There has been an attempt to discredit the story of the Nazi Bell recently that has appeared in various UFO-related sites, by attacking the idea that the structure at Ludwigsdorff, which I call "the Henge" and which Igor Witkowski and Nick Cook call "the Flytrap" was nothing but a support base for a cooling tower for an electrical power plant.

The argument is encapsulated in a couple of pictures. First, just to recall, here is the Nazi Bell's "Henge" or "Flytrap." Witkowski has argued that this was some sort of outdoor test rig for the device in his mamouth examination of Nazi secret weapons, The Truth About the Wunderwaffe, and Nick Cook elaborated on the idea in his bestseller, The Hunt for Zero Point.

The argument basically may be shown by a comparison of the base structure of a modern cooling tower. This is the picture used for comparison, to make the point. THis is from UFO Hunters, season two, episode 18. There can be no denying that there is a strong resemblance, and that the Henge like structure at Ludwigsdorff could have been the foundation for a cooling tower. After all, it is well known that there was an entire electrical power plant there, and there is a photo in Witkowski's book, dating from the war, showing the clear picture of three cooling towers! (See Igor Witkowski, The Truth About the Wunderwaffe, p. 268).

And that is the beginning of the problem for the "cooling tower hypothesis", for where are the other two henge like cooling tower structures? This is where, in my opinion, once again the television media's investigative powers were somewhat superficial and disappointing, for had they bothered to consult Witkowski's research, on p. 272, there are two overhead views of the Ludwigsdorff complex, aerial views showing The Henge, one dating from 1954, with no cooling tower. I plan to post a longer article about this problem with Witkowski's picture of the 1954 aerial view, in the future. Posting it here would not show the detail it needs to show. But the point is, that it also states on that page that this is similar to Allied aeial photographs from autumn of 1944 - "on which, for the first time, the mysterious ring-like structure first appeared." Ring like structure, but no cooling tower; remember, those were already built.

We have a ring-like structure that, viewed from the air, looks remarkably like a similar structure at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, barely visible in this photograph. While not readily visible in this photo, under magnification the structure looks remarkably similar to the Nazi Henge, and to the cooling tower support structure seen on UFO Hunters. The problem is, there is clearly no cooling tower at the Dugway Proving Ground. So the bottom line is, while the Nazi Henge structure may look superficially similar to the cooling tower support structure, that hypothesis fails to account for the structure on a number of counts: (1) where are the other such structures for the three cooling towers visible in Witkowski's photgraph of Ludwigsdorff from the war? (2) why don't they show up in the wartime Allied aerial photo and in the later 1954 photo?

And the answer is, the Henge was not the structural base of a cooling tower any more than the Dugway Proving Ground henge is either.