The truth behind Nazi UFOs
Turns out … there really isn’t any.
#Nazis #UFOs #FringeClaims #Pseudohistory #NaziUFOs #StrangeHistoricalClaims #Skeptic #ParanormalClaims #WorldWarTwo #WeirdWarTwo #ParanormalClaims
Greeetings. Although this piece is a reprint, it seems like a great place to begin discussions of how to evaluate strange and unlikely historical claims. How can one assess whether or not there is anything to some of the unlikely, unorthodox, or really bizarre claims we see about the past? This piece is one in a three part, loosely linked series on the subject. Next week, I hope to share a piece on looking at Herbert Asbury’s classic book, The Gangs of New York, and it’s tales of the savage, mid 19th Century, Irish-American Dead Rabbits Gang. The week after that will be the first of what I hope to be several pieces that discuss the historical reality of ninjas and how a subject that has lead to the creation of so many books, movies, comic books, and TV shows has somehow not appeared much in good quality, real historical studies and what that means. Even if these three subjects, Nazi UFOs, the Dead Rabbits gang from the Gangs of New York book and movie, and Ninjas and their martial art of ninjitsu do not interest you, reading these three pieces should offer a good background to understanding how real history works and how some hitorical claims are accepted by scholars and others are not.
As for the piece itself, it’s a reprint. A couple years ago, I was recruited by Ross Dobler and the New York City Skeptics 1 to create a couple pieces for an online pop-culture and comic book fan and review publication called AIPT. 2 The intention of this series was to look at several of the claims in a comic called The Department of Truth as it often featured conspiracy theories and fringe beliefs as story elements. 3.
As a slightly edited reprint, it was written for a different audience and does not contain the same system of citations and bibliography that I hope to normally use here. Hypertext Internet Links are included in the work, and it was not written using the Chicago Manual of Style format that I normally try to follow. Nevertheless, I think it includes easy to understand references to where facts and ideas came from.
As an aside, to really track down the sources for ideas like this, one often finds oneself searching for some really hard to find documents. For instance, obscure 40 year old Italian paperbacks aimed at a low brow overseas audience, 30 year old German language pulp novels, and low circulation neo-Nazi newsletters whose subscribers either hid from their neighbors that they read such things or were ignored as the town nut. Few such publications are stored in American libraries. (In fact, when they veer into “hate speech,” there is an active and understandable effort to actually hide them, probably saving lives, i,e, go look up the very important term stochastic terrorism , but making it hard for people like me to track down the source of things such as Nazi UFO beliefs.) It poses a real challenge for serious study, and may be one reason among many that academics tend to ignore these things.
Nevertheless, there’s more I have got to share on this subject. Perhaps some day, but next week it’s time for a completely different aspect of evaluating strange claims about the past. Were the Dead Rabbits gang from The Gangs of New York book and movie true? And what about other groups?
If one wants to see the original piece a link is include below. 4 It appeared August 31, 2022.
Below is an illustrtion of a commercially available plastic model kit of a Nazi UFO. It is one of several from several manufacturers of plastic model kits. In this case the packaging said:
As early as 1942, an enlarged fighter version of the prototypes, Haunebu II, was built with a diameter of 26 meters and a crew of 9. This craft could reach supersonic speeds between 6,000 and 21,000 km/h!
At the end of WWII, when Allied forces moved into occupied countries and eventually Germany, no evidence of these flying discs could be found other than documents relating to their existence. However, after further investigation by Allied Governments and the interrogation of former Thule Gesellschaft and Vril Society members, new information was revealed. This new information convinced some of the interrogators that perhaps the Germans had actually created a type of craft with a special propulsion system that was capable of the claims of the secret Haunebu projects.
With this model kit, you get to decide was Haunebu real? What did it look like? The choice is yours!
Well, I decided to do just that and decide if the Haunebu Nazi UFO was real.
Spoilers, it wasn’t . . .
Separately, the concepts of “Nazis” and “UFOs” immediately, almost unavoidably, invite attention. Put them together and you’ve got some great pulp fiction, but what’s the real history of the idea?
It starts with the fact that Nazis were (and neo-Nazis are still today) just plain weird. National Socialist Ideology and Hitler’s thought grew out of a whole milieu of strange counter- and pseudo-scientific ideas and philosophies. Anti-Semitic global Jewish conspiracy hoaxes, secret lodges, the lost continent of Thule, Cosmic Ice theory, eugenics, a worldview based on eternal Darwinian struggle between “races” that were really mere ethnicities, and more, sparked by the trauma of World War I and national defeat. Nearly everything in mid-war pseudointellectual and fringe circles somehow got mixed into Nazi thought.
Plus, Hitler and the Nazis had a great interest in strange technologies and secret projects, to the point that today no one’s entirely sure which alleged secret projects were real or invented. (For instance, check out the P-1000 and P-1500 “landkreuzer” land battleship. Was it a real proposal, a pipedream an engineer designed for fun, or a hoax? No one knows.) With Nazi secret projects, it’s hard to tell fact from fiction, and that’s part of the appeal, of the Nazi UFO image.
And many Nazi projects involved things that flew, like the V-1 buzzbomb, the V-2 missile, and the ME-262, the world’s first jet fighter. Not quite as successful was the ME-163, the world’s only operational rocket fighter plane ever. It tended to explode on take off or landing, making it more of a danger to its pilots than the enemy. Despite occasional claims to the contrary, the Nazis weren’t terribly efficient, and impartial historians generally agree these secret projects did little to actually affect the course of the war, and instead syphoned resources away from conventional manufacturing and development that could have had more of an impact.
The concept of Nazis constructing and operating UFOs first became widely publicized in the 1970s, an era when a lot of occult, paranormal, and fringe claims captured the public interest. In 1973, Trevor Ravenscroft’s pseudo-historical, Nazi themed, occult “non-fiction” classic The Spear of Destiny was published. Although containing no UFOs, it did have Hitler, lots of Nazis, and plenty of occult, New Agey content, and met with a good reception, making others notice that there was an eager audience out there for this subject matter.
Among the first to tie this in with UFOs was Wilhelm Landig, reportedly a former SS soldier, who in 1971 wrote a German language novel, Götzen gegen Thule (Idols Against Thule), which dealt with Nazi UFOs, a secret base in the Arctic, the lost continent of Thule, and similar themes. Although two sequels followed, to the best of my knowledge, his works were never translated into English and did not attract much attention in the English-speaking world.
Another who seized on the idea was Ernst Zundel, a German-born Canadian resident who also wrote under the pen names Mattern Friedrich and Christof Friedrich. Throughout his life, Zundel worked hard to change public impressions of Hitler, Nazis, and the Third Reich, largely by arguing that the Holocaust never occurred. Zundel seems to have seen the publication of allegedly non-fiction books on Nazi UFOs as a great way to obtain publicity, starting a mail order book catalog and a small publishing house that specialized in neo-Nazi and Holocaust denial literature.
On the off chance that Nazi UFOs didn’t attract sufficient attention, Zundel also mixed in ideas about the hollow Earth, the alleged headquarters of the Nazi UFO fleet. He even solicited funds for a planned expedition to Antarctica to find the entrance to the hollow Earth, and to make contact with the hidden Nazis and their circular aircraft. The result was a 1975 book entitled UFOs: Nazi Secret Weapon? Zundel’s Antarctic expedition never happened, and he ultimately stopped publishing the UFO books, fearing they detracted from the seriousness of his other work, and began focusing on ordinary hate-mongering.
In the early 2000s, investigator Kevin McClure spent some time tracking down the sources of Nazi saucer-shaped craft claims. He discovered that while the reports are widespread, they all seem to have originated with a very small number of extremely unreliable or provably wrong sources. The earliest of these (from 1950) are the claims of Renato Vesco, an Italian (not German) who wrote three books about man-made UFOs. Vesco was a teenager through most of the war, meaning there was little likelihood he’d have access to German wartime secrets. The same pattern was evident with the other claims McClure followed up on. Retconned and elaborated on, but lacking in physical evidence.
Like in the work of WA Harbinson, author of over 50 books, including five fictional and one “non-fiction” book on Nazi UFOs, 1996’s Projekt UFO: The Case for Man-Made Flying Saucers. Not surprisingly, McClure found this one suffered from the same sourcing problems as the other Nazi UFO books, and further asked why a war-era Nazi endeavor would be named “Projekt Saucer,” when “saucer” is not a German word, and “flying saucers” were not a recognized phenomenon yet.
And as if this all this weren’t weird enough, it gets weirder. To some, Hitler grew beyond an inspirational political figure into an actual religious icon, and the Nazi UFOs were not built by World War II Germans, but came here from outer space long ago, bringing the ancestors of the so-called “Aryan race.” Clearly such ideas are far beyond anything envisioned by Hitler even in his wildest moments.
Summarizing these ideas is a challenge, but right-wing Chilean politician Miguel Serrano somehow synthesized several diverse themes in his writings. Serrano was influenced not just by the usual mélange of 20th century fringe ideas like Nazi ideologies and the anti-Semitic conspiracies of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, but also by the ideas of white supremacist mystic Savitri Devi, whose writings taught that Hitler was an avatar of the Hindu God Vishnu. Serrano mixed these in with the myth of Hitler’s survival, the Nazi UFO bases inside the hollow Earth, and ultimately the notion that the races of mankind came from very different, extraterrestrial worlds.
Of course, Serrano offered no hard evidence of these wild assertions that not only retcon Nazi UFOs into the events of World War II, but retcon the entire history of mankind, changing our ancestors from early African hominids into space aliens from different planets who bred together and somehow merged into one species. The weirder and bigger Nazi UFO ideas get, the more things get retconned.
Here is a link to The New York City Skeptics . Although I live in New York State, I live several hours drive away from the city, and have no connection with the group. Many people do not realize how large and spread out different locations in New York State are. Humorously this often includes many people from Manhattan and the New York City area. If you’d like to share your thoughts on the group, please leave a comment.
Here is a link to the online publication AIPT Again, not something I read, but my friend Joe Fludd, fiction author as well as comic book fan and artist, says he finds their coverage of the Fantastic Four series to be very valuable and well done. Again, feel free to leave a comment on it below.
The Department of Truth comic The Department of Truth Again, not something I have read, but it could be truly awesome. Sadly, my time is limited. Again, feel free to read a comment below.
My original piece The Truth About Nazi UFOs at AIPT Comics Okay, I have actually read this one.