SS Brotherhood of the Bell: The Nazis’ Incredible Secret Technology (10 page)

Miniature German Television Camera for Missile Guidance

Moreover, this miniaturization implies something enormously important, and its importance will become more and more apparent as we proceed in part two of this work, for such a tremendous reduction in size implies some sort of breakthrough in vacuum tube technology, if not in semiconductor research itself.

The mention of semiconductors is intentional, for they may have accomplished much more, as the following picture demonstrates:

German “Proto-Transistor” from 1940

The pictured klystron tube is the same approximate size as the last knuckle and fingertip of the reader’s little finger!

In short, the Germans came exceedingly close, very early in the war, by virtue of competent research in semiconductors, to achieving the transistor, for the
Allied equivalent of this little tube at the
end
of the war is ten times as large!
This little “proto-transistor”, dating from 1940 (!), was used in 1941 in small radios that actually entered production for the German military, radios that were “as small as the later transistor radios of the 1950s and that also functioned with batteries.”
²⁷

The mere existence of this little tube is the first glimpse of a
very
significant problematic that will preoccupy us in part three of this book, and that was mentioned in the last two chapters of my previous book on Nazi secret weapons,
Reich of the Black Sun.
The problematic may be glimpsed here as a kind of preview to part three, and it is best stated in conjunction with Lt. Col. Philip J. Corso’s book,
The Day After Roswell.

2. The Problem of the Miniature German Klystron Tube: Roswell, The E.T. Myth and the Nazi Legend Revisited

Lt. Col. Philip J. Corso (US Army, Ret.) was perhaps something of a Godsend to UFO enthusiasts, for he corroborated – at least on the surface – the whole Roswell UFO-and-ET-crash and recovery scenario in his well-known book,
The Day After Roswell.
Corso’s thesis is familiar to most people who have investigated the UFO literature.

In his post as a top national security military officer, Corso maintains in his book that he was entrusted with some of the “recovered technology” from the “alien craft” that crashed at Roswell. His assignment was gradually to “seed” those aspects of “recovered ET technology” into American industry. Corso further maintains that among some of this “recovered and gradually seeded” technology were lasers, computers, fiber optics, and
transistors.
²⁸
Of course, after the book’s appearance and Corso’s own appearance on a popular overnight radio talk show, critical and historical analysis was all but suspended, and there was a further boost to the “ET” interpretation of the Roswell incident, all as a result of his book.

Crucial to Corso’s case was the transistor, and he spends a great deal of time in his book demonstrating that his thesis of its “ET-Roswell” origin has to be true by pointing out that the history of the discovery of the transistor by Bell Laboratories is obscure at best.
²⁹
The reason? Very simple. The transistor
had
no prior “discovery history” because it was “ET” in origin.

But given what has now been demonstrated, we propose that, like the ambiguity in the MAJIC-12 documents themselves – vacillating between technologies clearly exotic though terrestrial and an “ET” cover story – there is
another
possible explanation for the origin of the transistor, one which, as we saw in
Reich of the
Black Sun,
³⁰
it would appear that the highest authorities, including the military, wish to keep covered up. That other possible source for the transistor, one that would
much more satisfactorily explain
its obscure discovery history than the ET hypothesis, is wartime Nazi research and accomplishment in semiconductor research.

Simply put, Corso’s work is, in this respect at least, pure obfuscation and disinformation, since one can only assume that a man of Corso’s obvious intelligence could not have been unaware of German wartime scientific achievements, as plausibly demonstrated by the above miniature tube, fully
seven
years before the Roswell incident and its recovery of “advanced ET technology.”

But there are other aspects of Corso’s work that must also be called into question vis-à-vis the state of Nazi secret weapons research. It is well known that the Germans undertook and developed a wide range of infrared sites to enhance the night-fighting ability of their tanks and infantry. What is
not
generally known is the apparently high state of development of second and third generation technologies these infrared sites may have represented, for Polish researcher Igor Witkowski uncovered a certain amount of evidence in a recently declassified Alsos report that indicates preliminary work was undertaken in
liquid crystals
and something the Germans called “optical telephony.”
³¹
This is an extremely intriguing discovery, because fiber optics is yet another technology that Col. Corso maintained was recovered from “ET” at Roswell and “gradually seeded” into American industry.

One little known aspect of German wartime research is the area of over-the-horizon radars. While the Nazis were pursuing a number of options for the guidance of their intercontinental
Amerikaraket,
including a piloted version from which the pilot would eject at the last moment, the most preferred method was “beam riding,” a method that would allow the rocket to be guided to target by a beam. One project consisted of placing a secret radio transmitter inside the Empire State building for the purpose!
³²

But by far the most serious and promising – and technologically involved – methods were the various Over-the-Horizon Radars that the Germans were developing for the purpose, the sets
Elefant, See-Elefant,
and the mobile
Freya
unit. The
Elefant
set was developed by the Research Department of the
Deutsche Reischspost
, and was the world’s first genuine over-the-horizon radar based on temperature inversions in the ionosphere.
³³
The
See-Elefant
was a further development of this equipment, and was built in western Denmark and consisted of a sending antenna, approximately 100 meters high, placed between two permanent receiving antennae some distance to either side. It was a broadband antenna system, operating in the 23-29 MHz, 24-30MHz, and 30-38 MHz range.
³⁴

But the most advanced of these early over-the-horizon radars was the
Freya
unit, a “revolutionary system” that was “fully mobile.”
³⁵
The
Freya
unit’s basic principle of operation is visible from this German schematic from 1945:

German Schematic of Freya’s Basic Operating Principle

The basic idea is evident from an artist’s sketch dated March 30, 1945, of the
Freya
unit emplaced and ready to transmit. The diagram labels each of these antennae the
Sende und Empfangs—
Antennae
, the
Sende Antenna I
and
Send Antenna II.
³⁶
Thus, the
Freya
unit represents a considerably newer and different principle than the
Elefant
or
See-Elefant,
with their single sending and two receiving antennae. The central sending and receiving antenna sends out a pulse, which is also sent as secondary pulses
slightly later
by the antennae to either side. This is a true
phased array
radar, able to shape and bend its signals around the curvature of the earth, or “over the horizon.”

Artist’s Sketch of Freya

Consequently, the Germans, in spite of some technical shortcomings of their radar operations during the war, were experimenting in areas that were quite advanced for the day:

(a) Broadband radar systems based on

(b) Phased array “signal shaping” for

(c) Over-the-horizon, or “action at a distance” operation.

As will be subsequently argued in chapter five, they were combining all these ideas with that of sending pulses of bursts of energy. All of this was, of course, for the long-range guidance of their projected intercontinental rockets.

In any case, the accuracy of these types of systems had been brought to a high state by the Germans by October of 1943. By that time, the accuracy was such that it was able to guide aircraft at a distance of 105 kilometers, during a bombing run, to release their bombs within 600 meters of their target, even though it was not visible to them.
³⁷

However, as will be seen in a later chapter, the Germans may have discovered something while operating these sophisticated radar units that indicated they were a door beckoning to a whole new type of physics, one with a far greater promise than mere long-range rockets carrying atomic bombs.

The real question, the one that will now preoccupy us for the remainder of this book, remains:
why would the military-industrial-national security complex be so concerned to deflect attention away from Nazi scientific achievements – an effort represented by Colonel Corso’s
The Day After Roswell -
even at this late date, unless there is something it still wishes to hide?
The answer is twofold. The most important part of the answer lies in what the Germans may have discovered with these radar sets, a part with which we shall have much to do when we finally turn to examine the exotic type of physics the Nazis may have been developing in part two.

For now we will turn to a less important reason, the reason that, if one pulled on the thread long enough and hard enough, would inevitably lead one to ask questions about the “public consumption” history of the race to the moon, the most visible aspect of the survival of Nazi research projects and their “creative financing” in the postwar world.

¹
Friedrich Georg,
Hitlers Siegeswaffen: Band 2: Star Wars 1947: Teilband B: Von der Amerikarakete zur Orbitalstation – Deutschlands Streben nach Intercontinentalwaffen und das erste Weltraumprogram
(Schleusingen, Germany: Amun Verlag, 2004), p. 11, my translation.

²
Ibid., p. 223.

³
Joseph P. Farrell,
The Reich of the Black Sun: Nazi Secret Weapons and the Cold War Allied Legend
(Kempton, Illinois: Adventures Unlimited Press, 2004, pp. 1-158.

⁴
Friedrich Georg,
Star Wars 1947
, p. 223.

⁵
Friedrich Georg,
Star Wars 1947,
pp. 15-16.