The 1947 Memo That Linked Flying Saucers to Nazi Aircraft

# The 1947 Memo That Linked Flying Saucers to Nazi Aircraft

By DeClassX

On September 24, 1947 — less than three months after Kenneth Arnold's famous sighting over the Cascade Mountains launched the modern flying saucer era — a classified memo quietly circulated through the upper ranks of the United States Army Air Forces. It was a short document, barely a page, but it carried two attachments that together reveal something remarkable: senior military investigators were already drawing a direct line between unidentified aerial phenomena and the radical aircraft designs that had emerged from wartime Germany.

The memo, stamped SECRET and designated TSNAD-2B/ACL:eec, was addressed to the Commanding General of the Army Air Forces in Washington, D.C., with specific attention directed to Major General George McDonald, serving as AC/AS-2 — the Assistant Chief of Air Staff for Intelligence. It was sent in direct response to a telephone conversation that same day between General McDonald and Colonel H. M. McCoy of T-2, the technical intelligence branch at Air Materiel Command (AMC) headquarters. Whatever was said in that phone call, it moved quickly: within hours, a package of materials was assembled and dispatched up the chain of command.

The first item enclosed was a drawing. Not just any drawing — a copy of something called the "Loedding Flying Disc," internally designated LD-2. Alfred Loedding was a civilian aeronautical engineer working at Wright Field who had become deeply involved in early flying saucer investigations. He was, by multiple historical accounts, one of the more technically minded participants in what would eventually become Project Sign, the Air Force's first formal UFO study program, launched just a few months after this memo was written. The LD-2 designation suggests this was at least the second iteration of his disc design concept, and the fact that patent rights were explicitly noted — requiring a witness log of every person who viewed the drawing, with signatures and dates — tells us this wasn't a casual sketch. Someone believed the design had real technical and legal value.

The bureaucratic caution around the drawing is itself revealing. The memo instructs that it must be returned to AMC's Patent Office once it has "served its purpose." In the frenzied summer and fall of 1947, when sightings were flooding in from credible observers across the country and senior military officials were genuinely unsure what they were dealing with, the Army Air Forces was simultaneously tracking patent claims on disc-shaped aircraft. The overlap between the UFO investigation and proprietary aerospace engineering was apparently close enough to require formal administrative controls.

But it is the second enclosure that gives this document its most historically significant weight. Included alongside the Loedding drawing was a copy of Technical Note AERO 1703, prepared by the Royal Aircraft Establishment — Britain's premier aeronautical research institution — describing the Horten tailless aircraft. The Horten brothers, Reimar and Walter, were German engineers who spent the Nazi era designing and building a series of radical flying wing aircraft. Their designs were aerodynamically advanced for their time, featuring swept and parabolic wing configurations that eliminated the conventional fuselage and tail assembly entirely. The most ambitious of their projects, the Horten Ho 229, was a jet-powered flying wing that Allied forces discovered partially completed at the war's end. It bore a silhouette that, to an untrained observer glimpsing it at altitude, might reasonably be described as a disc or a saucer.

The memo's author doesn't spell out the inference — they don't need to. Instead, they direct the reader to specific pages and paragraphs of the RAE report, calling the referenced sections "significant in relating the Horten brothers perspective thinking and accomplishments toward the alleged 'Flying Saucer' case." The final item specifically flagged is a photograph of the Horten "Parabola," one of their most unconventional designs, found on page 54 of the technical note. The deliberate, curated nature of these citations makes the argument implicitly: look at these shapes, consider these capabilities, and ask yourself whether some of what people are seeing in American skies might be descended from German engineering.

This was not an idle speculation. In the aftermath of World War II, both the United States and the Soviet Union had conducted aggressive programs to acquire German aerospace talent and technology. The Americans ran Operation Paperclip, which brought over a hundred German scientists — including Wernher von Braun — into U.S. government service. The Soviets conducted parallel efforts with their own captured personnel. By September 1947, American intelligence analysts had every reason to wonder whether advanced aircraft developed from captured German research might be flying in Soviet hands, or in the hands of unknown third parties. The Horten connection wasn't fringe thinking — it was a rational hypothesis from people whose job was to account for things flying over American territory that they couldn't explain.

What makes this memo a genuine primary source treasure is how much it compresses into a single page. It shows us General McDonald, one of the most senior intelligence officers in the Army Air Forces, personally involved enough to make a same-day phone call demanding materials. It shows us Alfred Loedding, the engineer-investigator, already deep enough in the flying disc question to have produced a patentable design. And it shows us the institutional machinery of 1947 UFO investigation in motion — classified, bureaucratically careful, and pulling in allied intelligence reports from Britain to make sense of what American witnesses were describing in the sky.

The open question this document leaves on the table is one that researchers have never fully resolved: what, exactly, did Loedding's LD-2 drawing depict, and how closely did it resemble the craft that witnesses were reporting? The drawing itself has not surfaced in the public record. Its chain of custody ran to the AMC Patent Office in 1947, and whether it was later destroyed, buried in an uncatalogued file, or reclassified under a different designation remains unknown. Given that the military thought it significant enough to require a witness log and a patent record, finding that drawing — if it still exists — might tell us more about what early investigators privately believed they were looking at than almost any other document from that pivotal year.