Unidentified Flying Object

FOLLOWING THEIR APPEARANCE in the early postwar years, flying
saucers swiftly established themselves as a major cultural icon in popular
mythology. These futuristic discoid aircraft, capable of amazing speeds and
maneuvers, initially impinged on public awareness following an incident on
24 June 1947. Kenneth Arnold, flying his private plane through the Cascade
Mountains in Washington State, saw a formation of nine objects in flight at
about 9,000 feet. He estimated their speed at 1,700 miles per hour—an incredible
figure before ultrasonic flight—and described the strange craft flipping
up and down “like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water.”
Arnold’s sighting was not the first, as nearly forty had been recorded earlier
that year. However, this was the incident that sparked a major wave of journalism
on flying saucers, and further reports from forty-eight states were received
that summer alone. American fears of communism and Russian aggression—
the Cold War was just gearing up with the establishment of communist
regimes in Eastern Europe—fueled interest and anxiety. As the
number of saucer sightings mounted all over the Western world, it was realized
that the saucers’ performance far surpassed all known technology and
human endurance. Belief in the extraterrestrial origin of the flying saucers
soon became widespread.1
Public fear of Soviet superweapons or extraterrestrial visits clearly necessitated
an official response. The US government notably took an ambivalent
view of the saucers, seeking to debunk them if at all possible while strenuously
denying any possibility of their origin on earth. Founded in December
1947, a monitoring investigation called Project Sign examined 237 sightings
under the direction of Allen Hynek, then professor of astronomy at Northwestern
University. In February 1949, Project Grudge was commenced by the
United States Air Force. Renamed Project Blue Book in March 1952, and advised
by Hynek, this project represented the official U.S. investigation of the
UFO phenomenon (“Unidentified Flying Object” was by then the preferred
technical and more neutral term) until its closure in 1969. Meanwhile, civilian
investigation groups were founded in America, Britain and Europe.Waves
of sightings continued unabated. Science fiction magazines and films, a fastgrowing
genre in America and Europe during the 1950s, reinforced the imagery
of flying saucers and the likelihood of alien visitation.2 A new dimension
was added once direct meetings with extraterrestrial aliens were claimed.
A new contactee literature developed after George Adamski’s story of his encounter
with an alien in the Californian desert in November 1952.

Fifty years of the UFO phenomenon have turned into a global mythology
transcending national frontiers. Stephen Spielberg’s enormously successful
film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), initiated a widespread belief
in government coverup and conspiracy regarding its knowledge of UFOs and
aliens. A veritable UFO industry flourishes today. Hundreds of books are
published each year covering sightings, abductions, crash retrievals and even
alien autopsies. Scores of specialist magazines minutely analyze data and evaluate
rumors, claims, photographs and eyewitness accounts. The film Independence
Day (1996), featuring an alien invasion on earth with the Roswell,
New Mexico, crash story of July 1947 in the background, and the television
series The X-Files, highlighting the investigation of the paranormal, have generated
vast profits and a huge interest in UFOs within a complex mythology
involving extraterrestrial life, apocalyptic expectations, religious hopes and
government conspiracy against the people. Posters, T-shirts, and other merchandise,
together with advertising and visual references in popular media,
have created a discourse on UFOs and aliens accessible to everybody.
Esoteric Nazism has found its own niche within this powerful and universal
mythology.As early as the 1950s, rumors began to circulate among certain
German nationalist circles that the postwar flying saucers were in fact German
superweapons that had already been under development and tested during
the Third Reich. At the time of Germany’s surrender in May 1945, this
technology was supposedly shipped to safety in the Arctic, South America and
Antarctica. The abundance of UFO sightings was thus attributed to a hidden
Nazi presence in remote and inaccessible regions of the world. By the late
1970s, neo-Nazi writers were claiming that the “Last Battalion,” a massive
Nazi military force of highly advanced UFOs, was in possession of a vast tract
of Antarctica. At any moment, this fleet of Nazi UFOs could sally forth to deliver
the benighted world from the yoke of the two superpowers as well as the
postwar ills of democracy and liberalism. From the early 1990s these myths of
advanced Nazi technology were conflated with alternative energy sources and
alliances with an extraterrestrial civilization in the remote solar system of
Aldebaran. Jan van Helsing, the notorious German conspiracy theorist and
anti-Semite, now uses these myths, together with the Black Sun, in his bestselling
books on secret societies and their power in the twentieth century.
152 NAZI UFOs, ANTARCTICA AND ALDEBARAN
The roots of Nazi UFO mythology lie in the closely related Hitler survival
myth. Early myths of German revanche were linked with the idea that Adolf
Hitler had escaped from the Berlin bunker during the closing days of the war
and made his way to safety abroad. Conflicting accounts of events in the
Bunker, circumstantial evidence, and early Soviet suggestions that Hitler was
alive created widespread speculation regarding his fate.4 Stories of Hitler’s
last-minute marriage to Eva Braun and their flight to a new life began to circulate
in the international press during the summer of 1945. On 16 July a sensational
article in the Chicago Times had Hitler and Eva Braun landing in Argentina
and living on a German-owned estate in Patagonia. The story was
reprinted by every major American and European paper, including the New
York Times, the Baltimore Sun, The Times of London, and LeMonde. The story
was most likely prompted by the late surrender in early July of the German U-
530 submarine at the Argentine port of Mar del Plata. Several Buenos Aires
papers reported earlier clandestine landings by rubber boats along the coast.
However, on 17 July the newspaper Critica stated that the Führer and Eva
Braun had landed from the U-530 in Antarctica, noting that the possible place
of disembarkation was Queen Maud Land, the destination of a German
Antarctic expedition in 1938–39.5
The late surrender of German submarines in Argentina during the summer
of 1945 played a key role in focusing press interest on Hitler’s escape to
the Southern Hemisphere. The U-530 had given itself up at Mar del Plata on
10 July with an excessively large crew of fifty-four men, considerable stocks of
food and an odd cargo—more than five hundred large drums containing cigarettes.
On 17 August 1945, three months after the capitulation of the Third
Reich, another German submarine, U-977, surrendered at Mar del Plata.
Captain Heinz Schäffer had only thirty-two men under his command on
board. The logs of both submarines showed that both had left Kristiansund,
Norway, on 2 May 1945. As in the case of the U-530, the crew were all exceptionally
young and unmarried men. A third submarine had meanwhile surrendered
at Leixoes on the coast of Portugal on 5 June. The mystery of the
submarines’ long voyages, young crews, exceptional supplies and unknown
whereabouts during the intervening months before their surrender fed speculation
that the submarines had been involved in a “phantom convoy” bringing
Hitler and other top Nazis with auxiliary forces to a secret hideout in
Antarctica.6
Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s massive international mission to Antarctica in
1946–47 offered another suggestive piece of evidence for the Allies’ apparent
concern with a postwar Nazi military presence in Antarctica. On 2 December
1946 a United States fleet of thirteen ships, equipped with four thousand navy
NAZI UFOs, ANTARCTICA AND ALDEBARAN 153
troops, amphibious tanks, helicopters and two hundred airplanes, sailed from
Norfolk,Virginia, to join up with Anglo-Norwegian and Soviet task forces to
monitor Antarctica, ostensibly for the purposes of scientific research and to
establish territorial claims. On arriving in Antarctica, the expedition quickly
ran into difficulties. Byrd lost four airplanes and hastily withdrew, abandoning
the whole operation. A Chilean journalist, Lee Van Atta, quoted Byrd to
the effect that he was concerned about the threat to US security fromunidentified
enemies in the polar region who could fly from one pole to the other.7
A Hungarian exile living in Argentina, Ladislao Szabó, authored a book,
Hitler esta vivo [Hitler Is Alive] (1947), which described the abortive U.S.
Antarctic mission and the captured U-boats in the context of Hitler’s escape
to a secret Antarctic Nazi base. The book was immediately translated into
French and sponsored a spate of sensational magazine stories from 1947 into
the early 1950s.8
The next stage in Nazi UFO mythology was the link between postwar
saucer sightings and the revelation that German engineers had worked on flying
disks during the Third Reich. In March 1950, Flugkapitän Rudolf
Schriever (b. 1910) gave an interview to the German news magazine Der
Spiegel.He described how he had begun pondering solutions for vertical takeoff
while working as a chief pilot at Eger (now Cheb) in 1942. He designed a
central domed cabin for the crew and controls that was surrounded by a circular
plane of rotating turbine blades driven by three jets mounted below.
The whole disk had a diameter of 49 feet (14.4 meters). The turbines could
develop 1,650–1,800 rpm with a thrust of 100 meters/second. Schriever calculated
that his 3-tonne disk could achieve a flying speed of 4,200 kilometers/
second with a range of 6,000 kilometers. Once the Messerschmitt jet became
available in 1942, the project began to be developed by him and his team
at the BMW works at Prague. Schriever stated here that he worked on his designs
until 15 April 1945 but fled before the Russian advance into Czechoslovakia.
Living with his parents-in-law at Bremerhaven-Lehe, he related how his
workshop was burgled in August 1948, and his designs for the flying disk and
a model were stolen. He was convinced that Czech engineers had since reconstructed
his flying disk for a foreign power.9
More details soon emerged. According to a later report, the Schriever flying
disk was actually built and rolled out of the hangar for a test flight in April
1945: “A fantastic creation of nearly 15 meters in diameter, in its center the
plexiglass cupola of the control room glistening in the sunlight.”A slight technical
fault and an air-raid warning postponed the flight indefinitely. The
works shut down on 9 May in the midst of a Czech revolt. Schriever and his
colleagues blew up his flying disk and he escaped, driving his BMW into the
154 NAZI UFOs, ANTARCTICA AND ALDEBARAN
Bavarian Forest in the American zone.Here he repaired agricultural machinery
for a while, until his belongings, including the designs, were plundered.10
In early 1953, the A. V. Roe Company in Canada announced its development
of a circular jet aircraft with a speed of 1,500 mph.Another German engineer,
Georg Klein, former special commissioner in Albert Speer’s Ministry
of Armaments and Munitions, claimed that such designs were already current
in the Third Reich. He identified at least two classes of German flying disks.
The first was developed at Breslau by Richard Miethe, a V-2 rocket engineer,
and consisted of a non-rotating disk 42 meters in diameter. This disk fell into
Russian hands, while Miethe fled via France to the United States, where he
joined the A. V. Roe Company. The other model was the disk of Rudolf
Schriever and Klaus Habermohl built in Prague, consisting of a broad, flat
ring of moving turbine blades around a fixed, globe-shaped pilot’s cabin. Astonishingly,
Klein recalled that he had been present at this disk’s first manned
test flight on 14 February 1945, when the craft reached an altitude of 12,400
meters within three minutes and developed a maximum speed of 2,200 kilometers/
hour in horizontal flight.11
It was in the period 1951 to 1955 that Erich Halik, a member of Wilhelm
Landig’s circle, published his articles in Mensch und Schicksal. He was certain
that postwar sightings of flying saucers related to German craft. He devoted
careful analysis to George Adamski’s account of a cigar-shaped mother ship,
from which a saucer flew forth in November 1952.Halik argued that the naive
American, Adamski, could neither interpret the “Black Sun” insignia nor recognize
the swastikas in an “alien” inscription. In the science fiction idiom of
his day, Adamski had attributed both craft and crew to Venus, an identification
which obviously suited the authorities. As we have seen in chapter 7,
Halik concluded that German flying saucers were now operating from secret
polar bases in the Arctic.Halik’s publication in an Austrian esoteric magazine
attracted little notice at the time, but here in outline was the kernel of the Nazi
UFO mythos: the flying disks were an important part of a German plan to
create an extraterritorial state prior to a renewed attack on the Allied enemies
after 1945. As we shall see, Nazi ufologists in the late 1980s would recycle
Halik’s articles and match Adamski’s photographs with new “discoveries” of
wartime SS designs.12
In 1955 a book published in South Africa gave more details of the Miethe
disk. Known as the V-7, it had no rotating parts and was driven by twelve adjustable
jets, five rearward for forward flight and the other seven for directional
steering. With a range of 13,000 miles, the V-7 was able to reach
1,500–2,000 miles per hour. One of these craft was flown from the V-rocket
base Peenemünde and crashed on Spitsbergen. Another fell into Russian
NAZI UFOs, ANTARCTICA AND ALDEBARAN 155
hands at Breslau and was shipped, togther with two technicians, to a site in
Siberia. A flying disk with Russian inscriptions was reported to have landed in
Pomerania in July 1953, while the motive power of the A.V. Roe design was
based on the V-7. Besides emphasizing the advanced German contribution to
aeronautical engineering during the Second World War, these stories implied
that foreign powers had seized this German technology and were now secretly
developing flying disks—hence the wave of saucer sightings.13
As the war receded into the past, more technical experts from Germany
and Italy published substantial accounts of German secret weapons research
and development during the Second World War. In 1959 Major Rudolf Lusar,
who had worked at the German Patent Office, wrote a lengthy account of the
extraordinary variety of missiles, flying bombs and long-range rockets in operational
use before the end of the war. He also discussed the flying disks of
Schriever, Habermohl and Miethe, who were supported by an Italian physicist
called Bellonzo.14
The Italian connection was strengthened by Renato Vesco, an Italian aircraft
engineer, who had worked with the Germans at Fiat’s immense underground
installations at Lake Garda, producing advanced aeronautical devices
that were tested at the Hermann Goering Institute in Riva del Garda. Vesco
described an astonishing variety of advanced secret weapons in wartime Germany,
including explosive gases, blower cannons, television-guided bombs,
and pilotless fighter planes. Foremost among these for subsequent UFO speculation
was the Kugelblitz, an unmanned circular aircraft with gyroscopic stabilization,
and the Feuerball (“foo fighter”) antiradar device, a spherical armored
shell that could follow enemy bombers. Its fiery halo overionized the
atmosphere in the vicinity of the plane, disabling its radar and sometimes interfering
with engine ignition. Allied air crews had first become afraid of these
huge fireballs pursuing them across the German night skies in the autumn of
1944. Invisible to radar themselves, the fireballs could fly in formation at high
speeds, approach, disappear and regroup. In Vesco’s view, the Feuerball was an
early antecedent of the flying saucers.15
Vesco also documented the titanic industrial effort that the Third Reich
made in 1944–45 in order not to succumb. In August 1944 Hitler turned planning
and construction of new weapons over to the SS, whereupon Himmler
appointed SS-Gruppenführer Hans Kammler as director of secret war production.
Besides its own private research and testing centers, the SS now had
full access to other governmental sites. As Allied strategic bombing intensified,
huge underground installations were rapidly built, many with slave
labor. These included the enormous underground complexes of Nordhausen
and Kahla in the Harz-Thuringian Forest area.With two major tunnels a mile
156 NAZI UFOs, ANTARCTICA AND ALDEBARAN
long connected by sixty-two transverse tunnels, the Mittelwerke factories at
Dora near Nordhausen provided a total of twelve miles of underground installations.
In February 1945 the famous V-weapons center at Peenemünde
on the Baltic coast was partially evacuated to the neighboring village of Bleicherode
Ost. Shortly before the German surrender, the Dora complex had
begun the large-scale manufacture of V-2 rockets and V-1 flying bombs, while
the Bleicherode site developed the giant rocket-torpedo A-9/A-10 to bomb
the United States.16
The first connection between postwar flying saucers and Nazi fugitives in
the Southern Hemisphere was made by Michael X. Barton in a couple of sensational
books published in Los Angeles.His first book,WeWant You: Is Hitler
Alive? (1960), was based on the U-530 and U-977 stories in the Police Gazette
articles of the early 1950s. Barton claimed that Hitler was in Argentina, where
UFOs were being developed in secret underground installations by German
scientists, and he also alluded to the existence of neo-Nazis in West Germany
and Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party in the United States. However,
these UFOs were allegedly modeled on the silent “electro-magnetic” bellshaped
flying saucers built of copper at Vienna by Viktor Schauberger, an
Austrian inventor, in 1940.17 Barton’s second book, The German Saucer Story
(1968), described the Schriever-Habermohl and Bellonzo-Schriever-Miethe
disks, concluding that German scientists were now busy assembling large-size
flying disks in underground factories, comparable to the wartime facilities in
Nordhausen and Bleicherode, in remote areas of South America, South Africa
and possibly Antarctica.18
During the 1970s, Wilhelm Landig and Ernst Zündel, both neo-Nazi
publishers and authors, blended these stories, hints and suggestions into a
powerful and elaborate myth of Nazi resurgence. In novels and nonfiction
works they described how, during the war, the Third Reich had succeeded
in establishing secret bases in the Arctic and Antarctica. Naval convoys
had brought labor, expertise and material to the icy wastes of the polar regions,
where huge underground factories were built to produce the flying
saucers for continued hostilities in the event of a Nazi defeat in Europe.
The remoteness and inhospitality of the polar regions, surrounded by
pack ice and stormy seas, is juxtaposed with a technocratic utopia. Here,
throughout the postwar era, SS and Luftwaffe officers and soldiers live
and work under strict discipline, while their ever more advanced saucers
fly covert sorties across the world. The fearful nature of the Third Reich
and the burden of its defeat are thus deflected in a science fiction vision
of German technical and racial superiority as the huge saucers rise above
the brilliant white snows of an icebound Shangri-La.
NAZI UFOs, ANTARCTICA AND ALDEBARAN 157
In 1971 Wilhelm Landig published Götzen gegen Thule, the first novel in
his Thule trilogy. As we have already seen, this epic adventure of three German
servicemen across the world at the end of the war combines Aryan myths
from the works of Julius Evola,Herman Wirth and Edmund Kiß with Nazi revanchism.
Subtitling his book “A Romance Full of Realities,” Landig weaves
Nazi UFOs into his narrative in an almost routine manner. The men are flown
in a V-7 disk to Point 103, the secret base in Arctic Canada established by the
Black Sun division of the SS. There are references to similar disk construction
projects in Prague and Breslau. The men also witness a “manisola,” another
kind of disk powered by metaphysical, anti-gravitational energy. Equipped
with extensive floodlighting, workshops and living quarters, the secret base is
a large site with rocket-launching pads and caves excavated from the surrounding
mountain range to serve as hangars for advanced aircraft.19 The
men then fly to Prague to evacuate Schriever, his colleagues and the disk from
the BMW plant in the midst of a Czech uprising and Soviet tank advance.20
Landig’s first novel only mentioned these late wartime disks and a major Arctic
base, but it clearly served to inspire a much-expanded Nazi UFO mythology
from Ernst Zündel.
Zündel was well known as a German Canadian publisher in Toronto specializing
in neo-Nazi literature for worldwide distribution, especially in West
Germany. By the late 1970s, he was swamping the German Nazi underground
with books, fliers, audiotapes and videos that glorified Hitler and the Third
Reich, promoted Holocaust denial and drew attention to Allied war crimes.
Born in the Black Forest in 1939, Ernst Christof Friedrich Zündel had trained
as a graphic artist in Germany and emigrated to Canada in 1958. In 1961 he
befriended the veteran French Canadian fascist Adrien Arcand, under whose
influence he became an ardent German nationalist concerned with rehabilitating
the Third Reich.He founded his own publishing house, Samisdat Publications
in Toronto, to publish The Auschwitz Lie (1974), a translation of
Thies Christophersen’s notorious essay on Holocaust denial published in
Germany the preceding year. An immediate best-seller among far right and
anti-Zionist groups, the book established Samisdat as a flourishing underground
Nazi publishing concern. By the summer of 1979, more than 100,000
copies of the book had been sold in five languages.21
Zündel now wanted to reach new audiences with a revamped and exciting
image of Hitler and National Socialism. In the economic recession following
the rise in oil prices in 1973–74, hopes for left-wing revolution were giving
way to “New Age” ideas of spiritual renewal, fantasy and the occult. This period
notably witnessed the publishing peak in the modern mysteriosophy of
Nazi occultism. At this time, the books of Erich von Däniken, Robert Char-
158 NAZI UFOs, ANTARCTICA AND ALDEBARAN
roux, Raymond Drake and others about gods, ancient astronauts and flying
saucers were achieving huge worldwide sales in several languages.22 The widespread
UFO phenomenon was increasingly being co-opted by religious sects
in the English-speaking world such as the Aetherius Society as evidence of divine
instructors.23 Zündel exploited this new mood for the purposes of neo-
Nazi revisionism. The Hitler survival myth, UFOs and secret postwar Nazi
bases in Antarctica provided fantastic and sensational topics for his next
Samisdat books. Eventually, in a powerful myth of national salvation and
Hitler’s messianic world role, he would claim that the Nazis had extraterrestrial
origins or guidance.
His first offering was UFOs: Unbekanntes Flugobjekt? Letzte Geheimwaffe
des Dritten Reiches (1974), written by Willibald Mattern, a German émigré
living in Santiago de Chile. The book was an unashamed paean to the Third
Reich with extensive quotes from Hitler’s Mein Kampf and denunciations of
a Jewish world conspiracy. But the Reich was apparently not dead. On 24 February
1945 Hitler had declared: “In this war there will be neither victors nor
vanquished, only the dead and the survivors, but the Last Battalion will be
German!” This postwar German battle force, active and ready to resume
world combat, was directly linked to the postwar wave of flying saucers.24 Recycling
stories from the South American press, Ladislao Szabó’s Hitler esta
vivo (1947), and Michael X.’s We Want You: Is Hitler Alive? (1960), Mattern
dwelled at length on the two U-boats that had surrendered at Mar del Plata
months after the German surrender in the summer of 1945. Providing full
crew lists,Mattern commented on the youth of the crew and on their lack of
living relatives. U-530 and U-977 were supposedly just the stragglers of a
ghost convoy of U-boats that had carried Hitler and other top Nazi leaders
from Norway to permanent UFO bases in Antarctica.25
In 1975 Ernst Zündel next published an expanded English-language version
of theMattern text, followed by his own books on the German Antarctic
theme, Secret Nazi Polar Expeditions (1978) and Hitler am Südpol? [Hitler at
the South Pole?] (1979). The official German Antarctic Expedition of
1938–39 assumed a long-term strategic importance. Led by Captain Alfred
Ritscher, a veteran Arctic explorer, this scientific expedition carried out extensive
geographical, meteorological and zoological research in QueenMaud
Land, which had formed part of the Norwegian territorial claim on Antarctica
since 1930. Two large flying boats of the Dornier-Wal type flew daily from
the expedition ship Schwabenland, taking over 11,000 photographs, occasionally
landing, covering in all some 600,000 square kilometers and photomapping
350,000 square kilometers. The discovery of high alpine peaks (Mühlig-
Hofmann Mountains) and a group of warm-water oases (Schirrmacher
NAZI UFOs, ANTARCTICA AND ALDEBARAN 159
Lakes) amid the frozen wastes was of particular interest as it suggested that
there were hospitable microclimates within the icebound continent. At regular
intervals of 20 kilometers, the airplanes dropped thousands of metal
marker flags bearing swastikas to claim the newly surveyed territory for Germany,
which was henceforth called Neuschwabenland. Congratulatory messages
from Hitler and Hermann Goering greeted the expedition on its return
to Hamburg in April 1939.26
Zündel and Mattern regarded this expedition as the first step in a farreaching
German policy to develop the polar continent into both a future
refuge and a power base from which the Nazis could wage war even after defeat
in Europe.More than this: the global phenomenon of flying saucer sightings,
first noted in 1947, confirmed the presence of a Nazi colony with highly
advanced technology in Antarctica. As the saucer projects in Bohemia and
Silesia progressed and the military situation in Europe deteriorated, evacuation
plans were put in hand. The saucer factories and test sites were dismantled
and shipped to Antarctica by regular U-boat convoys. In this powerful
myth of national resurrection, both authors hinted that the Germans had
built up a gigantic yet secret complex of underground factories, saucer silos
and armed garrisons in the warm oases of Neuschwabenland toward the end
of the war.27
After the fall of the Third Reich, the secret Nazi colony in Antarctica continued
to develop the flying saucers in complete security deep below the
three-mile-thick icecap. With the advent of the worldwide UFO phenomenon,
consternation grew in the victorious Allied camp. Both Mattern and
Zündel cite “Operation Highjump,”Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s Antarctic mission
with combined American, British and Soviet forces in 1946–47, as compelling
evidence of the threat posed by the Nazi “Last Battalion.”Byrd himself
was quoted that the intention was “to break the last desperate resistance of
Adolf Hitler . . . in the Queen Maud Land region, or to destroy him.”28 Bases
were established, mapping missions flown and thousands of photographs
taken. The German response was swift and deadly. In the vicinity of the secret
Nazi base, American airplanes suffered instrumental failure. Within fortyeight
hours, four aircraft had been lost. Byrd hastily aborted the operation,
and the entire fleet returned to the United States.29 Since 1947,Antarctic Nazi
power has remained inviolate. Against a scenario of increasing racial chaos
and economic catastrophe, thousands of Nazi UFOs will one day fly forth to
restore German world power in an apocalyptic act of deliverance.30
Like Landig’s first novel, the Samisdat titles quickly became hot tips among
neo-Nazis in West Germany. Zündel also spiced his abridged English language
version of the Mattern book with esoteric ideas, linking German mil-
160 NAZI UFOs, ANTARCTICA AND ALDEBARAN
lenarian myths with extraterrestrial visitations. Did the Nazis in Antarctica
discover access to the “Inner Earth,” long ago described in Nordic legends and
sagas and assiduously cultivated by the Thule Society? Had the Nazis discovered
long-hidden secrets on their expeditions to the Himalayas and Tibet?
Perhaps extraterrestrials from other galaxies had assisted the Germans with
the saucer projects, having recognized their receptiveness to the new technology.
Perhaps this collaboration was based on some shared ancestral kinship.
He recalled Reinhold Schmidt’s UFO contactee account of a “Saturnian”
spacecraft whose crew spoke German and behaved like German soldiers, and
speculated whether the German nation was indeed a colony of Saturn, long
since settled on Earth.Why were the Germans so “different”? Could this explain
why the Germans always excel as soldiers, engineers and technologists?
Was Hitler planted on this planet to pull back Western civilization from the
brink of degenerate self-extinction?31
Back inVienna, Landig swiftly elaborated these ideas inWolfszeit um Thule
(1980), the second action-packed novel in his Thule trilogy. As indicated in
chapter 7, the book describes the voyage of a huge “phantom convoy” of German
U-boats fromNorway to Antarctica inMay 1945. The earlier Arctic base,
Point 103, is destroyed, and all the men and materiel are evacuated.V-7 flying
saucers accompany the convoy as it travels down into the South Atlantic.32
FromBouvet Island,midway between the Cape of GoodHope and theAntarctic
mainland, most of the German U-boats proceed to Neuschwabenland, the
600,000 square kilometer German Antarctic territory formerly claimed by the
Ritscher expedition of 1938–39.33 A returning eyewitness describes how, in
this enormous land mass the size of Germany, the forces of the Black Sun are
building an impregnable military fortress, backed by the miracle weapons and
flying saucers of the Third Reich. The secret bases are concentrated in the area
bounded by the Wohlthat Massif, the Conrad Mountains and the Ritscher
Peak near the warm-water Schirrmacher Lakes. This southern successor of
Point 103, far larger and impregnable, will serve as the “last German Battalion”
in a continuing standoff with the (temporarily) victorious Allies.34
The new Antarctic bases remain veiled in mystery as Landig’s tale then follows
the remaining German submarine to Argentina, where a small commando
group is put ashore at night by rubber boat on the Rio de la Plata. The
historical record is matched by the surrender of U-530 a few days later in July
1945, followed by U-977, another straggler of the “phantom convoy.”35 The
three men then travel from Buenos Aires in friendly Argentina to La Paz in
Bolivia. Contacts bring them southward to a large underground factory on
the west side of the Andes in Chile, known as Mime’s Smithy, located within
the huge, prehistoric tunnel systems earlier discovered by Edmund Kiß.Here,
NAZI UFOs, ANTARCTICA AND ALDEBARAN 161
several hundred engineers and scientists under German command are developing
the V-7 flying saucers, with which regular contact is maintained with
Point 211, the Antarctic base.36 Landig alludes to further secret German bases
in Brazil, including one colony at the headwaters of the Rio Purus. This was
the remnant of a wartime Waffen-SS expeditionary force of two thousand
men, who landed by U-boats in 1942 with plans to seize the Panama Canal.37
In early 1947 the colony at Mime’s Smithy exults in the rapid repulsion of Admiral
Byrd’s military invasion by their comrades in Neuschwabenland.38
The mythical power of these stories of German saucer bases in the Andes
and Antarctica was wholly dependent on worldwide curiosity about UFOs
throughout from the early 1950s through the 1970s. During this period,
thousands of UFO sightings over North and South America, Europe and Asia
were reported. Photographs of clearly recognizable saucer craft were published
in magazines and books.39 The Cold War, the superpower space race,
and a plentiful supply of science fiction created a demand for such stories in
the press. Recurrent scares of government cover-ups regarding the UFOs—
did the authorities know much more than they were telling?—created a psychic
space within which the UFO phenomenon could be linked with conspiracy
theory. In this view, both the Americans and Russians were anxious to
deny that the UFOs were man-made craft operated by renegade German Nazi
forces. Nazi UFOs linked with Antarctica supplied a powerful myth of German
revanchism against the hegemony of the superpowers.
The idea of Nazi UFOs caught on fast. The Belfast-born British author W.
A. Harbinson wrote a best-selling novel, Genesis (1980), on the theme, which
reprinted five times in three years.40 An American aviation genius emigrates
in 1935 to the Third Reich to profit from the resources of a totalitarian state.
Nazi slave labor working day and night hews out the huge underground factories
of the Harz and Thuringia, where his amoral thirst for technical
achievement knows no limits. Backed by the SS, he constructs a huge saucer
in the enormous rock tunnels at Kahla.As the war closes in, trains daily transport
slaves and materiel to Kiel, where they disappear to the “wilderness.”
When the Third Reich finally collapses, the ruthless genius finally escapes
with top SS fugitives Hans Kammler and Artur Nebe to their long-prepared
fortress in Antarctica. As the postwar years pass, a New Order state arises,
manned by “implanted” human robots, a secret scientific utopia rid of all humanity.
The concentration camps, SS guards, whips and barking dogs lie far
in the past; futuristic flying saucers flashing across the snowy peaks are a potent
symbol of victorious fascist inhumanity.41
During the 1980s the mythos was elaborated by further neo-Nazi publications
on miracle weapons, Nazi UFOs and secret German bases in Antarctica
162 NAZI UFOs, ANTARCTICA AND ALDEBARAN
by the Hugin-Gesellschaft and Teut-Verlag in the small town ofWetter in the
Ruhr. D. H. Haarmann’s three-volume Geheime Wunderwaffen [Secret Miracle
Weapons] (1983–85) dilated on the by now familiar topics of the Ritscher
expedition, the “phantom convoy” and Operation Highjump. Further Allied
Antarctic invasions had been mounted in 1955–56 and again under cover of
the International Geophysical Year in 1958, when atomic weapons were used
in vain against the hidden German enemy. Haarmann saw the Antarctic
Treaty of December 1959 as a ploy of the United Nations Organisation, conceived
in 1942 to achieve Allied war aims against the Axis Powers as well as a
nefarious world conspiracy.42 His subsequent volumes took up the themes of
worldwide saucer sightings in the 1950s, especially the (historical) incident
when seven disks flew over the White House in Washington on 20 July 1952,
interpreted by Haarmann as a show of German capabilities, and Reinhold
Schmidt’s encounter with a German-speaking saucer crew in November
1957. Haarmann also linked UFO cover-ups and the extraterrestrial hypothesis
with a “secret government” conspiracy of invisible elites such as the
Council on Foreign Relations.43
This conspiracy not only concerned a blackout on Nazi resurgence but on
alternative energy technology. How else could the modern saucers execute
such astonishing feats of speed, acceleration, rapid changes of direction with
soundless flight and the complete absence of exhaust? Here, the wartime work
of Viktor Schauberger, the Viennese inventor, on electromagnetic flying
saucers is cited as the prototype of antigravitational power. Evidently, the secret
German saucer industry is using free “implosive” energy from the earth’s
gravitational and magnetic fields rather than the “explosive” technology of
fossil fuels with all their harmful ecological consequences. Knowledge of the
Nazi saucers and their free energy power is thus being suppressed by a (Jewish)
conspiracy of banks, oil and automobile industries in the postwar world
economy.Haarmann even considers the mystical sources of such “implosive”
technology, citing Miguel Serrano’s speculation that the SS found the Cathar
Grail treasure in southern France, an idea that connects with Erich Halik’s
thoughts on “manisolas” and Julius Evola’s idea of the Grail as an Aryan-
Nordic mystery tradition.44 Such a world conspiracy against alternative energy
would become a major theme of New Age literature in the 1990s.
Richard Schepmann, the publisher of Teut-Verlag, is the son of the former
SA staff officer Wilhelm Schepmann. In 1983 he was sentenced to a six-month
suspended sentence and heavy fine for inciting racial hatred. The Hugin-
Gesellschaft and Teut-Verlag continued to present revanchist German nationalism
in an esoteric context, introducing the first volume of Miguel Serrano’s
“Esoteric Hitlerism” trilogy to a German readership in 1987. Serrano
NAZI UFOs, ANTARCTICA AND ALDEBARAN 163
had ready access to Spanish-language literature in South America bearing on
the Hitler survival myth and Nazi OVNIs (UFOs) cultivated by neo-Nazi
groups in Chile. Through Serrano, the Nazi UFO subculture was also able to
extend its esoteric references to the history of secret societies, the Grail, Templars
and Rosicrucians.Hugin’s program also included other Nazi UFO publications,
such as the two-volume work Deutsche Flugscheiben und U-Boote
überwachen die Weltmeere (1988–89) by O. Bergmann and a complete dossier
of press cuttings on UFO sightings from the 1950s to the present. The millennial
nationalist ideology behind all publications was evident from an announcement
in large print: “German Volk awake! You are at the threshold of
an incomparable golden age, not at the end of your long history.”45
Nazi UFO mythology has a serial character, whereby earlier details are constantly
elaborated into new concepts and ideas. In the early 1990s, the Austrians
Norbert Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ralf Ettl developed new Nazi UFO myths
involving ancient Babylon, Vril energy and extraterrestrial civilization in the
solar system of Aldebaran. These colorful ideas are integral elements of a dualist
Marcionite religion propagated by Ralf Ettl through his Tempelhofgesellschaft
(Temple Society) in Vienna, identified as a secret successor to the
historic Templars, who had absorbed Gnostic and heretical ideas in the Levant.
Marcion established his own religious community in Rome in the second
century a.d., whereupon sister churches spread through the east and west of
the empire. Marcion’s theology was dualistic. In the gospel he found a God
who is goodness and love, and who desires faith and love from men. In the
Old Testament, he saw a just, stern, jealous and wrathful God who requires
obedience, fear and righteous conduct from his servants.Marcion taught that
man was created out of matter by the just and wrathful god and fell under the
curse of the Demiurge, until a higher God took pity on the wretched race of
mankind and sent his Son down to earth to redeem men.
This strict distinction between the Christian God of the gospel and the
Jewish God of the Old Testament was the basis of Marcion’s doctrine. Marcion
championed Paul, who alone was supposed to understand the gospel.
Paul opposed the original apostles with their Judaistic doctrines.Marcion followed
in Paul’s footsteps, setting aside the spurious gospels, purging the
Gospel of Luke from judaizing interpolations, and restoring the Pauline epistles.
Marcion taught that all should put their trust in the good God and renounce
their allegiance to the Demiurge. The true Christian should shun all
things sensual and perishable, which are the works of the evil Demiurge. God
redeems only the spirit of man, as all matter perishes (an influence fromcontemporary
Gnosticism). The Marcionite churches enjoyed a golden age between
a.d. 150 and 250,when they represented a vital challenge to the Church.
164 NAZI UFOs, ANTARCTICA AND ALDEBARAN
Thereafter, they declined, with many Marcionites going over to the Manichaeans
in the east and providing impulses for the Gnostic Paulicians, Bogomils
and ultimately the Cathars in the west. By identifying the Jews as evil
antagonists in a dualist cosmology, modern Marcionites are typically anti-
Semitic.
Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ralf Ettl claim that Rudolf von Sebottendorff discovered
old texts or oral traditions on his travels in the Middle East relating
to this dualist rejection of El Shaddai (Jahve), the god of the Old Testament,
whom Jesus identified as the devil (John 8:44). Sebottendorff also allegedly
found Persian and Babylonian references to a millennial battle between good
and evil, which inspired his (spurious) book Der interkosmische Weltenkampf
(1919). Sebottendorff was supposed to be acquainted with the prophecy of
the “Third Sargon” by the Babylonian seeress Sajaha (c. 650 b.c.), which told
of terrible woes and the inversion of all values until the avenging emperor
would arrive from the north (Midnight) and destroy all evil by fire. Recalling
that Christ told the Jews that the Kingdom of God would be taken from them
and given to a people who would produce its fruit (Matthew 21:43), Sebottendorff
learned that Jesus later told Germans serving in a Roman legion that
they were the chosen people.46 In Jürgen-Ratthofer’s fictional account, Sebottendorff
was the first individual to understand that this cosmic battle between
the forces of darkness and light would reach its climax in the twentieth century
with the advent of the Age of Aquarius.
In August 1917, according to Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ettl, Rudolf von Sebottendorff,
Karl Haushofer, the medium Maria Orsic from Zagreb and
the pilot Lothar Waiz held a meeting with the old prelate Gernot of the
Societas Templi Marcioni at a café in Vienna. Their discussions turned on
astrology and apocalyptic predictions in Indian, German and Babylonian
traditions. Gernot was highly impressed and invited Sebottendorff to visit
the secret estate of his Templar order known as the “Die Herren vom
Schwarzen Stein” (DHvSS) [Lords of the Black Stone] at Marktschellenberg
in Bavaria. The DHvSS was supposedly founded by the Knight Commander
Hubertus Koch in 1221 as a Marcionite Templar order. Its dualist
and Gnostic “Babylonian” doctrine told of the dominion of evil on earth
and the battle between light and El Shaddai based on the revelations of
the goddess Ishtar. The Black Sun is the divine source of energy accessible
to initiates through a hierarchy of spiritual intermediaries. Through the
DHvSS, Sebottendorff understood that Marcionite anti-Judaist teachings
ultimately came from the much older Babylonian doctrine common to all
Aryan peoples. The cosmic challenge of the age demanded the defeat of El
Shaddai and the Jews.47
NAZI UFOs, ANTARCTICA AND ALDEBARAN 165
Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ettl next latched onto the Vril references in the occult
Nazi mythology of Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier. These, it will be recalled,
go back to Willy Ley’s report of a Vril Society in Berlin. German researchers
have recently established that such a group did exist in association
with the astrological publisher Wilhelm Becker. This wholly obscure “Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft
‘Das Kommende Deutschland’” published a short
brochure Vril: Die kosmische Urkraft (1930), which described the Atlanteans
as possessors of a spiritual “dynamo-technology,” superior to the mechanistic
notions of modern science. Based on Vril energy, this technology also enabled
the Egyptians and Aztecs to build their pyramids. The brochure claims that
this knowledge of the ancients should now be applied for the benefit of modern
mankind. The group’s second brochure,Weltdynamismus (1930), rejected
explosive technology and spoke of the release of free energy. A chapter headed
“The World Apple” described a bisected apple as a map of the universal free
energy field. It is quite probable that Willy Ley’s record of the Vril group recalled
this very detail as a meditational object.48
In Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ettl’s account, this group of esotericists concerned
with Atlantis and free energy becomes a powerful UFO research
agency. Between 1917 and 1919, Sebottendorff built up the Germanenorden
and the Thule Society as true to secret Aryan-Babylonian doctrine.When the
Thule was involved in the Bavarian revolution ofMay 1919, a separate section
for spiritual and esoteric studies was founded as the Vril Society. In December
1919 an inner group of the Thule and Vril held a joint meeting at Ramsau
near Berchtesgaden, where the medium Maria Orsic presented transcripts in
an old Templar script of communications she had received telepathically.
These proved to be written in Sumerian, the language of the founders of the
oldest Babylonian culture. These channeled communications allegedly came
from the planet Sumi-Er in the solar system of Aldebaran, the brightest star
in the constellation of Taurus, sixty-eight light years away from earth. Jürgen-
Ratthofer and Ettl claim that the DHvSS and its modern successor, the Vril
Society, received mediumistic confirmation that the Sumerians were a colony
of superior beings sent from Aldebaran to earth 500 million years ago. The
Aldebaran language not only resembled Sumerian but also German, since
both peoples shared the same Aldebaran ancestry.49
With mounting excitement, the Vril Society was supposed to have examined
the old archives of the DHvSS and concluded that Hubertus Koch and
his followers had established esoteric contact with the Aldebaran people back
in the Middle Ages. The apparition of the Babylonian goddess Isais was possibly
even a visit by an Aldebaran woman. The grand seal of the DHvSS showing
a winged bull clearly reflected Aldebaran’s location in Taurus, while Isais
166 NAZI UFOs, ANTARCTICA AND ALDEBARAN
was the Aldebaran empress. All the Aldebaran traditions indicated “a kind of
National Socialism on a theocratic basis.”The Vril Society concluded that this
exclusive contact between the German Marcionite order, themselves and
Aldebaran signified that the Aldebaran people were “the Germans in the sign
of Taurus” and thus allies in the great cosmic battle against the Jewish forces
of darkness.50 In fulfillment of this esoteric alliance across the galaxy, Maria
Orsic next received channeled instructions for the construction of a timetravel
machine. A leading member of the Vril, Dr.W.O. Schumann, pioneered
the development of electromagnetic fields through rotating disks, and a prototype
was constructed near Munich in 1922. Over the following decade, this
research and development led to an entire range of German flying saucers
based on the principle of anti-gravitational levitation.51
In June 1934 Lothar Waiz flew the first RFZ 1 (Rundflugzeug) at Brandenburg.
The stimulus of military innovation quickly led to highly advanced
craft. Thereafter, the Thule Society took a hand by establishing the SS Development
Department E-IV for advanced saucer technology. These larger and
much more powerful craft took the series name “Haunebu.” Driven by a
“Thule-Tachyonator,” the Haunebu I had a 25-meter diameter, a speed of
4,800 kilometers/hour, a range of eighteen hours and carried a crew of nine
men. Developed in November 1943, the Haunebu II was slightly larger and
could travel at 6,000 kilometers/hour for fifty-five hours. The massive
Haunebu III had a diameter of 71 meters and could reach a speed of 40,000
kilometers/hour with a range of eight weeks, carrying a crew of thirty-two
men. The Schumann group produced two smaller saucers, Vril-1 and 2, as
fighters. Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ettl reproduce detailed technical drawings, ostensibly
from the SS department E-IV and Schumann’s Vril group.Apparently
seven craft of the Haunebu II type were built, one each of the other Haunebu
types, and seventeen Vril-1 craft.52 In late 1944, the SS E-IV also designed the
Andromeda vessel, 139 meters in length and 30 meters high. Powered by four
“Thule-Tachyonators” and four “Schumann-Levitators,” this long-distance
spaceship could transport a Haunebu II and two Vril 1 saucers in its internal
hangars. This huge cigar-shaped mother ship and its accompanying saucers
were supposed to be responsible for George Adamski’s famous sighting in
California in 1952.53
Through their elaborate mythology of Sumero-Aldebaran links, Jürgen-
Ratthofer and Ettl attribute German flying saucer technology to semi-divine
guidance from extraterrestrial civilization. They also claim that National Socialism
and anti-Semitism are closely bound up with channeled communications
from a highly advanced society ethnically related to the Germans and
following a political model similar to the Third Reich. According to these
NAZI UFOs, ANTARCTICA AND ALDEBARAN 167
communications, the population of the Aldebaran solar system has long been
organized on racial lines. The master race of “light godmen” (Alpha-Aldebarans)
lives on the planet Sumi-Er, while the lesser races are confined to the
planet Sumi-An. These racial differences arose through the colonization of
former planets with different climates. Atomic wars also created mutations
among the colonists into “apemen.” (A commentary adds that the ancient Assyrians
thought Negroes were the result of a prehistoric conflagration and bemoans
the intellectual decline of America due to racial mixing.) Aldebaran is
also supposed to be at war with the empires of Capella and Regulus, culturally
inferior but with larger populations. (Again the commentary speculates
whether earth has also received colonies from these solar systems, thus accounting
for the white, yellow and black races on earth).54 The idea that the
Germans are the direct descendants of Alpha-Aldebarans simply translates
the “ario-heroic” godmen of Lanz von Liebenfels’s Ariosophy into the modern
science-fiction idiom of planetary colonization from a distant star.
Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ettl also articulate a sci-fi millenarianism, whereby
the Nazis are supposed to have sent flying saucer missions to seek extraterrestrial
support for the Axis against the Allies, even years after the latter’s victory.
On Christmas 1943, the Vril and Thule held a major conference at the
Baltic resort of Kolberg (now Kol⁄obrzeg), where desperate military measures
were discussed.Vril staffs were now working on a spaceship that could switch
into another dimension and thus reach Aldebaran, sixty-eight light-years
away. After discussions with Hitler and Himmler, the Vril group launched an
advanced Vril-Odin (Vril-7 or Vril-8) saucer in early 1945 into the “transdimensional
canal,” which enables travel at 900,000 kilometers/second (three
times the speed of light).After a voyage lasting only several weeks (on board),
Vril-Odin is supposed to have reached the Aldebaran solar system in 1967.
The Aldebaran regime then dispatched an enormous interstellar armada consisting
of 280 battle cruisers of various classes, ranging from 1.5 to 6 kilometers
in length and capable of carrying between 4 and 810 flying saucers apiece.
Depending on its speed after emerging from the “transdimensional canal” in
the asteroid belt, this armada is to arrive on earth sometime between 1992
and 2005 to resume the Second World War.55
Two Nazi-UFO videos are widely circulated in the neo-Nazi and New Age
milieus today. UFO—Das Dritte Reich schlägt zurück? [UFO—The Third
Reich Strikes Back?] tells the story of the Black Sun, illustrated with reliefs and
statues from ancient Babylon. The film also shows impressive images of recent
sightings of UFOs with German markings, compared with technical
drawings of Haunebu and Habermohl-Schriever saucer designs. It ends with
a pathetic account of the joint German-Japanese last-ditch mission in April
168 NAZI UFOs, ANTARCTICA AND ALDEBARAN
1945 to seek military aid from Mars. After an eight and a half month voyage,
the Haunebu III lands on Mars in January 1946, only to find the deserted
pyramid city and “Face,” signs of a bygone higher civilization. “What
disappointment must these men have felt, when they realized that all was
in vain!”56 The other video, also written by Jürgen-Ratthofer, UFO—
Geheimnisse des Dritten Reichs [UFO—Secrets of the Third Reich], covers the
Thule-Vril story with its background in Sebottendorff ’s meeting with the
Marcionite Templars. The Thule created the secret society of the Black Sun
within the SS.Actors stage the mediumistic séances, the young Hitler is shown
studying in a library and American UFO experts are interviewed. The line between
archival sources and fiction is constantly blurred, giving the impression
of a documentary.Where did the German saucers go at the end of the war?
One solution, we learn, is that they traveled back in time through the “transdimensional
canal” to safety in ancient Babylon, where the German crews
were feted as “white gods” from another world.57
Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ettl’s books were first published by Michael Dämbock,
who edits the magazine Pen Tuisko, “letters for German pagans,” as a
mixture of Germanic mythology, runelore and astrology. Jürgen-Ratthofer
has published further books on time machines and the Aldebaran galactic
empire. His most important recent book is Lichtreiche auf Erden [The Reichs
of Light on Earth], in which he speculates on an alliance between Iraq and the
Greater German Reich during the 1991 Gulf War. As Iraq lies in Mesopotamia,
its elite are also descended from the Sumerians and thus related to
the Germans. As German territory was a nuclear hostage to the Allies after
1945, the Nazi UFOs could only pursue a limited clandestine war against selected
targets. Meanwhile, the Cold War and the Strategic Defense Initiative
(SDI) can only be understood as the postwar Allied response to this threat.
Nevertheless, only the Nazi UFOs, the “Reichs of Light,” have prevented an
atomic war being fought in Europe as well as in Korea,Vietnam, the Falklands
and the Persian Gulf.58 The Nazi UFO books of Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ettl are
widely distributed by the Andromeda mail-order bookshop in Nuremberg,
which issues monthly catalogs in which similar material is listed alongside the
literature of conspiracy theory, channeling, New Age spirituality and redemption.
In the mid-1990s this quasi-ariosophical lore of Aldebaran-German linkage
penetrated the international UFO scene. The best-selling books of the
leading German conspiracy theorist, Jan van Helsing, recapitulated the imaginary
history of Vril flying saucers, the settlement of Aldebaran colonists in
Sumeria, and the German mission to Aldebaran.59 ThroughUFOconferences,
Helsing’s revelations have encouraged a new wave of Aldebaran channels. In
NAZI UFOs, ANTARCTICA AND ALDEBARAN 169
his new book Unternehmen Aldebaran [Operation Aldebaran] (1997), Helsing
describes how a Bavarian family recalled their contacts with extraterrestrials,
involving abductions and implants, while under hypnotic regression.
Karin and Rainer Feistle describe a UFO commander showing them enormous
“embryo farms” for the breeding of a “new race” that will secure
mankind’s future.60 Helsing uses these hints to elaborate on human history.
Arriving on earth 735,000 years ago, Aldebaran colonists bred “slaves” for menial
tasks (Helsing uses Lanz von Liebenfels’s term Tschandale), but these inferiors
revolted and mixed with other races. When the Aldebarans revisited
earth much later, they saw that the race-mixing slaves had caused wars, revolution
and political upheaval. The Aldebarans decided to breed up the race on
earth by means of the Germans as their closest relatives. They therefore helped
the Germans develop advanced technology during the 1930s, while the Feistles’
testimony indicates the ongoing Aldebaran project for a German master
race.61 This tableau involving the revolt of inferiors, harmful race mixing and
the creation of an Aldebaran-German elite reflect the updating of Ariosophy
through a modern mythology of semi-divine extraterrestrial guidance.
Anglo-American contributions to Nazi UFO mythology also exist: witness
the success ofW. A.Harbinson’s thrillers in the “Projekt Saucer” series. In June
1977, the U.K. independent television company Anglia broadcast a spoof television
program Alternative 3 about colonies on Mars erected to avoid ecological
catastrophe on earth. Nearly twenty years on, Jim Keith, the veteran
U.S. conspiracy theorist, elaborated a complex account of how German scientists
and industrialists, brought to America under Operation Paperclip
after World War II, may have already established secret bases on Mars pending
the evacuation of elites from a polluted and congested earth. (The secret
nature of this scenario recalls the clandestine Nazi buildup in Antarctica.) Although
carried out under U.S. auspices, this project represents the perpetuation
and eventual realization of Third Reich policy for the acquisition of German
Lebensraum (living space). Recalling postwar German involvement in
varied forms of totalitarian control such as intelligence, security, psychiatry
and genetic engineering, Keith wonders whether the Nazis are still implementing
schemes for their final triumph “by constructing bases on Mars or
the moon to carry the ancient Grail of Aryan racial purity away from what
they conceive as a cataclysm-doomed Earth.”62
Actual Anglo-American identification with the manifest German mission
of the Nazi UFOs is rarer. The German Research Project at Gorman, California,
directed by Henry Stevens has published excellent documentation on
Nazi UFOs, but eulogies of the SS, references to the Dark Power (Jews), the
New World Order and the sham of democracy indicate a sympathy for the
170 NAZI UFOs, ANTARCTICA AND ALDEBARAN
Third Reich.63 The Nazi UFO myth has also found support in the British far
right. For example, Tim Hepple (b. 1967) joined the “Political Soldier” faction
of the National Front in 1984, before moving on to the British National Party
in 1986. Although a university music student with a middle-class background,
Hepple was a hardened street fighter and organized the Dewsbury
race riot in June 1989.64 In 1992 he changed his name to Matthews and began
to infiltrate the British ufology scene.65 After initially taking the prevailing
line that UFOs were extraterrestrial in origin, he supported the thesis of manmade
UFOs with a paean to the pioneering achievements of the Third Reich.
Here Matthews cited the delta wing designs of Alexander Lippisch (1893–
1976), the “black triangles” (prototypes of “stealth” aircraft) of Reimar and
Walter Horten, “foo fighters,” and the flying disks of Schriever, Habermohl
and Miethe.66 Matthews’s enthusiasm for the Nazi origins of flying saucers
suggests an ideological allegiance beyond technical admiration.
Flying saucers are ambiguous. C. G. Jung interpreted their mandala form
as a symbol of the self and absolute wholeness.67 But radiant steel surfaces and
lightning speeds also suggest an aesthetic of armored, invincible identity. This
image of the flying saucers may reflect deep-seated fascist notions of technology,
gender and sexuality. Fascination with technology was a key element in
Italian futurism, whose founder, F. T.Marinetti, looked forward to the melding
of man and machine in a world of speed, violence and contempt for
woman. “The Futurist hero was the man of iron, the aviator and the engineer.”
68 After the First World War, Ernst Jünger celebrated a sleek aesthetic of
the machine, military technology and efficiency through his literary works
and photo essays. Shells, tanks and aircraft—metallic, armored and high velocity—
are threatening projections of symmetrical order upon a sensual, vegetative
natural world.69 Nazi flying saucer mythology certainly shares in this
symbolism, reflected by the glittering, lifeless, icy wastes of Antarctica, where
all-male military communities labor in saucer silos to reconquer the world.
Armed with this symbolism, Nazi UFO mythology always identifies the
Germans as the master race. In its first period, 1950 to 1970, chief emphasis
was laid on the myth of Nazi survival, German technical prowess and the construction
of miracle craft and secret bases in Antarctica and South America.
These tales served a consoling function for the defeat of the Third Reich and
division of postwar Germany while promising a revanchist Nazi millennium.
But the UFOs are also vehicles for a futuristic Aryan cult. In the period
1970–85,Wilhelm Landig and Ernst Zündel embroider the technical scenario
with Gnostic Thulean-Jewish struggles and the Black Sun mythos. By the
1990s,Miguel Serrano, Norbert Jürgen-Ratthofer, Ralf Ettl and Jan van Helsing
present Nazi UFOs within a new Ariosophy of semi-divine Aryan origins,
NAZI UFOs, ANTARCTICA AND ALDEBARAN 171
along with channeling, conspiracy theories and New Age beliefs. Sumerian
and Templar secrets, wise extraterrestrial guides, spiritual purity and the dazzling
perfection of spinning luminous saucers offer positive archetypal symbols.
These not only erase the cruel memory of the Third Reich, but suggest
that the Nazis were interesting, spiritual people. Such is the power of UFO
mythology to reconfigure Nazism for the twenty-first century.