Hitler's Super Weapons

The Nazis sought the world’s most advanced arsenal, but after WWII the wunderwaffen legend grew into something otherworldly

- Jason Colavito

On 9 December 9 1965, a massive fireball streaked across the eastern United States, sparking reports of UFO sightings. In the tiny town of Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, several residents claimed that the fireball had crashed in the adjacent woods. Members of the local volunteer fire department reported that they had found an acorn-shaped object as large as a Volkswagen Beetle inscribed with Egyptian style hieroglyphics, an object the US military supposedly removed under cover of darkness. Many explanations have been proposed, including the crash of a spy satellite, but most scientists concluded that the object was nothing more than a meteor.

The legend of the Kecksburg UFO might have remained the type of interesting but unconvincing local colour that makes up American folklore, except it was cited as evidence for Adolf Hitler’s wunderwaffen. Meaning ‘wonder weapons’, the Nazi regime hoped this arsenal – which ranged from cutting-edge V2 rockets and the world’s first fighter jet to the more outlandish, including giant guns built into cliff faces – would give Adolf Hitler’s forces the tactical advantage needed to win World War II. In the hands of a small group of obsessive researchers into the Nazis’ supposed ability to manipulate time, space, and magic, the Kecksburg UFO transformed into a Nazi time machine, the first successful test of an astonishing technology that could catapult members of the Third Reich out of their collapsing regime at the war’s end to new lives in the postwar US. This technology, the story goes, is now in the hands of the American military to be used for their own nefarious purposes.