There are recurring tales of the development of disc-shaped aircraft by the German Reich during World War 2. Although some researchers have found, on diligent examination, that the stories tend to have originated post-WW2, and in fact post 1947, when American private pilot Kenneth Arnold reported his string of unidentified flying objects "skipping like saucers" through the air near Mt. Ranier, Washington, enthusiasts are not deterred.

The accounts given between 1950 and 1957 by Schriever, Belluzzo (or Bellonzo) and Miethe, three of the four engineers supposedly responsible for the "Schriever, Habermohl, Miethe and Bellonzo Flying Disc" , and who supposedly came up with several disc-shaped aircraft designs that used jet engines, are said not to support each other. Each alleged participant gives different information, individually taking the lead in being responsible for what was achieved, and none of them state that they worked with the other three. Essentially, all claim to have been responsible for an assortment of different disc programmes, at a variety of different locations, testing and flying their different discs.

One of Schriever's drawings shows an egg-shaped cockpit surrounded by a rotating fan-like disc that provided the lift; a Miethe drawing depicts a smooth, flat saucer with an elongated hump on its back for the cockpit and a pair of exhausts pointing rearwards.

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We are left with the sparse evidence that Sack, an aero modeler, built a clumsy flying disc and supposedly worked on a full-scale saucer-shaped aircraft, also attributed to Dr. Lippisch, which according to accounts managed a few awkward hops; an anecdotal record of an accidental sighting of attempts to fly an equally clumsy disc-shaped craft; and the conflicting allegations surrounding designs by Schriever, Habermohl, Miethe, and Bellonzo.

Focke's innovative thinking may have produced a number of advanced aircraft, on paper and in reality, but no flying disc seems to have been among them. Whatever projects to explore disc-shaped aircraft the Germans undertook in World War 2, the evidence does not point to achievement of any particularly outstanding results. Significantly, perhaps, the German disc stories gained recognition in the 1950s, when the popular fascination with flying saucers was growing in the US.

Nazi UFOs The idea that Nazi Germany developed highly advanced aircraft or spacecraft appears in fiction as early as 1947. In Robert A. Heinlein's novel Rocket Ship Galileo, the protagonists discover Nazi fugitives living in a base on the moon. However, the idea is not limited to science fiction. Academic Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, in Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity, has documented a fringe belief that the Nazis developed flying saucers (Haunebu or Hauneburg-Geräte, and Reichs- or Rund-Flugscheiben) that they launched, and continue to launch, from a base in the Antarctic territory of New Swabia (Neu-Schwabenland). He includes the theory under the heading of "esoteric Nazism," an ideology that hopes for Nazi restoration through supernatural or paranormal means. Historical connections Nazi UFO theories agree with mainstream history on the following points: Nazi Germany claimed the territory of New Swabia, sent an expedition there in 1938, and planned others. Nazi Germany conducted research into advanced propulsion technology, including rocketry and Viktor Schauberger's turbine work. Some UFO sightings during World War II, particularly those known as Foo Fighters, were thought to be enemy aircraft. Early references The earliest non-fictional reference to Nazi flying saucers appears to be a series of articles by and about Italian turbine expert Giuseppe Belluzzo. The following week, German scientist Rudof Schriever claimed to have developed flying saucers during the Nazi period. Aeronautical engineer Roy Fedden remarked that the only craft that could approach the capabilities attributed to flying saucers were those being designed by the Germans towards the end of the war. Fedden also added that the Germans were working on a number of very unusual aeronautical projects, though he did not elaborate upon his statement. Revisionist claims Pauwels and Bergier A 1967 book by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, Aufbruch ins dritte Jahrtausend: Von der Zukunft der phantastischen Vernunft, made many spectacular claims about the Vril Society of Berlin. It claimed that the society had made contact with an alien race and dedicated itself to creating spacecraft to reach the aliens. In partnership with the Thule Society and the Nazi Party, it developed a series of flying disc prototypes. With the Nazi defeat, the society allegedly retreated to a base in Antarctica and vanished. Ernst Zündel When German Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel started Samisdat Publishers in the 1970s, he initially catered to the UFOlogy community, which was then at its peak of public acceptance. His main offerings were his own books claiming that flying saucers were Nazi secret weapons launched from an underground base in Antarctica, from which the Nazis hoped to conquer the world. Zündel also sold (for $9999) seats on an exploration team to locate the underground base. Some people who interviewed Zündel about this material claim that he privately admitted it was a deliberate hoax to build publicity for Samisdat, although he still defended it as late as 2002. Miguel Serrano In 1978 Serrano, a Chilean diplomat and Nazi sympathizer, published The Golden Band, in which he claimed that Adolf Hitler was an avatar of Vishnu and was then communing with Hyperborean gods in an underground Antarctic base. Serrano predicted that Hitler would lead a fleet of UFOs from the base to establish the Fourth Reich. Vladimir Terziski Bulgarian engineer Vladimir Terziski, billing himself as president of the American Academy of Dissident Sciences, has built on the claims of Pauwel and Bergier, claiming that the Germans collaborated in their advanced craft research with Axis powers Italy and Japan, and continued their space effort after the war from New Swabia. He writes that Germans landed on the Moon as early as 1942 and established an underground base there. When Russians and Americans secretly landed on the moon in the 1950s, says Terziski, they stayed at this still-operating base. According to Terziski, "there is atmosphere, water and vegetation on the Moon," which NASA conceals to exclude the third world from moon exploration. Terziski has been accused of fabricating his video and photographic evidence..

In 1950, a former Luftwaffe engineer named Rudolf Schriever gave a series of interviews to the West German press in which he claimed to have designed a "Flying Disc" during the war.   Schriever had been an engineer and test pilot for the Heinkel factory in Eger.   In 1941, he began to toy with the idea of an aircraft that could take off vertically, thus eliminating the need for runways, which were vulnerable to enemy bombing. By June the following year, he had built and test-flown a working model of his design, and work immediately began on a full-size fifteen-foot version.   In mid-1944, Schriever was transferred to the BMW plant near Prague, Czechoslovakia, where he was joined by an engineer from the rocket site at Peenemünde named Richard Miethe, another engineer named Klaus Habermohl and an Italian physicist from the aeronautical complex at Riva del Garda, Dr Giuseppe Belluzzo.   Together, it is claimed, they built an even larger, piloted version of the disc, featuring a domed pilot's cabin sitting at the centre of a circular set of multiple wings driven by a turbine engine mounted on the disc's vertical axis.   The German disc programme allegedly went under the title 'Projekt Saucer'.   According to the military historian Major Rudolf Lusar, Schriever's disc consisted of "a wide-surface ring which rotated around a fixed, cupola-shaped cockpit".   The ring contained "adjustable wing-discs which could be brought into appropriate position for the take-off or horizontal flight".   The Model 3 flying disc is claimed to have had a diameter of 138 feet and a height of 105 feet.   According to Schriever, the finished disc was ready for test-flying early in 1944, but was destroyed by its builders to prevent it from falling into the hands of the advancing Allies.   According to the story, Schriever and his colleagues fled as the BMW plant was taken by Czechoslovakian patriots.   In spite of Schriever's claim, Renato Vesco, who studied aeronautical engineering at the German Institute for Aerial Development and during the war was sent to work at Fiat's underground installation at Lake Garda in northern Italy, states that a highly advanced supersonic disc-shaped aircraft called the Kugelblitz was allegedly test-flown near the Nordhausen underground rocket complex in February 1945.   Also known as the V-7, this machine was said to have climbed to a height of 37,600 feet in just three minutes, and is claimed by 'true believers' to have reached a speed of 1,218 mph.   This craft and the technicians who built it were apparently seized by the Russians and taken to Siberia, where the disc project continued under Soviet control.   While Vesco concedes that the hard evidence for a German flying-disc programme is "very tenuous" (non-existant is more accurate), he notes that "the senior official of a 1945 British technical mission revealed that he had discovered German plans for 'entirely new and deadly developments in air warfare' ".   Vesco claimed that these plans must obviously have gone beyond normal jet aircraft designs, as both sides already had jet-powered aircraft in production and operational service by the end of the war.   Moreover, before Rudolf Schriever died some fifteen years after the war he had become convinced that the large numbers of post-war UFO sightings were evidence that his designs had been built and developed.   On 2 May 1980, another man claimed to the German press that he had worked on Project Saucer. Heinrich Fleissner, then 76 years old, told Neue Presse magazine that he had been a technical consultant on a jet-propelled, disc-shaped aircraft that had been built at Peenemünde from parts manufactured in a number of other locations.   Fleissner also claimed that Göring had been the patron of the project and planned to use the disc as a courier plane, but that the Wehrmacht had destroyed most of the plans in the face of the Allied advance.     According to Vesco, the Austrian inventor Viktor Schauberger, after being kidnapped by the Nazis, designed a number of disc-shaped aircraft for the Third Reich between 1938 and 1945.   The saucers were powered by what Schauberger called 'liquid vortex propulsion' which he explained as follows: 'If water or air is rotated into a twisting form of oscillation known as "colloidal", a build-up of energy results, which, with immense power, can cause levitation.'   It would be interesting to know the extent of the truth of these claims, because both scientific facts and principles seem to lie in ruins if what Schauberger says about Nazi UFOs is even half true.   Besides the claims of would-be inventors, wild rumours, and the claims of out-and-out crack-pots, there are few original first-hand historical documents about the development of saucer-shaped aircraft by the Nazis, though some did exist - though not as advanced as some would like to believe.   The supporters of the saucers' reality say that most but not all documents and blueprints were destroyed by the Nazis before surrender or captured by the Allied and never released, due to their extreme strategic importance.   Investigation for locating possible undisputable sources is still running.   The reality of the "Nazi UFOs" has been highly controversial to say the least Though it is undisputable that the Nazi's were indeed working on many advanced rocket and jet designs by the wars end, including some "flying discs" such as the Sack AS-6 and the Focke-Wulf VTOL Project), no hard historical evidence about the existence of the highly advanced technology mentioned above has been presented so far.