The Germans had been working on directed energy weapons and had sealed those working on it from the outside world. So many radical technologies and so long ago. I had no idea. Next page. Target: Daimler-Benz. City: Unter-Turkheim/Stuttgart. Activity: Secret weapon. Assessed: April 25, 1945. Remarks: "Said to stop ignition system of a petrol engine. The apparatus has succeeded in stopping a motor vehicle w/magneto ignition, but not one w/battery, at a range of 2 or 3 km."
The report went on to say that the technology had been insufficiently developed to have been brought against aircraft, but it made clear that this was the goal.
The Germans, then, had also been working on devices that were designed to "interfere with the engines of aircraft in flight," contrary to the note sent by Colonel Sullivan to General McDonald on September 28.
Why, then, did Sullivan say that all information available through interrogations, equipment and documents had been "thoroughly invesi gated" and that the subject "may be closed with negative result"? What negative result? Over the years, I had conducted extensive interviews on and off the record with intelligence analysts on both sides of the Atlantic about Soviet and Russian weapons developments and knew something of their techniques. They would never have dismissed an invention such as Windhund as cursorily as Sullivan had in the light of clear evidence that the enemy had been developing such a radical strand of technology. At the very least, the reports would have gone into a holding file. If no other reports came in to substantiate this finding, then in time it would have been downgraded. Only then, would field agents have been told to stop looking.
Instead, Sullivan's exhortation for investigators to cease forthwith their search for one of the key component technologies of the foo-fighter sightings, a mystery that had absorbed the USAAF's intelligence community in that winter of 1944—45, was, well, odd.
Unless, that is, they had found a foo-fighter and needed to put the lid back on.
It got better. I came to the field report on the last target to have been assessed, the Institut für Elektrophysik Hermann Goering at Landsbergam-Lech in Bavaria. Like so many of the others it was quite anodyne until the remarks section, which read:
"Experimental work in conjunction with airfield at Pensing, 9 km north (toward Munich). Activities: research on gas, aircraft, pilotless aircraft, radio communication."
Here, then, was a facility that merged in a single program all the activities that explained Vesco's Fireball drone: a pilotless, remotecontrolled aircraft that disrupted the engines and electronic systems of Allied bombers. And the fact that the research activity was taking place at an airfield seemed to suggest that the tests were at an advanced stage when the Lusty assessment team showed up.
I sat staring at the screen for several more minutes, scouring the text for other corroborative details, but there were no further clues and I was out of time.
I photocopied what I could, thanked the archivist and made my way outside. The taxi was already waiting, engine running, wipers working against the rain. I threw my bags on the backseat and sat back for the ride, my head buzzing with thoughts about a strand of weapons technology that appeared to have been buried from view for more than half a century. But it wasn't until the flight home that sanity prevailed. What had I actually learned from Lusty'? That the Germans had been working on technologies that far exceeded published accounts of their aeronautical achievements in the Second World War? Certainly. That they had developed a craft that explained the foo-fighter sightings reported by Allied airmen? Possibly. That they had developed antigravity technology — and that this technology had fallen into the hands of the Americans at the end of the war in Europe? Unfortunately, not. Besides which, I realized that Lusty had been declassified in the mid1960s, several years before Vesco's book Intercept — But Don't Shoot was published. A skeptic could claim that Vesco had simply concocted his account from the documents.
I had hoped that by applying a few basic investigative principles, I would find some tangible evidence of a radical propulsion technology that had been overlooked by everyone else. Of course, it was never going to be that simple. Despite all the stories, there was no concrete proof that the Germans had even designed, let alone built, a flying saucer. As for antigravity propulsion, no one had ever found a single piece of evidence that would reliably hold up in court.
A short postscript to the German story emerged; in Canada of all places. At the time it seemed irrelevant to the main body of my investigation, but it came screaming back at me later in a way I couldn't possibly have guessed at so soon after my return from Washington. I would recall it later as the "Silverbug affair."
In April 1959, during hearings of the Space Committee of the U.S. Congress, the U.S. Department of Defense revealed that it was working with the Avro Canada company to develop a "flying saucer." According to the Pentagon's Research and Engineering Deputy Director, John Macauley, the craft would "skim the earth's surface or fly at altitudes reached by conventional aircraft." This was the first public admission that Avro was building a flying disc, the Avrocar, the brainchild of a gifted British engineer called John Frost, who'd moved to Canada shortly after the war.
Activity surrounding the Avro project was shrouded in mystery. Word of its existence had leaked as early as 1953, when the Toronto Star reported that the company was working on a "flying saucer" that could take off and land vertically and would fly at 1,500 mph. British and American scientists were also reported to be involved. Both the Canadian government and Avro played down the reports.
When the Avrocar finally emerged from the shadows it was easy to see why. One look at the prototype was enough to know that it would never achieve supersonic flight. Flight tests, in fact, confirmed it was a dog.
Underpowered and unstable, the Avrocar made its first untethered flight in December 1959 and soldiered on for two more years as Frost and his team sought to overcome its failings.
By the end of 1961, at the conclusion of the U.S. development contract, the Avrocar had managed to claw no more than a few feet into the air. Funding for the world's only known flying-saucer program was not renewed and the Avrocar drifted into obscurity — although not fast enough for the Canadian aerospace industry, which has sought ever since to distance itself from the project. There and elsewhere, it has become a byword for failure; something of an aviation joke. Yet, that may have been the intention all along. Recently declassified papers show that from early 1952 right up until the cancellation of the Avrocar in 1961, a select group of engineers known as the Avro "Special Projects Group," led by John Frost, had been working on a highly classified set of programs that accurately reflected the Toronto Star's original leak of 1953.
The papers revealed that, commencing with Project Y, also known as the "Manta," via Project 1794 to Project PV 704, the SPG tested technology for a whole family of flying saucers whose projected performance was designed to eclipse that of all other jet fighters. Data on Project 1794, a design for a perfectly circular fighter-interceptor, show that it would have been capable of Mach 4 at 100,000 feet. The best fighters then on the drawing board were hard-pressed to achieve Mach 2.