Speaker 1: I want you to picture something. It is November twenty seventh,
nineteen forty four. Yeah, you're sitting in the cockpit of
a P sixty one Black Widow night fighter. The air
isn't just cold, it is that sharp, metallic freezing temperature
that cuts right through the sheeraling flight jackets and just
settles deep in your bones.
Speaker 2: And your over enemy territories.
Speaker 1: At night exactly, you are lt Ed Schlutter and you
are patrolling what the pilot's then called the ink black
void above the Rhine Valley.
Speaker 2: That is, I mean, a terrifying place to be in
late nineteen forty four, that quarter of darkness wasn't just
empty space. It was the friction point between the advancing
Allied armies and the crumbling, desperate heart of the Third Right.
Speaker 1: Anything could be out there, literally anything, And it's supposed
to be a routine intruder patrol. You're hunting for German
convoys moving under the cover of darkness, maybe looking for
the you know, the exhaust trails of a late night bomber.
But tonight the radio traffic feels well, it feels wrong
long how it's frantic, It's edge with a kind of
panic that doesn't fit the usual combat chatter. And then
your radar operator, the guy whose entire existence is focused
on just staring into that green glowing scope, he stiffens up.
He calls out a contact. But here's the thing. The
contact makes absolutely no sense.
Speaker 2: This is that moment, isn't it the moment where the
physics we all understand just sort of decides to take
a holiday. The blip on the radar isn't behaving like
a Messerschmidt. It is not behaving like a Junker's bomber.
The velocity, I mean, it defies the mechanical limitations of
a piston engine.
Speaker 1: It even defies the capabilities of the new jet turbines
that Allied intelligence had been whispering about me two sixty two.
Speaker 2: This was faster, weirder, soh schlutter. He has to look,
he has to verify this with his own eyes.
Speaker 1: Of course, He looks out the canopy, fighting the constant
vibration of those two massive Pratt and Whitney engines, straining
his eyes against the dark, and.
Speaker 3: He sees it and it's not a plane.
Speaker 1: It is not a plane. It has no wings, it
has no fuselage, no tail. It is a burning pulsating
orange orb a sphere of fire, just hovering there off
their port wing anchored to the.
Speaker 2: Air, itself anchored to the air. That is such a
deeply disturbing image. It implies a total mastery over the
medium it does. It's the feeling of, you know, a
predator being watched by something it cannot understand, let alone fight.
Speaker 1: So Schlutter does what any fighter pilot would do. Instinct
just kicks in. He banks hard, He pushes the throttle
to the firewall.
Speaker 2: He tries to engage.
Speaker 1: He expects this thing to fall behind, you know, like
a reflection or a flare, or even another aircraft that
just can't match the turn of a black widow. But
it doesn't.
Speaker 2: It stays with him.
Speaker 1: It matches his maneuver instantly, No banking, no visible drag,
no inertia. It just it was there and now it's here.
It completely mocks the laws of motion.
Speaker 2: And that lack of inertia that is the smoking gun here,
It's the key. If a human pilot tried to match
those movements We're talking instance, stops, right angle turns at
hundreds of miles per hour, the g forces would turn
their organs into soup.
Speaker 1: Survivable for ten minutes, this object just dances around them.
It accelerates from zero to insane speeds and a heartbeat,
glowing with this demonic reddish orange hue, and then just
as quickly as it arrived, it's gone. It shoots vertically
straight up into the stratosphere and vanishes at a speed that,
like you said, would turn a human too jelly wow.
When they land, the debriefing is uncomfortable to see. The
least officers call them foo fighters.
Speaker 2: Right, They catch all term for these things.
Speaker 1: They blame combat fatigue, sane elmo's fire, optical illusions. They
try to explain it away with weather balloons or you know,
swamp gas, the classics. But behind closed doors, the command
is terrified. They know it's not ghosts, it's technology. And
that brings us to today's deep dive. Welcome to thrilling Threads.
Speaker 2: It is great to be here to unravel this one
because it is a monster of a story.
Speaker 1: Today we are pulling out a thread that leads from
the desperate, crumbling ruins of the Third Reich right to
the absolutely fringes of science fiction. We are investigating the Hanabu,
the persistent nagging rumor that the Nazis didn't just build
better praines, but that they crack the code of gravity itself.
Speaker 2: It is a massive, massive topic. I mean, it involves
occult beliefs, what some have called twisted physics, and a
race against time that might actually, and this is the
crazy part explain some modern UFO sightings.
Speaker 1: It really forces you to ask a terrifying question, what
is that? What happens when a regime with zero morality
gets its hands on advanced theoretical physics?
Speaker 2: Chaos?
Speaker 1: So let's unpack this. We need to set the stage properly.
It's late nineteen forty four. Germany is being dismantled block
by block. The writing is on the wall. Why on Earth,
in the middle of losing a ground war do they
pivot to building flying saucers. It sounds like, you know,
a catastrophic misuse of resources.
Speaker 2: To understand the machine, you have to understand the smell
of burning cities. I mean that almost literally. By late
forty four, the Luftwaffe was effectively grounded, no fuel, no fuel, catastrophe,
pilot attrition. The Allied bomber streams were just darkening the
skies by day and setting the entire horizon on fire
by night. Infrastructure wasn't just damaged, it was being systematically erased.
Speaker 1: So it's total collapse, not just a retreat, but a
systemic failure.
Speaker 2: Precisely, and in the center of this firestorm, you have
Hitler's mindset. It had shifted from cold arrogance to this
manic desperation. He had completely abandoned logistics.
Speaker 1: He didn't care about the numbers anymore, not at all.
Speaker 2: He didn't care about fuel reserves or division counts. He
demanded wonderwaff and wonder weapons.
Speaker 1: A miracle. He needed a miracle.
Speaker 2: Yes, conventional physics had failed them. Tanks and planes, even
their advanced jets, weren't enough to turn the tide against
the massive industrial output of the Allies. They needed a
paradigm shift. They needed to leap frog a century of
aerodynamic evolution.
Speaker 1: It sounds like they were looking for a cheat code
for reality. Like if we can't win the chess game,
let's invent a piece that can just teleport.
Speaker 2: That is a perfect analogy. And because of this shift,
control of these dark projects also shifted. It moved away
from the LUFTWAFFA, the traditional air force. You know, guys,
like Hermann Goering, and it moved into the hands of
the ss the Black.
Speaker 1: Order, and specifically to one man.
Speaker 2: Specifically to a man named Hans Kamler.
Speaker 1: Kemler. Now I've read a bit about him, and to
call him a piece of work feels like a drastic understatement.
Speaker 3: It is ss overgroup infeeror Hans Kamler.
Speaker 2: He viewed human life strictly as raw material, as a
disposable resource. He wasn't the soldier in the traditional sense.
He was an architect by trade, a civil engineer.
Speaker 1: The most dangerous kind in that regime.
Speaker 2: Without a doubt. He was the man who designed the
gas chambers at Auschwitz. He applied cold industrial efficiency to
mass murder, and now as the right collapse, this same
man was tasked with designing the salvation of Germany.
Speaker 1: That is a chilling resume to go from designing death
camps to designing super weapons.
Speaker 2: It's the same mindset, maximum output, zero regard for the
human cost. He moved into these massive, hollowed out mountains
like in the heartshooted of Germany.
Speaker 1: So they were immune to the bombing.
Speaker 2: Raids, completely immune, subterranean cathedrals of industry where the laws
of morality, and frankly, the laws of conventional engineering were
totally suspended. He had an unlimited supply of slave labor
from concentration camps and absolutely zero oversight.
Speaker 1: A kingdom of shadows.
Speaker 2: It was a kingdom of shadows where the most insane
ideas could be prototypes.
Speaker 1: So you have this ruthless architect running the show, hiding
in mountains, willing to burn through human lives like coal.
But the actual inspiration for the saucer that didn't come
from a military strategist, did it. The story I've read
says it came from some were much much stranger.
Speaker 2: No, it didn't come from a general. And this is
where the story goes from military history into something else,
something truly bizarre. The SS, especially its leadership under Himler,
wasn't just a military organization.
Speaker 3: It was a cult, a death cult basically, and it had.
Speaker 2: Deep, deep roots in occult societies like the Thule Society
and the Vile Society.
Speaker 1: Okay, can we pause on that? What were these societies?
What did they believe?
Speaker 2: There were esoteric groups obsessed with ancient myths and lost
super races. They believed that the Aryan Rays were descendants
of God men from Atlantis or Hyperborea, and these god
men had mastered something called vrill Rill.
Speaker 1: Like a cosmic energy, a life force.
Speaker 2: Exactly, a primal cosmic energy that could power machines, heal
the body, or destroy cities. It was the force. But
for Nazis, this belief system was absolutely central to the
SS ideology.
Speaker 1: So this is where the science starts to get weird.
We're talking about magic and physics blending together, extremely weird.
Speaker 2: You have to remember the Nazis, and specifically the SS leadership,
they actively rejected Einstein. To them, relativity and quantum mechanics
were Jewish physics.
Speaker 1: What did that even mean to them? Jewish physics?
Speaker 2: They saw it as abstract, counterintuitive, and destructive. They looked
at the atom BAM research, which they knew was happening,
and saw it as proof it was a science focused
on explosion, on destruction, on taking things apart, chaos. They
believe that was a flawed, unclean approach to the universe.
Speaker 1: So if they rejected explosion, what was the alternative? What
did they want?
Speaker 2: They wanted a Germanic physics, a physics based on nature,
on life, on what they saw as order and the
core principle of this new physics was implosion.
Speaker 1: Implosion. Okay, this is a concept I really struggle with.
We're so used to engines that go bang inside a
cylinder to push a piston. How does implusion power a machine.
Speaker 2: It's a total reversal of our engineering philosophy. Yeah. Instead
of creating heat, pressure, and expansion to generate force, they
believe true power came from cooling, suction, and contraction. They
look to the vortex, the spiral, the whirlpool.
Speaker 1: And this brings us to Victor Schauberger.
Speaker 2: This brings us to the trout guy.
Speaker 1: I love this anecdote because it's so absurd and yet
in a weird way, so observant.
Speaker 2: The trout guy. Victor Schauberger wasn't a soldier, he wasn't
an SS officer. He was an Austrian forester and a naturalist.
He spent years, decades even just watching water flow in
pristine mountain streams, and.
Speaker 1: He noticed something about the trout.
Speaker 2: He noticed that trout could hold their position in a
raging current with seemingly no effort. They weren't swimming hard,
they were just hanging there. Or even more impossibly, they
could swim up a waterfall at incredible speeds.
Speaker 1: Which, if you think about it from a simple physics perspective,
shouldn't be possible. The force of the water pushing against
them is immense. It violates the drag equation exactly.
Speaker 2: Schauberger theorized that all of modern technology, our propellers, our jets,
our turbines, was fundamentally wrong because it was working against nature.
Oh so, combustion engines create heat and pressure, that's expansion.
He called it explosive technology. Nature, he argued, uses an implosion,
a cooling, spiraling, inward pulling vortex that generates immense power
without waste.
Speaker 1: And the trout.
Speaker 2: He believed the trout was manipulating the flow of water
through its gills to create a tiny, powerful pressure vacuum
in front of it, essentially getting sucked up stream by
its own vortex. It wasn't pushing against the river, it
was making the river pull it forward.
Speaker 1: So the SS, in their absolute desperation, finds this forester
and tells him, build us a machine that works.
Speaker 3: Like a trout.
Speaker 2: Essentially yes. In nineteen forty four, the SS located Shawburder
and forced him, using a team of prisoner engineers from
the mouthausand concentration camp to build a machine that sucks
itself through the air rather than pushing against it.
Speaker 1: And this is that convergence of madness and method you
were talking about.
Speaker 2: It's the absolute peak of it. You had real occultists
in one room conducting seances, trying to channel blueprints from
ancient aryan god mens seriously absolutely, and in the next
room you had hard nosed SS engineers like Kamler who
didn't care about frill, but who realized that a disc
shaped craft that could hover, make ninety three returns and
take off vertically from a hidden forest was a tactical
dream come true.
Speaker 1: Because if you don't have any runways left because the
Allies have bombed them all into rubble, a flying saucers
actually the perfect military.
Speaker 2: Solution, precisely. It's solves the biggest logistics problem they had.
But now you know they actually had to build the thing.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's get into the nuts and bolts, or I
guess the lack of bolts in this case. What did
this thing, the Hanaboo, actually look like, Because when I
think not to UFO, my mind goes to that silly
movie Iron Sky. But the reality was much much grimier.
Speaker 2: Oh, much grimeier. Forget sleek, polished sci Fi ships. If
we pieced together the alleged blueprints and the scattered interrogation
transcripts from after the war, we aren't looking at something elegant.
The hanaboo Oh was.
Speaker 3: A brute a flying tanks, a flying fortress.
Speaker 2: It's about twenty five meters in diameter.
Speaker 1: That's huge. That's bigger than a B seventeen bombers wingspan.
Speaker 2: Massive. It looked like an overturned saucer placed on top
of another one, creating this sort of thick, lenticular shape.
It had a central bubble cockpit on top, and you
could see these cannon ports bristling from the sides.
Speaker 1: And critically, you said, no rivets. Why is that so important?
Speaker 2: Because rivets are a weak point. The whole was supposedly
cast in a single piece using a specialized heat resistant
alloy called Victolin. They knew that if this thing worked
as advertised, this thrusses and the heat from the drive
system would melt conventional aluminum or just rip thousands of
rivets apart in midair.
Speaker 1: So it was built for conditions that no normal aircraft
could ever withstand.
Speaker 2: Exactly. And then there's the engine, the thule Atachionator.
Speaker 1: That name alone, it sounds like something a comic book
villain invented in his volcano layer.
Speaker 2: The name is pure a cult theater, but the concept
behind it was terrifyingly specific. It wasn't an engine in
the traditional sense. It was more like a controlled doomsday
device at the core of the ship.
Speaker 1: How did it work? What was the theory?
Speaker 2: And used a massive, heavily shielded, rotating centrifuge, and inside
this centrifuge was liquid mercury or in some reports, a
mercury based violet amalgam called red mercury.
Speaker 1: Mercury that's incredibly dense and incredibly toxic.
Speaker 2: Why mercury A few reasons. It's a liquid metal, it's
highly conductive, and it is incredibly heavy. The idea, according
to their twisted physics, was to spin this dense liquid
at tens of thousands of urpms. Okay, Spitting this mass
at that velocity was theorized to create a rotating electromagnetic
field so powerful, so intense that it would interact with
the local gravitational field. It would essentially cancel out mass.
It created gravity shield so wait.
Speaker 1: Let me see if I'm getting this. It's not flying
by aerodynamics. It's not using wings to create lift, it's
not using rockets to create thrust. It's creating a bubble
around itself where gravity doesn't apply.
Speaker 2: That's it, You got it. It's not flying, it's falling upward,
sideways whichever direction you want, becomes weightless within its own field,
like a cork in water, or as one of the
descriptions put it, it would slide through the air like
wet soap on a countertop. Frictionless inertialless.
Speaker 1: That explains the P sixty one encounter. If you have
no effective mass, you have no inertia. You can make
a ninety degree turn at MOK two because there's no momentum,
no force trying to keep you going straight. Your organ
don't get turned to mush.
Speaker 2: Theoretically, yes, that was the dream, and the sensory details
from the witnesses and the poor engineers who had to
work on it are terrifying.
Speaker 1: What did it sound like?
Speaker 2: It apparently produced a low, deep humming vibration that you
felt in your teeth and your bones, a very unsettling frequency,
and as the RPMs of the centrifuge increased, that hum
would rise to a deafening, piercing shriek.
Speaker 1: And the visual that glowing orange or of that ELTI
Schlutter saw.
Speaker 2: That's what they call the ionization effect. The electromagnetic field
from the drive was allegedly so strong that it stripped
electrons from the air molecules around the craft. It literally
superheated the air, shrouding the ship in a hazy blue.
Speaker 1: Violet plasma oh platum of field yes.
Speaker 2: Which as a side effect, also allegedly made it invisible
to radar. While radar works by bouncing radio waves off
a solid object and timing the return, but plasma absorbs
radio waves, it doesn't reflect them, so they inadvertently created
a plasma stealth cloak decades before the F one seventeen.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 1: Okay, so this sounds incredible on paper and inertialless radar,
invisible super fast interceptor. But this is where the dream
meets the absolute nightmare, isn't it? Building and flying this
Leviathan must have been hell on Earth.
Speaker 2: A complete and utter nightmare. You're spinning a giant, heavy
metal disk filled with liquid mercury at incredible speeds. What
does that create.
Speaker 1: It's basically a gyroscope, a massive.
Speaker 2: One exactly, and anyone who has ever played with a
toy gyroscope knows the fundamental rule. A spinning disc wants
to stay flat. It resists any attempt to tilt it.
This is the gyroscopic effect multiplied.
Speaker 1: By thousands, So steering this thing would have been agony.
Speaker 2: Almost impossible. The pilots didn't use alerons or flaps, They're
weren't any. They had to manipulate the magnetic field itself,
creating imbalances to make the craft fall in a specific direction.
They were literally fighting the core physics of their own
engine just to make a simple left.
Speaker 1: Turn, and the physical toll on the crew. We talked
about the lack of g forces during maneuvers, but living
inside a high intensity electromagnic field for hours can't be healthy.
Speaker 2: It was a torture chamber. The documents that survived talk
about pilots experiencing constant metallic tastes in their mouths, blinding headaches,
severe disorientation, and periods of lost time. Lost time they'd
land after a test flight and have no memory of
the last hour. Their brains were literally being scrambled by
the high frequency fields.
Speaker 1: It sounds like a combination of radiation sickness and a
severe concussion.
Speaker 2: And the interior. Forget the sleek bridges you see in
science fiction. This was a steampunk nightmare. It was all
heavy bake light switches, thick brass dials that buzzed under
your fingers, massive thick rubber cables snaking across the floor,
and the constant smell of ozone and sweat.
Speaker 1: And no windows.
Speaker 2: Right, I read that no windows at the theoretical speeds
and altitudes they were aiming for, a window is just
a structural weakness, a hole waiting to happen. The pilots
were encased in metal, flying blind.
Speaker 3: How did they see anything.
Speaker 2: They used a system of periscopes and very early primitive
television screens that showed a grainy, black and white view
of the outside.
Speaker 1: That is claustrophobic, beyond belief. You're in a shrieking, vibrating
metal tomb, your head is splitting open, and you're trying
to fly by watching a fuzzy TV screen.
Speaker 2: And that brings us to the story of the Hanabou
Second disaster. This is the part that for me really
highlights just how lethally dangerous. This bleeding edge tech was right.
Speaker 1: This is a tough one.
Speaker 2: It is horrific, but it illustrates the real price of
this leapfrog technology. They scaled up the prototype. The Hanabou
second was bigger, designed for a crew of nine, and
was supposed to be capable of supersonic speeds.
Speaker 1: So they were confident enough to put more people in it.
Speaker 2: They were arrogant. During a tethered hover test inside one
of the underground hangars, the mercury centrifuge destabilized. We don't
know why. Maybe a bearing failed, maybe the alloy cracked
under the strain, but the massive spinning core started to.
Speaker 1: Wobble like a dying top.
Speaker 2: Exactly like a dying top. All saucer began to show
shut her violently, and then it just it flipped and
the containment field for the mercury breached. A superheated toxic
mercury vapor flooded the cabin instantly. We are not talking
about a fire here. The crew didn't burn in the
traditional sense. They were and this is the quote from
a translated German document, chemically cooked from the inside out.
Speaker 1: What does that even mean?
Speaker 2: The mercury bonded with their organic tissue at a molecular level.
When the recovery team finally managed to get the hatch open,
they found the nine men fused to their seats, their
bodies turned into grotesque metallic statues.
Speaker 1: Good Lord, that is barely comprehensible, and yet they kept building.
They didn't stop after that. They even planned a dreadnought,
the Hanabu.
Speaker 2: The third Madness knows no breaks. Their ambition just grew.
They planned a craft that was seventy meters wide, that's
almost the wingspan of a seven forty seven, a.
Speaker 1: Flying aircraft carrier, basically.
Speaker 2: Armed with naval cannons, capable of carrying a small bomber underneath,
designed to stay in the stratosphere for weeks at a time.
They were cannibalizing the tire conventional war effort, stealing rare
earth metals, copper, and all the mercury they could find
from tank and U boat production to build these spaceships
while their factory roofs were literally being bombed in.
Speaker 1: It's the ultimate sunk cost fallacy, isn't it. We've come
this far, We've sacrificed so much. If this works, we win.
If it doesn't. We're all dead.
Speaker 2: Anyway, precisely, and that brings us to the final desperate
days March nineteen forty five. The end is near. Did
these things ever actually see combat? Or was it all
just testing and death and disaster?
Speaker 1: Right? Did they ever get one to work well enough
to shoot at anything?
Speaker 2: Well, this is where we enter the realm of the
hypothetical encounter. It's based on fragmented Allied pilot reports and
some post war hearsay, but there are stories.
Speaker 1: Let's hear one.
Speaker 2: Imagine you're a tail gunner on a B seventeen flying Fortress.
You call it a lucky Lady. You're cold, you're exhausted,
You're on your twentieth mission over Germany. Suddenly your waistgunner
screams over the intercom.
Speaker 1: And you look out.
Speaker 2: You look out, and you see three disc shaped shadow
rising from the black forest below, not climbing like a plane,
just rising like an elevator.
Speaker 1: It must have looked like nothing they had ever seen before.
He fires, right, that's his job.
Speaker 2: He opens up with his twin fifty cows. But the
discs just jump. They moved through the bomber formation with
no inertia. They're at twelve o'clock high, and in the
blink of an eye there at six o'clock low.
Speaker 1: Impossible to track.
Speaker 2: Impossible. But here's the catch, the fatal flaw. Inside the disc,
it's total chaos. The German commander is fighting the machine,
screaming at his crew.
Speaker 1: Because it's too fast. The human element can't keep up.
Speaker 2: Precisely, the Hanabu was a racehorse trying to pull a plow.
It was an interceptor designed for mock speeds, but its
weapons were conventional, manually aimed cannons.
Speaker 3: I see the problem.
Speaker 2: Imagine trying to aim a bolt action rifle while riding
the world's fastest, most unpredictable roller coaster. The gunners were
disoriented by the magnetic fields. They were fighting to stay conscious.
They couldn't aim, so.
Speaker 1: They buzzed the bombers. Terrified the crews.
Speaker 2: Scared him half to death, but they scored no hits.
They couldn't bring a single bomber down, so.
Speaker 1: It was a psychological weapon, not a practical one.
Speaker 2: It became the Foo Fighter, a scary light in the
sky that Allied command couldn't explain. But tactically it was
a complete failure. It couldn't stop the carpet bombing, so.
Speaker 1: Kamler he must realize it's over. The project is a failure,
the war is lost. The Soviets are just ten miles
away from his mountain fortress, so they can hear the artillery.
What happens to all this tech?
Speaker 2: Protocol? Eternity? That was the order total destruction. Kamler knew
that if the Allies, or even worse in his mind,
the Soviets got their hands on this technology, Germany was
finished forever or worse, the enemy would rule the world
with their own super weapon. So he orders the slate
wiped clean.
Speaker 1: How did they do it?
Speaker 2: His loyal SS engineers packed se four explosives into the
mercury drives. They doused the cockpits and gasoline and systematically
burned every single blueprint, every calculation, every research note.
Speaker 1: The description of the explosions is in ten I read.
They used magnesium flares to turn those special alloys into
malten slag.
Speaker 2: They wanted to leave nothing but ash and melted metal,
and then they collapsed the mountain roofs on top of
the hangars. They buried the dream in millions of tons
of rock and soil.
Speaker 1: So when the Soviets arrived.
Speaker 2: They found nothing, just smoking ruin, scorched concrete, and a
few confusing, curved metal scraps that looked like they didn't
belong on this earth.
Speaker 1: But the story doesn't end there, does it. The war ends,
but the hunt for the technology just begins.
Speaker 2: Oh kicks into high gear Operation paper Clip. The Americans
and the Soviets were in a frantic race, looting everything
they could find. They were just looking for V two rockets.
They were racing to grab the brains behind the madness.
Speaker 1: Did they find anything, any proof of the Hanaboo?
Speaker 2: They found wind tunnel models of saucer shaped craft. They
found interrogation reports where low level German engineers talked about
working on flying turtles or spinning tops. But they found
no hardware, no working engine.
Speaker 1: But they got the scientists, and suddenly, in the nineteen
fifties we start to see some very weird things popping
up in American airspace. The Avrocar.
Speaker 3: The Avrocar a US funded Canadian project.
Speaker 2: If you look at a picture of it, it looks
exactly like a neutered, less threatening Hanabu.
Speaker 1: It's a dead ringer for a classic fifties flying saucer.
Speaker 2: It is.
Speaker 3: It used es central turberotor to create a cushion.
Speaker 2: Of air to lift it. It failed miserably. It could
go faster than about thirty miles per hour and was
hopelessly unstable. But the design lineage is just it's suspiciously similar.
It looks like someone trying to reverse engineer a half
remembered blueprint.
Speaker 1: And let's not forget nineteen forty seven Kenneth Arnold the
first major flying saucer report. Near Mount Rainier in Washington.
Speaker 2: Just two years after the war. A private pilot sees
a string of nine crescent shaped objects flying at impossible speeds.
Is it a coincidence or is it captured German prototypes
being tested in secret over the remote Pacific Northwest. It
raises a huge, huge question.
Speaker 1: And then you can draw a line, a technological thread
all the way to modern stealth tech. The B two
Spirit bomber.
Speaker 2: Absolutely think about the shape of the B two. It's
a flying wing. It has no vertical stabilizers, no tail,
by all the conventional laws of aerodynamics that you just
flick over and fall out of the sky.
Speaker 1: So how does it fly?
Speaker 2: It relies on massive constant computing power. A bank of
computers makes thousands of microadjustments per second to its control
surfaces to force an inherently unstable shape to fly straight, which.
Speaker 1: Is the exact same conceptual problem Nazi engineers were struggling
with manually exactly.
Speaker 2: They had the right idea and unstable shape is more maneuverable,
but they didn't have the computer processing power to control it.
We just waited until we had the silicon to solve
the twisted physics.
Speaker 1: There's also the myth of survival, which we have to
touch on the Last Battalion.
Speaker 2: The legend, yeah, the story that in the final days,
a fleet of advanced U boats smuggled Hanabu components, scientists
and SS leadership to a secret base two eleven in
Neuschwabin Land in Antarctica.
Speaker 1: Ice fortress at the bottom of the world.
Speaker 2: It's almost certainly a fantasy, but it speaks to our psychology,
doesn't it. We want to believe the monsters escaped to
an ice fortress. It makes for a better, more complete narrative.
The reality is probably more mundane and maybe more disturbing,
which is what that the technology was simply absorbed piece
by piece into the black budget military industrial complexes of
the victors.
Speaker 1: So let's bring this all back to reality. What is
your final analysis on this, After all the research, all
the stories, did they actually build a working flying saucer?
Speaker 2: I think yeah, Yes. They built hulls, they built engines,
They poured blood, treasure, and human lives into it. The
evidence for the existence of the project is very compelling.
Speaker 1: But did it work? Did it fly like the legends say?
Speaker 2: It flew? But it was uncontrollable. It was a chaotic beast,
much like the Reich itself. It was a profound, terrifying
proof of concept, but it wasn't a reliable weapon.
Speaker 1: But it proved a terrifying point it did.
Speaker 2: It proved that if you completely sacrifice morality, insanity, if
you don't care about the cost, you can tear up
the laws of physics. You can break the rules if
you're willing to pay the price in blood.
Speaker 1: That's a chilling thought. It implies that scientific progress isn't
always linear or noble. Sometimes it takes a long, dark
detour through madness. So when you see a strange light
moving with impossible speed in the sky today, is it
alien or is it the final perfected echo of a
weapon forged in a collapsing mountain in nineteen forty five.
Speaker 2: That's the question, isn't it? Technological ambition is neutral. It
doesn't care if it's wielded by a democracy or a dictator.
Gravity doesn't care about your politics, and that I think
is the ultimate lesson of the Hanabu.
Speaker 1: So here's the question I want to leave all of
you with today, and I really want to hear your
thoughts on this thread. If we assume the core of
the story is true, that the tech was real and
was captured, do you think we've been seeing alien crafts
for the last eighty years or just the quiet, secret
evolution of a ghost from the Black Forest. Are we
looking at visitors from another world or are we just
looking at a piece of our own dark history reflecting
back at us. Let us know in the comments.
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to Thrilling Threads.
Speaker 1: Stay curious.