During World War II, many claims
had been made about Nazi secret weapons. If the
glowing "foo fighters" that harried allied airmen were
not the products of Nazi technology, the V-2 rockets,
prototypes of jet airplanes, and the discovery of
particle/laser beam weaponry certainly were.
Before the smoke had barely
cleared from the final resistance in Nazi Germany,
Major General Hugh Knerr, Deputy Commanding General
for Administration of US Strategic Forces in Europe,
acknowledged that the U.S. was "alarmingly backward"
in many areas of research, and he ordered the U.S.
occupation force to seize both the "apparatus and the
brains" that had created the advanced scientific
accomplishments of the Nazi scientists or the United
States would remain several years behind.
While it was agreed that
the United States should scoop up as many German
scientists as possible, the occupation force then had
to circumvent its own law that no former member of the
Nazi Party could immigrate to America. Of the 1600
scientists and their dependents who had been assembled
for immediate relocation in the United States, even a
superficial inquiry revealed that at least 1200 of
them had been avowed Nazis. Informed of this
intelligence, President Harry S. Truman decided that
it was in the national interest of the United States
to gain technological superiority and the scientists
were allowed to waffle and declare that they had only
been "nominal Nazis" and had not actively supported
Nazi military efforts.
The relocation of the
scientists still had to be conducted in utmost
secrecy, for the war had been costly and bitter with
many American lives lost. The U.S. public at large
would not respond favorably if they found out that
many of the scientists being given a free ride to the
States had worked in laboratories that had been
constructed by Nazi slave labor and death camps. The
scientists and their family members who were selected
by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency had
paperclips binding their scientific papers to the
standard immigration forms, hence the name "Operation
Paperclip."
As my wife Sherry and I
stated in our Conspiracies and Secret Societies: The
Complete Dossier (Visible Ink Press, 2006), Operation
Paperclip was not made public until after the first
astronauts had set foot on the Moon in 1973. The
eminent Dr. Hubertus Strughold, the "father of space
medicine," was one of the prominent physicians who
entered the United States under Operation Paperclip.
In 1977, the Aeromedical Library at the USAF School of
Aerospace medicine was named after Dr. Strughold.
Operation Paperclip also
allowed entrance to the United States to Reinhard
Gehlen, Nazi Intelligence mastermind, who helped Allen
Dulles restructure the OSS (Office of Strategic
Services) into the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA);
Klaus Barbie, the "Butcher of Lyon"; Otto von
Bolschwing, infamous for Holocaust abuses; and the SS
Colonel Otto Skorzeny. In 1984, Arthur Rudolph, who
had been awarded NASA's Distinguished Service Award in
1969, left the United States rather than face charges
for Nazi war crimes.
Long before Operation Paperclip
was finally disclosed, the general public was well
aware of the participation of such individuals as Dr.
Wernher von Braun and Dr. Hermann Oberth, widely
recognized as the "father of modern rocketry," as
having been integral to the success of the United
States space program.
Late in 1958, after the peculiar
malfunction of the Juno II rocket, von Braun was
quoted in West German newspapers as saying that the
rocket had strangely gone off course, as if it had
been "deflected." On January 1, 1959, he told a
reporter for Newes Europa that "we feel ourselves
faced by powers which are far stronger than we had
hitherto assumed….More I cannot say at present.
We are now engaged in entering into closer contact
with these powers and in six or nine months' time it
may be possible to speak with more precision on the
matter."
Who exactly were the far
stronger "powers" on whom von Braun placed the blame
for the malfunction of the Juno II?
The rocket scientist's enigmatic
reference recalled an earlier comment by his mentor,
Dr. Oberth, who protested the accolades for the
Germans' brilliant accomplishments in pioneering
rocket designs by stating: "We alone cannot take the
credit for our record advancement in rocket
technology. We have been helped by people from other
worlds."
Just who were these mysterious
people "from other worlds" who had served as the
tutors that enabled Nazi scientists to create a
technology unparalleled on Earth?
On February 16, 1953, the
Canadian Minister for Defense Productions released
information to the Canadian House of Commons that
Avro-Canada, a Canadian aircraft manufacturing
company, was engaged in developing plans for a "flying
saucer" that would be able to fly at 1,500 miles an
hour and lift up and descend vertically. Avro
projected that their proposed vehicle would make all
other forms of supersonic aircraft obsolete.
It was no secret that the
Canadians had retrieved some of the research from the
German rocket base at Peenemuende that had been
directed by Walter Dornberger and Wernher von Braun in
the production of the vergeltungswaffe, the V-2 rocket
that had ravaged London, and this announcement seemed
clear evidence that they had been successful in
assembling one of the Nazi's secret craft.
As if not to be outdone by the
Canadians, on February 15, 1955, the Air Technical
Intelligence Center, together with the Wright Air
Development Center at Wright-Patterson U.S. Air Force
Base in Dayton, Ohio, revealed that the Air Force
proposed building jet-propelled "flying saucers" under
the code name of Project Silverbug.
Circular, saucer-shaped, like
the classic UFOs that civilians had been sighting
since at least 1947, the largest of the proposed
saucers would weigh 26,000 pounds and would be powered
by radically advanced jet engines that would be able
to lift the craft to an altitude of 36,090 feet in
about one minute and 45 seconds. The cruise speed of
these remarkable vehicles would be Mach 3.48 and the
operating ceiling would be able to soar to 80,600
feet. By way of comparison, today's F-15 fighter jet
has a similar performance range, but it was developed
more than 20 years after the proposed saucers of
Project Silverbug.
For some UFO researchers, this
rare disclosure from the Air Force seemed proof that
the German occult Vril Society really had made contact
with extraterrestrials who had given the Nazis their
technological advantage at the onset of World War II.
Others spoke of the Nazi discovery of a downed UFO and
the intense work of the German scientists and
engineers to reverse-engineer the alien spacecraft.
While the source for the
technological know-how that allowed the U.S. Air Force
to announce plans for such an astounding aerial
vehicle will remain controversial, a June 1955 issue
of Look magazine carried an article disclosing the
information that Avro-Canada, Ltd, had been developing
a saucer-shaped craft since 1953 but that all the
research efforts had come to naught. According to the
article, the "Avro" project had been abandoned because
of the estimated $75-million development costs.
After such dramatic advance
promotional efforts on the part of Avro-Canada, the
physical results were finally disappointingly
represented in 1958 in the Avrocar (Avro Car). Instead
of a radical new jet engine that soared into the
skies, the circular platform of the Avrocar was lifted
a short distance into the air by many small
conventional jets. An analysis of the initial test
flights concluded that the vehicle was underpowered
and unstable. The ambitious plans to create a flying
saucer were abandoned, and the vehicles themselves
were relegated to displays at the Smithsonian and
Wright Patterson.
Conspiracy theorists, however,
maintain that the feeble demonstration of the Avrocar
was an exercise in public disinformation. A friend of
mine who was employed during this period as an
engineer in Canada's de Havilland aircraft production
told me that they did indeed create a "flying saucer,"
but they couldn't master the trick of keeping it in
the air for very long periods. According to my
friend, the Canadians did abandon their hopes of
building an aeronautic super craft.
A large number of UFO
researchers remain convinced that the U.S. Air Force
continued to develop the saucer-shaped superships at
Area 51 in Nevada and that many of the huge
"motherships" sighted in the skies recently have been
our very own flying saucers built on the
alien-inspired craft first constructed by the Vril
Society.
In 1919, Karl Haushofer founded
the Vril Society in Berlin. The term "Vril" was
derived from The Coming Race (1871), a novel by
Edward Bulwer-Lytton about a race of supermen living
within the Earth's interior. The Vril Force, a form
of energy so powerful that the ancient ones had
outlawed its use as a potential weapon, was derived
from the Black Sun, a large ball of "Prima Materia"
that provided light and radiation to the inhabitants
of the inner Earth. Vril had been known among the
alchemists and magicians as the Chi, the Odic force,
the Orgone, the Astral Light, and the ancient force
possessed transformative powers to create supermen of
ordinary mortals.
The Vril Societies maintained
that the Germanic/Nordic/ Teutonic people were of
Aryan origin and that Christianity had destroyed the
power of the Teutonic civilization. The end of World
War I had left Germany with its people poor and its
morale low. The Vril might well be the means of the
nation's restoration as a major world power. Those
who learned control of the Vril would become master of
themselves, those around them, and the world itself.
Such members of the Lodge as Adolf Hitler, Heinrich
Himmler, Hermann Goring, Dr. Theodor Morell, Hitler's
personal physician, and other top Nazi leaders,
became obsessed with preparing German youth to become
a Master Race. They wanted desperately to prove
themselves worthy of the super humans that lived
beneath the surface of the planet.
It was while the society--now
renamed Vril Gesellschaft--was meeting at an old
hunting lodge near Berchtesgarden, that they received
remarkable news. Maria Orsic (Orsitch), a medium who
led the Vrilerinnen, a group of beautiful young women
psychics in the society, began to receive messages
from Aryan aliens on Alpha Tauri in the Aldeberan star
system. Maria and a sister medium named Sigrun,
learned that a half billion years ago, the Aryans,
also known as the Elohim or Elder Race, began to
colonize our solar system. On Earth, the Aryans were
identified as the Sumerians until they elected to
carve out an empire for themselves in the hollow of
the planet.
Maria, Sigrun, and the other
members of the Vrilerinnen, Traute, Gudrun, and Heike,
began to receive transmissions that dictated diagrams
and blueprints of advanced flying machines, complete
with the mathematics and physics to go with them. The
mediums, contrary to popular feminine custom of the
day to wear bobbed or short hair, wore their hair long
to serve as better receptive antennas for the alien
messages.
By 1921, some say that a working
model of what would one day be called a "flying
saucer" had been built. Working in underground bases
with the alien intelligences, the Nazis mastered
antigravity space flight, established space stations,
accomplished time travel, and developed their
spacecraft to warp speeds.
In 1922, members of Thule
and Vril claim to have built the Jenseitsflugmaschine,
the Other World Flight Machine, based on the psychic
messages received from the Aldebaran aliens. W. O.
Schulmann of the Technical University of Munich was in
charge of the project until it was halted in 1924, and
the craft was stored in Messerschmitt's Augsburg. In
1937, after Hitler came into power, he authorized the
construction of the Rund flugzeug, the round, or
disk-shaped vehicle, for military use and for
spaceflight. A few years later, the Fuhrer officially
abolished all secret societies, but sources indicate
that the Vril continued its work unabated.
Some maintain that rather
than receiving a late night visitor dressed as a
quiet, mannerly, and respectable burgher as had the
alchemist Helvetius, Hitler's encounter with a Vril
master from the inner Earth was far more dramatic.
According to Hermann Rauschning, governor of Danzig,
Hitler was shaken by the visit and declared that the
"new man" was already living among them and that he
was "intrepid and cruel." The Fuhrer admitted that he
was afraid of him.
Research sources are vague
as to the eventual fate of Maria Orsic. Some say that
Maria, Sigrun, Traute, Gudrun, and Heike were
transported by the Jenseitsflugmaschine, the Other
World Flight Machine, to live eternally with their
extraterrestrial guides on another planet. Another
source has Maria escaping to Acapulco where Admiral
Canaris had established a submarine base in 1945.
Others maintain that all five of the lovely mediums
went with Vril members by submarine to establish a
secret base in Antarctica in 1943. Those who know of
Admiral Richard Byrd's claim of finding a "new world"
in Antarctica are also those who remind us that the
Americans, Canadians, British, and Russians did not
snatch up all the German scientists. Some point out
that as many as 130 scientists who were working on the
secret Vril projects disappeared immediately at the
war's end. Simultaneously, a number of German Freight
U-boats capable of transporting 850 metric tons each
vanished from official inventory. And, at the same
time, several airliners capable of flying very long
distances seemingly disappeared from Tempelhof Air
Base. Shortly after these aircraft and submarines had
mysteriously vanished, officials noted that tens of
millions of marks in gold bullion and precious stones
were missing from the Reichsbank.
A most intriguing question
that may always remain unanswered is whether or not
the Vril Society divided its membership after contact
was established with the Aldebarans and sent some of
its alien-inspired scientists to the United States.
In 1969, when I was living in
Chicago, I received a telephone call from Ray, an
executive in a large advertising agency who asked me
to appear as a consultant at a meeting of an executive
from a major airline, some investment counselors, and
a group of people who claimed to be a secret group of
German scientists who had been working with
extraterrestrials--or non-Terrans, as they preferred.
The scientists claimed that they were now willing to
share a number of inventions that the larger Earth
society could use: A powder that transformed common
tap water into smokeless, nonpollutant, no-knock fuel,
and a liquid that would totally fireproof any surface
upon which it had been sprayed. The advertising
executive wanted me to advise him and his friends just
who the hell these "people" were.
For the first meeting I asked my
friend Glenn, a former detective, to accompany me. We
met in a private home not far from O'Hare Airfield.
There were three principals:
Ray, the advertising executive
whom I had met before, was a former jet pilot who had
chased UFO's in Korea and had been on their trail ever
since. Bill, an executive with a major airline, who
was dedicated to solving the UFO enigma and able to
travel anywhere at a moment's notice to investigate
any UFO report firsthand.
The member of the secret society
who had been chosen to negotiate for the fuel base
and the fireproofing solution.
In addition to these
individuals, I was never really introduced to any of
the others who, apparently, were the investment
counselors, and a number of stoic, silent men and
women who were apparently members of the secret
society of German scientists and their non-Terran
allies.
One of the alleged non-Terrans,
a tall redheaded woman with very strange, staring
eyes, was extremely hostile to me, complaining that in
one of my books I had said that some UFO's may not
have the most friendly of intentions. She retreated
after a time to a corner of the room with the other
members of the silent non-Terran/German scientist
group.
Did the fuel work?
Yes, Ray said. He had used it in
his lawnmower all summer with good results. An
attorney used it in his Lincoln Continental for
several months, and he had been told by mechanics that
the motor was in excellent condition.
A jarful was mixed and handed
around the room. There seemed to be little odor. Glenn
dipped in a finger and touched it to his tongue.
Little taste--maybe a bit like kerosene. We poured a
bit out and touched a match to it. Instantly it poofed
into smokeless flame.
Did the fireproofer work?
We were informed that a
demonstration had been arranged at a nearby airfield.
A mixture of oil and gasoline consuming an old
fuselage had been extinguished within seconds with but
one squirt from a fire extinguisher filled with the
substance.
Ray felt he could get backers to
raise the money the group was asking for the formulas.
In subsequent late-night
meetings with the negotiator for the group, we learned
that he had been trained by the German scientists who
worked closely with the non-Terrans. He was a rarity
among the group in that he was not of German descent,
but was an Italian-American.
According to his account, at the
end of World War I, Dr. Rhinelander (as we shall call
him) was a member of a secret society in Germany that
had been contacted by a group of non-Terrans and told
that he would be given the plans and assistance to
build marvelous aerial craft that would run on a
propulsion system totally unknown to the earth science
of the day. If he wished to receive this information,
he must form a group of scientific disciples and
immigrate to a certain coal-mining community in the
Midwest, U.S.A.
Dr. Rhinelander agreed, and as
soon as possible, the Germans immigrated to the
designated area. It was important to be near these
nearly played-out mines, Dr. Rhinelander was told,
because the fuel he would need for the crafts would be
made from a by-product of coal.
Dr. Rhinelander and his fellow
scientists established themselves in the community,
beginning their day when the last whistle sounded in
the mines. While the other miners trudged for the
bars, home, supper, and bed, the scientists entered
their laboratories and set about to fulfill the time
schedule that had been set for them by their
mysterious benefactors. Eventually, through the
apparently unlimited funds provided by the
non-Terrans, Dr. Rhinelander was able to buy up old
mines to convert into spacious laboratories and to
employ large numbers of the indigenous
community.
Those who wished to work for Dr.
Rhinelander had first to pass a rigorous physical
examination and a tortuous, maddening psychological
examination. If one were accepted, he was given a
special diet and was required to submit to a regular
testing of his blood, "to see if it stayed
right."
When the first craft was
completed about 1924, Dr. Rhinelander had such
confidence in his brilliant daughter's abilities as a
pilot that he permitted her to captain the maiden
flight of the aerial craft that had been designed
according to their tutors' specifications.
Although the takeoff was
accomplished without incident, the craft was no sooner
free of the Earth's atmosphere when a similar but
larger vehicle appeared and literally "caught" the
ship piloted by Ms. Rhinelander within its metallic
structure.
The alarmed and confused German
scientists were then informed that another group of
non-Terrans had objected to the intervention of Dr.
Rhinelander's benefactors. They were not eager for
Homo sapiens to have the secrets of interstellar
travel. In fact, they would seek to delay humankind's
leap to other worlds as long as possible.
In spite of this interference by
a hostile extraterrestrial group, Dr. Rhinelander
became determined to master space travel and to
negotiate for the return of his daughter. Two more
vehicles were lost to the opposing factor of
non-Terrans before the Germans perfected a means of
avoiding capture. Dr. Rhinelander's daughter and the
other crew members were never returned, although the
Terrans were assured that these people were being well
cared for on another world.
Dr. Rhinelander had finally
accomplished space travel in the 1930's, but it seemed
to matter little. He grieved over the loss of his
daughter and became diverted from his work.
Concurrently, the unlimited financial funding that
they had enjoyed seemed to be curtailed. Chaos began
to permeate their once splendid structure of efficient
order.
At the time of Dr. Rhinelander's
death, the group was approaching poverty, and now the
scientists wished to sell the formulas to the
non-pollutant fuel and the fireproofer. Even though
they remained in close contact with the non-Terrans in
their underwater bases, the scientists had little
inclination to attempt more than an occasional foray
into the night skies with their two surviving
craft.
I went along on a midnight
meeting in some seedy bar where we were to rendezvous
once again with the negotiator. It rained so hard that
night that it must have kept even UFO's out of the
sky, because the man did not show to deliver the
formulas.
Although the negotiator failed
to keep his appointments, it was not long before Ray
found himself confronted by attractive young women who
claimed that they had gone to school on a base on the
Moon that had been established by German scientists in
the 1930s. Ray telephoned me and appealed for help. He
said that the women could answer any technological
question that he, a former Air Force jet pilot, could
throw at them without hesitation.
Excitedly, he told me that he
had taken one of the Moon Maids for dinner a couple of
nights before in an attempt to ply her with alcoholic
beverages to loosen her tongue. She had put away
enough drinks to topple a horse without slurring a
syllable, without contradicting any previously
disclosed aspect of her story, and without once
excusing herself to go to the ladies' room.
I turned down the opportunity to
come along for the next "for sure" transfer, and I was
hardly surprised when Ray told me that our mysterious
salesman had not shown on that occasion,
either.
Were the strange group of German
scientists and alleged aliens that we met that night
in Chicago really a splinter group of the Vril Society
who had made their spacecraft work in hidden bases in
the United States? Or were they clever frauds who
tried to exploit the romance of secret societies and
extraterrestrial mentors into just another scam? If
they were merely scammers, however, why did they never
take the money that was offered to them several times
and run? From my point of view at the time, it seemed
that the group that had met with us had somehow
violated the code of their larger society and had been
ordered to break off contact with those outsiders who
wished to buy their formulas.
Ray kept in touch for quite some
time, and he proved to possess a rare degree of
determination. He told me of a number of midnight
meetings, which the other parties never kept. On
occasion, he was "tailed" by three dark men in dark
automobiles, who proved to be unshakable.
But he never managed to track
down those magical formulas, and he never received
another telephone call from the mysterious secret
society.
As a footnote, although outlawed
in Germany, Vril has recently resurfaced in Italy
where it is known as Causa Nostra (Our Cause).
Membership is restricted to women only, and the
principles are said to be those established by Maria
Orsic, the original Vril Chefin, and the Vril
Gesellschaft of Sigrun, Traute, Gudrun, and Heike.
Maybe this time, their extraterrestrial contacts will
reveal themselves to the world at large. Or maybe
they've been walking among us for years now.
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