DRAINING THE NAZI UFO SWAMP

Maurizio Verga. Flying Saucers from Naziland. The Real Story of the Nazi UFOs. Volume 1. Verga, 2023.

The 'Nazi UFO' stories have been haunting ufology and ufologists, even from before the official birth of the saucers in 1947. Promoted by a coalition of naïve ufologists, cynical exploiters, conspiracy theorists and actual real-life Nazis, they have created a hugely complex network of myth, rumour, fraud and political intrigue.

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This book helps us navigate this complex and contentious landscape. Verga identifies two distinct but linked 'Nazi Saucer' myths. Firstly the 'German secret weapon' phase, which lasted from probably just before the end of WWII, until about 1954. This involved stories of secret weapons, some with an element of believability. The knowledge that captured German scientist were being used by the victorious Allied nations in their own weapons and rocket programmes boosted the idea that they had information on German weapons which had been designed, perhaps even constructed, but were never used before the end of the war.

Approaching the 1980s, Verga suggests that the myth morphed into more fantastical and overtly neo-Nazi political propaganda, boosting ideas of German/Aryan superiority, and promoting theories about surviving Nazi scientists developing advanced technologies in secret laboratories. This began to move to neo-Nazi propaganda into a form of political science-fiction which was able to accommodate the whole range of 'saucer' iconography. This aspect Verga will be exploring in a forthcoming second volume.

Rumours about secret German weapons were circulating even before the outbreak of World War II, with stories of secret 'death-ray' experiments causing mysterious car-stop incidents. As early as October 1939 there were reports of mysterious light in the sky in the north of England during the blackout, “created and put there by German scientists to act as aerial guideposts for German raiders”.

Towards the end of the War there were the well-known foo-fighter reports which fostered ideas of newly developed weapons that would drastically change the course of the war in the final few months. These included claims of the testing of what would have been a tactical nuclear weapon in the island of Rugen allegedly witnessed by an Italian journalist, and a 'freezing bomb' which could trap ships on the high-seas.

Verga looks at these, and other claims of mystery rockets, super-fast aircraft, and Russian flying saucers that circulated in the years after the end of the war, as well as stories of mystery submarines full of Nazi scientists with secret weapons, a theme which was to be repeated, with a Russian origin, off the coast of Sweden in the 1970s and later.

The first actual claim of a German-built saucer emerged as early as 1948 in a Brazilian newspaper. A Noite carried an interview with a German calling himself Nils Christian Christiensen who claimed to have been working on the construction of a disc-shaped craft, which was successfully flown in secret laboratories in Hamburg in 1941. Christiensen – real name Starziczny – was later the head of a Nazi spy-ring in Brazil.

Other early claimants to the creation of 'saucers' included the Italian engineer Giuseppe Belluzzo, and German taxi-driver Rudolf Schriever, and reports of flying saucer inventors multiplied through the 1940s and early 50s. Some of these came from apparently respectable sources such as the American radio commentator Henry Taylor, who later become the US ambassador to Switzerland, who claimed that they were actually two versions of top-secret US inventions.

Verga describes how many individual 'engineers' and publicists took advantage of the stories to promote their own ideas and finances. Others were just plain fantasists like Lino Saglioni, a handyman from Northern Italy with a very chequered war career. This did not stop him from weaving an elaborate story involving Mussolini and a group of Italian scientists, an experimental saucer factory in Norway, and involvement is an unsuccessful mission to destroy the factory by an Allied paratroop patrol. If this sounds vaguely familiar it is basically the same story as the sabotage of the German heavy-water plant in Norway, dramatised in the film The Heroes of Telemark.

By 1950 the various rumours of German secret aircraft, and stories of Hitler's survival began to coalesce into the 'Secret Antarctic Base' concept, which formed the basis for the development of the entire 'Nazi Saucer' mythos. Verga points out that in the years immediately after the War the idea of Hitler cheating death and escaping to plan a Fourth Reich was rather less of a crank idea than it is today, as was held by a number of serious commentators

Fictionalised accounts of the construction and use of saucer-weapons appeared in a number of European papers in the 1950s, including accounts of Allied bombers being destroyed by German saucers. This story provided a template for a number of writers promoting the later 'Nazi Saucers' rumours, including figures such as Wendelle Stevens and Renato Vasco. The story of the fake 'Spitzbergen' UFO crash, was 'post engineered' into the crash of a German saucer on its test flight.

In an appendix to the main timeline of the German saucer narrative, Verga looks at the reality and the rumours behind German attempts to create a nuclear weapon, and how these fed into the Nazi Saucers stories. Post-war claims by characters with peripheral connections to the wartime German military spread stories about German development of atomic weapons, including claims of actual German atom-bomb tests, and even the use of atomic weapons to destroy Allied bombers over Germany.

Maurizio Verga has scoured the world's on-line press archives to present us with the widest possible range of published material relating to the origins, growth and eventual form of the Nazi UFO stories. The referencing and reproduction of source material is perhaps the main value and purpose of this book. Newspapers and magazines from Europe, the USA, South America, Japan and elsewhere are quoted at length, giving us the earlier available versions of the rumours, lies, propaganda and sometimes even facts that have built this legend.

It is a hugely detailed account and the sheer wealth of information sometimes seems overwhelming. Verga has foreseen this potential problem, and each section of the book concludes with a summary of the preceding account, a 'Recap'. This goes over the principle points of the development of the story, signalling the new elements which have been introduced, a reminder of the personages involved, correlations with other aspects of the UFO phenomena. He also lists 'Unconvincing Elements' which in most cases seems to be just about everything reported, and a brief 'timeline' of the issued covered in that section.

There is also a huge selection of illustrations usually taken from magazine and newspaper articles. In some cases – especially the reproduction of newspaper pages – these are rather too small to be studied in detail, but they help give an impression of the way the topics were dealt with in the media of the period. This English translation is by the author, and there are a few infelicities which do not detract too much from the narrative, but I did find it very confusing at times that titles of books were not shown in italic type, particularly with non-English titles. An index of personal names is provided, but a more comprehensive indexing would have been appreciated.

This is a work for a reference library, it is not something to read right through sequentially from page 1 to page 305, but anyone seriously interested in the social and political history UFOs, and particularly those aspects which today still spreads a sinister shadow over the subject, it is of great importance. And perhaps even more so when Volume II is published.

• John Rimmer

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