Nazi UFOs: The Legends and Myths of Hitler’s Flying Saucers in WW2

By S.D. Tucker

Nazi UFOs tells the strange tale of how, following the first alleged flying saucer sightings made in the USA in 1947, a series of fantasists and neo-fascists came forward to create a media myth that the Nazis may have invented these incredible craft as a means for winning the Second World War, a plan which was tantalisingly close to completion before the Allies conquered Berlin in 1945. Today, the fantasy of Nazi UFOs has grown into an entire mythology in books, on TV and online. Did Germany back-engineer anti-gravity craft, and even a full-blown time-machine, by stripping technology from a crashed alien saucer? Did the SS secretly invent ‘Green’ technology for use in their star ship engines, and was this planet-saving discovery later suppressed at the behest of a sinister Big Oil conspiracy? Did Himmler try to develop ‘lightning weapons’ for use in aerial combat? By contrasting the fake military-industrial pseudo-histories of Nazi UFO theorists with details of real-life Nazi aerospace achievements, the author demonstrates both how this modern-day mythology came about and how it cannot possibly be more than fractionally true. For the first time, this fake ‘alternative military history’ is laid out in full. This book features an appealing cast of con-men and spies, complete madmen, real-life Nazis and completely made-up ones, operating right across the globe from South America to wartime Europe and Japan. A good example may be the ‘mad professor’, Viktor Schauberger, who actually genuinely did manage to gain a personal audience with Adolf Hitler in order to try and convince him that he had discovered and then exploited some amazing new source of natural ‘free energy’ which could make objects (such as saucers, in the opinion of some) float. Hitler dismissed his plan, but it does nonetheless show how close some bizarre schemes came to being implemented in Nazi Germany.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9781399071574

Book preview

Introduction

Jerry-Built Saucers?

War is the father of all things.

Adolf Hitler, German politician and inventor of flying saucers

Beginning in 1946, the year after he had supposedly shot himself dead through the skull in a Berlin bunker to escape the imminent advance of the Red Army, no less an individual than Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) began mailing out a long-running series of letters to persons living in the rural eastern US states of Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia. These letters – in which Adolf strangely billed himself as ‘the Furrier’ rather than ‘the Führer’, or else allowed the name of his new wife, ‘Eva Hitler’, or his latest Chief of Staff, ‘General Kannengeiser’, to appear in their evil master’s stead – came soliciting donations for a cunning new Nazi plot to enslave the US, the world and finally the galaxy itself.

It turned out Hitler had been taken alive after all, and had then somehow escaped and fled across the Atlantic to the US, from where his latest communications, written in the kind of barely literate English you might expect from a non-native speaker, made their recipients a tempting offer: in return for cash donations in the form of postal orders, Adolf would consider pushing General Kannengeiser aside and making each donor his official ‘Furrier #2’. As Hitler would accept individual sums as low as $5 for his cause, this represented quite a bargain.

Hiding out in a top-secret location somewhere in the enemy heartland, Hitler had established no fewer than 116 underground factories across Kentucky and Idaho, with his 36,000-strong army of German revolutionaries slowly but surely digging tunnels towards Washington where he would later establish his ‘new kingdom’. Within these subterranean lairs, Adolf’s scientists were busily manufacturing atom bombs and an indestructible fleet of ‘invisible spaceships which make no sound’ with which to defeat the US. If those in receipt of the Furrier’s begging letters had not already seen or heard such wonders buzzing through their local skies, then this only showed just how invisible and silent these craft were – the ideal vehicles, Hitler maintained, to launch a ‘surprise attack’ on the White House.

Authorities were first tipped off about this rebellion when Adolf’s most generous supporter, a 70-year-old Virginia stonemason with the good, solid old Teutonic name of G.A. Huber, dropped dead. Huber’s family did not expect to inherit much from their apparently penniless relative, living as he did in a pathetic wooden shack. Yet the reason Huber was so destitute was because he had blown his $10,000 life savings on aiding Hitler’s future coup. A 1947 Gallup poll showed 45 per cent of Americans believed Hitler was still alive, with newspapers full of wild tales to that effect, and Huber, described as being in ‘poor physical and mental health’, had taken it upon himself to investigate the fugitive Führer’s whereabouts personally. After Huber’s death, around 200 handwritten begging letters from Hitler were found in his hovel, together with stacks of money order receipts filed away as proof of Huber’s purchase of the eventual role of Deputy-Furrier.

Alerted to the existence of this looming totalitarian plot, a heroic postal inspector named W.W. Lewis managed to lure Adolf into a post office in Middlesboro, Kentucky, to pick up a vital new money order worth as much as $15 towards conquering the universe. As soon as Hitler cashed the cheque on 11 August 1956, he was arrested, despite the dictator’s shrewd disguise – that of a 61-year-old black man, surely the last identity you would ever expect to have been assumed by history’s most notorious white supremacist. Once safely behind bars, the dark-skinned prisoner had to admit he was not the Furrier at all, but a former coalminer and part-time Baptist mountain-preacher turned mail-order fraudster named William Henry Johnson (b.1895).

Hearing rumours Hitler was hiding in Kentucky, G.A. Huber had met with Johnson, who lied that he knew Adolf himself, offering to become a ‘go-between’ linking the two men. Lined up to be ‘Furrier #3’ behind Huber was the Tennessee handyman Charlie Brown who, despite his name, had hardly been sending Johnson peanuts. Around $1,000 had been squeezed from Charlie by promising him a ‘royal palace’ and his ‘choice among … virgins’, with a forced child-bride to be sourced from the families of the future Nazi diplomatic corps once Washington had been obliterated. So eager was Charlie for his reward that, when contacted by Inspector Lewis, he had only 8 cents and a single can of beans left to live off, having just mailed Hitler his final $20. Adolf was so impressed by Brown’s sacrifices that he wrote to Huber admitting he may make Charlie ‘assistant world-ruler [alongside yourself] for his bravery act last week (in sending me money)’.

Sometimes, Brown was brave enough to send Hitler other things via the US Postal Service too, specifically a natty sports-coat and pair of size 11 white shoes, it being ‘necessary for Adolf to dress sporty so he won’t be recognised’ when goose-stepping around town. Yet Hitler also had use of an ‘invisible cab’ to go with his invisible spaceships, so you would have thought no camouflage was necessary. Charlie very much wanted to meet Adolf, but this would blow the demonstrably non-white Johnson’s cover, even if he donned full Nazi field-uniform and a fake moustache, and every time a rendezvous was arranged, it was irritatingly thwarted at the last moment by Adolf falling suddenly ill or becoming trapped in his room by FBI agents. However, as Hitler’s future close assistant Charlie Brown was black too, perhaps the Nazi Party was now an equal opportunities employer. Furrier #1 implied that by taking a German ‘diplomat virgin’ for his wife ‘our coloured friend Brown’ could put a drop of beneficial white Aryan blood into his offspring, thus helping ‘hand down German rulers [to the blacks] to rule their race’.

William Henry Johnson had high hopes for the potentially bottomless nature of both his fellow human beings’ gullibility and their wallets, signing some letters in the neo-Nazi non-name of A. von Boguslowski in apparent mockery. Given that he sometimes slipped up and signed letters in his own real name too, Johnson could easily have been mocked himself. Johnson hoped his captors would prove equally stupid, claiming to legal authorities that, as a top undercover private detective, he had perpetrated the scam at the behest of a group of shadowy Chicago-based intermediaries but that, once he had amassed enough proof, he intended to turn double-agent and warn the FBI about all the hidden Nazi spacecraft factories. However, his story was inconsistent. One time, he said the Chicago firm was headed up by G.A. Huber’s cousins, another time he said he had been recruited on his doorstep by ‘a man named Hoover’, presumably the FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover (1895–1972), who was, illogically, Hitler’s true Deputy-Führer. In court, he showed off a large home-made badge reading ‘Secret Service’, claiming to have graduated from a ‘Chicago Secret Service correspondence school’ for spies, on whose behalf he was tracking Nazis.

When arrested, Johnson had provided a written confession that ‘I am guilty of everythings’, but added he would only admit so if the police guaranteed his case would not make the newspapers, so his Baptist congregation wouldn’t discover their preacher was a criminal. If no such deal was forthcoming, Johnson warned he would have to pretend to be not guilty instead. But as he also confessed he was ‘a poor guilty criminal’ and that if his victims had been ‘crazy enough to send me money, I had been crazy enough to spend it’, it is difficult to see how he could deny culpability. Further armed with the knowledge he had a previous 1951 conviction for postal fraud, a jury took only 15 minutes to find Johnson guilty and Hitler received three concurrent three-year sentences (though not to be served in Landsberg Prison this time) from presiding judge, H. Church Ford – much to the disgust of loyal black Nazi Charlie Brown, who, such was his devotion to the cause, actually testified on the false Führer’s behalf. He was impressed that, after being arrested, Hitler had charitably returned $800 of the $1,000 he had previously stolen to build his space fleet.¹

* * *

The Kentucky Hitler Hoax appears to show that, as early as 1946, a mere year after German defeat, there was already an imaginative connection being made between the ostensibly unconnected fields of Nazism and what we now call UFOs. Actually, however, Johnson’s initial acts of fraud predate the very idea of a UFO as such entirely. The word ‘UFO’ was first used by the newly formed US Air Force (USAF) in the late 1940s and early 1950s, then popularised through Project Blue Book, an official investigation of the subject headed up by USAF Captain Edward J. Ruppelt (1922–59) from 1952 onwards. Blue Book’s dry adoption of the term ‘Unidentified Flying Object’ was intended in a literal non-committal sense, as indicating some unknown item witnessed in the sky, not as a technical-sounding synonym for ‘alien spaceship’, as we tend to presume today. Ruppelt, who claimed personal credit for devising the phrase, hoped it might replace the hitherto ubiquitous label ‘flying saucer’, as the majority of reports investigated by him were not of classic disc-shaped objects at all, and also as a wilfully banal-sounding means of distancing the subject from sensational Hollywood sci-fi b-movies of the era like Earth vs the Flying Saucers and Invasion of the Saucer-Men.²

This earlier term ‘flying saucer’ had gained currency in the immediate wake of the first widely publicised UFO sighting, that made by the private pilot and travelling fire-safety equipment salesman Kenneth Arnold (1915–84) when flying over Washington State’s Cascade Mountains at around 3.00 p.m. on 24 June 1947, on the look out for wreckage of a missing C-46 Marine Corps transport plane. During this search, when ‘the sky and air was as clear as crystal’, Arnold saw ‘a bright flash as if a mirror were reflecting sunlight at me’ bounce off his plane. Towards Mount Rainier, he then spied ‘a chain of nine peculiar aircraft’ flying at ‘a terrific speed’ from which the sun kept reflecting.

These ‘peculiar aircraft’ were the first ever flying saucers. Yet they were not saucers at all. Although Arnold later concluded that UFOs were not machines but shoal-like ‘groups and masses of living organisms’ native to Earth’s upper atmosphere and able to change their shapes and densities at will, his initial thought was that the objects were secret aerial weapons, possibly tail-less jet planes or ‘guided missiles, robot-controlled’. He thought them unmanned, as ‘the human body simply could not stand’ the speed they flew at, estimated initially at 1,200mph. These proto-drones may well have been the work of enemy powers, reasoned Arnold – not Nazis, but Russians.

In a written report to US military authorities, Arnold later warned that ‘used as an instrument of destruction, in combination with our atomic bomb, the effects [of these craft] could destroy life on our planet’. Accordingly, immediately after his sighting Arnold flew to the nearest FBI office in Oregon but found it closed. Unlike secret agents, the news never sleeps, so he instead got warning out to the nation by giving a post-flight interview to reporters Bill Bequette (1917–2011) and Nolan Skiff of the East Oregonian newspaper, talking of having witnessed nine objects whizzing through the sky in an ‘erratic’ high-speed manner compared with being ‘like a saucer would [move] if you skipped it across the water’. If only Arnold had made the more familiar comparison with a pebble being skimmed over a lake, not a saucer, the consequent mess of verbal confusion may not have arisen.

The nine objects were not circular at all, but roughly crescent-shaped, with later sketches resembling Batman’s patented ‘batarang’ device, sprung free from his famous utility belt. In a 26 June radio interview, Arnold preferred to describe them as looking ‘like a pie-plate that was cut in half with a sort of convex triangle in the rear’. Arnold’s initial urgent news was delivered just before presses rolled, however, so his story was written up in a mad rush, before appearing on the newspaper’s front page under the heading ‘Impossible! Maybe, But Seein’ Is Believin’, Says Flier’. And Arnold himself was widely believed; as a responsible self-employed businessman, experienced licensed air rescue pilot, deputy US Marshal and all-round solid citizen, he seemed the very definition of a reliable witness. Unlike his supposedly circular saucers themselves, Arnold seemed much too square and straight to be doubted.

Paraphrasing Arnold’s words in compressed fashion, the East Oregonian fatefully stated that the objects were ‘saucer like’, an evocative phrase understandably taken to mean the aerial phantoms were saucer shaped, which they were not. In a follow-up report on 26 June, Bill Bequette clarified that Arnold had actually described the objects as ‘somewhat bat-shaped’, but the damage was already done. Other newspapers quoted Arnold describing his mystery objects as ‘crescent-shaped’ or ‘half-moon shaped, oval in front and convex in the rear’, but by 27 June the specific phrase ‘flying saucers’ was already in print, coined by several different journalists independently.

Arnold later employed other metaphors to the effect that the objects, which had flown in a kind of reverse-echelon formation like migrating birds, really moved more like ‘speed-boats on rough water, or similar to the tail of a Chinese kite that I once saw blowing in the wind’, but the image had stuck, and so we do not speak of people having seen ‘flying speedboats’ or ‘alien kite-ships’. Arnold also described them as looking ‘boomerang-shaped’ or even ‘tadpole-shaped’, rather suggesting he wasn’t entirely certain quite what he had seen. Nonetheless, in the immediate wake of Arnold’s mis-reported sighting, thousands of witnesses came forward to report spotting their own circular saucers in US skies too, a class of objects conspicuously absent from the popular imagination prior to this date.

Then again, ufology is full of peculiar ambiguities, and it does appear there were a handful of purported sightings of odd disc-shaped things whizzing over the US from April 1947 onwards, from several different states. However, these accounts only gained meaningful publicity in the wake of Arnold’s words, and you would guess some witnesses were re-interpreting what they had seen in light of Arnold’s sighting of 24 June, or else inventing them wholesale. The initial opinion of Arnold on this subsequent copy-cat cascade was sceptical; if this ‘lot of foolishness’ continued at this rate, ‘it wouldn’t be long before there would be one of these things in every garage’.

Maybe so. By 19 August, a Gallup opinion poll showed nine out of ten Americans had heard the phrase ‘flying saucers’, a great rate of brand-name recognition for such a newly launched consumer product. The only known specific pre-1947 verbal comparison of an unknown aerial item to a saucer occurred in 1878 when a Texan farmer, John Martin, reported an orange object ‘the size of a large saucer’ in the sky – but again, Martin did not say it was saucer like in shape at all, only in size. One 1946 Iowa newspaper spoke of what would now be termed a UFO, but which was described at the time as both ‘a great white bird’ and ‘a bomb’, things every bit as dissimilar as a boomerang and a tadpole.³ The term ‘flying saucer’ became so ubiquitous less because of its physical accuracy than because it allowed the public to place their otherwise potentially unrelated and unclassifiable encounters with unusual things in the atmosphere within a convenient and catchy new verbal and conceptual category. By 1948, Arnold was writing an article, ‘The Truth About Flying Saucers’, for the first ever issue of FATE magazine, soon to become the US’ leading paranormal periodical, which came with a hugely inaccurate yet highly striking cover painting showing his plane encountering not flying tadpoles but a pair of giant ‘classic’ flying saucers emerging from within a cloudbank. Arnold could not have objected too much to the mis-representation, as when his article was expanded into book-length form in 1952 as The Coming of the Saucers, this very same illustration was recycled on the dust jacket.⁴ Personally, I have no idea what Kenneth Arnold actually saw that day over the Cascade Mountains, whether mundane or genuinely mysterious. Odd things seen skimming through the skies are not purely a media invention; but flying saucers, strictly speaking, self-evidently are.

* * *

Once Kenneth Arnold had accidentally given birth to the flying saucer, a second new bastard-child was then sired: that of the Nazi flying saucer, a genuine historical – or ahistorical – anachronism. Although Nazi Germany ceased to exist in 1945, flying saucers did not begin to exist until 1947, and so all talk of such things are by definition backwards mental projections. Like the plain vanilla saucers themselves, ones bearing swastikas were also a concocted, media-spawned fantasy; the notion that the Third Reich might have possessed top-secret super weapons which would have been unleashed to wreak anti-gravity, laser spitting death upon a defenceless world had the war only been strung out by Hitler for a few months more was a sci-fi horror story of great potency. As such, it has sold a lot of books, films and newspapers down the years, beginning as quickly as 28 June 1947, only one day after the very term ‘flying saucers’ itself first began troubling the headlines, when a story appeared in the Seattle Times speculatively linking Arnold’s objects with wartime Nazi tech.⁵

Naturally, several con men exploited this fortuitous confluence of media tropes for personal gain during the decade or so following the war, and not only in the US. Rivalling William Henry Johnson’s tale for strangeness was that of the one-time Nazi spy-ring leader Niels Christian Christensen (a cover name stolen from a dead Danish athlete, his real identity being Josef Jacob Johannes Starziczny). Arrested and imprisoned, in 1948 the secret agent disingenuously offered to spill the beans about Arnold’s saucers to his captors. Christensen had been recruited by the Nazi counter-intelligence agency, the Abwehr, and dispatched to Rio de Janeiro in 1941 to establish hidden radio networks transmitting information about British merchant shipping, allowing vessels leaving Brazilian ports to be easily targeted and torpedoed by U-boats. The subsequent sinking of Brazilian-flagged supply ships alongside the British-flagged ones led to a public outcry and police were soon on the look out for German agents.

The careless Christensen made three key mistakes. First, he personally went into a store and ordered a wave-meter part suitable for use only in powerful transmitters of the kind ordinary people would never need. Alerted by the shopkeeper, officers were easily able to trace Christensen due to his second rookie error, that of openly installing a large antenna on the roof of his own house like a big neon sign saying ‘NAZIS ARE HERE’. Thirdly, he wrote himself a helpful list of his fellow conspirators as an aide-memoir, which was discovered during a raid, unravelling the whole spy ring. Arrested, tortured and interrogated, confessions were soon elicited from the Abwehr recruits and sentences handed down, including thirty years behind bars for Christensen himself.

Apprehended in March 1942, the not-so-secret agent was silent until 5 November 1948, when an interview appeared in mass-circulation Rio evening newspaper Diário da Noite, concerning the saucers first seen by Kenneth Arnold the previous summer. The prisoner confirmed these were wartime German creations, radio-controlled drones intended for aerial reconnaissance and anti-aircraft purposes. Being an inventor himself, trained at the University of Breslau with a hundred or so patents to his name, who had used his time in prison to invent a new form of ‘dehydrator and atomiser’ for food, Christensen offered to gift the Brazilian Army Hitler’s old saucer patent for free. If given access to some ‘young engineers’, he could build Brazil a working disc with a top speed of 1,000kmph within a mere ninety days and for a low, low cost of only 400,000 cruzeiros, he said.

As Christensen had personally invented the craft’s design himself ‘without any help from anyone’ he did not see why this task should prove especially difficult. It would be easy to gather materials, as the propeller driven drone was made of simple aluminium and its silent-running engine powered by nothing more exotic than oil and alcohol. The disc could also carry ‘explosive bombs’ (are there any other kind?), even atom bombs, which could be detonated remotely. Whilst proclaiming he would gift Brazil his invention for free, ‘requiring nothing in exchange for the patent’, the subtext was that all Christensen really asked for in return was his freedom. He didn’t get it, at least not immediately, but Diário da Noite did give him some twenty articles, between December 1948 and January 1949, to make his case.

Although General Álvaro Fiúza de Castro (1889–1971), Chief of Staff of the Brazilian Army, later denied ever having heard from the man, Christensen kept on popping up in the national press throughout the next decade, insisting he be taken seriously. Yet every time Christensen made the papers, his claims became more grandiose. His spy saucer grew into an actual spaceship, capable of dousing enemy planes in flammable materials, and it transpired he had now worked on it directly during 1939–40 back in the Third Reich, where prototypes had later been successfully built in his absence before all the blueprints were stolen by Russian troops in 1945. So, if the Communists already had these things, surely Brazil needed to have them too, for the sake of national security? ‘What I want to make very clear is that these discs do not come from other planets,’ Christensen explained. In fact, they were not even discs at all, this being an optical illusion created by the actions of the propeller and the escape of burning propulsion gases during flight.

In June 1952 the ex-Nazi’s wife wrote to the US military, pleading for Washington to ensure her husband’s extradition to the West, as the Russians were dangerous and ‘only one spaceship could destroy another’. By that August the prisoner was indeed walking free, as were many other local Abwehr members arrested alongside him. Yet Christensen’s release had little to do with US intervention.

In return for filling up their pages, Christensen was given a sympathetic write-up by Diário da Noite, journalists complaining of his ‘sadness and his silence’ at being condemned to ‘thirty years of seclusion’, when the war was now long over. Honourably, Christensen pledged to go on living amongst the Brazilian people, ‘perfecting their scientific knowledge’ and placing himself ‘at the disposal of the Brazilian Government in every way’. So, with his ‘exemplary behaviour sheet’ and his vow to have ‘renounced Nazism’, why had he not yet been granted any pardon? A ‘mysterious force’ kept him in prison, the paper implied, possibly some Supreme Court minister with a grudge. This was surely ‘a crime that is committed against national interests’ Christensen wailed,