1947 Secret Memo Linked Soviet Bombers to Nazi Flying Wing

# 1947 Secret Memo Linked Soviet Bombers to Nazi Flying Wing Design

By DeClassX

In the summer of 1947, the United States was gripped by a wave of flying disc sightings that would reshape American culture for decades. Kenneth Arnold's famous June sighting over the Cascades had set off a nationwide frenzy, and the military was under intense pressure to explain what people were seeing in the skies. Behind closed doors, a small community of Army Air Forces intelligence officers was working a very different angle — and a declassified letter dated September 24, 1947, offers a rare window into exactly what they were thinking.

The document is a SECRET-marked memorandum forwarded under the signature of Colonel H. M. McCoy, Deputy Commanding General of Intelligence — a designation known internally as T-2 — at Wright Field, Ohio. McCoy was no minor figure. He was one of the central architects of early postwar American air intelligence and would later become a key player in Project Sign, the Air Force's first formal UFO investigation. The subject line of the letter he signed reads simply: "Flying Disc." That alone should command attention. But the contents are what make this document genuinely remarkable.

At the heart of the memo is a striking intelligence claim sourced from the U.S. Military Attaché in Moscow. According to a report dated June 9, 1947 — filed just days before Arnold's sighting made international headlines — Soviet forces were in the process of building 1,800 aircraft based directly or indirectly on the Horten VIII design. The memo describes the Horten VIII as a six-engine pusher aircraft with a wingspan of 131 feet and a gross weight of approximately 33,000 pounds. The Soviet version, the memo notes pointedly, was jet propelled.

To understand why this matters, you need to know who the Horten brothers were. Reimar and Walter Horten were German aeronautical engineers who, throughout the 1930s and into World War II, pursued an obsessive and visionary goal: the perfect flying wing. Unlike conventional aircraft, a flying wing has no fuselage and no tail — the entire aircraft is essentially one continuous lifting surface. The design promised extraordinary aerodynamic efficiency, reduced radar cross-section, and potentially tremendous range. The Horten IX, a prototype jet-powered flying wing, was among the most advanced aircraft concepts produced by Nazi Germany, and Allied forces scrambled to capture Horten hardware, personnel, and documentation as the war ended in 1945.

The memo references several specific technical documents that were enclosed with the original letter: a drawing, a Royal Aircraft Establishment Technical Note designated AERO 1703, and a T-2 report titled "German Flying Wings Designed by Horten Brothers," carrying the identification number F-SU-1110-ND. The body of the letter also catalogs a set of referenced pages — among them page 69 covering the Horten VIII, pages 71 and 72 containing photographs of the Horten IX versions, and page 74 showing a drawing of an aircraft called "the Parabola." These references suggest the memo was part of a larger compiled intelligence package being distributed to Army Air Forces headquarters in Washington.

The filing notation on the document — "X 452 1 Airplanes - Russia" — places it squarely within an active intelligence tracking effort focused on Soviet aviation capability. This was the dawn of the Cold War. The Berlin Blockade was still a year away, but American military planners were already consumed by a fundamental question: what could the Soviets fly, and how far could they fly it? A fleet of 1,800 long-range jet-powered flying wing bombers, if the Moscow attaché's report was accurate, would represent an existential threat to the continental United States.

There is a layered irony embedded in this document that shouldn't be missed. The same radical aircraft geometry that American intelligence feared the Soviets were weaponizing was, simultaneously, being seriously considered as an explanation for the "flying disc" sightings flooding into military channels that summer. The Horten IX flying wing, with its smooth blended shape and absence of traditional aircraft features, bore a striking visual resemblance to what witnesses were describing. Some investigators and historians have since argued that early UFO reports were at least partially composed of misidentifications of experimental or captured aircraft — and this memo suggests that American intelligence officers were themselves thinking along exactly those lines in the critical months of mid-1947.

Colonel McCoy's role is worth underscoring. When Project Sign formally launched in early 1948 to investigate the UFO phenomenon, McCoy was positioned to shape the inquiry. The fact that his office was simultaneously tracking Soviet exploitation of Horten technology, and circulating technical drawings and RAE reports on flying wing designs under a "Flying Disc" subject heading, raises legitimate questions about how much of the early UFO investigation was actually an exercise in masking sensitive foreign-technology intelligence work behind a more publicly palatable label.

The memo's administrative details are also telling. Recipients are instructed to return the enclosed documents after they have "served their intended purpose" — standard security language, but a reminder that this material was considered sensitive enough to require physical accountability. The notation at the bottom indicates the enclosures were mailed with the original letter on December 19, 1947, with a "Goodwin" listed as the responsible party, suggesting ongoing administrative handling months after the letter's original date.

What this document does not tell us is whether the Moscow attaché's figure of 1,800 Soviet aircraft was accurate, exaggerated, or fabricated. Intelligence reports from behind the Iron Curtain in 1947 were notoriously difficult to verify, and the Soviets were skilled at feeding disinformation to foreign military attachés. The claim may reflect genuine Soviet ambition, a deliberate deception operation, or an attaché's overconfident extrapolation from limited data.

What we can say with confidence is this: in the same weeks that Americans were scanning the skies for flying discs, the U.S. Army Air Forces' own intelligence apparatus was treating the Horten flying wing as a live and urgent military threat — and filing its concerns under the heading of "Flying Disc." Whether that overlap is coincidence, cause, or something more complicated is a question this document alone cannot answer. But it is precisely the kind of question that makes declassified archives worth reading.

— DeClassX