GENESIS (Projekt Saucer)

by W. A. Harbinson

  as the swirling snow settled down. Stanford muttered and sang. He

  heard someone singing somewhere. His fingers touched and felt nothing

  and bent as his body inched forward. Stanford saw streams of light. The

  light flashed and beat about him. Stanford slithered onto the slab of

  pack ice and rolled onto his back.

  All white. Everything. Stanford saw lights in the sky. They were

  very high up, very small, pulsating and glowing. He knew what the

  lights were. He smiled when he saw them. The lights were like stars in

  the white sky, very bright and intense. Stanford lay there on the pack

  ice. The ice drifted imperceptibly. Stanford lay there and let the frost

  encase him and grow into more ice. The lights glided across the sky.

  They defied the sky’s bright haze. The ice drifted and flashed blue and

  yellow and became part of Stanford. He lay there and smiled. The ice

  carried him away. He felt a fierce defiance and exultation that would not

  let him die. The frost thickened and hardened. It molded Stanford to the

  pack ice. He turned around in the sun, a glass figure, quite beautiful, the

  light flashing on and off him, exploding, streaming skyward, gradually

  turning him into a glacier, a prism… a star.

  Author’s Note

  While Genesis is a work of fiction, it has been based on certain facts which the author feels are worth bringing to light. In the course of researching a different novel altogether, I obtained, through the Imperial War Museum in London, two short articles that immediately attracted my attention. The first was a routine war report by Marshall Yarrow, then the Reuters special correspondent to Supreme Headquarters in liberated Paris. This article had been published, among other places, in the South Wales Argus on December 13, 1944, and it stated: ‘The Germans have produced a “secret weapon” in keeping with the Christmas season. The new device, which is apparently an air defence weapon, resembles the glass balls which adorn Christmas trees. They have been seen hanging in the air over German territory, sometimes singly, sometimes in clusters. They are colored silver and are apparently transparent.’ The second article, an Associated Press release, extracted from the New York Herald Tribune of January 2, 1945, illuminated the subject even more. It said: ‘Now, it seems, the Nazis have thrown something new into the night skies over Germany. It is the weird, mysterious “Foo Fighter” balls which race alongside the wings of Beaufighters flying intruder missions over Germany. Pilots have been encountering this eerie weapon for more than a month in their night flights. No-one apparently knows what this sky weapon is. The balls of fire appear suddenly and accompany the planes for miles. They seem to be radio-controlled from the ground, so official intelligence reports reveal…’

  Intrigued by these reports, I conducted some more research and discovered a highly technical but little known book entitled Intercettateli Senza Sparare (see ‘Sources’ for details) by Renato Vesco, in which the author claims that the ‘Foo Fighter’ actually existed, that it was originally called the Feuerball, and that it was first constructed at the aeronautical establishment at Wiener Neustadt, with the help of the Flugfunk Forschungsanstalt of Oberpfaffenhoffen (F.F.O.) According to Vesco, the Feuerball was a flat, circular flying machine, powered by a special turbojet engine, that was used by the Germans during the closing stages of the war both as an anti-radar device and as a ‘psychological’ weapon against Allied pilots. Says Vesco: ‘The fiery halo around its perimeter – caused by a very rich fuel mixture – and the chemical additives that interrupted the flow of electricity by overionizing the atmosphere in the vicinity of the plane, generally around the wing tips or tail surfaces, subjected the H2S radar on the plane to the action of powerful electrostatic fields and electromagnetic impulses.’ Vesco also claims that the basic principles of the Feuerball were later applied to a much larger ‘symmetrical circular aircraft’, the Kugelblitz (or Ball Lightning Fighter), which was the first example of the vertical-rising, ‘jet lift’ aircraft.

  Further intrigued, I continued my research in West Germany and came up with a surprising number of newspaper and magazine clippings

  – all from the 1950s – about one Flugkapitän Rudolph Schriever. One clipping stated that this Luftwaffe engineer had designed, in the spring of 1941, the prototype for a ‘flying top’ and that the device was tested in June, 1942; another stated that the same Flugkapitän Schriever, with ‘three trusted colleagues’, had actually constructed, in August 1943, a ‘large specimen’ of his original ‘flying disk’, but that in the summer of 1944, in the East Hall of the B. M. W. plant near Prague, he had redesigned the original model, replacing its former gas turbine engines with some highly advanced form of jet propulsion; and a third, which reiterated the above information, added the interesting news that original plans for the flying disk had been drawn up by the ‘German experts’, Habermohl and Miethe, and an Italian physicist, Dr Belluzzo. According to other reports (and, subsequently, to Major Rudolph Luzar’s indispensable book, German Secret Weapons of World War II, English language editions published by Neville Spearman, London, 1959, and the Philosophical Library, New York, 1959), Habermohl and Schriever had designed a large ring plate with ‘adjustable wing-disks’ that rotated around a ‘fixed, cupola-shaped cockpit’, while Miethe had developed a ‘discus-shaped plate in which adjustable jets were inserted’. Reportedly, the flying saucer had a diameter of 42 m. ((137.76 ft.), a height from base to canopy of 32 m. (104.96 ft.) and had reached an altitude of approximately 40,000 ft. with a horizontal flight speed of 2,000 km./h. (1,250 mph).

  So far, so good… But what I now came to was a series of small but puzzling contradictions.

  Shortly after the war, Rudolph Schriever was resident at Hokerstrasse 28 in Bremerhaven-Lehe, West Germany, from where he announced that the flying disk had indeed been constructed, that it had been ready for testing in April 1945, but that with the advance of the Allies into Germany, the test flight had been cancelled, the machine entirely destroyed, and his design papers either mislaid or stolen. Schriever’s story was, however, slightly contradicted by alleged eyewitness Georg Klein, who later stated that he had actually seen the test flight of the Schriever disk, or one similar, on February 14, 1945. A certain doubt may be cast on Klein’s date since, according to the War Diary of the 8th Air Fleet, February 14, 1945, was a day of low clouds, rain, snow and generally poor visibility – hardly the conditions for the testing of a revolutionary new kind of aircraft. Nevertheless, according to Renato Vesco, the test flight of a machine called the Kugelblitz – which was rumoured to be a revolutionary kind of supersonic aircraft – was successfully conducted over the underground complex of Kahla, in Thuringia, some time during that February of 1945.

  By 1975 Luftfahrt International was stating that a certain Flugkapitän Rudolph Schriever had died in the late 1950s and that found among his papers were the incomplete notes for a large flying saucer (most of them technically out of date), a series of rough sketches of the machine (some of which had clearly been redrawn and updated just before his death), and several newspaper clippings about himself and his supposed flying saucer. Now, while none of the designs would have led to a workable flying saucer, Luftfahrt International did include reproductions of the designs of both Schriever and Dr Miethe, while also pointing out that Schriever, right up to his death, had been convinced that the UFO sightings since the end of the war were proof that his original ideas had been taken further with successful results.

  Could this be true?

  Let us examine the possibilities. According to Schriever, what appears to have been the final version of his flying saucer was constructed at the B. M. W plant near Prague in the early months of 1944 and was ready for testing in April 1944. According to Georg Klein, a similar flying disk was actually test-flown near Prague in February 1945; and according to the Italian author, Renato Vesco – who
seems unaware of the existence of the Schriever legend – an extraordinary new flying machine called the Kugelblitz was test-flown sometime during that same month over the complex of Kahla, in the mountain region of Thuringia.

  Tying in with this information is the fact that the gas-turbine section of B. M. W. was originally located in the suburb of Spandau, near Belin – where, according to Renato Vesco, a lot of research on the Kugelblitz was undertaken; that it was later moved to the underground plant at Wittringen, near Saarbrucken; but that it finally ended up, as from 1944, in seven enormous underground complexes in both Thuringia and Nordhausen in the Harz Mountains.

  That whole area, running in a metaphorical arc from the Harz Mountains, down through Thuringia, Bohmen and Mahren, was to form the German’s last redoubt and as such was littered with a staggering number of underground military and scientific complexes, including the immense Mittle-Werke factories and the personnel and equipment from the experimental center at Peenemünde. Certainly, while history was to decree otherwise, it was from there that Hitler intended to defend the remnants of the Third Reich with ‘a whole underground army’ and the ‘secret weapons’ he had been promised for so long.

  In May, 1978, at Stand 111 in a scientific exhibition in the Hanover Messe Hall, some gentlemen were giving away what at first sight appeared to be an orthodox scientific tabloid newspaper called Brisant. This contained two seemingly unrelated articles: one on the scientific future of Antarctica, the other about Nazi Germany’s World War II flying saucers. The flying saucer article reiterated the information mentioned above, but added that the research centers for ‘Projekt Saucer’ had been located in the areas of Bohmen and Mahren.

  Regarding this, it should be noted that Prague is in Bohmen, and that Bohmen is more or less surrounded by the metaphorical arc of the Harz Mountains, Thuringia and Mahren – all of which areas contained vast underground research complexes, none of which were more than a few hundred kilometers from Prague.

  The article also included reproductions of detailed drawings of a typical Second World War flying disk, did not mention the designer’s name, and claimed that the drawings had been altered by the West German government to render them ‘safe’ for publication. Adding weight to this claim, the unnamed author then pointed out that during the Second World War all such inventions, whether civilian or military, would have been submitted to the nearest patent office where, under paragraphs 30a and 99 of the Patent-und Strafgesetsbuch, they would have automatically been stamped ‘Secret’, taken away from their rightful owners, and passed on to Heinrich Himmler’s SS research establishments… and, according to the article, at the end of the war some of those patents disappeared into secret Russian files, others into equally secret British and American files, and the remainder would possibly have disappeared with various ‘missing’ German scientists and SS troops.

  (Since neither the British, the Americans or the Russians are ever likely to reveal what, precisely, was discovered in the secret factories of Nazi Germany, it is worth noting that in 1945 Sir Roy Feddon, as leader of a technical mission to Germany for the Ministry of Aircraft Production, reported: ‘I have seen enough of their designs and production plans to realize that if they had managed to prolong the war some months longer, we would have been confronted with a set of entirely new and deadly developments in air warfare.’ And by 1956, Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, then head of the U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book, was able to state: ‘When World War II ended, the Germans had several radical types of aircraft and guided missiles under development. The majority of these were in the most preliminary stages, but they were the only known craft that could even approach the performances of the objects reported by UFO observers.’)

  The Brisant article went on to point out that in 1938, Hitler, anxious for a foothold in the Antarctic, sent an expedition commanded by Captain Alfred Richter to the coast due south of South Africa. Daily for three weeks two seaplanes were catapulted from the deck of the German aircraft-carrier Schwabenland, with orders to fly back and forth across the territory that Norwegian explorers had named Queen Maud Land. The Germans made a far more thorough study of the area than the Norwegians had done, finding vast regions that were surprisingly free of ice. This job done, they renamed the whole area Neuschwabenland and claimed it as part of the Third Reich.

  According to Brisant, German ships and U-boats continued to prowl the South Atlantic Ocean, particularly between South Africa and the Antarctic, throughout the whole of the Second World War. Then, in March, 1945, just before the end of the war, two German provision Uboats, U-530 and U-977, were launched from a port on the Baltic Sea. Reportedly they took with them members of the flying saucer research teams, the last of the most vital flying saucer components, the notes and drawings for the saucer, and the designs for immense underground complexes and living accommodations based on the remarkable underground factories of Nordhausen in the Harz Mountains. The two U-boats duly reached Neuschwabenland, more correctly known as Queen Maud Land, where they unloaded. Finally, two months after the war, the same U-boats surfaced mysteriously off the coast of Argentina where the crews were handed over to the American authorities, who interrogated them at length and then flew them all back to the United States.

  About a year after this, the United States launched the biggest operation ever known regarding the Antarctic. While the stated purpose of the operation was to ‘circumnavigate the 16,000-mile Antarctic coastline and map it thoroughly’, Brisant found it odd that Operation Highjump, under the command of Antarctic veteran Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd, included thirteen ships, two seaplane tenders, an aircraftcarrier, six twin-engine R4D transports, six Martin PBM flying boats, six helicopters and a staggering total of 4,000 men. It was also considered odd that when this virtual assault force reached the Antarctic coast, it not only docked, on January 27, 1947, near the Germanclaimed territory of Neuschwabenland, but then divided up into three separate task forces.

  That expedition became something of a mystery. Subsequent official reports stated that it had been an enormous success, revealing more about the Antarctic than had ever been known before. However, many other, mainly foreign, reports suggested that such in fact had not been the case: that many of Byrd’s men were lost during the first day, that at least four of his airplanes inexplicably disappeared, and that while the expedition had gone provisioned for six to eight months, the men actually returned to America in February 1947, after only a few weeks. According to Brisant, Admiral Byrd later told a reporter (I could find no verification for this) that it was ‘necessary for the USA to take defensive actions against enemy air fighters which come from the polar regions’ and that in the case of a new war the USA would be ‘attacked by fighters that are able to fly from one pole to the other with incredible speed’. Also, according to Brisant, shortly after his return from the Antarctic, Admiral Byrd was ordered to undergo a secret crossexamination – and the United States withdrew from the Antarctic for almost a decade.

  What was being suggested, then, is that throughout the course of the Second World War the Germans were sending ships and planes to the Antarctic with equipment for massive underground complexes, that at the end of the war the flying saucer project’s team of scientists were taken by submarines U-530 and U-977, that the Americans interrogated the crews of those submarines when they docked in what they had assumed was a friendly Argentina, that the Americans then, upon hearing about the Antarctic base, organized a military task force disguised as an exploratory expedition, that the expedition was subsequently put to disarray when it came up against the extraordinary German flying saucers, and that the United States then pulled out of the Antarctic temporarily, in order to build their own saucers based on the designs found in Germany after the war.

  The second article was also of interest. It was, in point of fact, a rather crude propaganda statement masquerading as a scientific review of Antarctic potential. Dusting off the already well known topographical facts, what one was left with was an
insistence that the Democratic Republic of Germany should claim back their rights to that part of the Antarctic which the Nazis stole from the Norwegians and arrogantly renamed Neuschwabenland.

  Taking note of the National Socialist leanings of the article, bearing in mind the fact that Brisant had been published by a company that had since disappeared (Lintec, GmbH, Jungfrauenthal 22, D-200 Hamburg 13), and reminding myself that the whole theory had suspicious parallels with the more far-fetched ‘Holes in the Poles’ UFO myths, I nevertheless checked up on other aspects of the article and discovered that the Germans had in fact been patrolling the Antarctic regions of the South Atlantic Ocean throughout the war. Indeed, two years after the Richter expedition, a couple of Norwegian whaling ships were seized by boarding parties from the German raider Pinguin as they rested at anchor in their own territorial waters just off Queen Maud Land. Within hours of that incident, a Norwegian supply ship and most of the nearby whaling convoy had been lured into the trap – and the war in Antarctica was underway. In May 1941 HMS Cornwall located and sank the Pinguin, but not before Pinguin had captured a whole string of Allied merchant ships totalling more than 135,000 tons. What is also historical fact is that Pinguin’s sister ships, appropriately named Komet and Atlantis, continued to prowl the Antarctic shores until the end of the war.

  Regarding the two submarines, I also came across some intriguing information. U-977, under the command of Captain Heinz Schaeffer, did in fact leave Kiel harbour in the Baltic Sea in April, 1945, stopped in at Christiansund South on April 26, left there the following day, and was not seen again until it surfaced at Mar del Plata, Argentina, on August 17, 1945 – a period of nearly four months.

  Where was the submarine all that time? According to Captain Schaeffer, they had left with the intention of patrolling the South Atlantic, had docked for fuel at Christiansund South the following day, and had then, several days later, heard over their radio that the war was over. Convinced that he would not be treated too kindly by the Allied Command, Schaeffer gave his crew the option of being put off along the coast of Norway or travelling on with him to what he thought was a friendly Argentina. Since some of the crew preferred to return to Germany, the next few days were spent in hugging the Norwegian coastline until, on May 10, they dropped some of their men off on the mountainous coast not far from Bergen. This done, according to Schaeffer, he and the remaining crew embarked upon what surely must have been one of the most remarkable naval feats of the war: a journey through the North Sea and the English Channel, past Gibraltar and along the coast of Africa, finally surfacing, all of sixty-six days later, in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean. During the next month they alternated between floating on the surface and diving back to the depths, once even surfacing off the Cape Verde Islands and going ashore on Branca Island, another time going so far as to ‘disguise’ the submarine when it was on the surface by rigging up false sails and funnel to make it look more like a cargo steamer. Finally, when close to Rio de Janeiro, they heard over their radio that another fleeing German submarine, U-530, had put into the River Plate and that its crew had been handed over to the United States as prisoners of war. Disturbed by this news, they nevertheless put into Mar del Plata on August 17, 1945