Gerd Wiechmann’s book “From the German Flying Disc to the Nazi UFO”

Sthey are back. In recent years, UFO sightings have been increasing again, especially in the United States. The sometimes refreshing sighting reports (including blurred photos) can be viewed on the website of the National UFO Reporting Center. Quite a few “experts” suspect secret weapons of the military behind the celestial phenomena. The American House of Representatives now wants to set up a reporting system that should provide a little more transparency in this notoriously shadowy area. Of course, none of this is new, neither the extraterrestrial hype nor the secret weapon thesis, and for those who want to know more about it, a wonderfully researched book by the Oldenburg historian Gerhard Wiechmann has now been published.

Step by step, the study traces how two insane, actually mutually exclusive phantasms came together: the myth of a rotating flying disk developed by German engineers in the middle of the war (Hitler’s true miracle weapon V7) and the assumption that extraterrestrials, technically infinitely superior to mankind, would come with spaceships of all things visiting, which closely resemble standard kerosene lantern covers – the “Venus spaceship” photographed by the ufologist, science fiction author and self-proclaimed professor George Adamski was identified as such back in the 1960s, writes Wiechmann.

In secret mission

The highlight of the book is to make it comprehensible that the doubling of madness has led to an amazingly stable narrative, promoted by various media out of sheer lust for sensation. This connection made it possible to solve the supposed UFO puzzle without having to forego an equally spectacular theory. In the Internet age, predestined for every conspiracy botch, both sides of the imaginary discs are now booming.

The green men arrived in June 1947, sighted by former US Navy Major Donald E. Keyhoe; and Wiechmann traces the origin of the legend of the German Flugkreisel to Italy, namely in the daily newspaper “Il Giornale d’Italia”, where around three years later the engineer Giuseppe Belluzzo claimed that the UFOs sighted around the world were flying disks that had been built in Germany on a secret mission since 1941 – and he was, by the way, their actual inventor.

The self-proclaimed engineers

The “Spiegel”, which made this information public in Germany a few days later, had this fictitious story authenticated by a retired flight captain named Rudolf Schriever, who in this context immediately claimed to be the builder. This is how it went: A whole series of (self-appointed) engineers wanted the discs developed. “The inventors of the ‘flying saucer’ – it always claims to have been someone else – come and go,” commented the “Frankfurter Neue Presse” at the time.

With every pirouette, however, the Nazi tech narrative became more fantastic. There was talk of flight speeds of over 4000 km/h, and airworthy prototypes were soon reported to the Reich Air Ministry. However, the plans and models almost always fell into the hands of the Russians at the end of the war. However, the flying objects that have now been spotted are not only Soviet replicas, but also American or Canadian prototypes, built with the help of the brilliant German designers who had emigrated.