AMERICA'S NUCLEAR FLYING SAUCER.

A trail of secret documents reveals the starting truth about the U.S. Air Force's flying disc aircraft.

In 1949, the biggest black hole in the universe wasn't in space, but across the Bering Strait. Stretching across 12 time zones, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was, as Winston Churchill would so memorably describe it, "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." "The few things that most people knew about life behind and the Iron Curtain seemed to be pieces of an incomprehensible puzzle. For the handful of intelligence experts who saws how the pieces fit, the "workers' paradise" presented a clear and present danger to the American way of life. What the intelligence community knew, and most people did not, was that in the final frantic hours of World War II, the Soviet army had hastily raided Germany's most advanced weapons research laboratories. And, on Aug. 29, 1949, only four years after Hiroshima, the technological booty from those raids turned a country whose farmers still used horse, drawn plows into a nuclear superpower.

The fireball of the communist atomic bomb cast a sinister new light on an event that previously seemed usual rumor had begun to circulate within the intelligence division of the European Command. During interrogations, captured German aircraft engineers referred to an extraordinarily fast rocket plane under development at a secret base in Bavaria. Unlike the Messerschmitt Me 163 rocket planes that had begun to attack Allied bombers in the last months of the war, this aircraft had an odd-looking curved wing that blended into its fuselage. The aerodynamic advantage of this configuration had been known to American designers for more than a decade. It created more lift than a standard wing, especially at low speeds, and provided more internal capacity for carrying bombs. In the early days of the war, the U.S. Navy had briefly experimented with circular wing design for those very reasons.

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