further develop this design as they set up Dr. Miethe to set up
further develop the Leduc engine based design. The Germans even
refer to the Schriever-Habermohl design as a "Flugkreisel" or
flying top in English and the Miethe design as a "Flugdiskus".
Our vernacular, "flying saucer" originally corresponded to the
German folk-word "Flugschiebe" or flying disc. If the
Flugkreisel, Flugdiscus and Flugschiebe are all different
machines and we know who built the first two then who built the
third, the Flugscheibe? The answer is that Peenemuende built the
Flugscheibe. Officials at Peenemuende saved the best for
themselves while controlling the other two.
Let's look at some evidence. The May, 1980 issue of Neue Presse
featured an article about the German fluidics engineer Heinrich
Fleissner (10). Fleissner was an engineer, designer and advisor
to what he calls a "Flugscheibe" project based at Peenemuende
during the war. It is interesting to note that Fliessner's area
of expertise, fluidics, is exactly the specialty involved in
investigating problems with boundary layer flow. Fleissner
reports that the saucer with which he was involved would have
been capable of speeds up to 3,000 kilometers per hour within the
earth's atmosphere and up to 10,000 kilometers outside the
earth's atmosphere. He states that the brains of the
developmental people were found in Peenemuende under the tightest
of secrecy (11). We will return to this article again, at a
later point, but what is of most interest to us here are three
facts. First, that Fleissner worked at Peenemuende on a flying
saucer project. Second, that a hint of this design has survived
to this day. Third, the surviving design can be linked to
photographic evidence of a German saucer, circa World War Two.
Almost ten years after the war, on March 28, 1955, Heinrich
Fleissner filed a patent application with the United States
Patent Office for a flying saucer (Patent Number 2,939,648).
Fleissner's saucer was unlike Schriever's, Habermohl's, or
Miethe's. The engine employed by Fleissner rotated around the
cabin on the outside of the saucer disc itself. It was set in
motion by starter rockets as with Schriever and Habermohl. The
difference is that this engine was really a form of ram-jet
engine. It featured slots running around the periphery of the
saucer into which air was scooped. The slots continued obliquely
right through the saucer disc so that jet thrust was aimed
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