pdf - WHALE

special team of investigators had been formed)," were compared
with similar British work done during the war. The report, as Vcsco
notes, "still bears the label 'top secret." 6 What the Germans were
apparently trying to do was simply build a disk-shaped aircraft, the
entire surface of which was both the turbine intake, as well as the
lift surface. This was, so to speak, the "Mark I" flying saucer: a
standard suction aircraft, albeit, with a very unconventional lift
surface, which was one and the same as its fuselage and air intake.
However, Vesco maintained more in his book, namely, that the
"Foo Fighters" - the strange balls of light that Allied and German
pilots began to see accompanying their formations near the end of
the war - were in fact an even more revolutionary radio-controlled
anti-aircraft weapon, used to jam Allied radars via very small,
ceramic-cased miniaturized klystron tubes, or to actually down
Allied planes by firing ionized gases to short out, or even explode,
an aircraft's ignitions or engines. In this respect, Vesco's assertions
became more detailed, and simultaneously, more fanciful and easily
dismissed. For one thing, Vesco claimed that these were secret
German anti-aircraft weapons, a claim that seemed to fly in the face
of absurdity, since the official history of their sighting never
associated the loss of any Allied aircraft with them. In fact, they
appeared quite harmless according to all standard versions of the
history of their appearance.
Once again, only recently has the German perspective on "Foo
Fighters" been verified by a February 1945 report called "An
Evaluation of German Capabilities in 1945." This report, among
other things, lists a German "phoo bomb" as well as atom bombs.
Miniaturized klystron tubes, as well as German advances in silicon
and germanium crystals, two elements essential in the making of
semiconductors which in turn are the basis of the transistor, were
actually under development as well. 7 Most of this research was
burned by the Germans in the face of the Allied advance into the
Reich, and the rest fell into American hands.
6
Vesco and Childress, op. cit., pp. 212-213.
7
Henry Stevens, Hitler's Flying Saucers: A Guide to German Flying Disks
of the Second World War, p. 75.
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