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Projekt UFO: The Case for Man-made Flying Saucers
Widely regarded as one of the most detailed and level-headed books ever published on the controversial subject of UFOs, Projekt The Case for Man-Made Flying Saucers, is also considered to offer the definitive explanation for a mystery that has haunted the world for over sixty years. Now, at last, this revelatory book is again available to a worldwide readership. This new edition has been updated by the author
388 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
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September 9, 2019
SPOILERS below:
The gist of Harbinson’s hypothesis is as follows: In the late 1800s, someone got a jump on building ships for air travel. Then in the 1930s, the first rocket launch took place in the Americas but it was Nazi Germany that took advantage of this new technology and started building ships that would eventually become flying saucers. Although Nazi Germany did not get their own saucer into production quick enough to win the war, the technology was scooped up by Great Britain, Canada, the United States and Russia after the fall of Berlin. From there, man-made saucers (and other flying wing craft) went into production (in secret) and that’s what became the modern UFO phenomenon. Another possibility is that some of the survivors of the Third Reich fled to Antarctica where they continued their “Projekt Saucer” program in underground bases that gave rise to a serious threat to the allied powers. Oh, and the ufonauts may be cyborgs, enhanced humans and/or advanced artificial intelligences.
Why I have no doubt of the possibility people were constructing airships and successfully flying them prior to the Wright Brothers, there is no more than anecdotal evidence for this. Where I start to get skeptical is on the claims of Nazi Germany having a Projekt Saucer program.
As Kevin McClure noted in his essay, “The Nazi UFO Mythos: W A Harbinson and Projekt Saucer”, the word “saucer” isn’t even a German word. And the term “flying saucer” didn’t even come into existence until 1947, after a reporter mistook the words of Kenneth Arnold. So the questioning of a name of a Nazi German secret project makes the rest of it suspicious right from the beginning.
And the rest of it is.
Harbinson takes the likes of Renato Vesco and other questionable sources at face value. A review of Vesco’s work shows that for an alleged aeronautical engineer, his descriptions of the Foo Fighters are implausible. He appears to have taken pilot descriptions of their encounters with said fireballs and worked up an imaginary design. And if he made up how the Feuerballs worked, that puts into question all the other claims he made. Vesco claimed he got a lot of his information from classified British Intelligence and Allied Combined Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee reports (BIOS and CIOS). So the sources cannot be independently checked and are therefore useless.
Harbinson also takes Rudolph Schriever at his word. Schriever claimed in 1942 he designed a flying disc and was part of a test flight. But in 1950 Schriever was delivering Stars and Stripes newspapers to the American army occupying Germany. Is it really believable someone with the alleged credentials as Schriever would be delivering newspapers after the war? No. He’d have been swept up under Operation Paperclip or otherwise.
The problem of Nazi Flying Saucers is the sources are flimsy and quite frankly, with World War Two being the most studied subject in history, we’d surely have more information on this were it true.
Now it is true that Nazi Germany was well advanced for its time, their unethical use of slave labor and other standards to their advantage. And it is true the allied powers swept up their top scientists and tech after war’s end. Nazi Germany’s rocket technology eventually took America to the moon. The question here, however, is did Nazi Germany have the foundation for what became the modern UFO phenomenon.
Harbinson makes note of the many advances in flight America and Canada made after the war. Now declassified projects like Canada's AVROcar and others are trotted out as evidence. And these are fine and dandy and historical but the jump Harbinson then asks of the reader is to take these advancements and consider that events like the crash at Roswell in 1947 and the 1957 Levelland UFO case are examples of just such projects in production. It’s a hard pill to swallow because if (big if) Roswell and Levelland were actually craft, they were far in advance of anything like the AVROcar. In other words, the advances America and Canada were making couldn’t be attributed to these sightings or many of the others that American jetfighters were chasing around in the late forties and fifties.
Harbinson anticipates this objection by introducing two possibilities (or a combination of both). It is possible, as noted above, the UFO phenomenon is escaped Nazi scientists still working away in Antarctica now come to harass the allies. And/or a secret group of allied powers working in the black, perfecting flying saucers and other tech. This predates Richard Dolan’s “Breakaway Civilization” theory to explain UFOs. In any case, it’s explaining one mystery with another mystery and explains nothing. If we had an actual saucer from the late forties, like an archeologist working with remains, we could then start figuring out where it came from. We have nothing, however, other than anecdotal information to work with and thus, until we have a body, we cannot go any further. To beat a dead horse, considering a breakaway civilization at this point is like hypothesizing the origin of a flesh and blood unicorn. We need the unicorn first, gentlemen.
Since we don’t have any proofs of flying saucers, or otherwise, we could probably stop here. But we still have the UFO pilots to talk about. Harbinson attempts to explain the weird and android like features of UFO occupants (ufonauts) by spending a chapter on medical achievements such as organ transplants and human enhancements (cyborgs) and all the other medical advances extending and benefiting human life. He suggests a combination of tech grafted onto the human body as an explanation of why the ufonauts look and act the way they do. However, this is putting the cart before the horse. We have to have a body before we can consider the origins. Not to mention like Harbinson invoking the AVROcar to explain flying saucer reports that suggest tech far advanced for the AVROcar explanation, invoking cyborgs with the medical advancements available in the late forties and fifties to explain ufonauts isn’t satisfying. If the reported ufonauts really do exist, the tech available that made them is way more advanced than what was available seventy years ago.
But again, a breakaway civilization could be brought up to explain that advances made in public are no where in comparison to advances made in the dark. And I’d agree with this. But we cannot use absence of evidence to prove something that exists only anecdotally.
To his credit, W. A. Harbinson has probably presented the best case for man-made UFOs in this volume. I’ve no doubt there are black, secret projects involving flight and transhumanism. And surely in some sectors, unethical treatments and practices like that of Nazi Germany are still in existence. But we need either a craft or body of some sort to examine before we can start talking origins. That is really the only thing lacking here. But it doesn’t mean we can’t keep watching the skies.
The gist of Harbinson’s hypothesis is as follows: In the late 1800s, someone got a jump on building ships for air travel. Then in the 1930s, the first rocket launch took place in the Americas but it was Nazi Germany that took advantage of this new technology and started building ships that would eventually become flying saucers. Although Nazi Germany did not get their own saucer into production quick enough to win the war, the technology was scooped up by Great Britain, Canada, the United States and Russia after the fall of Berlin. From there, man-made saucers (and other flying wing craft) went into production (in secret) and that’s what became the modern UFO phenomenon. Another possibility is that some of the survivors of the Third Reich fled to Antarctica where they continued their “Projekt Saucer” program in underground bases that gave rise to a serious threat to the allied powers. Oh, and the ufonauts may be cyborgs, enhanced humans and/or advanced artificial intelligences.
Why I have no doubt of the possibility people were constructing airships and successfully flying them prior to the Wright Brothers, there is no more than anecdotal evidence for this. Where I start to get skeptical is on the claims of Nazi Germany having a Projekt Saucer program.
As Kevin McClure noted in his essay, “The Nazi UFO Mythos: W A Harbinson and Projekt Saucer”, the word “saucer” isn’t even a German word. And the term “flying saucer” didn’t even come into existence until 1947, after a reporter mistook the words of Kenneth Arnold. So the questioning of a name of a Nazi German secret project makes the rest of it suspicious right from the beginning.
And the rest of it is.
Harbinson takes the likes of Renato Vesco and other questionable sources at face value. A review of Vesco’s work shows that for an alleged aeronautical engineer, his descriptions of the Foo Fighters are implausible. He appears to have taken pilot descriptions of their encounters with said fireballs and worked up an imaginary design. And if he made up how the Feuerballs worked, that puts into question all the other claims he made. Vesco claimed he got a lot of his information from classified British Intelligence and Allied Combined Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee reports (BIOS and CIOS). So the sources cannot be independently checked and are therefore useless.
Harbinson also takes Rudolph Schriever at his word. Schriever claimed in 1942 he designed a flying disc and was part of a test flight. But in 1950 Schriever was delivering Stars and Stripes newspapers to the American army occupying Germany. Is it really believable someone with the alleged credentials as Schriever would be delivering newspapers after the war? No. He’d have been swept up under Operation Paperclip or otherwise.
The problem of Nazi Flying Saucers is the sources are flimsy and quite frankly, with World War Two being the most studied subject in history, we’d surely have more information on this were it true.
Now it is true that Nazi Germany was well advanced for its time, their unethical use of slave labor and other standards to their advantage. And it is true the allied powers swept up their top scientists and tech after war’s end. Nazi Germany’s rocket technology eventually took America to the moon. The question here, however, is did Nazi Germany have the foundation for what became the modern UFO phenomenon.
Harbinson makes note of the many advances in flight America and Canada made after the war. Now declassified projects like Canada's AVROcar and others are trotted out as evidence. And these are fine and dandy and historical but the jump Harbinson then asks of the reader is to take these advancements and consider that events like the crash at Roswell in 1947 and the 1957 Levelland UFO case are examples of just such projects in production. It’s a hard pill to swallow because if (big if) Roswell and Levelland were actually craft, they were far in advance of anything like the AVROcar. In other words, the advances America and Canada were making couldn’t be attributed to these sightings or many of the others that American jetfighters were chasing around in the late forties and fifties.
Harbinson anticipates this objection by introducing two possibilities (or a combination of both). It is possible, as noted above, the UFO phenomenon is escaped Nazi scientists still working away in Antarctica now come to harass the allies. And/or a secret group of allied powers working in the black, perfecting flying saucers and other tech. This predates Richard Dolan’s “Breakaway Civilization” theory to explain UFOs. In any case, it’s explaining one mystery with another mystery and explains nothing. If we had an actual saucer from the late forties, like an archeologist working with remains, we could then start figuring out where it came from. We have nothing, however, other than anecdotal information to work with and thus, until we have a body, we cannot go any further. To beat a dead horse, considering a breakaway civilization at this point is like hypothesizing the origin of a flesh and blood unicorn. We need the unicorn first, gentlemen.
Since we don’t have any proofs of flying saucers, or otherwise, we could probably stop here. But we still have the UFO pilots to talk about. Harbinson attempts to explain the weird and android like features of UFO occupants (ufonauts) by spending a chapter on medical achievements such as organ transplants and human enhancements (cyborgs) and all the other medical advances extending and benefiting human life. He suggests a combination of tech grafted onto the human body as an explanation of why the ufonauts look and act the way they do. However, this is putting the cart before the horse. We have to have a body before we can consider the origins. Not to mention like Harbinson invoking the AVROcar to explain flying saucer reports that suggest tech far advanced for the AVROcar explanation, invoking cyborgs with the medical advancements available in the late forties and fifties to explain ufonauts isn’t satisfying. If the reported ufonauts really do exist, the tech available that made them is way more advanced than what was available seventy years ago.
But again, a breakaway civilization could be brought up to explain that advances made in public are no where in comparison to advances made in the dark. And I’d agree with this. But we cannot use absence of evidence to prove something that exists only anecdotally.
To his credit, W. A. Harbinson has probably presented the best case for man-made UFOs in this volume. I’ve no doubt there are black, secret projects involving flight and transhumanism. And surely in some sectors, unethical treatments and practices like that of Nazi Germany are still in existence. But we need either a craft or body of some sort to examine before we can start talking origins. That is really the only thing lacking here. But it doesn’t mean we can’t keep watching the skies.
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