“Stalin learned from Hitler,” the EG&G engineer says, “revenge… and other things.” And that to consider Stalin’s perspective one should think about two key moments in history, one right before World War II began and another right before it ended. On August 23, 1939, one week before war in Europe officially began, Hitler and Stalin agreed to be allies and signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, meaning each country promised not to attack the other when war in Europe broke out. And yet almost immediately after shaking hands, Hitler began plotting to double-cross Stalin. Twenty-two months later, Hitler’s sneak attack against Russia resulted in millions of deaths. And then, just a few weeks before World War II ended, Stalin, Truman, and Churchill met in Potsdam, Germany—from July 17, 1945, to August 2, 1945—and agreed to be postwar allies. Just one day before that conference began, America had secretly tested the world’s first and only atomic bomb, inside the White Sands Proving Ground in the New Mexico desert. Truman’s closest advisers had suggested that Truman share the details of the atomic test with Stalin at Potsdam, but Truman did not. It didn’t matter. Nuclear weapons historians believe that Joseph Stalin was already well aware of what the Manhattan Project engineers had accomplished. Stalin had spies inside the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory who had been providing him with bomb blueprints and other information since 1941. By the time the Potsdam conference rolled around, Stalin was already well at work on his own atomic bomb. Despite Stalin and Truman pretending to be allies, neither side trusted the other side, neither man trusted the other man. Each side was instead making plans to build up its own atomic arsenal for future use. When Operation Crossroads commenced just twelve months after the handshakes at Potsdam, the Cold War battle lines were already indelibly drawn.
It follows that Stalin’s black propaganda hoax—the flying disc peopled with alien look-alikes that wound up crashing near Roswell, New Mexico—could have been the Soviet dictator’s revenge for Truman’s betrayal at Crossroads. His double cross had to have been in the planning stages during the handshaking at Potsdam, metaphorically mirroring what Hitler had done during the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. By July of 1947, Stalin was still two years away from being able to successfully test his own nuclear bomb. The flying disc at Roswell, says the EG&G engineer, was “a warning shot across Truman’s bow.” Stalin may not have had the atomic bomb just yet, but he had seminal hover and fly technology, pilfered from the Germans, and he had stealth. Together, these technologies made the American military gravely concerned. Perplexed by the flying disc’s movements, and its radical ability to confuse radar, the Army Air Forces was left wondering what else Stalin had in his arsenal of unconventional weapons, usurped from the Nazis after the war.
“Hitler invented stealth,” says Gene Poteat, the first CIA officer in the Agency’s history to be assigned to the National Reconnaissance Office, or NRO. Gene Poteat’s job was to assess Soviet radar threats, and to do this, he observed many spy plane tests at Area 51. “Hitler’s stealth bomber was called the Horten Ho 229,” Poteat says, “which is also called the Horten flying wing. It was covered with radar-absorbing paint, carbon embedded in glue. The high graphic content produced a result called ‘ghosting,’ which made it difficult for radar to see.”
The Horten Ho 229 to which Poteat refers was the brainchild of two young aircraft designers who worked for Hitler’s Luftwaffe, Walter and Reimar Horten. These are the same two brothers who, in the fall of 1947, became the subject of the U.S. Army Intelligence’s massive European manhunt called “Operation Harass”—the search for a flying-saucer-type aircraft that could allegedly hover and fly.
Whatever happened to the Horten brothers? Unlike so many Nazi scientists and engineers who were recruited under Operation Paperclip, Walter and Reimar Horten were originally overlooked. After being captured by the U.S. Ninth Army on April 7, 1945, at their workshop in G?ttingen, they were set up in a guarded London high-rise near Hyde Park. There, they were interrogated by the famous American physicist and rocket scientist Theodore Von Kármán, who decided the Horten brothers did not have much to offer the U.S. Army Air Forces by way of aircraft technology—at least not with their flying wing. After being returned to Germany, Reimar escaped to Argentina, where he was set up in a beautiful house on the shores of Villa Carlos Paz Lake, thanks to Argentinean president and ardent Nazi supporter Juan Perón. Walter lived out his life in Baden-Baden, Germany, hiding in plain sight.
The information about the Horten brothers comes from the aircraft historian David Myhra, who, in his search to understand all-wing aircraft, industriously tracked down both Horten brothers, visited them in their respective countries in the 1980s, and recorded hundreds of hours of interviews with them on audiotape. These tapes can be found in the archives of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.