Technol Rep Tohoku Univ: GENERATION OF ANTI-GRAVITY ...

NICK COOK 55
flying bomb designed to knock down enemy aircraft. The other was
manned, but flew in anger only once before hostilities ended.
The unpiloted version was called the Feuerball (Fireball) and it
blended a number of highly advanced technologies.
"In the autumn of 1944," Vesco wrote, "in Oberammergau in Bavaria,
the OBF—an experimental center run by the Luftwaffe—had completed
a series of researches into electrical apparatus capable of interfering with
the operation of an engine up to a maximum distance of about a hundred
feet by producing intense electromagnetic fields."
In parallel, a separate effort was under way by the Germans to produce
a "proximity radio interference" device capable of jamming or spoofing
Allied radio and radar systems. Put these two technologies into a small,
circular, armored airframe "powered by a special turbojet engine, also flat
and circular and more or less resembling the shell of a tortoise" and "a
highly original flying machine was born."
Radio-controlled at the moment of takeoff, the machine was steered
toward Allied bomber streams by a ground operator, whereupon it automatically
latched onto their slipstreams, "attracted by their exhaust flames,
and approached close enough without collision to wreck their radar gear."
And then came the detail. The Fireball was first constructed at an
aircraft plant at Wiener Neustadt, south of Vienna, with the help of the
Flugfunk Forschungsanstalt of Oberpfaffenhoffen (FFO), an aircraft
electronics firm near Munich. Hermann Goering, Hitler's deputy,
inspected progress on the weapon "a number of times," hoping that the
principle of the Fireball could also be used to produce "an offensive
weapon capable of revolutionizing the whole field of aerial warfare.
"The fiery halo around the perimeter—caused by a very rich fuel
mixture—and the chemical additives that interrupted the flow of
electricity [in Allied aircraft] by overionizing the atmosphere in the
vicinity of the plane, generally around the wing tips or tail surfaces,
subjected the H2S radar on the plane to the action of powerful
electrostatic fields and electromagnetic impulses (the latter generated by
large klystron radio tubes protected with anti-shock and anti-heat
armor). Since a metal arc carrying an oscillating current of the proper
frequency—equal, that is, to the frequency used by the radar stationcan
cancel the blips (return signals from the target), the Feuerball was
almost undetectable by the most powerful American radar of the time,
despite its nighttime visibility."
Once again, I pictured the desperation felt by Schlueter as his radar
operator, Meiers, failed to register the orbs of light ahead of the Black
Widow on the SCR540.