From Schriever in the 1950s to Vesco's testimony in the 60s — and others before, during and since — maybe a dozen Germans had come forward to say that they had worked on flying-saucer technology under the Nazis. And some, like Viktor Schauberger, were so very nearly believable.
Schauberger, whose story was contained in notes on the Legend sent to me by Lawrence Cross, was an Austrian who had supposedly invented a totally new form of propulsion based upon a principle called "implosion." No one I spoke to seemed entirely sure what implosion meant, but according to the stories that had grown up around this man, the implosion process was at the heart of a radical turbine that Schauberger had installed in a sub-scale flying disc sometime during the war. A test of this small flying vehicle, with its echoes of the Schriever Flying Top, had supposedly taken place and the results were said to have been highly impressive. In one account of the test, the craft had apparently risen toward the ceiling of the test facility "trailing a glow of ionization." This immediately elevated the report above the many others I had come across, for it signaled that, whatever was occurring within the implosion process, it had precious little to do with jet propulsion. If true, it could only have been an antigravity effect. If true. Though Schauberger was long dead, his son Walter was still alive when I telephoned him at his home in Austria in 1991. Talking through an interpreter, I asked Walter about his father's experiments and got a disconcerting answer. I had imagined that Viktor had attended some impressive German or Austrian technical institute; that he was a professor of physics at Vienna or Salzburg or, at the very least, an eminent aerospace engineer. But no. Walter Schauberger told me that his father had developed his radical ideas about energy and propulsion by observing what he had seen in Nature, the way rivers flowed and fish swam. His only professional training had been as a forester.
This was the trouble. While all of these stories were laced with detail, which immediately gave them a veneer of credibility, they were almost always let down either by corrupted data or a complete absence of it. In a decade of investigating the aerospace industry, I had never once come across a designer who did not have a set of initials after his name. A forester was simply absurd.
Had there been more to the Schauberger story, I would not have hesitated to make the trip to Austria. But as decisions went, this was an easy one. I was using my training to make value judgments all the time on the data that was gathering in my basement. You didn't need a degree in physics, though, to appreciate that whatever they had or hadn't been, foo-fighters would have had to have come from the minds of engineers— not from a man who'd spent his time among Alpine forests and streams.
It was for this reason that I gently declined Walter Schauberger's of fer to visit his "biological-technical institute" in the Salzkammergut Mountains.
For any of the "evidence" about German flying saucers to be irrefutable, it had to emerge from official documentation. But Lawrence Cross and a number of other credible researchers I'd contacted on the subject had already been through the BIOS and CIOS reports and found nothing. And that should have been the end of it. Yet, I knew that if the Germans had developed a revolutionary air weapon, based perhaps on some radical form of propulsion technology, it was inconceivable that the CIOS or BIOS intelligence teams would have documented the discovery for the world to read about.
To go the extra mile, I realized I'd have to access the original intelligence data on which the BIOS and CIOS assessment teams, most of whom were technical types sat at desks in Brussels, Paris, London and Washington, had based their analyses. Here again, I knew there would be no smoking gun. Had intelligence units in the field come across anything meaningful, these reports, too, would have been sanitized. Anything as obvious as a full-blown air vehicle or a new form of propulsion system would not have escaped the censor's attention.
But to identify evidence of a new form of aerospace technology, particularly one as far-reaching as that described in the legend or by Vesco, I wasn't searching for the obvious, because the obvious would have been picked up by the censors.
As with any new piece of technology, developments came together as a series of systems and subsystems. There would have been prime contractors and subcontractors, some of them working in new scientific areas — areas that would have been on the very edge of the technical knowledge of the deskbound BIOS and CIOS assessors.
Between the chaos of the front line and the overstretched resources of the intelligence units tasked with assessing German hardware and documentation — which the victors had shipped out of Germany by the ton-load — there might still, I figured, be some fresh evidence; something useful that had been overlooked.
I started with the British, whose initial stab at organized technology plunder was vested in the hands of a ragtag private army — composed, bizarrely, of sailors and Royal Marine commandos. This outfit was the brainchild of a certain Commander Ian Fleming, who 15 years later would go on to create the Bond persona in the double-oh-seven novels. Bond's character, it appears, drew heavily on the exploits of 30 Assault Unit RN, which rode roughshod over the conventions of the day. Following the battle for Cherbourg, in which 30 AU RN had been tasked with capturing German naval headquarters, the marines liberally enjoyed the spoils of war. Their behavior was described as that of "merry courageous, amoral, loyal, lying toughs, hugely disinclined to take no for an answer from foe orfraulein"
As a result of their "martial exuberance," as one assessor wrote, 30 AU RN was reined in somewhat and renamed 30 Advanced Unit RN. It was also ordered to subordinate its activities to a new and much larger force of British tech-plunder units, known as "T-Forces." These would move forward with General Bernard Montgomery's 21st Army Group, principally in Monty's theater of operations, northwest Germany, but not exclusively so. Under the terms of the CIOS charter, with its AngloAmerican task jointly to exploit German spoils of war, British T-Force teams would also be allowed to tag along with forward U.S. Army units in pursuit of their objectives.
These objectives were to locate and secure intact technical "targets" of interest; to preserve German high technology from "destruction, loot, robbery and, if necessary, counterattack," until the completion of their examination by teams of experts or until their removal. They were also to act as armed escorts in enemy territory for the "expert investigators" drawn from CIOS offices far behind the front lines. As a quid pro quo, U.S. technical teams could ride with forward British assault units. The eventual size of British T-Forces would grow to 5,000 personnel.
But from the reports generated by these units, now freely available in the U.K. Public Records Office, it was apparent that the British were desperately ill-prepared to make the most of the opportunity that lay before them.
Over the next two months, I spent every spare moment down at the Public Records Office. And when I wasn't in the Records Office, just down the road in Kew on the outskirts of London, I was gathering as much open-source reading material as I could on the Allies' systematic plunder of German high technology at the end of the war. One book, The Paperclip Conspiracy by Tom Bower, read like a manual on how to dismantle an entire nation's technology base. If America, Britain and their allies had applied the lessons of Paperclip to the Iraqi problem at the end of the Gulf War in 1991, the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's war machine would have been eradicated forever.