THE BLUE BOOK OF SECRETS
THE WEEK|The UFO Files
Were UFOs ‘weaponised’ by Joseph Stalin as black propaganda amid the Cold War?
Justin Paul George
THE BLUE BOOK OF SECRETS

Amid the soaring temperatures of the Cold War, the Roswell incident was a milestone in the deteriorating USUSSR relations, with the former suspecting Soviet premier Joseph Stalin’s direct involvement. In her 2011 book Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base, Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen made some startling claims. Jacobsen stated that the flying disc was a Soviet aircraft based on a design created by Walter and Reimar Horten, two brothers who were engineers in Nazi Germany. The Horten brothers created the world’s first ‘flying wing’ jet-powered aircraft. A flying wing is an aircraft that is tailless and has no definite fuselage; the design is considered optimal for long-range missions and for reducing radar signature. The Horten brothers’ flying wing design, which flew for the first time in 1944, and their work, would lay the foundation for research that created the US B-2 stealth bomber four decades later.

In the late 1940s, a flying wing design based on the work of the Horten brothers would have been able to evade radar detection and create panic in the US.

This story is from the The UFO Files edition of THE WEEK.

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