“Good grief,” Clarise said. “That’s Richter’s process.”
“What about the bomb?” Nili pressed. “Is there any real evidence the Nazis had one?”
“There is,” Melissa said, thumbing through the handout. “Look at page twelve and following. There are some reproduced military intelligence reports and other documents. Some of them come from microfilm, so the visual quality isn’t great.”
“Oh, my!” Nili gasped. “This Zinsser paper—”
“You’re looking at the Zinsser affidavit. Hans Zinsser was a test pilot.”
“This is incredible,” Clarise murmured.
“And terrifying. Zinsser was debriefed in October, 1944—a full eight months before the first American atomic bomb test in New Mexico.”
“He says he witnessed a mushroom cloud explosion while flying in northern Germany,” Nili said, reading from the paper and shaking her head. “This sounds just like you’d see in films of atomic explosions.”
“It does—and notice that he refers to the location of the explosion as a test area. He knew about the testing. There’s another report on the next page from the same month of a similar explosion on the German island of Reugen. On that occasion, an Italian officer, Luigi Romersa, was the eyewitness.”
“The Japanese had a nuclear bomb as well?” Ward had already moved on to the next series of documents.
“Hard to argue against that,” said Neff as he read, tracking with Ward. “What else could you conclude from these intercepted cables from the Japanese embassy in Sweden?”
“The Japanese conducted their first atomic bomb test two days after Hiroshima,” Melissa explained. “Their bomb capability is fairly well known in the mainstream historical discussion. Some historians think it was part of what prompted Hirohito to surrender.”
“Why surrender when you had the bomb, too?” Madison looked up.
“I think Hirohito would have asked, ‘Why continue the war?’ ” Malone replied, looking over at her. “He could probably see that not surrendering could mean trading nuclear bombs—if the Japanese had a way of delivering them to their enemies’ territory, anyway.”
“And they didn’t,” Melissa finished the thought.
“It’s a good thing, judging by the following page,” Nili said.
“That’s a chart that provides radiation-effect estimates of a nuclear explosion over New York City. It was prepared for Hermann Göring in 1943. A later translator added the English in the document. Bombing New York seems to have been something of an obsession for Hitler.”
“He had his own Manhattan Project in mind,” Brian added.
“There’s really no doubt that the Nazis had nuclear know-how and were thinking of ways to weaponize it,” Melissa continued. “The accepted historical narrative seems to conveniently forget that top-flight Nazi scientists like Dr. Erich Schumann and Dr. Walter Trinks filed nearly forty patent applications in Germany during the war for what we’d now call tactical nuclear weapons. Take a look at the recent UK Daily story I included about the Nazi nuclear waste.”
“Gotta love this,” Ward said, skimming the front page of the article. “An old salt mine containing 126,000 barrels of nuclear waste … from an era when the Nazis weren’t supposed to be able to produce a single barrel.”
“I’ll say it again,” Malcolm chimed in, “thank God they were never able to deliver anything.”
“Actually,” Melissa said, turning to him, “they were very close. They may have even undertaken a dry run.”
“Seriously?”
“Does she look like she’s kidding?” Clarise said.
“She’s talking about the Junkers flight,” Ward noted, again ahead of everyone. “Look at the page after the nuclear-waste article. The Junkers aircraft were long range. They would have been capable of a trip to the east coast without stopping for fuel.”
“There’s circumstantial evidence,” Melissa began, “pointing to a German reconnaissance mission to the east coast of the US in September 1944.”
“One month before the nuclear tests you told us about,” Malcolm said ominously.
“Exactly. A Junkers plane apparently crashed off the coast of Maine, near a place called Owl’s Head. There were reports of discovered bodies.”
“How was that not news?” Neff asked. “I’ve read a lot of World War II stuff, and I’ve never heard of that.”
“It was a different world back then,” Melissa said, shrugging. “The military and local authorities found plane wreckage in the location with partial serial numbers and German words like ‘JunkersMotorWerkes’ on it.”
“Man,” Malcolm shook his head and looked up from the page, “I wish I’d never heard of this guy.”
“You hit Kammler?”
“Yeah,” he sighed. “It’s so clear.… Ferguson’s rubbing our noses in it.”
“What’s this … thing … next to his picture?” Madison asked. “It looks like a huge bell.”
“It’s what brings all the threads together,” Melissa answered, crossing her arms. “Nazi saucer research, Paperclip, Kammler, and the occult ideology of the SS. Its code name was Die Glocke … the Bell.”
59
When WWII ended, the Germans had several radical types of aircraft and guided missiles under development. The majority were in the most preliminary stages, but they were the only known craft that could even approach the performance of objects reported to UFO observers.
—Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, USAF Director of Projects GRUDGE and BLUEBOOK
“What was this … Bell?” Ward asked.
Melissa glanced knowingly at Brian, then looked at Ward. “Remember the photo-chemical process I described? As near as the best researchers can tell, the Bell was the container. It gets its name from its shape.”
“Okay …”
“The story of the bell came into public view through the work of a Polish research named Igor Witkowski. In 1997, a Polish Intelligence officer introduced Witkowski to the Bell through original documents of a war crimes interrogation of an SS officer at the rank of Gruppenführer named Jakob Sporrenberg. He was shortly thereafter tried and executed.”
“It’s likely someone in that position would be trying to provide any information of real value that might keep himself alive,” Ward noted.
“That’s certainly possible. Witkowski began his own investigation and was subsequently contacted by a member of Polish military intelligence, who gave him access to some classified documents on the matter. The Bell was described as around nine feet in diameter and twelve to fourteen feet high. The outside was said to be made of thick ceramic material that acted as an insulator, since it absorbed incredible amounts of electricity. Inside the Bell were two rotating drums where the conversion process took place. The whole thing supposedly glowed violet-blue when it was operating.”
“Well, there it is,” Ward announced, leaning forward. “This Bell was, in effect, a particle accelerator. Richter’s processes called for that.”
“That’s the supposition. It was located in Silesia, which is a region of central Europe that covers mostly Polish territory. Silesia was a major source of thorium, which was crucial to the whole process. This is where Walther Gerlach reenters the picture.”
“The gravity guy?” asked Madison.
Melissa nodded. “Gerlach was head of something called Project Thor. You have the first page of a document that suggests Thor used Tesla coils or something called a Van der Graaf generator that could produce five million volts of electricity. So,” Melissa added, looking at Brian and Malcolm, “we have all the elements that we learned about at Area 51 with respect to the basics of gravity modification research from Dr. Yu: huge amounts of electrical power, spinning surfaces, magnetism. The only question seems to be whether Kammler or someone else applied all that to flight. The Colonel and some of our other friends back at Dreamland filled in those gaps for us last summer.”
“Essentially,” Ward followed, “nuclear power and gravity modificati
on were married—either for linear propulsion, like a rocket, or lifting.”
“That’s what it seems. Toward the end of your stack there are photocopies of several formerly classified documents that make a pretty strong independent case that the Germans were using this technology to power wingless craft—saucers. There’s the cover page of a 1946 OSS restricted study on German experiments in electro-magnetism, a catalogue sheet from the National Archives and Records Administration that casually notes the Germans were working on a flying saucer, and, finally, a declassified document from the National Archives and Records Administration on Richter that mentions, and I quote, ‘experimental approach to the unified field theory and the velocity of propagation of gravity’ and ‘nuclear propulsion systems under hypersonic flight conditions.’ ”
“If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck …”
“I hear you, Malcolm,” Melissa said, looking over her glasses at him and allowing herself to smile.
“What in the world is this?” Clarise asked, holding up one of the pages. “It looks like a miniature Stonehenge or something.”
“I know exactly what that is,” Ward answered, looking at his wife, whose expression told everyone she wasn’t buying it. “That’s a fly trap.”
Clarise started to laugh. “Shouldn’t somebody close the windows?”
“He’s right,” Melissa confirmed with an amused grin. “Ward?”
“It gets covered with netting. Fly traps are used for testing helicopters.”
“Don’t tell me …”
“I think you already know,” Melissa cut in. “There are surviving accounts of witnesses who saw saucer craft floating inside—the Nazis used it for testing. The Canadians did the same for testing the AVRO-car, their experimental saucer. There’s a 1952 declassified CIA document on that in your handout.”
“I asked you not to tell me,” Clarise sighed.
“The ‘henge’ is located in a little village in Ludwikowice, Poland. Anyone want to guess what region of Poland that’s in?”
“It is in Silesia, where this Bell was kept,” Sabi answered. “I have been in that village.”
Melissa nodded. “The Bell project went by other code names. Some of them are ironic, to say the least. One is Kronos, the Greek name for Saturn. It’s probably a reference to the spinning inside the Bell. But, as Brian was quick to tell me, Kronos has another meaning.”
“Kronos was a Titan,” Brian explained, “the one overthrown by Zeus and thrown into Tartarus, the place where the book of Peter has the fallen sons of God imprisoned.”
“That’s a nice touch,” snickered Malcolm.
“It gets weirder,” Melissa continued. “The Bell’s other code name was Der Laternenträger, no doubt because it glowed. How’s your German, Malcolm?”
“Hmmm, ‘the light’ … or ‘lantern’ … something.”
“ ‘The light-bearer,’ ” Sabi cut in. “Or, in Latin, Lucifer.”
“Great,” Malone replied. “Let the record show that I’m officially creeped out now.”
“Some have speculated,” Melissa added, “that the Bell was eventually reproduced and fitted into a saucer-type craft to harness its lift-power capability.”
“Did you see anything like that at Area 51?” Nili asked.
“No, and I’m guessing they’re well beyond the design.”
“There’s a classic UFO crash account,” Brian added, “that might be related to this, though. It’s known as the Kecksburg incident. Not as famous as Roswell, but important. The object that crashed there was bell-shaped and seemed to had runes on it—which were familiar signs used by the SS. But it’s still only speculation that the Bell may have been adapted for flight.”
“So what happened to the Bell—and to Kammler?” Neff asked.
“Well, there are no less than five separate accounts of Kammler’s death,” Melissa answered, “all of them different.”
“What else would we expect?” he smirked.
“No one really knows what happened to him,” she continued. “All we have is conflicting witness testimony. I have a timeline in your handout, the second page from the end. It’s pieced together from the debriefings of an SS general named Sporrenberg, Hauptsturmführer Rudolf Schuster, and Dr. Wilhelm Voss, the person in charge of the SS Skoda works—which was a sort of Skunk Works factory for the SS at the end of the war. Skoda was in Pilsen, a Czech province a few hours from Silesia.”
“Can you summarize it for us?” asked Malone, finding the page.
“The last verifiable communication from Kammler was a cable on April 17, 1945. Kammler was turning down a request from the German high command for the use of a Junkers long-range aircraft.”
“That’s really close to the time of Hitler’s suicide,” Neff observed. “Makes you wonder why they’d want a plane for long-range evacuation.”
“Albert Speer testified after the war that they wanted to fly Hitler to Japan. That, of course, didn’t happen. It’s unclear whether this rejection by Kammler is related. Hitler’s pilot, a fellow named Hans Baur, factors into the story at this point, at least for Kammler’s possible escape. In 2004 a former German soldier in his nineties testified that after the denial, on May 1, Baur ordered him to ready a six-engine Junkers to fly certain Nazi VIPs from Norway to Greenland.”
“The far northern location will take on more significance when we get into the Nazi mythology,” Brian inserted.
“Schuster testified that a Junkers-390 flew from Prague—that’s right next to Pilsen—to somewhere near Opole, Poland. Sporrenberg also told his captors that a Junkers-390 took off from a place called Schweidnitz, which is about 100 kilometers west of Opole. He also testified that he knew of three people on that flight: mathematician Elizabeth Adler; Herman Oberth, a rocketry expert and Luftwaffe officer; and Dr. Kurt Debus, whose specialty was high voltage. The flight went to Bodo, Norway. Dr. Voss, independent of the other two witnesses, confirmed the flight from Schweidnitz to Bodo, as well as the detail about the Bell being on board. He didn’t specifically mention Kammler, since Voss believed Kammler died at the end of the war, though he didn’t witness his death.”
“Do you think Kammler was on board?” Ward asked.
“Witnesses say that Kammler had roughly sixty scientists associated with the Bell executed before its evacuation. Witkowski and other researchers believe Kammler accompanied the Bell. It’s possible, but I have to confess I’m still not sure, largely because of another issue. Wernher von Braun said after the war that Kammler talked about going underground before the Americans got to his location. He even described escaping disguised as a Jesuit priest, the way Bormann did.”
“I thought Bormann died at the end of the war,” Neff said. “I’ve read that.”
“He wound up in Argentina. I’ve reproduced several documents from the Argentine secret police that show they knew Bormann was in their country under several aliases. They kept track of him but didn’t arrest him. At least one of the documents has him with Mengele, and we know for sure he was alive and well in South America.”
“It’s true,” Malcolm spoke up. “I’ve seen those documents. Andrew showed me copies once. He lived through all that, remember.”
“I agree,” Nili added. “I have read old Israeli intelligence reports about Bormann, Mengele, Barbie, Eichmann.… There was great suspicion Bormann was hiding in Argentina.”
“Any word on what happened after Norway?” Ward asked.
“The Junkers went to Argentina,” Melissa answered.
“That’s within its range,” noted Ward.
“There’s really no dispute to the arrival, either,” she continued. “The real question is who all made that leg of the trip. Witnesses have the plane landing at Puntas de Gualeguay. An Argentine report declassified in 1993 refers to a Bell device being unloaded. That’s the only public piece of information about the Bell before Witkowski’s information was published in 1998.”
“Puntas de Gualeguay is a couple hundred ki
lometers north of Buenos Aires,” said Neff. “Did the plane stay there?”
“Witkowski says he’s read a classified report by a Polish diplomat who said he saw a Junkers dismantled on a German ranch. That was May, 1945.”
“This is a pretty tight reconstruction,” Malone mused, “but it’s still hard to believe the Allies would have failed to get Kammler, in Germany or anywhere else. He was arguably the worst war criminal of the lot—all that slave labor at Peenemunde and Nordhausen.”
“They may not have gotten a chance,” Brian offered. “He may have had something to barter—something the Allies couldn’t refuse.” He turned to Melissa. “We should tell them about Operation Lusty.”
“Lusty?” Madison said dubiously.
“I don’t know about the name,” Melissa answered lightly, “but the project was real—and very significant.”
“Lusty was sort of a project that ran parallel to Paperclip,” Brian explained. “It wasn’t about obtaining people, though—it focused on documents and hardware.”
“Project Lusty managed to find an amazingly large number of documents,” Melissa began, “but the mother lode—since we don’t believe in coincidences here—was tied to Skoda.”
Neff shook his head and started to laugh. “Malcolm was right. You couldn’t script this.”
“Sometimes truth is indeed stranger than fiction,” Melissa said with a shrug. “In February of 1946, the Americans got a tip—and of course, the question is from whom—about a cache of secret documents hidden near Prague. There’s evidence that the documents—and perhaps the tip—were linked to the Kammlerstab, Kammler’s personal staff. If it came from Kammler, then he didn’t go with the Bell—unless, of course, he planted the tip earlier.”
“In a nutshell,” Brian summarized, “Kammler either went north to Greenland or somewhere closer to the Arctic, or he wound up in Argentina with the Bell.”
“The location of the cache presented a problem,” Melissa said, “since it was in territory ceded to the Soviets by agreement among the Allies. The decision to go in and get the documents led to an international incident and a subsequent American apology, but it was well worth it. “
The Portent Page 38