Roswell and the Horten Brothers

It was nighttime on the Rio Grande, 29 May 1947, and Army scientists, engineers, and technicians at the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico were anxiously putting the final touches on their own American secret weapon, called 'Hermes'. The twenty-five-foot-long, three-thousand-pound rocket had originally been named V-2, or Vergeltungswaffe 2, which means "vengeance" in German. But 'Hermes' sounded less spiteful; Hermes being the ancient Greek messenger of the gods. The actual rocket that now stood on Test Stand 33 had belonged to Adolf Hitler just a little more than two years before. It had come off the same German slave-labor production lines as the rockets that the Third Reich had used to terrorize the people of London, Antwerp, and Paris during the war. The U.S. Army had confiscated nearly two hundred V-2s from inside Peenemünde, Germany's rocket manufacturing plant, and shipped them to White Sands beginning the first month after the war. Under a parallel, even more secret project called "Operation Paperclip" the complete details of which remain classified as of 2011, 118 captured German rocket scientists were given new lives and careers and brought to the missile range. Hundreds of others would follow. Two of these German scientists were now readying 'Hermes' for its test launch. One, Wernher Von Braun, had invented this rocket, which was the world's first ballistic missile, or flying bomb. And the second scientist, Dr. Ernst Steinhoff, had designed the V-2 rocket's brain. That spring night in 1947, the V-2 lifted up off the pad, rising slowly at first, with von Braun and Steinhoff watching intently. 'Hermes' consumed more than a thousand pounds of rocket fuel in its first 2.5 seconds as it elevated to fifty feet. The next fifty feet were much easier, as were the hundred feet after that. The rocket gained speed, and the laws of physics kicked in: Aything can fly if you make it move fast enough. 'Hermes' was now fully aloft, climbing quickly into the night sky and headed for the upper atmosphere. At least that was the plan. Just a few moments later, the winged missile suddenly and unexpectedly reversed course. Instead of heading north to the uninhabited terrain inside the two-million-square-acre White Sands Proving Ground, the rocket began heading south toward downtown El Paso, Texas. Dr. Steinhoff was watching the missile's trajectory through a telescope from an observation post one mile south of the launchpad, and having personally designed the V-2 rocket-guidance controls back when he worked for Adolf Hitler, Dr. Steinhoff was the one best equipped to recognize errors in the test. In the event that Steinhoff detected an errant launch, he would notify Army engineers, who would immediately cut the fuel to the rocket's motors via remote control, allowing it to crash safely inside the missile range. But Dr. Steinhoff said nothing as the misguided V-2 arced over El Paso and headed for Mexico. Minutes later, the rocket crash-landed into the Tepeyac Cemetery, three miles south of Juarez, a heavily populated city of 120,000. The violent blast shook virtually every building in El Paso and Juarez, terrifying citizens of both cities, who swamped newspaper offices, police headquarters and radio stations with anxious telephone inquiries. The missile left a crater that was fifty feet wide and twenty-four feet deep. It was a miracle no one was killed. Army officials rushed to Juarez to smooth over the event while Mexican soldiers were dispatched to guard the crater's rim. The mission, the men, and the rocket were all classified top secret; no one could know specific details about any of this. Investigators silenced Mexican officials by cleaning up the large, bowl-shaped cavity and paying for damages. But back at White Sands, reparations were not so easily made. Allegations of sabotage by the German scientists who were in charge of the top secret project overwhelmed the workload of the Intelligence officers at White Sands. Attitudes toward the former Third Reich scientists who were now working for the United States tended to fall into two distinct categories at the time. There was the let-bygones-be-bygones approach, an attitude summed up by the Army officer in charge of 'Operation Paperclip', Bosquet Wev, who stated that to preoccupy oneself with "picayune details" about German scientists' past actions was "beating a dead Nazi horse". The logic behind this thinking was that a disbanded Third Reich presented no future harm to America but a burgeoning Soviet military certainly did and if the Germans were working for us, they couldn't be working for them. Others disagreed, including Albert Einstein. Five months before the Juarez crash, Einstein and the newly formed Federation of American Scientists appealed to President Truman: "We hold these individuals to be potentially dangerous¡­ Their former eminence as Nazi party members and supporters raises the issue of their fitness to become American citizens and hold key positions in American industrial, scientific and educational institutions". For Einstein, making deals with war criminals was undemocratic as well as dangerous. While the public debate went on, internal investigations began. And the rocket work at White Sands continued. The German scientists had been testing V-2s there for fourteen months, and while investigations of the Juarez rocket crash were under way, three more missiles fired from Test Stand 33 crash-landed outside the restricted facility: one near Alamogordo, New Mexico, and another near Las Cruces, New Mexico. A third went down outside Juarez, Mexico, again. The German scientists blamed the near tragedies on old V-2 components. Seawater had corroded some of the parts during the original boat trip from Germany. But in top secret written reports, Army Intelligence officers were building a case that would lay blame on the German scientists. The War Department Intelligence unit that kept tabs on the German scientists had designated some of the Germans at the base as "under suspicion of being potential security risks". When not working, the men were confined to a six-acre section of the base. The officers' club was off-limits to all the Germans, including the rocket team's leaders, Steinhoff and von Braun. It was in this atmosphere of failed tests and mistrust that an extra-ordinary event happened, one that, at first glance, seemed totally unrelated to the missile launches. During the first week of July 1947, U.S. Signal Corps engineers began tracking two objects with remarkable flying capabilities moving across the southwestern United States. What made the aircraft extra-ordinary was that, although they flew in a traditional, forward-moving motion, the craft, whatever they were, began to hover sporadically before continuing to fly on. This kind of technology was beyond any aerodynamic capabilities the U.S. Air Force had in development in the summer of 1947. When multiple sources began reporting the same data, it became clear that the radar wasn't showing phantom returns, or electronic ghosts, but something real. Kirtland Army Air Force Base, just north of the White Sands Proving Ground, tracked the flying craft into its near vicinity. The commanding officer there ordered a decorated World War II pilot named Kenny Chandler into a fighter jet to locate and chase the unidentified flying craft. This fact has never before been disclosed. Chandler never visually spotted what he'd been sent to look for. But within hours of Chandler's sweep of the skies, one of the flying objects crashed near Roswell, New Mexico. Immediately, the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or JCS, took command and control and recovered the airframe and some propulsion equipment, including the crashed craft's power plant, or energy source. The recovered craft looked nothing like a conventional aircraft. The vehicle had no tail and it had no wings. The fuselage was round, and there was a dome mounted on the top. In secret Army intelligence memos declassified in 1994, it would be referred to as a "flying disc". Most alarming was a fact kept secret until now, inside the disc, there was a very earthly hallmark: Russian writing. Block letters from the Cyrillic alphabet had been stamped, or embossed, in a ring running around the inside of the craft. In a critical moment, the American military had its worst fears realized. The Russian army must have gotten its hands on German aerospace engineers more capable than Ernst Steinhoff and Wernher von Braun, engineers who must have developed this flying craft years before for the German air force, or Luftwaffe. The Russians simply could not have developed this kind of advanced technology on their own. Russia's stockpile of weapons and its body of scientists had been decimated during the war; the nation had lost more than twenty million people. Most Russian scientists still alive had spent the war in the Gulag. But the Russians, like the Americans, the British, and the French, had pillaged Hitler's best and brightest scientists as war booty, each country taking advantage of them to move forward in the new world. And now, in July of 1947, shockingly, the Soviet supreme leader had somehow managed not only to penetrate U.S. airspace near the Alaskan border, but to fly over several of the most sensitive military installations in the western United States. Stalin had done this with foreign technology that the U.S. Army Air Forces knew nothing about. It was an incursion so brazen, so antithetical to the perception of America's strong national security, which included the military's ability to defend itself against air attack, that upper-echelon Army Intelligence officers swept in and took control of the entire situation. The first thing they did was initiate the withdrawal of the original Roswell Army Air Field press release, the one that stated that a "flying disc"­ landed on a ranch near Roswell , and then they replaced it with the second press release, the one that said that a weather balloon had crashed, nothing more. The weather balloon story has remained the official cover story ever since. Of all the historically significant political/military events of the 20th Century, none have had more official explanations than the so called "Roswell Incident". In fact, as of 2011, the United States government has issued four sanctioned explanations: 1) The crash of a flying saucer, 2) the remains of a weather balloon, 3) the remains of a "Project Mogul" balloon, 4) Crash test dummies. Logic alone would dictate that if the government lied about the last three explanations, why should the general public believe the first one? The fears were legitimate: fears that the Russians had hover-and fly technology, that their flying craft could outfox U.S. radar, and that it could deliver to America a devastating blow. The single most worrisome question facing the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time was: What if atomic energy propelled the Russian craft? Or worse, what if it dispersed radioactive particles, like a modern-day dirty bomb? In 1947, the United States believed it still had a monopoly on the atomic bomb as a deliverable weapon. But as early as June 1942, Hermann Göring, commander in chief of the Luftwaffe, had been overseeing the Third Reich's research council on nuclear physics as a weapon in its development of an airplane called the "Amerika Bomber", designed to drop a dirty bomb on New York City . Any number of those scientists could be working for the Russians. The Central Intelligence Group, the CIA's institutional predecessor, did not yet know that a spy at Los Alamos National Laboratory, a man named Klaus Fuchs, had stolen bomb blueprints and given them to Stalin. Or that Russia was two years away from testing its own atomic bomb. In the immediate aftermath of the crash, all the Joint Chiefs of Staff had to go on from the Central Intelligence Group was speculation about what atomic technology Russia might have. For the military, the very fact that New Mexico's airspace had been violated was shocking. This region of the country was the single most sensitive weapons-related domain in all of America. The White Sands Missile Range was home to the nation's classified weapons-delivery systems. The nuclear laboratory up the road, the Los Alamos Laboratory, was where scientists had developed the atomic bomb and where they were now working on nuclear packages with a thousand times the yield. Outside Albuquerque, at a production facility called Sandia Base, assembly-line workers were forging Los Alamos nuclear packages into smaller and smaller bombs. Forty-five miles to the southwest, at the Roswell Army Air Field, the 509th Bomb Wing was the only wing of long-range bombers equipped to carry and drop nuclear bombs. Things went from complicated to critical at the revelation that there was a second crash site. Paperclip scientists Wernher von Braun and Ernst Steinhoff, still under review over the Juarez rocket crash, were called on for their expertise. Several other Paperclip scientists specializing in aviation medicine were brought in. The evidence of whatever had crashed at and around Roswell, New Mexico, in the first week of July in 1947 was gathered together by a Joint Chiefs of Staff technical services unit and secreted away in a manner so clandestine, it followed security protocols established for transporting uranium in the early days of the Manhattan Project. The first order of business was to determine where the technology had come from. The Joint Chiefs of Staff tasked an elite group working under the direct orders of G-2 Army intelligence to initiate a top secret project called "Operation Harass". Based on the testimony of America's Paperclip scientists, Army intelligence officers believed that the flying disc was the brainchild of two former Third Reich airplane engineers, named Walter and Reimar Horten, now working for the Russian military. Orders were drawn up. The manhunt was on. Walter and Reimar Horten were two aerospace engineers whose importance in seminal aircraft projects had somehow been overlooked when America and the Soviet Union were fighting over scientists at the end of the war. The brothers were the inventors of several of Hitler's flying-wing aircraft, including one called the Horten 229 or Horten IX, a wing-shaped, tailless airplane that had been developed at a secret facility in Baden-Baden during the war. From the Paperclip scientists at Wright Field, the Army Intelligence investigators learned that Hitler was rumored to have been developing a faster-flying aircraft that had been designed by the brothers and was shaped like a saucer. Maybe, the Paperclips said, there had been a later-model Horten in the works before Germany surrendered, meaning that even if Stalin didn't have the Horten brothers themselves, he could very likely have gotten control of their blueprints and plans. The flying disc that crashed at Roswell had technology more advanced than anything the U.S. Army Air Forces had ever seen. Its propulsion techniques were particularly confounding. What made the craft go so fast? How was it so stealthy and how did it trick radar? The disc had appeared on Army radar screens briefly and then suddenly disappeared. The incident at Roswell happened just weeks before the National Security Act, which meant there was no true Central Intelligence Agency to handle the investigation. Instead, hundreds of Counter Intelligence Corps [CIC] officers from the U.S. Army's European command were dispatched across Germany in search of anyone who knew anything about Walter and Reimar Horten. Officers tracked down and interviewed the brothers' relatives, colleagues, professors, and acquaintances with an urgency not seen since Operation ALSOS, in which Allied Forces sought information about Hitler's atomic scientists and nuclear programs during the war. A records group of more than three hundred pages of Army Intelligence documents reveals many of the details of "Operation Harass". They were declassified in 1994, after a researcher named Timothy Cooper filed a request for documents under the Freedom of Information Act. One memo, called 'Air Intelligence Guide for Alleged Flying Saucer Type Aircraft', detailed for CIC officers the parameters of the flying saucer technology the military was looking for, features which were evidenced in the craft that crashed at Roswell. Extreme maneuverability and apparent ability to almost hover; a plan form approximating that of an oval or disc with dome shape on the surface; the ability to quickly disappear by high speed or by complete disintegration; the ability to group together very quickly in a tight formation when more than one aircraft are together; evasive motion ability indicating possibility of being manually operated, or possibly, by electronic or remote control. The Counter Intelligence Corps' official 1947 C1948 manhunt for the Horten brothers reads at times like a spy novel and at times like a wild goose chase. The first real lead in the hunt came from Dr. Adolf Smekal of Frankfurt, who provided CIC with a list of possible informants' names. Agents were told a dizzying array of alleged facts: Reimar was living in secret in East Prussia; Reimar was living in Göttingen, in what had been the British zone; Reimar had been kidnapped "presumably by the Russians" in the latter part of 1946. If you want to know where Reimar is, one informant said, you must first locate Hannah Reitsch, the famous aviatrix who was living in Bad Hauheim. As for Walter, he was working as a consultant for the French; he was last seen in Frankfurt trying to find work with a university there; he was in Dessau; actually, he was in Russia; he was in Luxembourg, or maybe it was France. One German scientist turned informant chided CIC agents. If they really wanted to know where the Horten brothers were, he said, and what they were capable of, then go ask the American Paperclip scientists living at Wright Field. Neatly typed and intricately detailed summaries of hundreds of interviews with the Horten brothers' colleagues and relatives flooded the CIC. Army Intelligence officers spent months chasing leads, but most information led them back to square one. In the fall of 1947, prospects of locating the brothers seemed grim until November, when CIC agents caught a break. A former Messerschmitt test pilot named Fritz Wendel offered up some firsthand testimony that seemed real. The Horten brothers had indeed been working on a flying saucer-like craft in Heiligenbeil, East Prussia, right after the war, Wendel said. The airplane was ten meters long and shaped like a half-moon. It had no tail. The prototype was designed to be flown by one man lying down flat on his stomach. It reached a ceiling of twelve thousand feet. Wendel drew diagrams of this saucerlike aircraft, as did a second German informant named Professor George, who described a later model Horten as being "very much like a round cake with a large sector cut out" and that had been developed to carry more than one crew member. The later-model Horten could travel higher and faster, up to 1,200 mph. because it was propelled by rockets rather than jet engines. Its cabin was allegedly pressurized for high-altitude flights. The Americans pressed Fritz Wendel for more. Could it hover? Not that Wendel knew. Did he know if groups could fly tightly together? Wendel said he had no idea. Were "high speed escapement methods" designed into the craft? Wendel wasn't sure. Could the flying disc be remotely controlled? Yes, Wendel said he knew of radio-control experiments being conducted by Siemens and Halske at their electrical factory in Berlin. Army officers asked Wendel if he had heard of any hovering or near-hovering technologies. No. Did Wendel have any idea about the tactical purposes for such an aircraft? Wendel said he had no idea. The next batch of solid information came from a rocket engineer named Walter Ziegler. During the war, Ziegler had worked at the car manufacturer Bayerische Motoren Werke, or BMW, which served as a front for advanced rocket-science research. There, Ziegler had been on a team tasked with developing advanced fighter jets powered by rockets. Ziegler relayed a chilling tale that gave investigators an important clue. One night, about a year after the war, in September of 1946, four hundred men from his former rocket group at BMW had been invited by Russian military officers to a fancy dinner. The rocket scientists were wined and dined and, after a few hours, taken home. Most were drunk. Several hours later, all four hundred of the men were woken up in the middle of the night by their Russian hosts and told they were going to be taking a trip. Why Ziegler wasn't among them was not made clear. The Germans were told to bring their wives, their children, and whatever else they needed for a long trip. Mistresses and livestock were also fine. This was not a situation to which you could say no, Ziegler explained. The scientists and their families were transported by rail to a small town outside Moscow where they had remained ever since, forced to work on secret military projects in terrible conditions. According to Ziegler, it was at this top secret Russian facility, exact whereabouts unknown, that the German scientists were developing rockets and other advanced technologies under Russian supervision. These were Russia's version of the American Paperclip scientists. It was very possible, Ziegler said, that the Horten brothers had been working for the Russians at the secret facility there. For nine long months, CIC agents typed up memo after memo relating various theories about where the Horten brothers were, what their flying saucers might have been designed for, and what leads should or should not be pursued. And then, six months into the investigation, on 12 March 1948, along came abrupt news. The Horten brothers had been found. In a memo to the European command of the 970th CIC, Major Earl S. Browning Jr. explained. "The Horten Brothers have been located and interrogated by American Agencies", Browning said. The Russians had likely found the blueprints of the flying wing after all. "It is Walter Horten's opinion that the blueprints of the Horten IX may have been found by Russian troops at the Gotha Railroad Car Factory", the memo read. But a second memo, entitled 'Extracts on Horten', Walter, explained a little more. Former Messerschmitt test pilot Fritz Wendel's information about the Horten brothers' wingless, tailless, saucerlike craft that had room for more than one crew member was confirmed. "Walter Horten's opinion is that sufficient German types of flying wings existed in the developing or designing stages when the Russians occupied Germany, and these types may have enabled the Russians to produce the flying saucer". There is no mention of Reimar Horten, the second brother, in any of the hundreds of pages of documents released to Timothy Cooper as part of his Freedom of Information Act request, despite the fact that both brothers had been confirmed as located and interrogated. Nor is there any mention of what Reimar Horten did or did not say about the later-model Horten flying discs. But one memo mentioned "the Horten X"

Due to the rapidly deteriorating war conditions in Germany in the last months of WWII, the RLM [Reichs Luftfahrt Ministerium, or German Air Ministry] issued a specification for a fighter project that would use a minimum of strategic materials, be suitable for rapid mass production and have a performance equal to the best piston engined fighters of the time. The 'Volksjäger' [People's Fighter] project, as it became known, was issued on 8 September 1944 to Arado, Blohm & Voss, Fiesler, Focke-Wulf, Junkers, Heinkel, Messerschmitt and Siebel. The new fighter also needed to weigh no more than 2000 kg [4410 lbs], have a maximum speed of 750 km/h [457 mph], a minimum endurance of 30 minutes, a takeoff distance of 500 m [1604 ft], an endurance of at least 30 minutes and it was to use the BMW 003 turbojet.



Although not chosen to submit a design, the Horten Brothers came up with the Ho X [10] that met the specifications laid out by the RLM. Using a similar concept that they had been working on with their Horten IX [Ho 229] flying wing fighter, the Ho X was to be constructed of steel pipes covered with plywood panels in the center section, with the outer sections constructed from two-ply wood beams covered in plywood. The wing featured two sweepbacks, approximately 60 degrees at the nose, tapering into a 43 degree sweepback out to the wingtips. Control was to be provided by combined ailerons and elevators at the wingtips, along with drag surfaces at the wingtips for lateral control. A single BMW 003E jet engine with 900 kp of thrust was housed in the rear of the aircraft, which was fed by two air intakes on either side of the cockpit. One advantage to this design was that different jet engines could be accommodated, such as the Heinkel-Hirth He S 011 with 1300 kp of thrust, which was to be added later after its development was complete. The landing gear was to be of a tricycle arrangement and the pilot sat in a pressurized cockpit in front of the engine compartment. Armament consisted of a single MK 108 30mm cannon [or a single MK 213 30mm cannon] in the nose and two MG 131 13mm machine guns, one in each wing root.



In order to determine the center of gravity on various sweepback angles, scale models with a 3.05 meter [10 feet] wingspan were built. A full-sized glider was also under construction but was not completed before the war's end. Due to the ending of hostilities in 1945, the Horten Ho X was not completed.



Of the competing firms the Heinkel He 162 Volksjäger a single-engine, jet-powered fighter aircraft, designed and built quickly, and made primarily of wood as metals were in very short supply and prioritised for other aircraft, was the winner. The He 162 was the fastest of the first generation of Axis and Allied jets. Other names given to the plane include 'Salamander', which was the codename of its construction program, and 'Spatz' [Sparrow], which was the name given to the plane by Heinkel. and another referred to "the Horten XIII" . No further details have been provided, and a 2011 Freedom of Information Act request by the author met a dead end.



The Horten Ho XIII B supersonic flying wing fighter was developed from the Ho XIII A glider, which had 60 degree swept-back wings and an underslung nacelle for the pilot. The XIII B was to be powered by a single BMW 003R turbojet/rocket engine. The cockpit was located in the base of a large, sharply swept vertical fin. Like the research XIII A glider, the XIII B also had swept back wings at a 60 degree angle. Projected armament were two MG 213 20mm cannon, and the Ho XIII B was projected to be flying by mid-1946. Span: 12 m [39' 4.8"] Length: 12 m [39' 4.8"] Max. Speed: 1800 km/h [1118 mph]

On 12 May 1948, the headquarters of European command sent the director of Intelligence at the United States Forces in Austria a puzzling memo. "Walter Horten has admitted his contacts with the Russians", it said. That was the last mention of the Horten brothers in the Army Intelligence's declassified record for "Operation Harass". Whatever else officially exists on the Horten brothers and their advanced flying saucer continues to be classified as of 2011, and the crash remains from Roswell quickly fell into the blackest regions of government . They would stay at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base for approximately four years. From there, they would quietly be shipped out west to become intertwined with a secret facility out in the middle of the Nevada desert. No one but a handful of people would have any idea they were there. -- Annie Jacobsen, "Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base", RuBooks.org

Roswell and the Horten Flying Wing Lt Col Walker, at the Air Material Command, asked his operatives in the field to discretely track down the Horten brothers and ascertain whether their radical "Flying Wing" designs - developed during WWII - might be responsible for the rash of Flying Saucer sightings in 1947. This is a document released under the Freedom Of Information Act SECRET HEADQUARTERS BERLIN COMMAND

OFFICE OF MILITARY GOVERNMENT FOR GERMANY (US)

BERLIN, GERMANY



S-2 Branch

APO 742, US ARMY



Subject: Horten Brothers [Flying Saucers]



To: Deputy Director of Intelligence

European Command, Frankfurt

APO 757, US Army

1. The Horten brothers, Reimar and Walter, are residing in Göttingen at present. However, both of them are traveling a great deal throughout the Bi-Zone. Walter at present is traveling in Bavaria in search of a suitable place of employment. It is believed that he may have contacted USAFE Head-quarters in Wiesbaden for possible evacuation to the United States under "Paper Clip". Reimer is presently studying advanced mathematics at the university of Bonn, and is about to obtain his doctor's degree. It is believed that when his studies are completed he intends to accept a teaching position at the Institute for Technology [Techniscbe Hochschule] in Braunschweig sometime in February or March 1948.



2. Both brothers are exceedingly peculiar and can be easily classified as eccentric and individualistic. Especially is this so of Reimar. He is the one who developed the theory of the flying wing and subsequently of all the models and aircrafts built by the brothers. Walter, on the other hand is the engineer who tried to put into practice the several somewhat fantastic ideas of his brother. The clash of personalities resulted in a continuous quarrel and friction between the two brothers. Reimar was always developing new ideas which would increase the speed of the aircraft or improve its manoeuvrability; Walter on the other hand was tearing down the fantastic ideas of his brother by practical calculations and considerations.



3. The two men worked together up to and including the "Horten VIII" a flying wing intended to be a fighter plane powered with two Hirt engines [HM-60-R] with a performance of approximately 650 horsepower each. After the "Horten VIII" was finished, one of the usual and frequent quarrels separated the two brothers temporarily. Walter went to work alone on the "Horten IX", which is a fighter plane of the flying wing design, with practically no changes from the model VIII except for the engines. Walter substituted the Hirt engines with BMW Jets of the type TL-004. The plane was made completely of plywood and was furnished with a Messerschmidt ME-109 Landing gear.



The model of this aircraft (Horten IX) was tested extensively in the supersonic wind tunnel [Mach No. 1.0] of the aero-dynamic testing institute [Aerodynamische Versuchsanstalt, located in Göttingen. The tests were conducted in the late summer of 1944 under the personal supervision of Professor Betz, chief of the institute. Betz at that time was approximately sixty years old and next to Prandtel [then seventy-eight years old], was considered to be the best man on aerodynamics in Germany. Betz's attitude toward the flying wing is very conservative to say the least. Basically he is against the design of any flying wing. According to the official reports about the tests, air disturbances were created on the wing tips, resulting in air vacuums, which in turn would prevent the steering mechanism from functioning properly. This seems logical as, of course, neither the ailerons nor the rudders could properly accomplish their function in a partial vacuum created by air disturbances and whirls.



In spite of that, two Horten IX's were built and tried out by a test pilot, Eugen [now living in Gottingen] at Rechlin in the fall of 1944. One of the two planes, piloted by another test pilot, developed trouble with one of the jet engines while the pilot was trying to ascertain the maximum rate of climb. The right jet stopped suddenly, causing the aircraft to go into an immediate spin and subsequent crash in which the pilot was killed. Eugen, however, was more fortunate in putting the other ship through all the necessary paces without the least trouble. He maintains that the maximum speed attained was around 950 km per hour, and that there were no steering difficulties whatsoever, and that the danger of both head and tail spins was no greater that any other conventional aircraft.



After extensive tests, the Horten IX was accepted by the German Air Force as represented by Göring, who ordered immediate mass production. The first order went to Gothaer Waggon Fabrik, located in Gotha [Thuringia] in January 1945. Göring requested that ten planes be built immediately and that the entire factory was to concentrate and be converted to the production of the Horten IX. The firm in question received all the plans and designs of the ship. In spite of this explicit order, production of the Horten IX was never started. The technical manager of the firm, Berthold, immediately upon receipt of the plans, submitted a number of suggestions to improve the aircraft. It is believed that his intention was to eliminate the Horten brothers as inventors and to modify the ship to such an extent that it would be more his brain child than anybody else's. Numerous letters were exchanged from High Command of the German Air Force and Dr. Berthold, which finally were interrupted by the armistice in May 1945. When US troops occupied the town of Gotha, the designs of the Horten IX were kept in hiding and not handed over to American Military authorities. The original designs in possession of the Horten brothers were hidden in a salt mine in Salzdettfurt, but the model tested by Eugen was destroyed in April 1945. The original designs were recovered from Salzdettfurt by British authorities in the summer of 1945.



The Horten brothers, together with Dr. Betz, Eugen and Dr. Stüper [the test pilot of the aerodynamic institute in Gottingen], were invited to go to England in the late summer of 1945 where they remained for approximately ninety days. They were interrogated and questioned about their ideas and were given several problems to work on. However Reimar was very unwilling to cooperate to any extent whatsoever, unless an immediate contract was offered to him and his brother. Walter, on the other hand, not being a theoretician, was unable to comply and Reimar was sufficiently stubborn not to move a finger. Upon their return to Göttingen Walter remained in contact with British authorities and was actually paid a salary by the British between October 1945 and April 1946, as the British contemplated but never did offer him employment. Walter subsequently had a final argument with his brother and the two decided to part. Reimar then went to the university of Bonn to obtain his degree, and Walter organized an engineering office in Göttingen which served as a cover firm to keep him out of trouble with the labor authorities. Walter married Fräulein von der Gröben, an extremely intelligent woman, former chief secretary to Air Force General Udet.



In the spring of 1947 Walter Horten heard about the flying wing design in the United States by Northrop and decided to write Northrop for employment. He was answered in the summer of 1947 by a letter in which Northrop pointed out that he, himself, could not do anything to get him over to the States, but that he would welcome it very much if he could come to the United States and take up employment with the firm. He recommended that Walter should get in touch with USAFE Headquarters in Wiesbaden in order to obtain necessary clearance.



4. As can be seen from the above, most of the Hortens' work took place in Western Germany. According to our source, neither of the brothers ever had any contact with any representative of the Soviet Air Force or any other foreign power. In spite of the fact that Reimar is rather disgusted with the British for not offering him a contract, it is believed very unlikely that he has approached the Soviet authorities in order to sell out to them. The only possible link between the Horten brothers and the Soviet authorities is the fact that a complete set of plans and designs were hidden at the Gothaer Waggon Fabrik and the knowledge of this is known by Dr. Berthold and a number of other engineers. It is possible and likely that either Berthold or any of the others having knowledge of the Horten IX would have sold out to the Soviet authorities for one of a number of reasons. However, this will be checked upon in the future, and it is hoped that contact with the the Gothaer Waggon Fabrik can be established.



5. As far as the "flying saucer" is concerned, a number of people were contacted in order to verify whether or not any such design at any time was contemplated or existed in the files of any German air research institute. The people contacted included the following:



Walter Horten



Fräulein von der Gröben, former Secretary to Air Force General Udet



Günter Heinrich, former office for research of the High Command of the Air Force in Berlin



Professor Betz, former chief of Aerodynamic Institute in Göttingen



Eugen, former test pilot



All the above mentioned people contacted independently and at different times are very insistent on the fact that to their knowledge and belief no such design ever existed nor was projected by any of the German air research institutions. While they agree that such a design would be highly practical and desirable, they do not know anything about its possible realization now or in the past.





















A few items don't make sense



First, some excerpts from: "The Horten Flying Wing in World War II: The History & Development of the Ho 229", by H. P. Dabrowski, translated from the German by David Johnson [Schiffer Military History Vol. 47].



"In February 1945 Heinz Scheidhauer flew the Ho VII to Göttingen. Hydraulic failure prevented him from extending the aircraft's undercarriage, and he was forced to make a belly landing. The resulting damage had not been repaired when, on 7 April 1945, US troops occupied the airfield. The aircraft presumably suffered the same fate as the Ho V and was burned.



"The [Ho IX V1, RLM-Number 8-229] machine was sent to Brandis, where it was to be tested by the military and used for training purposes. It was found there by soldiers of the US 9th Armored Division at the end of the war and was later burned in a 'clearing action'. "Construction of the Ho IX V3 was nearly complete when the Gotha Works at Friederichsroda were overrun by troops of the American 3rd Army's VII Corps on 14 April 1945. The aircraft was assigned the number T2-490 by the Americans. The aircraft's official RLM designation is uncertain, as it was referred to as the Ho 229 as well as the Go 229. Also found in the destroyed and abandoned works were several other prototypes in various stages of construction, including a two-seat version The V3 was sent to the United States by ship, along with other captured aircraft, and finally ended up in the H.H. "Hap" Arnold collection of the Air Force Technical Museum. The wing aircraft was to have been brought to flying status at Park Ridge, Illinois, but budget cuts in the late forties and early fifties brought these plans to an end. The V3 was handed over to the present-day National Air and Space Museum [NASM] in Washington D.C."



From these excerpts we see that certainly by late April or early May, 1945, the US had not just knowledge but at least semi-functional examples of the Horten flying wing. Ii can be assumed that the US would have wanted these craft back home for study as soon as was practical.



Lieutenant General Twining's [Commander of the Army Materiel Command] 23 September 1947 letter to Brig. General Schulgen [Commanding General Army Air Forces] states:



"It is possible within the present U.S. knowledge -provided extensive detailed development is undertaken- to construct a piloted aircraft which has the general description of the object in subparagraph (e) above which would be capable of an approximate range of 700 miles at subsonic speeds".



Why only possible? The Horten flying wing(s) had already been in US possession for two years.



Twining continues:



"Any developments in this country along the lines indicated would be extremely expensive, time consuming and at the considerable expense of current projects and therefore, if directed, should be set up independently of existing projects".



Why expensive? The design, prototype and development work had already been completed. Is this a dodge for more money?



Twining points out:



"Due consideration must be given the following: The possibility that these objects are of domestic origin - the product of some high security project not known to AC/AS-2 or this command".



How likely is it that the AMC was unaware of the captured Horten flying wing(s)?



Twining states that:



"This opinion was arrived at in a conference between personnel from the Air Institute of Technology, Intelligence T-2, Office, Chief of Engineering Division, and the Aircraft, Power Plant and Propeller Laboratories of Engineering Division T-3".



How likely is it that these groups were unaware of the captured Horten flying wing(s)?



Phil Klass [SUN #26, March 1994] quotes Air Intelligence Report No. 100-203-79, 10 December 1948:



"The origin of the devices [UFOs] is not ascertainable. There are two reasonable possibilities: (1) The objects are domestic [U.S.] devices. (2) Objects are foreign, and if so, it would seem most logical to consider that they are from a Soviet source. "The Soviets possess information on a number of German flying-wing type aircraft, such as the Gotha P60A, Junkers EF-130 long-range jet bomber and the Horten 229 twin-jet fighter, which particularly resembles some of the descriptions of unidentified flying objects".



This report was prepared by the US Air Force's Directorate of Intelligence and the Office of Naval Intelligence and more than a year has passed since Twining's letter.



How is it that these agencies believe that it is the Soviets who have the captured Horten flying wing(s) or just information when, by this time, the US has had them for at least three years? What value would there be in pointing the finger at the Soviets and suggesting that they have aircraft far in advance of our own?



Klass contends that the USAF Directorate of Intelligence and the Office of Naval Intelligence demonstrate no knowledge of a Roswell-related crashed object/disk because there wasn't such an incident. Yet, three years after the fact, these same offices demonstrate no knowledge of the US possession of the Horten flying wing(s).



Klass can't have it both ways - and neither can the rest of us.



If these offices were not aware of the US possession of the Horten flying wing(s) then the so-called UFO cover-up exceeded their need-to-know and began before the Roswell incident.



If these offices were aware of the US possession of the Horten flying wing(s) then why would they not acknowledge such [in a Top Secret document that took 37 years to declassify]? Roswell Saucer? Reports of an alien spacecraft being struck by lightning and crashing late at night in early July 1947, near Roswell, New Mexico, were the beginnings of the most compelling event in all UFO lore.



Originally reported in the "Fort Worth Star-Telegram" and confirmed by military officials as authentic, the report was later refuted by the military and the crash remains were claimed to be nothing more than a weather balloon.



Renowned aviation artist Tony Weddel has depicted the moments before the crash by capturing the object as an alien spacecraft in the initial stages of its death throes. In freefall, moments after being hit by a lightning upstroke, debris can already be seen in the slipstream. Seconds later it would careen off the desert floor on the way to its final resting place. Shedding debris from a fatal wound, its struggle for survival and the lives of seven aliens purportedly ended 40 miles later when it slammed into the wall of an arroyo. The unusual appearance of the UFO is based on various eyewitness accounts and other sources

Roswell Saucer?







Horten Parabola in 1945, copied by the U.S. postwar?







1947 Parabolic disc over New Mexico

Note aircraft features, not alien









Nazis were close to building stealth bomber that could have changed course of history

Nazi engineers were dangerously close to building a stealth warplane shielded from radar that could have changed the outcome of World War II

The Telegraph

8 July 2009 A prototype of the Horten Ho 229 made a successful test flight just before Christmas 1944, but by then time was running out for the Nazis and they were never able to perfect the design or produce more than a handful of prototype planes. However, an engineering team has reconstructed the bomber –albeit one that cannot fly– from blueprints. It was designed with a greater range and speed than any plane previously built and was the first aircraft to use the stealth technology now deployed by the US in its B-2 bombers. It has been recognised that Germany's technological expertise during the war was years ahead of the Allies, from the Panzer tanks through to the V-2 rocket. But, by 1943, the Nazis were keen to develop new weapons as they felt the war was turning against them. Nazi bombers were suffering badly when faced with the speed and manoeuvrability of the Spitfire. In 1943 Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring demanded that designers come up with a bomber that would meet his "1,000, 1,000, 1,000" requirements – one that could carry 1,000kg over 1,000km flying at 1,000km/h. Two pilot brothers in their thirties, Reimar and Walter Horten, suggested a "flying wing" design which they were sure would meet Göring's specifications. The centre pod was made from a welded steel tube, and was designed to be powered by a BMW 003 engine. But the most significant innovation was Reimar Horten's idea to coat it in a mix of charcoal dust and wood glue which he believed would absorb the electromagnetic waves of radar. They hoped that that, in conjunction with the aircraft's sculpted surfaces, would render it almost invisible to radar detectors. This was the same method eventually used by the U.S. in its first stealth aircraft in the early 1980s, the F-117A 'Nighthawk' .

Until now, experts had always doubted claims that the Horten could actually function as a stealth aircraft.



But, using the blueprints and the only remaining prototype craft, Northrop-Grumman defence firm built a fullsize replica of a Horten Ho 229, which cost £154,000 and took 2,500 man-hours to construct. The aircraft is not completely invisible to the type of radar used in the war, but it would have been stealthy enough and fast enough to reach London before Spitfires could be scrambled . "If the Germans had had time to develop these aircraft, they could well have had an impact," Peter Murton, aviation expert from the Imperial War Museum at Duxford, in Cambridgeshire told the "Daily Mail". "In theory the flying wing was a very efficient aircraft design which minimised drag. "It is one of the reasons that it could reach very high speeds in dive and glide and had such an incredibly long range". The research was filmed for a documentary on the "National Geographic Channel". The National Geographic Channel describes it as one of the best-kept secrets of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich



Toward the end of World War II, a mysterious, futuristic-looking aircraft was discovered by American troops in a top-secret German facility. The prototype jet, which resembled a massive bat wing, and other advanced German aircraft were brought to the United States in the military project “Operation Seahorse.”



In the early 1960s, the prototype jet was transferred to a Smithsonian facility in Maryland that is off-limits to the public. It remains there today.



“There have been no documents released on it, and the public has no access to it,” said Michael Jorgensen, a documentary filmmaker who secured National Geographic Channel backing to assemble a team of Northrop Grumman aeronautical engineers to study the craft and build a full-size replica from original plans. The completed model, which has a 55-foot wingspan, was quietly trucked to San Diego to join the San Diego Air & Space Museum's permanent collection.



The big mystery: Was this a stealth aircraft created more than three decades before modern stealth technology debuted? Could the wedge-shaped jet — almost completely formed of wood — actually evade radar detection? If so, military analysts wonder if the outcome of the war might have been different had the Germans had time to deploy the technology. The prototype craft was successfully tested by the Germans in late 1944.



The reconstruction process was filmed over three months last fall by Jorgensen's Flying Wing Films production company. Film crews followed the model to Northrop Grumman's restricted test site in the Mojave Desert in January, where the craft was mounted five stories high on a rotating pole. Radar was aimed at it from every direction and aerial attacks were simulated.



"It was a chance to be involved in solving a mystery that has baffled aviation historians for a long time," said Jim Hart, a spokesman for Northrop Grumman, which created the B-2 stealth bomber.



















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