the help of the Flugfunk Forschungsanstalt of Oberpfaffenhoffen (FFO), an aircraft electronics firm near Munich. Hermann Goering, Hitler's deputy, inspected progress on the weapon "a number of times," hoping that the principle of the Fireball could also be used to produce "an offensive weapon capable of revolutionizing the whole field of aerial warfare.
"The fiery halo around the perimeter — caused by a very rich fuel mixture — and the chemical additives that interrupted the flow of electricity [in Allied aircraft] by overionizing the atmosphere in the vicinity of the plane, generally around the wing tips or tail surfaces, subjected the H2S radar on the plane to the action of powerful electrostatic fields and electromagnetic impulses (the latter generated by large klystron radio tubes protected with anti-shock and anti-heat armor). Since a metal arc carrying an oscillating current of the proper frequency — equal, that is, to the frequency used by the radar stationcan cancel the blips (return signals from the target), the Feuerball was almost undetectable by the most powerful American radar of the time, despite its nighttime visibility."
Once again, I pictured the desperation felt by Schlueter as his radar operator, Meiers, failed to register the orbs of light ahead of the Black Widow on the SCR540.
Was this what they had encountered that night, the Fireball? To believe that it might have been, I had to accept that what we had here was a weapon system that was decades ahead of its time. Years before the deployment of the surface-to-air guided missile — sufficiently perfected to shoot down the CIA U-2 pilot Gary Powers over Russia only in 1960—and decades before radar-evading stealth technology would become a household word, the Vesco portion of the legend held that the Germans had developed a single weapon system that blended these and other exotic technologies. Not only that, but the Fireball was able to home in on its intended prey, the Americans' B-17 and B-24 bombers, via an automatic guidance system — one that tracked their exhaust plumes — a sensor so advanced that it was unheard of, even with the benefit of modern-day knowledge. Once close to the bombers, it could then either disrupt their electronics or stop their engines in flight with a gas that killed their ignition systems.
At a stroke, Vesco had assembled all the evidence he needed to explain the foo-fighter conundrum. He also threw in some eyewitness testimony. "One person who saw the first short test flights of the device, without its electrical gear," he wrote, "says that 'during the day it looked like a shining disc spinning on its axis and during the night it looked like a burning globe.' ' The trouble was, it sounded like science fiction. When the Russians advanced into Austria, Vesco maintained, the Fireball production line was moved from Wiener Neustadt into underground facilities run by the Zeppelin Werke in the Schwarzwald— the same area of Rhineland and Black Forest where Schlueter, Ringwald and Meiers, and a host of other aircrew from the 415th Night Fighter Squadron, had first encountered the inexplicable.
Vesco went on to explain that the Feuerball had an "older brother," the Kugelblitz or "Ball Lightning Fighter," that was built and flighttested — once — in the vicinity of Kahla, site of a huge underground weapons development complex in Thuringia, a region of mountainous uplands in the heart of Germany known as the Harz. If this "fact" also was a hoax, it was a clever one, since the Harz certainly had housed a number of underground Nazi weapons factories, among them the facility at Nordhausen, where Wernher von Braun's V-2 rockets had been produced.
Vesco was notoriously reclusive. Some researchers believed he'd never existed at all; lending credence to the supposition that Intercept really was just an elaborate hoax. But Vesco was real, all right. I managed to trace a group of Italian researchers who had been in contact with him up until his death in November 1999. According to them, Vesco didn't care whether people believed him or not.
"He was very correct," one of them told me over the phone, "so it's very hard to believe that he made it all up." But where was the proof? Vesco claimed that the evidence for Feuerball and Kugelblitz was to be found within obscure tracts of the British Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee (BIOS) reporting system and its successor, the U.S.-U.K.administered Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee (CIOS), published in the immediate aftermath of the war (a number of reports from which, however, are still withheld). BIOS and CIOS were the systems employed by the British and the Americans for assessing German high technology. But researchers had been through all the available CIOS and BIOS files with a fine-tooth comb and had found nothing that pointed to anything that described the Fireball or its "older brother" the Ball Lightning Fighter.
Vesco had stuck to his guns, never wavering from the conclusions he had espoused in his book: that the Germans had developed a truly revolutionary new form of air vehicle; that it was the British who had happened upon the technology at the end of the war and that they, together with Canadian scientists, had refined it in the frozen wastelands of British Columbia and Alberta.
Vehicles resulting from this endeavor, Vesco maintained, were respon sible for the rash of U.S. flying-saucer sightings in 1947.
A familiar pattern was emerging and it wasn't helping my case. The more I looked, the more "evidence" I found that the Germans had been tinkering with technology that explained the foo-fighters sightings ofthat winter of 1944^5.