Top Secret Nazi UFOs
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Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. Had the Nazis developed a brand new flying craft at a secret research facility in northern Germany? Did the Americans and Russians steal that technology after the Second World War?

And was it, as many have claimed, a man-made flying saucer? There were some very strange experimental Nazi aircraft in the air before the war ended. There could well have been prototype German aircraft that brought some sort of similarity to the flying saucer. There would have been maybe some kind of flying object that could have taken off vertically. Perhaps.

The US military were well aware about the technology of the Germans because they captured a lot of stuff. The reason the Nazis built these craft were for maintaining their military supremacy. They didn't hesitate to kill thousands of people in order to keep this secret being a secret. We were right on the brink of that delivery being made. It could have changed history.

It's one of the great mysteries of the Second World War. Had the Nazis really developed a craft that was invisible to radar, able to outmaneuver enemy aircraft and travel across the globe at hypersonic speed? It sounds like something from science fiction. But there are many who believe they did. Journalist Jamie Theakston is hoping to unravel the evidence and find out whether there really were Nazi UFOs.

There was a lot of supposition towards the end of the Second World War that the Nazi air force, the Luftwaffe, were experimenting with fighter planes and bombers that were faster and more dangerous than the Hurricane or the Spitfire. They felt that they had got the worst of every aerial battle in which they'd been engaged with our men, and so they were looking for superior weaponry.

We have to remember that at the start of World War II, aircraft design was still, relatively speaking, in its infancy. So new ideas were being tried out all the time. Hitler in particular and the big generals around him were very interested in wonder weapons. And the more desperate they became, the more interested they were in wonder weapons.

The reality is that even if the Nazis had developed a UFO, then it came too late for them to turn around their fortunes in the war. But newly released documents and deathbed confessions from scientists involved in top-secret Nazi development paints a picture of a race to develop a supercraft codenamed Die Glocke, or "The Bell", which would have changed the face of history forever.

In fact, the idea of the Nazis developing a flying saucer wasn't such a crazy idea at all. They had, for years, been at the cutting edge of aircraft design, with early prototypes for vertical takeoff jets and even fixed-wing and stealth technology.

German engineers were, and still are, among the very best in the world. If they set their hearts and minds on developing, whether it was an aircraft or a submarine, or anything new and unusual and superior to what they considered to be their opponents, then I believe it was within their capabilities that there were some very strange,

very unusual experimental Nazi aircraft in the air before the war ended. All indications are the Nazis were ahead of all of the allied nations in terms of technology. First-hand accounts tell us that from as early as the 20s and 30s, their technology far outstripped anything else on the planet.

Further evidence for highly advanced Nazi flying craft came in the form of the so-called "Foo Fighters". They were unexplained balls of extremely fast moving light that started buzzing Allied aircraft over Germany.

They were first reported in November 1944, towards the end of the war, and were sometimes seen as single balls of light streaking across the sky in front of Allied aircraft. And sometimes, there were many of them flying off, around, and under the wings.

There were reports from our airmen and, strangely enough, from the Luftwaffe fliers later on about these mysterious Foo Fighters which were faster and which had better armory and which caused a lot of damage. The whole thing was hushed up for many years, but it looks as though the German designers and developers had produced

several experimental machines which were generally called Foo Fighters. Some pilots described them as resembling Christmas tree lights and reported that they seemed to toy with the aircraft, making wild turns before simply vanishing. Pilots and aircrew reported that the objects flew in formation with their aircraft and behaved as if under intelligent control, as they could never be outmaneuvered or shot down.

The phenomenon was so widespread that the military took the sighting seriously, suspecting that the mysterious objects might be secret German weapons. What appears are the Nazis built advanced, technologically superior flying machines for purposes of military supremacy. However, their radical design led them to be interpreted as being of extraterrestrial origins.

The fact that the Foo Fighters appeared at the time when the Nazis were experimenting with this kind of craft is enormously suggestive that the Foo Fighters were actually the German craft, perhaps remote controlled. I wouldn't say it's proof positive because it depends what you think of all the other UFO reports that have come out since then.

If they're extraterrestrial craft, they could have been buzzing around then. But it's certainly suggestive and it certainly ties in with the idea that these were actually kind of Nazi secret aircraft. From 1944 onwards, the Allies all but obliterated the Nazi industrial heartland in northern Germany.

So it's believed that Hitler and his high command made the decision to move their most sensitive and secret projects, including the UFO development, out of the front line and down to what is now the area of Wrocław in southwest Poland, on the border of the Czech Republic. It was remote, mountainous, and out of the way. They constructed a huge underground facility, called Der Riese, or "The Giant", in what today is known as the Owl Mountains.

It was a series of interconnected bases built deep into the mountains, safe from aerial detection or bombs. Different facilities developed different top-secret flying craft and weapons. This ensured that if any one base was discovered or compromised, then the others could still continue. The code name for the project was Lothar.

And according to intelligence documents seized by the Allies after the war, it became the highest priority for the German command from 1944 onwards. They were developing something that they believed could win the war. The Nazis had been so brutally bombed by Allied forces. All of their infrastructure was under threat, all of their discoveries. So they had no choice. They made a conscious decision. We need to move this the heck out of here. And so they moved it to southern Poland.

They were actually delving into mountains. They were making bunkers of a kind that no bombs of that period would be able to do more than scratch the surface. And from Hitler's point of view, it was the cleverest thing he could have done with his production machinery and with his, you know, dawning rocketry. He wanted it safe from the RAF.

and he got it as safe as he could. The Nazis abandoned the underground facilities in the last weeks of the war, but the remains of Der Riese are still there, deep inside the Owl Mountains. Although much of the complex has either collapsed over time or become flooded, a Warsaw-based military historian and journalist, Igor Witkowski, who has been researching the top secret projects, agreed to take Jamie into two of the remaining facilities which are still accessible.

The first one is known as the Osówka Base, and it's believed to have been the home of Die Glocke, or the Bell UFO. We are going to one of the underground facilities in the south-western Poland, which is called Rize. It is part of a very large complex that the Germans were building here during the war.

And it was one of the most secret, if not the most secret undertaking of the SS because I have written it literally in a document. It was something of very high priority. You think they were building some kind of flying craft there?

There is a construction which resembles a test rig for vertically taking off and landing craft. And there are also testimonies of some witnesses from the time of the war, former prisoners which worked here. And they have described some objects hovering noiselessly in the air.

And so was this a mine before, Igor? No, it was built as an armament facility or a command post or any way typically wartime facility. Right, okay. When did they start building it? They started to build it in 1943. It was built essentially by the prisoners of a concentration camp which was located

These underground structures were quite phenomenal. There were hundreds, thousands of slave labourers digging away into the heart of the mountain.

to create this impregnable underground city. And the defenses outside, the way the gun emplacements were ready to mow down any infantry who were approaching this underground city's entrance. And it was inside those impregnable labyrinths in the mountain

that the Germans were continuing to develop their advanced aircraft and all of the other new weapons that Hitler had ordered. Like any abandoned military facility, this base was an eerie place, with a network of tunnels leading to guardrooms, weapons stores, and even a telephone exchange, all slowly rusting and rotting away underground.

I think they were experimenting with new designs to see what they could do, to see how fast it could be, how high they could go, whether they could evade radar or not show up on radar. I don't know they necessarily knew that any of those things were going to... they were going to achieve any of those things, but they were going to try it out and find out. And tell me more about the bell. The bell was a device which was in the shape of the bell.

but it was a kind of accelerator. There were two drums or cylinders inside, which were spinning during an experiment at opposite direction with very high speeds. And it was something that was emitting very harmful radiations of various kinds. And the bell was tested underground in special underground chambers

probably as the one that we can see here. It was a device four or five meters tall, so it would take a significant portion of such a hole. And so these are top secret experiments that the Nazis are carrying out in these tunnels? Yes, these experiments were so top secret that the entire facility where it has been tested has been blocked.

Fundamentally, the Die Glocke or the Bell was full of certain deadly radioactive materials in order to make it do what they were hoping it would do. And a number of the top scientists and technologists who were working on it in the experimental stage died of radiation poisoning. It was in a double sense a potentially deadly weapon.

According to plans discovered at the end of the war, the bell was actually the propulsion device for a powerful vertical takeoff craft, which had two large discs rotating inside a cylindrical outer shell. It was these discs, powered by a huge energy force, possibly radioactive, that gave the craft its vertical lift. Whether it was a flying craft or just a flying bomb, no one knows. So essentially these are...

Like giant underground science labs? Yes, the entire undertaking was to be a conglomerate of industrial research facilities, command posts, something like a...

research laboratories combined with an arsenal of the last resort that they could use to win the war, even in 1945 or late 1944. So everything was supposed to be connected with each other, all the parts. And in all, it would be the size of a small or medium-sized city.

One of the things that we need to remember about that stage of the war was the tremendous technological difference between these experimental planes, these new mysterious machines, some disc-shaped, some flying wings, and all kinds of experiments. This, I think, is where they got ahead of us. They were prepared

under that central leadership where Hitler said he wanted something, and by thunder they did it. Was this some kind of UFO they were trying to build? What I can say, and what can be verified, and what is substantiated by the documents that they have found, is that they did work on an exotic propulsion system

linking gravity with quantum physics, for example. And for this, this can be proven. So the Nazis were trying to develop anti-gravity propulsion, is that what we're saying? Yes, to this day it is the most likely hypothesis.

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That's BetterHelp.com/ForbiddenUS. Journalist Jamie Thekston is on the hunt for the truth about the so-called Nazi UFOs. Did Hitler secretly commission a flying saucer project in the dying days of World War II as a last chance to save the day? It sounds fantastical, but recently declassified documents and footage do lend some credibility to the theory.

According to local military historian Igor Vitkowski, the top secret project was codenamed Lothar and was based in a series of huge underground facilities in the Owl Mountains of southwest Poland. Abandoned by the Nazis in a rush at the end of the war, they are still accessible today. It's quite clear that the Germans were terrified that the Allies would discover what they were doing down here.

Yes, they were guarding this secret very, very carefully. And one of the evidence for this is that the number of the counterintelligence officers here was record-breaking, around 100 of them, which was unusual because normally it would be one or two or three officers. And the other evidence for this is that for the secrecy,

is that none of the prisoners that were working in the finished parts of the complex have survived, which means that they didn't hesitate to kill thousands of people in order to keep this secret being a secret. Igor has often been asked to describe the feeling he gets when he walks around this underground base, and a general sense of dread he says would probably come closest.

Not surprising, really, when you realize that over 40,000 people died down here. The Asufka underground facility is certainly an eerie, disturbing place. If the Nazis did actually build flying saucers, then an Austrian scientist called Victor Schauberger was probably one of the leading lights behind it.

In 1934, it's reported that Schauberger and other scientists were summoned to Berlin to meet Hitler and start work on an exotic flying craft. Their work had unlimited funding and would be carried out in total secrecy. After the war, documents discovered by Allied intelligence show that the scientists did in fact have some success.

Victor Schellberger is a Nazi technologist who had this motto of "observe and copy nature." He came up with the first, what was called a repulsion craft, the first craft that had the ability to have completely vertical liftoff. So he succeeded in this basic tabletop design of vertical liftoff, and instantly the Nazis got right behind him.

Once Hitler knew that on a small scale such a machine had been able to defy gravity as he was thinking of it, then all the resources went in so that Schauberger could make one that was big enough to take men, to take bombs, to take anything that the Führer wanted. It seems very likely to me that the Germans were trying to evolve

a craft that was capable of vertical takeoff. I mean, that was kind of like the holy grail of aviation during the war. As the war went on, this would become even more important, of course, because more and more runways on aerodromes were being bombed, and it would be much better to support ground troops if you could have vertical takeoff aircraft.

It's fair to say that the Allies strongly suspected, and maybe even had hard evidence, of a top-secret development program that explained the multiple sightings of unidentified craft in the skies. So when the Nazi regime finally fell in 1945, the Russians and the Americans were very keen to get their hands on the data, documents, and the scientists behind it.

The Americans set up a top secret operation to bring as many Nazi scientists to the US as possible. It was codenamed "Paperclip".

Come the end of the war, there was an incredible competition, I mean a frenzied competition to gain access to the individuals who were the brains behind Germany's leading technological elite. So Russia wanted them, everybody wanted them, and ironically, the US, one of the allied forces, was victorious in obtaining them. It was a race. It wasn't just a race to capture Berlin, it was a race to get technology.

At the end of the war, the Allies seized something like more than two million patents from the German industry. These patents were given for free to the private industries in Germany, France, the UK and of course in Russia. And it was a fantastic booty.

In fact, there were both Russian and American flying saucer projects that were developed after the war. The Russian project was called Tarielka, and the American one was a joint effort with the Canadians, called the Avrocar. In 1953, the international press came up with a starting news. Canadians were working on a flying saucer.

Actually, the Avro aviation company in Canada was funded by the Americans to develop a disc-shaped aircraft. The Americans invested a lot of money, not so much, but a good amount of money, and the Canadians developed the disc pretty slowly, and a few years later they came up with a test.

And there is some footage about that. You see something like an hovercraft jumping over the ground, about two meters over the ground with very, very poor performances. And after that, the Americans realized that the money was completely wasted and so they canceled the project. But there is another story.

Many think that that was a conspiracy, that Avrocar was just a poor craft shown to the public to demonstrate that the project failed. But behind the scenes there was another project successfully making a real flying saucer with top performances. But no one knows about that, of course.

Back in the Owl Mountains, Igor took Jamie to explore another Nazi facility. This was Sobon, and unlike Osufka, it was a base which had both above and below ground facilities, including what Igor thought could have been a huge stone test rig for a vertical liftoff craft, maybe even a man-made UFO, codenamed Die Hennenbau.

The base was run by the elite SS troops, who maintained the highest level of security.

In fact, the entire valley that surrounded it was sealed off by thousands of soldiers, roadblocks and gun emplacements. Historians have nicknamed it the Nazi Area 51. So whatever it was that the Nazis were doing here, whatever experiments they were doing here, they wanted to make sure that no one got anywhere near it.

Why is that? They were, according to the German nomenclature, bearers of the secrets. So they had no right physically to live.

So far, local historian Igor Witkowski has taken Jamie into two former top-secret Nazi bases.

And he's shown him plans, blueprints, and official Nazi documents that prove they were developing some sort of advanced vertical takeoff, or disc-shaped hypersonic flying craft. If the Nazis had developed an anti-gravity propulsion, what would the craft that would be propelled by this look like? Describe it to me. The craft probably would have been circular and more or less flat because...

That's the extrapolation of the geometry of the filters surrounding such a device. It could be a kind of a saucer-like or disk-like, but it might have been a ball, for example. And this links this research project with the Foo Fighters, for example. There is a lot of documents on it.

We may say with absolute certainty that the Germans were producing, manufacturing strange flying machines, crafts, which were able to perform manoeuvres which were impossible to perform for any conventional machines.

It would be very different from the traditional UFOs, largely because of the shape and because we're never quite certain whether it was intended to project something else or, in other words, was it a launching device with all that mysterious power inside it, or was it itself?

capable of flying and delivering heaven knows what toxic compounds on the enemy. Needless to say, the Allies took the whole Nazi UFO phenomena very seriously indeed. The Foo Fighters might just be harmless lights in the sky, buzzing aircraft, but if the Nazis had developed some exotic hypersonic craft, which could evade not only aircraft, but also radar,

then it might have been possible for these craft to deliver a crushing payload to destroy London or even New York and Washington DC. As darkness fell, Igor took Jamie into the tunnels beneath the base.

What they were doing here was something much larger, which incorporated all these facilities, research posts and so on. It was codenamed Sonderbauvorhaben S3, which means Special Construction Undertaking S3. And it is written in the document that it was the most

the most important such an undertaking of the SS during the entire war. They were planning to make a giant underground complex the size of a city and probably it would be something serving the production and research of the strategic weapons of a completely new kind. Something that would give them a victory in the war.

Just imagine if those hyperfast German craft could have reached Moscow, could have reached London, could have reached New York. What would have happened? We were right on the brink of that delivery being made. It could have changed history.

In the last stages of World War II, the Nazis developed a wealth of very, very advanced, even exotic projects in aviation and rocketry. Hundreds of different blueprints for even very bizarre airplanes, and most of them were jet-propelled. And they were something completely different from the technology that the Allies had in their hands at that time.

By definition, a UFO means an unidentified flying object. But most people these days take a UFO to mean a flying saucer or an interstellar spacecraft of some sort. If we're talking about the real meaning of UFO, then clearly the Nazis, like the Allies, were indulged in that kind of behaviour.

I think the main thing they were after was a vertical take-off craft. The size of the craft that they were experimenting with seems to indicate they were thinking in terms of fighters rather than bombers, because they couldn't actually carry lots of heavy bombs. That's exactly what they needed at that stage. They needed something that would be able to shoot down the Allied bombers that were completely obliterating Germany then.

I think the Nazis were undoubtedly playing around with new technology at the time, propulsion technologies and magnetic technologies as well. And I think what we've done is we've added the word UFO post, you know, and so it fits a nice picture of what we see today. But I don't think they were building what they thought as interstellar craft. These were new technologies of the time.

Whether the Nazis were really building UFOs inside these secret bases will perhaps always remain a mystery. But all the evidence suggests that they were certainly developing secret weapons that had the Allied victory not come when it did, could have changed the course of the war and the course of history.