Rudolf Lusar and the Nazi disc claims

Rudolf Lusar and the Nazi disc claims

Date	1958
People	Rudolf Lusar, Rudolf Schriever, Stefan Possony, Horten brothers, Nick Cook
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 60
Year	1958 in UFO history
Timeline	1958 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	8

Rudolf Lusar was the author of Die deutschen Waffen und Geheimwaffen des 2. Weltkrieges und ihre Weiterentwicklung ("German weapons and secret weapons of the Second World War and their further development"). The book was published in West Germany in the mid-1950s and in English in 1959 as German Secret Weapons of the Second World War.^[1] Alongside a survey of German armaments from the automatic rifle to atomic research, it claimed that German and Italian engineers had built and flown "flying saucers" during the war. It named Rudolf Schriever, Klaus Habermohl, Richard Miethe and the Italian Giuseppe Belluzzo as the designers.^[1][8] The book drew on stories already circulating since 1950, and it became a key source for the later legend of Nazi flying saucers.^[2][8] According to Michael Shellenberger's 2024 timeline for Congress, the U.S. Air Force set up a special study group under Stefan Possony in 1958 to analyse the book.^[8] None of the specific disc claims has been corroborated.^[2][8]

The book and its author

• Lusar. Shellenberger describes Lusar as a Nazi-era major who commanded a German Army technical unit in the Second World War.^[8] A 1957 Reuters report called him the wartime head of the Technical Arms Department of the German War Ministry.^[1] The Open Library description is more guarded, calling the author "a man calling himself 'Major Rudolf Lusar'".^[1]
• Publication. Open Library dates the German edition to 1956 and lists two English editions of 1959, from Spearman and from the Philosophical Library.^[1]
  • A Reuters story datelined Munich, 17 February 1957, reported the book's revelations as news "today". It was printed in the Washington Post on 18 February 1957 under the headline "Hitler's Arms Chief Tells of Plan to Bomb U.S. By Super-Plane, Says Reich Had Flying Saucers".^[1]
  • The earlier version of this article dated the German book to 1957. The sources read here give 1956, with press coverage in February 1957.^[1]
• Contents. The book covered "the whole range of German armaments", with photographs.^[1]
  • According to Shellenberger's summary, Lusar claimed German scientists had worked on jet engines and thermal imaging a decade before the West, as well as directed-energy weapons, sound weapons and flying saucers.^[8]
  • Reuters highlighted a bomber said to be able to attack the United States and return without refuelling. It added that Lusar said such weapons fed Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels's belief that a "wonder weapon" would turn the war at the last minute.^[1]

The disc claims

• Designers and sites. Lusar said Germany began developing saucer technology in 1941.^[8]
  • The work involved the scientists Schriever, Habermohl and Miethe, and the Italian engineer Belluzzo, whom Shellenberger spells both "Bellonzo" and "Belluzzo".^[8]
  • Development took place at Breslau, now in Poland, and at Prague.^[8]
• Performance. The figures differ between accounts.
  • In Shellenberger's summary, the craft once reached an altitude of 12,400 metres and a speed of 2,000 km/h.^[8]
  • The 1957 Reuters report said the saucers, designed by three German engineers and an Italian, were 138 feet across. It said the first flew on 14 February 1945 at Prague, climbing above 40,000 feet and reaching 1,250 miles an hour.^[1]
• Post-war fate. Lusar claimed that Miethe was taken to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in the United States. He said Habermohl was captured by the Soviet Union and put to work in a design bureau east of Moscow.^[8]

Where the stories came from

• Wartime and early Cold War rumours. During the war, strange sightings over Europe, including the foo fighters, were often thought to be new German weapons. Germany had already fielded the V-1, the V-2 and the Me 262 jet fighter.^[2]
  • In 1946 the ghost rockets over Scandinavia were thought by some to be Soviet tests of captured German missiles.^[2]
  • After Kenneth Arnold's 1947 sighting, staff of Project Sign noted that the flying-wing designs of the Horten brothers resembled some UFO reports.^[2]
  • Edward Ruppelt later wrote that radical German aircraft and missiles under development at the war's end were "the only known craft" that could even approach the performance UFO witnesses described.^[2]
• Belluzzo, 1950. The earliest mass-media claim of German flying saucers seems to have been an article in the Italian newspaper Il Giornale d'Italia in early 1950. Its author was Professor Giuseppe Belluzzo, an Italian scientist and a former Minister of National Economy under Mussolini.^[2]
  • He wrote that "types of flying discs were designed and studied in Germany and Italy as early as 1942".^[2]
  • He also suggested that "some great power is launching discs to study them".^[2]
• Schriever's interviews. In the same month, the German technician Rudolf Schriever (1909–1953) told Der Spiegel he had designed a craft driven by a circular plane of rotating turbine blades 15 metres (49 ft) across.^[2]
  • He said he and his team had worked on it at BMW's Prague works until April 1945, when he fled.^[2]
  • His designs and a model were stolen from his workshop in Bremerhaven-Lehe in 1948, and he believed Czech agents had built the craft for "a foreign power".^[2]
  • In a second Spiegel interview in October 1952 he said instead that the plans were stolen on 14 May 1945 from a farm near Regen where he was hiding. There are other discrepancies between the two interviews too.^[2]
  • Shellenberger also mentions Schriever telling West German media in 1950 that a flying machine he had worked on at a Heinkel facility at Marienehe would have changed the course of the war.^[8]
  • After the war Schriever drove supply trucks for the U.S. Army, while telling reporters that foreign delegates kept making him offers for his wartime work.^[2]
  • The earlier version of this article dated the first interview to March 1950. The sources read here say only that it came in the same month as Belluzzo's early-1950 article.
• Klein, 1953. In 1953 Avro Canada announced that it was developing the disc-shaped VZ-9-AV Avrocar, with an estimated speed of 300 mph. The German engineer Georg Klein then claimed that such designs dated from the Nazi era.^[2] He described two types:
  • a non-rotating disc built at Breslau by the V-2 engineer Richard Miethe. Klein said it was captured by the Soviets, while Miethe fled to the United States via France and ended up working for Avro;^[2]
  • a disc built by Schriever and Habermohl in Prague, with a ring of moving turbine blades around a fixed cockpit. Klein said he had watched its first crewed flight on 14 February 1945, when it climbed to 12,400 metres in three minutes and reached 2,200 km/h in level flight.^[2]
  Lusar's figures and his 14 February 1945 date closely match Klein's story.^[1][2][8]
• Fedden. The British aeronautical engineer Roy Fedden, chief of a wartime technical mission to Germany, said in 1945 that if the Germans had prolonged the war a few more months, the Allies would have faced "entirely new and deadly developments in air warfare".^[2]

What checks have found

• No corroboration. None of the core claims has been confirmed.^[2]
  • No corroborating evidence exists for Miethe's claim to have worked on the V-2.^[2]
  • Klein's story that Miethe escaped from Breslau in a Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet rocket plane would have been impossible.^[2]
  • "There is no evidence that Habermohl even existed."^[2]
  • Schriever's claim to have worked for Heinkel as a test pilot and engineer in 1940–41 has never been corroborated, according to the Wikipedia account.^[2]
• The Pretty memo, 1947. On 16 December 1947, Army Lieutenant Colonel Harry H. Pretty wrote to the Deputy Director of Intelligence in Berlin. He reported that the aircraft designers Reimar and Walter Horten had been found in Göttingen. Although they had designed the Horten flying wing, an investigation had found that no flying saucer design "ever existed nor was projected by any of the German air research institutions".^[7] Shellenberger notes that this finding was never presented to Congress in an open forum. See Pretty memo on the Horten brothers (1947).^[7]
  • The earlier version of this article described the memo as German aviation experts saying no saucer design had existed. In fact it was a U.S. Army officer reporting the results of an investigation.^[7]
• The Air Force study, 1958. Shellenberger says the Air Force commissioned a special studies group within Air Force Intelligence, headed by Stefan Possony, to analyse Lusar's book in 1958.^[8]
  • The earlier version of this article added that an Air Technical Intelligence Center memo citing Possony found nothing in its files showing that Germany or the Soviet Union had built such discs.
  • That memo is not covered in the sources read here.
• Nick Cook's research. The aviation writer Nick Cook examined Lusar's claims in The Hunt for Zero Point. He records being told that in the trade the story is known as "the Legend".^[3] Shellenberger summarises Cook as finding "mixed corroboration".^[8]
  • Schriever and Belluzzo did exist. Shellenberger, citing Cook, says Schriever worked for Heinkel, maker of the He 280, the world's first jet fighter. That conflicts with the Wikipedia account's statement that Schriever's Heinkel work was never corroborated.^[2][8]
  • Belluzzo had been an industry minister under Mussolini and wrote of disc-shaped "flying bomb" technology passed to Germany.^[8]
  • Cook found no corroboration for Lusar's claims about Miethe going to Wright-Patterson or Habermohl going to the Soviet Union.^[8]
  • Cook did find U.S. Army Air Forces files on the German air force's secret weapons work at the Air Force Historical Research Agency at Maxwell Air Force Base, with another copy at the Office of Air Force History at Bolling.^[8]
  • He found a memo from Lieutenant Colonel A. R. Sullivan Jr. of the Office of Technical Services, which handled captured German documents. It said "balls of fire" and foo fighters had no connection with anything OTS found in Germany.^[8]
  • Yet raw OTS reports, Cook found, described a facility at Brunswick working on radio-controlled craft, one in Vienna experimenting with directed-energy weapons, and one in Stuttgart using electromagnetic effects to stop vehicle engines. Cook suggests Sullivan's report may have been falsified to shut down further inquiry.^[8]
  • The earlier version of this article dated Cook's book to 2001. The sources read here do not give its date.
• Vesco's version. The Italian author Renato Vesco, citing post-war Italian sources, told a different story from Lusar.^[8]
  • Vesco described a radio-controlled "Feuerball", developed at Oberammergau in Bavaria, said to disrupt Allied aircraft with intense electromagnetic fields.^[8]
  • He described a larger "Kugelblitz" said to have been built in an underground complex in Thuringia, both shaped like a tortoise shell.^[8]
  • Vesco said his information came from British and Anglo-American intelligence (BIOS and CIOS) files. Others with access to those records say they contain no evidence of either craft.^[8]

The later legend

• Fringe literature. By the 1960s fringe authors were tying Nazi UFOs to the occult or to aliens. Names such as Haunebu, Vril, Feuerball, Kugelblitz and Reichsflugscheibe circulated as supposed code names.^[2]
  • German UFO literature often rests on some real history: the 1938 Antarctic expedition to New Swabia, and genuine research such as rocketry, Viktor Schauberger's engines, the Horten flying wings and the Arthur Sack A.S.6 circular-winged aircraft.^[2]
  • The earlier version of this article said historians regard the stories as post-war legends built from wartime rumours, a few real experimental aircraft and later embellishment. That description fits the sources read here, but they do not attribute it to historians by name.^[2]
• Zündel. From the 1970s the German Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel used his Samisdat Publishers to spread the claim that flying saucers were Nazi secret weapons launched from an underground base in Antarctica.^[2]
  • He even sold places, for $9,999, on an expedition to find the polar entrance to the hollow Earth.^[2]
  • Some who interviewed him said he privately admitted it was a deliberate hoax for publicity, though he still defended it as late as 2002.^[2]
  • The earlier version of this article called Zündel a "neo-Nazi publisher". The source describes him as a Holocaust denier who ran Samisdat Publishers.
• Later variations. Later writers added the Vril Society, after Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier's 1960 book The Morning of the Magicians, and Miguel Serrano's "esoteric Hitlerism". Cook himself helped popularise the claimed Nazi device Die Glocke, which mainstream reviewers have dismissed as fiction or hoax.^[2]
• Popular culture. In 2018 the model maker Revell withdrew a "Haunebu II" kit, and apologised, after criticism that its packaging presented the craft as historical.^[2]

People and topics

• U.S. Air Force — The U.S. military service that ran the official UFO projects from 1947 to 1969.
• Unidentified flying object — An object in the sky that can't be identified; the older term for UAP.
• Rudolf Lusar — German author of a 1957 book on secret weapons that popularized the Nazi flying disc story.
• Bernard Schriever — Air Force general who led the ballistic missile program and Air Force Systems Command.
• Air Technical Intelligence Center — The Air Force intelligence center at Wright-Patterson that housed Project Blue Book.
• Stefan Possony — Air Force intelligence analyst cited on German and Soviet disc claims.
• Horten brothers — German aircraft designers of the Ho 229 jet flying wing, investigated in 1947 as a possible source of the discs.
• Nick Cook — Jane's Defence Weekly aviation editor and author of The Hunt for Zero Point.
• The Hunt for Zero Point — Nick Cook's 2001 book on secret anti-gravity research.

On the Timeline

• NATO science grants and anti-gravity claim (1958) — NATO begins supporting anti-gravity research through its science grants.
• John Lilly and the alleged hypnosis project (1958) — An alleged Air Force project used drugs and hypnosis; one participant believed he contacted aliens.

See every 1958 event on the UAP Timeline →

Further reading

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “Nazi UFOs”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.