U.S. Military Feared UFOs Were Soviet Spacecraft Built By Kidnapped Nazi Rocket Scientists

[Paul_Exeter]

"Historian and Author Garrett M.Graff writes that some in the military were concerned that the Russians had managed to kidnap Nazi rocket scientists at the end of World War II, and that working together they had created a flying saucer.​

"Ironically, it is the government and the Air Force that first popularizes the term UFOs in the late 40s and early 50s to try to destigmatize the conversation around flying saucer sightings because very quickly people begin to laugh and make fun of people reporting flying saucers, and then this becomes a huge part of pop culture," said Graff. "In the early 50s you have the alien invasion movies, and it becomes this very obvious feedback loop that plays out across decades of the pop culture interest in flying saucers and UFOs and aliens."
https://www.insideedition.com/us-mi...-spacecrafts-kidnapped-nazi-rocket-scientists

 

[eburacum]

The Soviets 'deported' 302 rocket specialists from East Germany (or rather, from the Soviet sector of occupied Germany) and put them to work designing and building rockets. By 1951 the Soviets reckoned they knew enough to do without German help, and sent them home again.
Does that count as kidnapping? I suppose it does, in a way.
Contrast it with the US program, where the German scientists enthusiastically stayed in the US, and became part of NASA.

It would be perfectly natural if the US suspected that the Ghost Rockets and other UFOS were the result of Soviet/German collaboration; some of them probably were. But there was no Nazi flying saucer program, no flying Bell; that is all much later mythology.