Mark Felton Examines Nazi Flying Saucer Research

This might interest some of the readers of this blog, who are interested in the rumours that during World War II the Nazis were engaged in developing Flying Saucers. Mark Felton, according to the biographical note to his channel’s videos, is an historian and the author of 22 books as well as numerous appearances on various TV shows. His channel, Mark Felton Productions, puts up videos about the Second World War and particularly its military technology. Three days ago on the 17th June 2021, he put up this video entitled ‘Hitler’s Flying Saucers – Fact or Fantasy?’

The video begins with the statement that German aeronautical engineering during the War was excellent and in advance of the Allies, as shown by the Messerschmitt Komet rocket plane and the V2 rocket. But there have also been rumours that they were developing disc-shaped craft. The video shows here a photo of the Sack AS-6, which really does look like a flying disc. The engineer credited with this research is Joseph Andreas Epp, who designed a circular aircraft with helicopter blades mounted on top, inspirited by the Focke-Wulf FW61 helicopter. He created four designs for these disc-shaped craft, all helicopters with adjustable rotor blades, and claimed to have built a 1/10 scale model, which he sent to the Ministry of Aviation in 1941. These designs and the model were examined by staff belonging to General Ernst Udet. The material was then passed on Walter Dornberger, the head of the Peenemunde V2 research base. A facility was supposedly built at Prague airport to develop these novel aircraft and the project placed under the authority of Rudolf Schriever and Jurgen Habermohl, and given assistance from a number of firms and organisations including the Luftwaffe and Skoda. It was run by Albert Speer’s armaments ministry until 1944 when it was absorbed into the V2 under the SS, led by Hans Kammler. One flying disc was supposedly built, dubbed the Flugkreisel, which incorporated some of Epp’s designs amongst other, later innovations. Epp allegedly took a grainy photograph of the disc in flight from Prague airport through vegetation as he was approaching it one day in his capacity as consultant. This was one of four unofficial flights, and the aircraft made its first official flight in January 1945. This is supported by Georg Klein, who was supposedly one of the craft’s designers at Prague, and a sworn statement from a test pilot, Georg Langer, after the end of the War. But Felton cautions that all this must be taken with a pinch of salt.

In addition to Epp, Schriever and Habermohl, there was a third project to develop flying discs carried on at the airport. This was supposedly a joint German-Italian programme under Richard Miethe and the Italian professor Giuseppe Belluzzo. It’s existence is also supported by the testimony of the staff involved, but these could be lying. There are designs for such an aircraft dating from the Second World War as well as a second photo of a disc in flight, but this could have been planted after the War to add verisimilitude.

In addition to the Germans, other countries were also active developing saucer-shaped craft. These included America with the Vought V-173 ‘Flying Pancake’ and the Vought XF5U. The German projects were abandoned 15th April 1945 as the Red Army closed in on Prague. The designs were packed up and taken away and the vehicles themselves taken out of their hangars and burned. Schriever later set himself up as an inventor, also working as a trucker for the occupying Allies to support himself. In 1948 his workshop was burgled and his materials on flying discs were stolen. He claimed he was approached by the western intelligence agencies for material on flying discs, but refused to cooperate. He officially died in 1953, but people who knew him later claimed they had seen him alive in the ’60s. Epp continued working on flying discs, and claimed he had built a flying model in 1946, and continued flying them into the 1950s. He also wrote about Nazi flying discs and appeared on German television talking about them. He claims that he approached the Americans with his ideas, but was rebuffed. He married, and briefly settled in East Germany, returning to West Germany in 1959. He applied for a patent, but this was blocked by the Americans for ten years. This conflicts with what is known about the American interest in Nazi technology, such as Operation Paperclip, the programme that saw the transfer of the V2 scientists and personnel to America to continue their rocket research.

Felton speculates that the Americans were interested in flying disc designs, as the Miethe disc resembles an aircraft designed by the British engineer, John Frost, called ‘Project Y’. The Miethe disc contained an internal, rotating jet engine. It was launched from a ramp. For its undercarriage, it used skids like the Komet rocket plane. ‘Project Y’, which looks rather spade-like, was dubbed ‘the Flying Manta’ and developed by Avro Canada, and it was rumoured that Miethe helped with the project. Frost had previously worked for De Havilland in Britain, developing the swept-wing, tailless De Havilland DH108 Swallow. He migrated to Canada in 1947, where he helped to create the CF-100 jet fighter, joining the Special Project Group set up in Avro Canada in 1952. This was set up to develop a VTOL aircraft which could be used after the destruction of airports in a nuclear war. The result was the VZ-9 Avrocar. This used a single turbo rotor to produce lift and thrust. It had difficulty going any higher than 3 feet off the ground, and the project was cancelled in 1961 when the American Air Force, which had supplied the funding, pulled the plug.

The similarities between these projects and those of the Germans may be coincidental, but they allow Felton to suggest the following conclusions:

1. If Miethe and the Germans were involved in the Avrocar, then its failure shows that they were unable to make their own aircraft fly.
2. Even if the Canadian project had no input from the Germans, it still faced some of the same problems. Its failure is therefore odd if the Germans, with less resources and knowledge, had been successful years before.
3. The existence of the Avrocar indicates that the Americans had not captured a Nazi saucer about the time of the Roswell crash, for the reason that if the Americans had, why was the Avrocar a failure? It also shows that UFOs were not American. Here the video shows a clip of Airforce General Sandford talking about UFOs. He states that they have received 3,000 sightings, the great bulk of which could be adequately explained. These are hoaxes, misidentified aircraft, and meteorological and electrical phenomena. But some sightings were still unexplained and the American air force was still attempting to resolve them. But they were convinced that these sightings showed no pattern or purpose that related to a threat to the US.
4. But did research into flying discs terminate with the Avrocar? The Groom Lake test facility, dubbed Area 51, was active from 1951 and was the place where a series of high-performance military aircraft, including the U2 spy plane, the Blackbird and the stealth fighter, were developed and tested.

Felton also suggests that Nazi disc research could also be entirely fictional and that Epp and co. were lying. This has been turned into a credible story by documentary film-makers, and that flying discs are really a post-War development. As the Nazis experimented with every other form of aircraft, it is credible that some experiments were made. It is not certain, however, if any of these aircraft were ever built of flown. What is certain is that Hitler never flew to a secret Antarctic base in one.

Felton thanks Panzerfux military kits for the use of the photograph of the Miethe disc, and begins his video with the statement that it ‘isn’t going to be like certain kinds of popular TV documentaries, much in vogue at the moment’. This looks like a swipe at some of the programmes on the History Channel, which has run any number of programmes on UFOs. It also has a TV series in which Dr Allen Hynek and a USAF officer try to get at the truth about flying saucers, while von Braun and his team are experimenting with a real one. The first series of the show is out on video, and looks like an attempt to do something vaguely like the X-Files but for the 21st century.

There has been discussion and debate about the possible existence of Nazi flying saucers since the end of the Second World War, and this reached a peak in the 1990s when W.A. Harbinson published Projekt UFO. This concluded that the Nazis really did have flying saucers and that these were now stationed at a secret Nazi base in Antarctica. The Nazis had also created a race of cyborg pilots, surgically altered to fly them and survive the high speeds and dangerous conditions. Kevin McClure and the peeps over at Magonia did some research into these claims, and concluded that they were rubbish. The evidence for some of them is tenuous and contradictory. For example, Giuseppe Belluzzo is also called ‘Bellonzo’ in some of these accounts. Some of the people pushing these stories were neo-Nazis, and it looks like some of the purpose behind their doing so was to keep alive the myth that the Nazis were super-scientists far in advance of the Allies. I’m extremely doubtful about this. The Germans had excellent scientists and engineers, thanks to the Prussian educational system set up in the 19th century. But their scientists and engineers faced some of the problems of official apathy ours did. Ohain, the genius behind the German jet aircraft, was also repeatedly turned down by the German air force and aviation authorities, just as Frank Whittle, the British jet inventor, was over here. Hitler was also initially convinced that the V2 was going to be a failure due to a recurring dream he had of the machine falling over and exploding. His opposition was only reversed after the Peenemunde team invited him to see the progress they had been making in its development.

And then there’s the very far-fetched story put out in videos like the one in which the Nazis developed real, space-travelling flying saucers from mediumistic messages telepathically received from Aldebaran. In my opinion, this is complete nonsense. I was always sceptical of the idea that the Nazis developed flying discs, but it looks like there may be more evidence for them than I thought.

If they were developed, however, I think they’re far more likely to have been aircraft like the Flying Pancake, Project Y and Avrocar than highly advanced, high performance vehicles or spacecraft.

More Lies and Disinformation about Roswell: Crash Hoaxed with Victims of Nazi and Japanese Human Experiments

There’s some very nasty lies – at least, I sincerely hope they’re lies – being put about by someone about the notorious Roswell UFO crash. This was the incident in 1947 when a UFO supposedly crashed on Mac Brazell’s ranch in Roswell, New Mexico. The US army came to investigate and collect the debris. The USAF then released a statement by Major Quantanilla that they had recovered a ‘flying disc’. This story was then changed the next day, or a few days later, to a tale that they had in fact recovered a weather balloon, with Quantanilla shown holding up its foil remains. That, more or less, is what is known for sure. However, local people continued to believe very strongly that an alien space vehicle had crashed near their town. In 1980 Charles Berlitz and another researcher published a book claiming that this was the true. This was followed by even more books claiming that not only had a UFO crashed, but alien bodies had been recovered and removed to Wright-Patterson AFB for analysis and dissection. There was also one alien survivor, who was also taken by the Air Force. This in turn spawned the infamous Alien autopsy hoax video created by pop producer Ray Santilli and shown around the world. Which in turn inspired the British SF comedy, Alien Autopsy, starring those lovable funsters Ant and Dec, now appearing on Britain’s Got Talent.

Since then there have been a number of theories and highly dubious claims about what really happened at Roswell. And one of these stories is extremely nasty, and, in my view, grossly offensive. It’s that the crash was a deliberate fake, using children or handicapped adults, who had been experimented upon by Nazi, Japanese, Russian and American scientists, as part of a Cold War plot.

Annie Jacobsen and the Joe Rogan Experience

A few days ago I discovered this video from the Joe Rogan Experience, put up on YouTube on 18th May 2019. In it, Rogan, the host, talks to the journo Annie Jacobsen, about the claims in her new book that American scientists working for the military surgically altered children to look like aliens as part of a Cold War campaign of disinformation against the Soviets. The Russians had supposedly tried to fake a UFO encounter using children mutilated by the Nazis, and the Americans were experimenting to see how the Russians did it.

Rogan’s sceptical about the whole tale. He states that he knows people in the armed forces, and they will spin stories to get people going. And I share Rogan’s scepticism. This seems to be simply the latest version of a series of claims that the crash was faked using children operated upon by the Nazis, Japanese and Russians.

Redfern’s Account of the Russian Hoax Landing

A few days ago the Magonia website published my review of Nick Redfern’s Flying Saucers from the Kremlin: UFOs, Russian Meddling, Soviet Spies & Cold War Secrets. In it, Redfern discusses similar claims made by Jacobsen in an earlier book, published in 2011, Area 51. Based on information supplied by an anonymous informant, she claims that the Roswell Crash was a failed attempt to fake a UFO landing by the-then dictator of the USSR, Joe Stalin. The flying saucer was based on the tailless aircraft designed by the Nazi aeroengineers, the Horten brothers. The aliens were really children surgically altered by the Nazi doctor and war criminal, Josef Mengele. The mysterious hieroglyphs seen on some of the saucer remains was really Cyrillic, the Russian alphabet. Jacobsen doesn’t name her source, but another investigator, Tony Bragaglia, claims that he was Alfred O’Donnell, an elite engineer from EG&G, the leading designer and contractor of federal classified facilities in the US. Redfern then states that he was told practically the same story from a former employee of Area 51, which he published in his 2010 book, The NASA Conspiracies. This source claimed that physically altered people had been flown from Russia to the US aboard a bizarre-looking aircraft in order to convince Americans that their country was being invaded by aliens.

Redfern and Japanese Human Experiments at Roswell

In an earlier version of this tale, also published by Redfern five years earlier, the object that crashed at Roswell was a massive balloon based on Japanese technology, which carried a manned glider. This contained a pilot, and a group of handicapped Japanese. Suffering from diseases such as dwarfism and progeria – rapid aging – they had been brought to the US from the Japanese Unit 731, the infamous Japanese military unit responsible for experiments on humans. These experiments were every bit as sick and horrific as Mengele’s and the Nazis’. A little while ago one of the Horror blogs reviewed a film someone had made about the Unit’s atrocities in Japanese-occupied China and Mongolia during the Second World War. The film claimed to be recreations of real experiments. From reading the review, I decided it was definitely one to miss. Apparently the victims of the Roswell and similar crashes were being used as guinea pigs to assess the effects of exposure to high altitude and radiation.

Redfern’s book, Body Snatchers in the Desert: the Horrible Truth at the Heart of the Roswell Story (Paraview Pocket Books 2005), was reviewed by Magonia in issue 89, August 2005. Their review concluded that it wasn’t a story that should be accepted or rejected out of hand, but was worth the attention of properly qualified reporters and investigators, and would gain in stature if someone, particularly outside Ufology, would come forward to corroborate it. Or if a whistleblower also came forward, and they brought with them evidence and documentation.

The Magonia article notes that there were unethical experiments conducted by the American state, like the MKUltra drug experiments and the infamous Tuskeegee syphilis experiments on Black sharecroppers. They also mention here the scandal of the British state sending ‘orphaned’ children to be used as slave labour in Canada and Australia. However these conspiracies are backed up by genuine evidence and documentation. But there’s none here. Only people walking up to Redfern at UFO conferences. Magonia says of this

Assuming that these people exist and are who they say they are, then the fact the people on two continents approach Redfern with more or less similar stories suggests either that rumours along these lines have been around for some time and are being ussed as the basis of stories, that the stories are to some degree at least true, or that Redfern is being set up by someone or other. 

My guess is that they’re either just rumours, which people are turning into stories, or that Redfern and Jacobsen have been set up.

The Problem of Age and Memory

In the above interview, Rogan does ask Jacobsen if the people telling her these tales weren’t lying. She replies that her informant was a 95 year-old man, who broke down crying in front of his wife of 65 years, because he was so ridden with guilt at his complicity in the atrocity. She asks him in turn how this could happen if the story wasn’t true.

The problem with this is the same that Magonia also pointed out affected the testimony of other witnesses to the supposed Roswell crash, people who believed they’d seen alien bodies. They were very elderly, sometimes quite frail, and the family of one man said that his mind and memory were prone to deceive him. It’s quite possible that this has happened here and that the whole story is a confabulation by a man, who is clearly upset and disturbed about something in his career, but whose mind has constructed a false story about why. On the other hand, it could also very well be that this entire story is simply malign twaddle dreamed up by someone. It could be the government trying to hide a genuine mystery, or it could simply be private citizens laughing at the gullibility of the public, who have somehow pulled this bloke into their fantasies.

The Weekly World News and the Nazi Saucer Myth

These tales also seem to resemble and draw on a version of the Nazi saucer myth published in the Weekly World News on 27th January 1981. The Weekly World News was an American supermarket tabloid newspaper, and gave us such brilliant investigative reports such as ‘Mom was bigfoot, says beastie man’. This reported the claim of Olav Meyer, a German geologist living in Seville, Spain, that the UFOs were developed by the Nazis, but not actually used because Hitler preferred the V2. The article claimed that this had been corroborated by another journalist and investigator, Christof Friedrich, of Toronto. According to Friedrich, the Germans were working on flying saucers, but were unable to develop them because of a shortage of raw materials. Friedrich also said that he had learned from Major Donald Keyhoe that the Americans had seen troops into Germany to recover the saucer scientists, but that they had escaped to Russia instead. Both Meyer and Friedrich cited a book, published in the 1950s by Rudolph Lazar, which supposedly showed the Nazis were developing flying saucers.

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=1O8DAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

Lazar’s book is notorious. Although the WWN article claims that Lazar was a scientist, he was really a former German army officer. His book was about supposed German super weapons developed during the War, which included flying saucers. It’s one of the major sources for the Nazi saucer myth, which returned once again to haunt Ufology back in the 1990s. Apart from ordinary people, who have been taken by this rubbish, the myth seems to be pushed by Nazis trying to create some kind of spurious glamour about the Third Reich. As it developed, the Nazi saucer squadron was supposed to have escaped the allies, establishing a secret base out in the Canadian arctic. They then moved down to Antarctica, which is why the Americans also have a base down there. The video UFO Secrets of the Third Reich, produced by Royal Atlantis Films in the 1990s, also claimed that they were built following instructions channelled through a medium from an alien civilisation around the star Aldebaran. The Nazi saucer myth also formed the basis for the SF comedy, The Iron Sky, in which a female American president, who resembles Sarah Palin, starts a war with a Nazi colony on the Moon. Magonia published a series of articles attacking the Nazi saucer myth. Kevin McClure, a long-time investigator of the paranormal, also published a very well researched piece very effectively demolishing it.

I find the Nazi saucer myth vile and distasteful, if not dangerous for the way it seeks to promote and glamorize the Nazis. And the stories of maimed and disfigured people used to impersonate aliens seems to me to be a kind of blasphemy against the real victims of Nazi and Japanese experimentation.

I have no idea whether these stories are some kind of government/ state disinformation campaign, or simply private hoaxers. But I don’t doubt for a single minute that they’re lies that should be discarded. Until someone involved comes forward bringing real evidence and supporting documents, at least.

Ron Paul, Racism, Conspiracy Theories and Utter Looniness

One of the pieces I’ve reblogged from Still Laughing At UKIP a short while ago is a piece noting that John Gill, the admin of UKIP’s Facebook page, is a fan of far-right Republican presidential candidate, Ron Paul. The article provides detailed information on just how far-right Paul is, with friends and political collaborators in a host of Nazi and racist organisations, including the Klan, the National Alliance – by far the largest American nationalist organisation – the National Socialist Workers Party and the racist website, Stormfront. It also has links to several websites giving even more information on Paul and his noxious connections to the racist right.

One of these is to an article in the liberal journal, Mother Jones, listing some of the extreme and offensive opinions expressed in Paul’s bulletins, which he issued from 1975 onwards. Paul tried to disown some of them, by saying that he’d never read them until after they were issued, but as he’s listed on them as ‘editor’, this seems unlikely. The views are what you’d expect from a pillar of the American far right: racist, homophobic and with a venomous hatred of any type of welfare and its recipients, whom he views as simply lazy. He also has a line in barking conspiracy theories. Two of his assertions stood out in particular to me. These were

1) AIDS was a secret experiment that escaped from Fort Dettrick, and

2) 95 per cent of Black American men in DC are criminals.

AIDS: The Germ Warfare Experiment

The idea that AIDS was secret germ warfare experiment emerged in the 1990s. Kevin McClure, a long time weird watcher, who has edited a series of small press magazines since the 1970s covering all aspect of the paranormal and alternative spirituality, tackled this one twenty years or so ago in an edition of his small press mag The Wild Places. From the evidence, it looks like this story was a piece of Soviet disinformation in retaliation for the American line that the KGB was behind the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II, rather than a group of Turkish Fascists called the Grey Wolves.

A medical doctor writing in the American conspiracy magazine, Steamshovel Press, noted that the story was believed by large numbers of Black Americans. It was especially plausible to them, he pointed out, because of the Tuskeegee experiments in the 1930s. This was a programme in which a group of Black share croppers were given syphilis and refused treatment in order to examine the progress of the disease. Their funerals were, however, paid for by the state. The American government also conducted mind control experiments on American servicemen and unwitting civilian personnel. Again, those victimised were the poor, and particularly Blacks. Paul believed it because he’s a Nazi who’s paranoid about his government. Blacks, on the other hand, had every reason to believe it, because experiments like it had been inflicted on them.

Locking Up Black Americans, Just in Case They Commit Crime

As for Paul’s assertion that 95 per cent of Black males in Washington D.C. were crims, this largely stemmed from his own racism and bizarre belief in the absolute rectitude of his bonkers views. According to him, the only Black men, who weren’t criminals were those, who agreed with him in wishing to end the welfare state and affirmative action and anti-segregation programmes. It’s bizarre, but unfortunately, Paul’s not alone. There are plenty of others, who have similar opinions. An American friend of mine told me about one Republican politico, who decided that most crime was committed by young Black men between 18 and 30. He therefore had a simple solution to solving America’s crime rate: lock up every Black American male between those ages.

Another Republican politico had a similar, though less severe suggestion. He wanted everyone to be locked up in prison for three days on their 18th birthday, in order to deter them from a life of crime. With these, you really are dealing with the part of the Republican Party rationality forgot.

Ernst Zundl and the Nazi Flying Saucers

One of the links also takes you to a website, which details Paul’s links to Ernst Zundl. Zundl’s a notorious Canadian Nazi, who’s been publishing Holocaust Denial rubbish for decades. Back in the 1990s he was one of the talking heads on a Channel 4 documentary about the designer of gas chambers for the American prison system. Sponsored by various American Neo-Nazi organisations, this particular expert went off to examine the surviving gas chambers at Auschwitz. He concluded that there was no evidence to support the assertion that they were gas chambers. A Jewish researcher was also featured, who knocked down every piece of evidence this particular individual used in his argument.

Along with promoting Holocaust Denial, Zundl has also published stuff claiming that UFOs were really super-secret spacecraft created by Nazi scientists. One version of this claims that these ships were built under scientific instructions from an advanced technological civilisation on planets orbiting the star Aldebaran. See the video, UFO Secrets of the Third Reich, produced by Royal Atlantis Films. Kevin McClure and the anti-Ufologists over at Magonia debunked the Nazi saucer myth about a decade ago. It’s pernicious, bonkers stuff, as some of it is produced by Nazis keen to keep the myth of a technologically advanced Third Reich alive. Zundl, however, although he publishes it, doesn’t appear to believe it. He has apparently said that he only publishes it because it makes money.

This really tells you all you really need to know about Ron Paul and the really, really lunatic fringe of the American political system he represents: vindictive, racist and with a strong desire to lock anybody and everybody up, even if they’re innocent of any crime, because, well, just in case.

And these are the people John Gill admires.