SS Brotherhood of the Bell: The Nazis’ Incredible Secret Technology (20 page)

But it is when Van Helsing arrives at World War Two and the continuation of these projects under the Nazis that his fantasia knows no bounds. For example, he alleges that “at the beginning of 1943 it was planned to build in the Zeppelin works a cigar-shaped mother ship,” a machine called the “Andromeda Device”, with a length of around 150 yards, capable of storing “several saucer-shaped craft in its body for flights of long duration,”
¹⁴²
or perhaps better stated, flights of Adamski-esque imagination.

But immediately after these sensational and highly questionable allegations, Van Helsing again comes up with more unsubstantiated specifics:

By Christmas 1943 an important meeting of the
Vril Gesellschaft
took place at the seaside port of Kolberg. The two mediums Maria Orsic and Sigrun attended. The main item on the agenda was the Aldebaran Project. The mediums had received precise information about habitable planets around the sun Aldebaran and one began to plan a trip there. At a January 22, 1944 meeting between Hitler, Himmler, Kunkel (of the Vril Society) and Dr. Schumann this project was discussed. It was planned to send the Vril 7 large-capacity craft
through a dimension channel independent of the speed of light
to Aldebaran. According Ratthofer a first test flight in the dimension channel took place in the winter of 1944. It barely missed disaster…
¹⁴³

In addition to all this, Van Helsing also states that these exotic craft “should create an extremely strong field around itself extending somewhat into its surroundings which would render the space thus enclosed including the machine
a microcosm absolutely
independent of the earthbound space.”
¹⁴⁴

All of this exotic research was conducted under the Nazis, according to Van Helsing, by a group “within the SS” that was “studying alternative energy, the SS-E-IV,” or
SS Entwicklungstelle IV
(SS Development Group IV). Here Van Helsing is on more solid ground, for there was indeed such a group in the SS, whose top secret brief was precisely to research “alternative energy.” But Van Helsing adds his customary occult twist, for he calls this group “Development Group IV of the Black Sun,” or
Schwarze Sonne
, abbreviated “SS”. The doctrine of the Black Sun (
Schwarze Sonne
) or Black Stone (
Schwarze Stein
) was the secret doctrine of the SS known only to Himmler’s highest SS generals.
¹⁴⁵
The purpose of this group was “to render Germany independent of foreign oil.”
¹⁴⁶

What emerges from all this is that there were two space programs already in existence in Nazi Germany, a “public” space program, that was in fact the “
secret”
rocket program of Von Braun and the Peenemünde scientists, and a
much more secret
, and much earlier, one, that begun by the secret societies and later continued by the SS, a program with a completely different physics and technology.

While most of Van Helsing’s fantasia inevitably strikes one as absurd, certain aspects of it fit the broad outlines one has come to expect with Nazi secret weapons development: an undercurrent of occult inspiration, development in utter secrecy, the search for a new physics and new technology, the evident reliance upon and knowledge of ancient myths in the reconstruction of that science and technology, and the fusion of these with other occult doctrines – “root races”, extraterrestrial human origins, and so on – and a genocidal political agenda.

If, as Van Helsing suggests, this dual track program was in fact begun by pre-war secret societies, then one method of
testing
his allegations might be to see if there is any indication that after the war the same or similar groups continued the lines of exotic and esoteric research the SS was pursuing during the war.

In any case, Van Helsing’s is not the last word in the Two Space Programs Hypothesis. Indeed, if David S. Percy and Mary Bennett are correct, then not only were the Two Space Programs that were begun by the Nazis during the war continued
after
the war both by the Soviet Union and the United States, they moreover exhibited much more coordination between them than the space programs of alleged rivals should really exhibit, especially at the height of the Cold War where the ultimate prize – the Moon – promised rich benefits in prestige and military position to whomever got there first.

6. The
Dark Moon
Version

British authors David S. Percy and Mary Bennett are the latest in a long line of researchers who question the historical record of the Apollo manned Moon missions. This is not to say that they are of the typical “Apollo-was-entirely-hoaxed” genre. Quite the contrary. As they put their own case, the purpose of their book,
Dark Moon: Apollo and the Whistleblowers,
is “to question the entire validity of the official record of mankind’s exploration of the Moon especially the Apollo lunar landings. We are
not
however claiming that astronauts from Earth have never walked on the Moon.”
¹⁴⁷
That is to say, they believe mankind went to the Moon, but that it did not happen in the way we have been told it happened.

Like many researchers who question the official explanation of the Apollo program and its celebrated Moon landings, Bennett and Percy offer a compelling case that many of the Moon photographs allegedly taken by the astronauts while on the Moon were in fact photographs that were taken on a set. Like many others, they cite the usual discrepancies in lighting, varying angles of shadows within single frames, light sources from areas supposedly in shadow, and so on.
Unlike
many others, they do not cite these anomalies as proof that we never went, but only to raise questions about the official version of the
way
we went. And the Two Space Programs Hypothesis is crucial to their reconstruction of what they believe
actually
happened.

On their view, the Two Space Program Hypothesis takes on the following outline:

• The foundations for the grand space project were laid down during WWII.

• The project was conceived and designed as a collaboration between two superpowers.

• The Cold War was a convenient cover under which aspects of this project could be implemented and hidden.

• All these machinations were orchestrated at the very highest level, with only a select
and hidden
few ever knowing
the overall objectives
of the project.

• These objectives have not yet been achieved in full. We are referring to a project that has been around at least since 1947 – and it divides into several sections.

• Put another way, NASA’s Apollo phase, seen by the public to be the end result of a decision made in the 1960s by President Kennedy was in fact only a small (but significant) part of a greater plan.

• Whatever humanity has experienced concerning the rivalries between the super powers of this world, today, at some very high but invisible level, our attitudes are being molded to suit an agenda which does not necessarily have all our interests at heart.
¹⁴⁸

What is of interest here is the clear connection of the Two Space Programs Hypothesis to the famous events of 1947 – Kenneth Arnold’s first “UFO” sighting in Washington state and the later even more famous “Roswell incident” with all its attendant corollaries – but more importantly, to the events of World War Two. In this respect, Bennett and Percy are unique.

Moreover, they repeatedly hint at a Nazi connection, or at least,
implication
to their approach, for “without the remnants of Hitler’s war machine, our first steps into space would probably have occurred decades later.”
¹⁴⁹
According to Bennett and Percy, the deceptions that became so much a part of the public policy of NASA – deceptions already noted in this chapter in connections with other versions of the hypothesis – were already in place well before the agency had even been established. The policy decisions leading to these deceptions began, as they point out, in the “pre-and postwar period in Germany.”
¹⁵⁰
The deceptions originate, in fact, with a deliberately muddied picture of Operation Paperclip. As Bennett and Percy quip:

Now follows some interesting arithmetic. We are told by (David) Baker that the German scientists began arriving at Fort Bliss in October 1945 (that is the advance guard of Von Braun and his small team of five) and by March 1946 their numbers had peaked – at the grant total of thirty nine.

(Paperclip scientists) Stuhlinger and Ordway inform us that there were three shipments and
a total of 118 men
arriving in America between November 1945 and February 1946. So by 1946 the American Army have already lost 85 scientists. Were they declared AWOL or were they housed elsewhere, and not at Fort Bliss? Were some of them at Almogordo perhaps? From 127 total German rocket scientists allowed into America under Operation Paperclip we have a total of 6 + 118 = 4.
¹⁵¹

But their suspicions predate even Operation Paperclip and the inability of the historical record to come up with anything like a consistent number of German scientists and technicians actually brought to the USA.

The Two Space Programs may have actually begun, at least on the Allied side of things, during the war itself. In evidence of this allegation, Percy and Bennett proffer the R.A.F’s massive 600 bomber raid against the Peenemünde facility in 1943.

Thanks to information from Germany supplied by Paul Rosbaud, codenamed ‘Griffin’, the British put Operation Hydra into action, designed to eliminate 1) the engineer’s residential quarters 2) the missile pre-production facility and 3) the R&D laboratories/offices. From nine minutes past midnight on August 18 and over forty seven minutes, 600, yes
six hundred
, Royal Air Force aircraft marked targets and then dropped 1,593 tons of high explosives and 281 tons of incendiary bombs onto Peenemünde. However, from the beginning the start point of the bombing run was altogether misidentified – the northern peninsular (sic) of Peenemünde being lit by the target indicators rather than the designated Ruden Island situated two miles further north. As a result of this initial ‘blunder’, the air raid failed in two-thirds of its avowed objectives…. Instructions from the highest level, it seems, had been to target personnel and certainly
not the V-2
rocket production facilities.
¹⁵²

Indeed, even in targeting personnel the raid was not much of a success, since “of the eight hundred personnel on the ground who did die about half were from the prisoner labor force (mostly Soviets) and the other half were technicians and their families.”
¹⁵³
The important scientists – Kurt Debus, Werner von Braun, Hermann Oberth et al – survived.

So this raises the specter of a last minute change in the operational plan of the raid, a change effected at the highest level. The RAF, not noted for inaccuracy or incompetence on its bombing raids over Nazi Germany, received faulty information on the coordinates for the starting point for the bombing run itself. Such an alteration “would have ensured that the advance pathfinders placed the marker flares ‘too short’ and/or ‘too long’, thus ensuring the safety of the individuals and rocket technology desperately needed by those that knew – the ‘masters of infinity’.”
¹⁵⁴
Simply put, Bennett and Percy believe, on the basis of this singular and unique failure of the RAF to deliver its customary knockout punch to a target, that crucial areas of Peenemünde were deliberately spared in order to capture its technology and scientists after the war.

But immediately after the war, things became even stranger. After careful consideration of the various accounts, Bennett and Percy concluded that both the Soviets and Americans arrived at the notorious Mittelwerk – the underground factory for building V-2s using concentration camp slave labor, constructed by SS General Kammler-
at the same time
and moreover cooperated in divvying up the booty!
¹⁵⁵
Such glaring discrepancies

Most certainly uphold our theory that this entire period was being organized as a cohesive whole and was not just a ‘race’ against time to see who could bag the bigger haul of documents, materials and men. This plan was surely a precursor to the ‘space race’ story, which was also designed to look like one thing but actually to function in a completely different way.
¹⁵⁶

While the USA was shipping a few hundreds of German scientists to the USA, along with Von Braun and the precious documents he brought with him, the Soviet Union rounded up over three
thousand
technicians who had worked on the rockets, and whose new job for their new Soviet masters “was to reestablish the documentation taken by von Braun.”
¹⁵⁷
It was a convenient division of the spoils.

And perhaps a bit
too
convenient.

Bennett and Percy point out that in 1958 a British publisher, Robert Maxwell, attended symposia in Moscow for the international geophysical year. While there, Maxwell returned to his hotel room one day with a sixty three page manuscript containing what were supposedly “book titles” and asked his wife to photograph the pages quickly, as the papers absolutely had to be returned before lunch. His wife recounts how

by page thirty two she noticed that they were not book titles at all, but were “Die deutschen Firma, deren Einrichtung demontiert und zur Ausführ nach der Sowjetunion bestimmt sind.” Which translates as: “German firms whose equipment is to be dismantled and transported to the Soviet Union.” …It is significant that this Soviet shopping list was written in
German.