Nazi UFOs: When Did the Flying Saucer Story Actually Begin?

The Nazi UFO story begins most usefully with machines we can actually place in workshops, photographs and surviving collections.

By the final years of the Second World War, German engineers were developing aircraft and weapons that looked dramatically different from much of what had been flying when the war began. The Messerschmitt Me 262 entered combat as an operational jet fighter. Wernher von Braun’s team developed the V-2 ballistic missile at Peenemünde, a liquid-fuel rocket that travelled faster than 5,000 kilometres per hour and rose beyond the atmosphere during its trajectory. After the war, captured V-2s became part of American rocket research at White Sands and eventually contributed directly to the technological lineage of the space age.

Then there was the Horten Ho 229.

Brothers Reimar and Walter Horten had been experimenting with flying-wing designs for years. In 1943 Hermann Göring funded development of a jet-powered version, and a powered prototype flew before the war ended. The surviving Ho 229 V3 is now held by the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, which describes it as a unique jet-powered all-wing aircraft whose unusual shape promised remarkable performance for the period.

Viewed from certain angles, the aircraft barely resembles the conventional fuselage-and-tail silhouette most people associate with a Second World War fighter.

This matters because the postwar UFO story did not emerge into a technological vacuum.

People already knew that German engineers had been working on rockets, jets, unconventional wings and secret projects under extraordinary wartime pressure. Some programmes were captured intact. Others were found unfinished. Engineers disappeared into American, Soviet, British and French research systems.

So when stories began circulating that another German aircraft programme had existed, the historical setting gave the claim somewhere plausible to land.

Then the Sky Filled With Flying Saucers

The modern flying-saucer era erupted in 1947, after American pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine fast-moving objects near Mount Rainier.

The press turned the description into the language of “flying saucers,” and the expression spread internationally.

At that point, an interesting question emerged almost immediately. If unknown high-performance objects really were appearing in the sky, did they have to be extraterrestrial?

The Second World War had ended only two years earlier.

German scientists were already working for the victorious powers.

German rockets were being launched from American soil.

Unusual German aerodynamic designs were being examined by Allied engineers.

It was therefore not difficult for one possibility to enter the discussion: perhaps some of the new objects represented technologies that had begun in Germany and continued elsewhere after 1945.

That idea appears before the elaborate occult version of Nazi UFO history.

The first saucers in the story were technological, not mystical.

In 1950, Giuseppe Belluzzo Said Germany and Italy Had Worked on Discs

On 24 March 1950, Italian engineer Giuseppe Belluzzo, a turbine specialist who had served as a minister under Mussolini, published an article in Il Giornale d’Italia claiming that circular aircraft had been considered in Germany and Italy during the war.

Belluzzo dated the work to around 1942 and described it in terms of contemporary turbine and jet technology rather than extraterrestrial engineering. His comments were among the earliest widely published postwar claims directly connecting Axis wartime research with flying discs.

The timing is interesting.

The flying-saucer phenomenon was already receiving international attention, but the enormous later mythology involving Vril societies, Aldebaran and Antarctic survival colonies had not yet been constructed.

Belluzzo’s claim was considerably simpler.

Circular aircraft had been studied.

Could some postwar sightings be related to that work?

A week later, Germany produced another claimant.

Rudolf Schriever Described a German “Flying Disc”

On 31 March 1950, Der Spiegel published a report involving Rudolf Schriever, who said he had developed a circular aircraft concept during the war.

Schriever described a central cockpit surrounded by a rotating ring fitted with turbine blades. He claimed the project had been developed during the final years of the war and that his plans had disappeared after Germany’s collapse.

This article became one of the foundational pieces of the German flying-disc narrative. Later writers repeatedly returned to Schriever, sometimes adding other names including Klaus Habermohl, Richard Miethe and Georg Klein to an increasingly elaborate wartime programme. Historian Christian Brandau’s study of the subject identifies the 1950 Spiegel article as a central early point in the development of the Reichsflugscheibe, or Reich flying-disc, story.

What did Schriever actually build?

Was there a completed aircraft?

Did his story preserve part of a genuine late-war experimental programme?

Those questions became much harder to answer as later accounts began incorporating increasingly dramatic performance figures and additional engineers.

But the important chronology remains.

By 1950, people were publicly claiming that Germany had experimented with disc-shaped aircraft.

They were not yet talking about Haunebu.

Circular Military Aircraft Were Not an Impossible Idea

The idea of an actual military flying disc was sufficiently attractive that the United States and Canada later spent serious money attempting one.

During the 1950s, Avro Canada developed the VZ-9 Avrocar with American military support. The circular craft used a central turborotor and was intended to explore vertical take-off and high-performance flight. The National Museum of the United States Air Force describes the original ambition as a supersonic vertical-take-off fighter-bomber.

The Avrocar physically existed. It flew.

Its disc shape also looked exactly like the object popular culture had already decided a flying saucer should resemble.

That creates another wrinkle in the historical story. The circular aircraft idea itself was not confined to UFO literature. Engineers genuinely experimented with it.

So when a former German technician described a wartime flying disc, the shape alone could not settle what had or had not happened.

The harder questions concern the specific programmes, people and claimed performance.

The Occult Material Arrived Through Another Door

During the 1950s, German flying-disc stories existed mainly as technological and nationalist narratives.

Then another stream began merging with them.

In 1960, Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier published Le Matin des magiciens, translated into English as The Morning of the Magicians. The book presented a sprawling mixture of science, esotericism, secret societies, ancient mysteries and Nazi occult interests, and gave considerable attention to ideas surrounding Vril, Thule, alternative cosmology and hidden forces.

“Vril” itself was much older. The word originated in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1871 novel The Coming Race, where it described a mysterious energy used by an advanced subterranean civilisation.

By the twentieth century, that fictional concept had wandered into occult and esoteric circles.

Once Vril became associated with Nazi occult mythology, it provided something the early Schriever-type flying-disc story had lacked.

A different kind of propulsion.

Now the aircraft did not necessarily need to rely only on turbines and jets.

They could be connected with hidden energies, secret societies and ancient knowledge.

The flying saucer was beginning to change species.

Antarctica Joined the Story in the 1970s

The next major fusion involved a place we have already visited rather thoroughly.

Antarctica.

Political scientist Michael Barkun traces one important strand of the Nazi-saucer narrative through postwar German nationalist literature and into the work of Canadian neo-Nazi publisher Ernst Zündel during the 1970s. In these versions, Germany had developed advanced flying discs before defeat, and surviving personnel later escaped with the technology to hidden bases in Antarctica.

That single addition connected several previously separate stories.

The genuine 1938–39 German Antarctic expedition supplied New Swabia.

The surrender of German U-boats in Argentina supplied mysterious postwar movements.

Operation Highjump supplied a large American naval expedition to Antarctica.

The earlier flying-disc claims supplied advanced aircraft.

Once these elements occupied the same narrative, Highjump could be reinterpreted as an encounter with surviving German technology rather than simply a polar military expedition.

The pieces came from different periods.

The story allowed them to operate simultaneously.

Then Haunebu and Vril Acquired Model Numbers

The Nazi UFO familiar from modern websites arrives much later than Schriever’s 1950 disc.

Religious-studies scholar Julian Strube traces a major stage in its development through the German-speaking esoteric nationalist milieu surrounding Norbert Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ralf Ettl.

Jürgen-Ratthofer published a series titled Geheimwaffe UFO, “Secret Weapon UFO,” in 1980 and later assembled material on alleged Third Reich UFOs and secret weapons. By the late 1980s, drawings circulated purporting to show machines carrying names such as Vril and Haunebu. Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ettl then developed the mythology extensively in Das Vril-Projekt in 1992.

Now the flying discs had become an entire technological family.

Different models acquired dimensions, engines, crews, performance specifications and operational histories. The narratives described Vril craft, Haunebu I, II and III, enormous cylindrical or disc-shaped spacecraft and ultimately interplanetary designs.

Something else entered the story as well.

Aldebaran.

The Engineers Were Joined by Mediums and Extraterrestrials

In the Vril narrative developed around the 1990s, a secret esoteric society supposedly established telepathic contact with beings from the star system Aldebaran.

Female mediums, most famously a figure later known as Maria Orsic, were said to have received technical information allowing German researchers to construct advanced flying machines.

The story now combined almost everything developed during the previous forty years: wartime flying discs, esoteric Vril power, secret societies, advanced propulsion, SS programmes and extraterrestrial contact.

Strube’s analysis shows how Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ettl drew together older postwar flying-disc material, esoteric National Socialist ideas and contemporary UFO culture into a much more comprehensive cosmology. Their Haunebu and Vril imagery spread further through books, videos and eventually the internet.

The familiar diagrams showing beautifully engineered German saucers therefore belong to a much later stage of the story than the Second World War itself.

That does not tell us what, if anything, German engineers may have experimented with in 1944.

It tells us when a particular version of that history becomes visible.

What About the Horten Flying Wing?

The Horten Ho 229 inevitably reappears whenever Nazi UFOs are discussed because it demonstrates just how strange an actual late-war German aircraft could look.

Its smooth all-wing profile seems almost designed for retrospective UFO interpretation.

Yet the Horten project followed a very different aerodynamic concept from the circular machines described by Schriever and later Haunebu literature. The Smithsonian’s surviving aircraft gives us an unusually concrete benchmark: here is an unconventional German jet project whose prototypes, engineering history and physical remains can still be examined.

That makes comparison useful.

What documentation would we expect from another development programme of comparable scale?

What components might have survived?

Which engineers would have worked on it?

Where would engines have been developed and tested?

Which Allied technical-intelligence teams would have encountered the remains?

A secret programme would naturally leave fewer records than the Ho 229.

How few can disappear before history becomes impossible to reconstruct?

That is the uncomfortable border the Nazi UFO story repeatedly approaches.

The Story Keeps Growing Because the Historical Background Was Already Strange

By 1945, Germany possessed operational jets, ballistic missiles and secret underground production facilities. Allied powers were actively searching for German scientists and technology. Flying-wing aircraft existed. Rocket engineers who had built weapons for the Third Reich were soon launching rockets in the United States.

Then came the postwar layers.

Belluzzo said circular aircraft had been studied.

Schriever described his own flying-disc concept.

Later writers added additional engineers.

Occult literature introduced Vril and secret societies.

Antarctic narratives joined the discs to New Swabia and Operation Highjump.

By the 1980s and 1990s, the machines acquired the names Vril and Haunebu, detailed drawings, exotic propulsion systems and extraterrestrial connections.

The chronology does not force one conclusion.

It allows us to separate the questions.

Did German engineers experiment with circular aircraft?

What exactly lay behind Schriever’s 1950 account?

Were other late-war aerodynamic programmes lost or absorbed by the victorious powers?

When did the idea of unconventional German aircraft become connected with occult propulsion?

When did Antarctica enter the narrative?

And when did the specific Vril and Haunebu machines acquire the appearances and histories now endlessly reproduced online?

Those are different mysteries.

The internet usually hands them to us as one finished package.

History does not.

The first Nazi flying saucers to appear after the war were comparatively modest machines built from turbines, rotating blades and the technological possibilities of 1945.

Only later did they acquire anti-gravity, secret orders, polar bases and instructions from Aldebaran.

Whether those later layers preserve fragments of something earlier, reinterpret scattered wartime projects, or represent an entirely different evolution of the story is precisely why the Nazi UFO question remains more interesting when we follow it backward instead of beginning with Haunebu III already hovering over Antarctica.