From: Nick Balaskas <Nikolaos@YorkU.CA>
To: UFO UpDates - Toronto <ufoupdates@virtuallystrange.net>
Date: Tue, 20 May 2003 23:28:39 -0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)
Subject: Re: Manned V-1's - Balaskas

>From: James Oberg <joberg@houston.rr.com>
>To: <ufoupdates@virtuallystrange.net>
>Subject: Re: Manned V-1's
>Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2002 14:23:44 -0600

<snip>

>Gordon Cooper tells an interesting tale in 'Leap of Faith', pp.
>153-154, recounting what he says he heard from Joaquin 'Jack'
>Keutner, whom he worked with on the Mercury-Redstone rocket.

>-----

>In an attempt to improve accuracy over the target, some V-1s
>were modified with a cockpit to allow for a pilot, Jack had
>flown several trips across the English channel atop a V-1
>strapped under a twin-engine Junkers bomber. After being dropped
>free, he would air-start the "Flying Bomb". When they got within
>range of London, he would release the bomb, then turn toward the
>French coast and ride the rocket home. Before landing, Jack
>would dump any remaining fuel and glide the V-1, modified with
>landing skids, to a belly landing in a field.

>One time, things didn't go as planned. For this flight, they
>had a two-man cockpit in a V-1, and Jack was checking out a less
>experienced pilot. When they were dropped by the Junkers, they
>couldn't get an air start and had to turn back toward France.
>Jack released the warhead but was unable to dump fuel, so they
>came in heavy, loaded with combustable fuel and at a high rate
>of speed: in excess of 270 miles per hour. They hit the field,
>slid its entire length, and went into a pine forest, leaving a
>trail of burning debris behind them. The rocket disintegrated.
>Somehow Jack got out, but the other fellow didn't.

>At war's end, a manned V-2 was sitting on the pad at Peenemunde,
>all tested out, fueled up, and ready to go. It would have been
>launched on a low-energy easterly orbit, Jack explained. The
>plan: to drop a warhead on New York City. That 1945 manned
>rocket flight - sixteen years before the first U.S. manned
>rocket flight - came within a week or two of being launched."

>-----

>I guess the kindest thing to say about this silliness is that
>Cooper must have been a sucker for wild and wooly 'war stories',
>and it's sad he didn't know enough history and enough
>aeronautical engineering to realize how impossible all these
>tales were. That's assuming he actually did get these stories
>from the German guy.

<snip>

Hi everyone!

I have been catching up on my reading this Victoria Day long weekend. To my surprise, in the very first page of the latest issue of 'Quest, The History of Spaceflight Quarterly' there is a drawing of an oval shaped spacecraft with porthole windows and a dome on top. The caption beneath it reads "Ralph's space-flyer cruising above the Earth in Hugo Gernsback's 'Ralph 124C41+', Boxton Stratford, 1925.". On page 25 there is a picture from this same work of the New York City skyline with the night sky crowded by flying saucers - over two decades before Kenneth Arnold's sightings of similar objects in the U.S. Could our interpretation of unknown objects seen in the sky in modern times be influenced by these images from science fiction stories of the past? Previous generations who saw similar unknown objects in the sky as depicted in old paintings and works of art had very different interpretations of what these objects were. Which one is correct? Of course, there can be more than one explanation to the UFO mystery.

In this same issue there is an article about the weapons of mass destruction, the German V-1 cruise missle and the V-2 ballistic missile Hilter used against London, Antwerp and Paris starting late in 1944. Of the estimated 3,255 of the large V-2 missiles the Germans launched against targets during World war II, a total of 1,610 were fired at Antwerp, Belgium and another 1359 at London, England killing many thousands. Compare this to the nearly zero fatalies attributed to the much fewer but comparible Scud missiles fired by Iraq in 1990 (no Scuds were fired in the 2003 war). What is of particular interest to me and other readers of UFO UpDates, including James Oberg, the short excerpt below.

"The A-10 was a longer-range missile that could hit targets 3,500 miles away. (25) German engineers had designed the A-10 to include a human pilot at the controls. These missiles would have become the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile and could hit American cities alog the Atlantic coast. A post-World War II U.S. Navy study estimated A-10 strikes against New York City or Washington [shades of 9-11!] would have started in early 1946. Additionally Hitler had envisioned a massive onslaught of 5,000 V-2s fired in quick succession to destroy Antwerp and London [many more missiles than all the much smaller cruise missiles the U.S. launched against Iraq in both 1990 and 2003 wars]. (26)

(25) The General Board, V-2 Rocket Attacks and Defense Study #42 File: R 471.6/1 (United States Forces, European Theater: US Army, 1945), p. 4.

(26) Ford, Brian, 'German Secret Weapons' (New York: Ballantine Books, 1969), p. 54.

It would seem to me that astronaut Gordon Cooper's account of a planned 1945 manned V-2 (or the longer range version, A-10) orbital attempt by German engineers may be much closer to the truth than James Oberg suspected. Also, if anyone is interested, I can send pictures of a manned V-1 that is currently housed at a museum in the U.K.

Nick Balaskas