BOOKS Nazi fakes and fantasies

Jerry Glover finds that the myths of Nazi UFOs and esoteric Nazism stem from fake theories, some of them very silly – but dangerous

The Saucer and the Swastika

The Dark Myth of Nazi UFOs

SD Tucker

Amberley Books 2022

Hb, 320pp, £20, ISBN 9781398105386

“Myth” is one of those words we hear so often it’s practically a synonym for “untrue”. It’s “just a myth that [insert a common falsehood here]”, we often say. Yet myths can be much more, provoking strong beliefs, moving people to action. This is a brilliant history of how a myth can emerge from kernels of truth in strange, silly and sometimes dangerous tendrils of imagination.

Along with Nazi UFOs, Tucker charts the underground spiritual movement of “Esoteric Nazism”, the claim that National Socialism was actually an occult religion in the guise of a political movement, controlled by SS high priests with the aim of transforming reality into a spiritually pure realm fit for Aryans. It’s a complex journey through eccentricity and charlatanism, with diversions into Nazi “ice cosmology”, Hollow Earth theories, Atlantis, alchemy, Hindu deep time cycles, alien-human breeding cults, SS Grail knights and Tibetan magic. As Tucker notes: “One fake theorist builds on the fake theories of an earlier fake theorist, and then these new fake theories are built on to create a further generation of hybrid monsters, a process with no apparent end.”

One key ur-text for this mythology was Lord Lytton’s The Coming Race of 1871, an alleged Rosicrucian allegory in which an advanced race of subterranean psychics harnessed “Vril”, a Jedi-esque magical energy that gave its name to the drink Bovril.

Another influence was Josef Adolf Lanz (1874-1954) who pseudonymously published “perhaps the funniest book ever written – until you realise what it helped lead to”, Theo-Zoology:

Or, the Lore of the Sodom-Apelings and the Electron of the Gods,a sexo-racist theory in which history up to Roman times was secretly devoted to the breeding of lovepygmies and other species of wellendowed animal-people for the sexual pleasure of fallen Aryans. His monthly magazine describing alien Nordic women having sex with dinosaurs and monkeys was allegedly collected by Hitler as an art student, finding the magazine’s content analogous to multiethnic Vienna. Of many bizarre ideas here, this is probably the silliest, and it is illustrated.

The history of the Nazi spacecraft myth splits into two main periods. In the first, Nazi engineers and scientists designed prototype “flying saucers”, from

“foo fighters” to Die Glocke, the beloved “bell” craft of commercial TV “history” shows (spoiler: they didn’t). This era runs from around the Kenneth Arnold sighting in 1947 up to the early 1980s, after which a more sinister and outlandish era of “Nazi UFOs” began, feeding alt-right movements with conspiracies of alien-fascist puppet governments, off-world and polar military bases and gruesome biological experiments.

According to Chilean diplomat Miguel Serrano (1917-2009), Hitler (a “solar god”) used Himmler’s discovery of the Stone of Ornolac to invent the “antiatom bomb”, the UFO, which was powered by music or mantrachanting. Serrano went on a military-scientific expedition to Antarctica to commune with Hitler’s frozen spirit (a common trope), later befriending the Dalai Lama and encountering a vimana, another kind of fictional flying vehicle from ancient times. For Serrano’s many published revelations, Tucker characterises him as the “rough Nazi equivalent of William Blake” who dreamed of a New Jerusalem, only without Jews. Very rough indeed.

Then there was Erich Halik (1926-95), an engineer who cofounded the Interplanetary Society in 1959. He believed in nutsand-bolts and supernatural UFOs originating in the Holy Grail and King Arthur’s Round Table. His were the first serious elaborations of the myth of surviving Nazi bases in polar regions. Feminazi author and American alt-right figurehead Savitiri Devi (1905-82) literally worshipped Hitler, proclaiming Nazism by inserting handwritten propaganda into cigarette packets and tubs of butter. In modern times, there was conspiracy author and X-Files inspiration Milton William Cooper (1943-2001), and the pseudonymous “Branton” who revealed the presence of various species of alien fascists in cahoots with German Nazis in institutions, ideas teased out into even more grotesque imaginings by David Icke and others. As the narrative reaches modern times, the theories ratchet up in horror-comedy weirdness. Fortunately, the author’s dry humour pervades.

Knowing a few of the books, films and videogames cited in this book, I thought I was fairly well-versed in the sources of esoteric Nazism, but if there ever was a book that underscores the extent of my ignorance about a familiar subject, this mythography is it. With its cavalcade of lunatics and oddballs, Tucker’s research is astounding, so why no index? It can’t be too highly recommended, otherwise – if you have the stomach for it. ★★★★