German Scientist's Article on 'Flying Discs'

This CIA Information Report, distributed on 31 July 1950, did not describe a sighting at all. It forwarded a translated newspaper article. The piece, titled “The Mystery of the ‘Flying Discs’: a contribution to its possible explanation,” was by Dr. Eduard Ludwig, a German engineer living in Santiago, and had been submitted to a German-language magazine published in Chile. The CIA marked it as unevaluated information.

The author’s theory

Ludwig opens by saying the reports should be treated with severe skepticism, perhaps as “mass-hypnosis,” and he calls the idea that the craft come from beyond Earth an “absurd conjecture.” He suggests instead that the shining rings witnesses describe at night could be the glowing exhaust of a rotary gas turbine whose rotor doubles as a stabilizing top.

The rest of the attachment is a history lesson. Ludwig says he worked in Professor Junkers’s research plant at Dessau under a Dr. Bock, and he walks through the aerodynamics of the boundary layer, the Kutta–Joukowski theory of lift, and the Flettner rotor, a fast-spinning cylinder that generates lift. He describes Junkers experiments fitting such a cylinder into a wing, which he says ran into vibration and broken axles.

Why the CIA kept it

Ludwig himself raises the question that would have interested intelligence officers. He notes that his former chief, Bock, had been deported to the Soviet Union, and he ends by wondering whether the discs are pure imagination or the fruit of advanced German science that, like the nearly finished atomic bombs he mentions, may have fallen into Russian hands. The CIA report adds no comment of its own and marks the article as unevaluated.