Chapter 17:

THE KECKSBURG ACORN RINGS THE BELL

"When you started on the path that you did, sooner or later the trail was going to lead you to Germany. "

Nick Cook

The Hunt for Zero Point ¹

 

"This is a story of how key Nazis.... anticipated military disaster and laid plans to transplant Nazism, intact but disguised, in havens in the West... "

Mae Brussel

Rebel Magazine ²

1 Nick Cook, The Hunt for Zero Point, p. 270.
2 Cited in Jonathan Vankin, Conspiracies. Crimes, and Cover-ups, p. 104.

A. The "Bell"

The most sensational piece of information on Nazi secret research to come out since the reunification of Germany - indeed, since the origins of the Nazi "UFO" Legend itself- is the story told by Nick Cook in his Quest for Zero Point, which appeared in the U.K. in 2001. The story is, additionally, the only real solid piece of corroboration of the Nazi UFO Legend to appear since the war, based, as as it is, on a secret and recently declassified Polish war crimes trial affidavit of a former SS general.

"The Bell" (German: die Glocke) represented something at the very pinnacle of Kammler's grizzly and super-secret SS "wonderweapons" empire. Cook's book represents the only publicly accessible information on this bizarre object in the English language, the equally macabre experimentation that surrounded it, and the stringent security the SS held it under.

The following are the salient features of The Bell, according to Cook:

(1)

The Bell was reportedly a metallic object, approximately 9' in diameter and 12-15' tall;

(2)

It looked like a "Bell", hence its codename to the Germans, die Glocke;

(3)

It was comprised of two counter-rotating cylinders, rotating a purplish liquid-metallic looking substance code-named "Xerum 525" by the Germans, at high speeds;³

(4)

"Xerum 525" was apparently highly radioactive, being purple in color, and housed in cylinders with lead lining 3 cm thick;⁴

(5)

The Bell apparently required high amounts of electrical power in its operation;⁵

(6) During use, it could only be run for approximately one to two minutes, as it apparently gave off strong radiation and/or other electromagnetic or unknown field effects;⁶

(a)

Several scientist died on its first operation;⁷

(b) Subsequent tests included various plants and animals, all of which decomposed into a blackish goo and without normal putrefaction, within a matter of a few minutes or hours after exposure to its field effects when in operation;⁸

(c)

Technicians near the Bell during these experiments reported metallic tastes in their mouths after being exposed to it;⁹

(d)

The chamber in which the Bell was tested was lined with ceramic bricks and rubber mats, and had to have its rubber matting removed and burned after each test, and it was subsequently washed down with brine by inmates from nearby concentration camps;¹⁰

(6)

All the scientists and witnesses who saw or worked on the Bell were murdered by the SS as the war neared its end;¹¹

(7) The Hell was transplanted out of Silesia to a destination that has never been discovered. The Bell, along with General Kammler himself, simply disappear entirely from history, never to be seen again.

(8) A strange "henge" like structure was constructed by the Germans out of reinforced concrete near the facility where the Bell was located and tested. This structure resembled a test rig for the possible test of extremely powerful propulsion devices.¹²

3 Cook, op. cit., p. 192.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid., pp. 182, 197
6 Ibid., pp. 192-193
7 Ibid., p. 193.
8 Ibid., p. 192.
9 Ibid., p. 193.
10 Ibid., p. 192.
11 Ibid., p. 184. It is due to the fact that the Bell's scientists were murdered that we know anything about it at all, for the chief executioner, SS General Sporrenburg, who was tasked by Kammler with the murders, gave the only known testimony and descriptions of the Bell in his affidavit to a post-war Polish war crimes trial, for which he was convicted and executed.

12 Cook, op. cit, pp. 197-198.

Cook also notes that, at the end of the war, Kammler had special jurisdiction over a secret "SS evacuation command" that had been personally established by Reichsleiter Martin Bormann in great secrecy. This command included jurisdiction over all of Nazi Germany's heavy-lift ultra-long range transport aircraft, including the Ju-290 and the six engine monster, the Ju-390, that we encountered in part one. These planes were based at the end of the war quite near the secret underground facility where the Bell was being tested.

Before proceeding, it would be useful to note a few things about this strange list of properties.

First, whatever the Bell was, Kammler's SS apparently thought its secrets were so valuable, that anyone connected with its construction and/or testing had to be executed at the end of the war to prevent these from being leaked, presumably to the Russians, since the Bell was located and tested in Silesia, in what would later become Poland and East Germany.

Second, we note again the use of concentration camp inmates to perform the dangerous, and one can only presume, eventually lethal, operation of cleaning the test chamber after each experimentation with the Bell. This fact places this mysterious object firmly within Kammler's SS secret weapons black projects empire. It is entirely possible that the Bell represented something so sophisticated in terms of its principles of operation, that the then existing technology could not offer a sufficient means of protection for the important personnel involved in the experiments. Hence, concentration camp inmates may have been used as fodder to enable the experiments to go forward. Any breakthroughs the Bell represented were thus accomplished by this means, at enormous human cost.

Finally, certain properties about the Bell should be noted, since they constitute unusual data points that will be examined in connection with the Kecksburg "UFO crash". These are:

• Heavy electrical power consumption

• Rotation of a radioactive liquid in two counter-rotating cylinders

• An unusual radioactive liquid metal of unknown composition

• Its location in a chamber lined with ceramic bricks and rubber mats

The rotation of the object, and presumably the radioactive liquid-metal called "Xerum 525", suggests that the Germans were investigating the inertial and vortex properties of radioactive material when subjected to high speed rotation, as well as the resulting field effects. It is likely that this rotation was caused by passing a current through the liquid - hence the high power consumption - but the possibility of mechanical rotation should not be ruled out in addition to this, as German progress in jet engine turbines and uranium centrifuges would have given them the experience to construct very high speed turbines for rotating such material for study.

In this sense, it is possible that the Bell was nothing more than two counter-rotating ultra-high speed turbines That is to say, the Bell may have been an ultra high speed electro- mechanical turbine of some sort, an offshoot, perhaps, of German centrifuge technology development.

The housing of this device in an underground chamber lined with ceramic brick and rubber mats suggests that it gave off extremely strong electro-magnetic or electro-static field effects as well as high heat when in operation. The reporting of metallic tastes in the mouths of what few surviving personnel there are suggests this. The quick decay without apparent putrefaction of organic material within its field suggests effects that some would associate with scalar waves.

But what was the mysterious "Xerum 525"? When I first read of this strange material, I thought it might be some radioactive isotope of mercury, or possibly a more radioactive substance in chemical solution of some sort. It is perhaps worth noting that recently a strange substance known as "red mercury", or mercury antominate oxide, has been alleged to have strong neutron emitting properties when subjected to sudden explosive stress, and is alleged to be a non-fissile method of triggering the enormous fusion reactions of hydrogen bombs, as well as being able, in its own right, of fission explosions in the small kiloton range. Perhaps the Nazis had stumbled onto a similar such substance during the war.

It was on the basis of certain features of the above lists of the Bell's properties that I hypothesized in my previous book, The Giza Death Star Deployed, that the object that crashed in the famous Kecksburg UFO crash retrieval case might have been the Bell itself. In that book, I did not explore that hypothesis, leaving it for "another book." Well, this is that "other book", and it is now necessary to examine the odd data points that seem to connect these two mysterious objects.

B. The UFO Crash and Retrieval at Kecksburg, Pennsylvania,December 1965

Twenty years after Kammler's "Bell" went missing, a remarkably similar object reportedly crashed in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, in a wooded area in the country. The story of the Kecksburg incident begins at approximately 4:45 PM, December 9, 1965. From northern Canada to western Pennsylvania, thousands of witnesses described "an orange fireball tearing across the evening sky towards the south east, followed by a trail of smoke."¹³ Witnesses included pilots spread throughout Ontario, Michigan, and Ohio that were along the flight path of the object.

13 Michael Hesemann, UFOs Secret History, p 167.

Once over Ohio, however, the object clearly demonstrated that it was not a typical meteor, nor a crash in the ordinary sense of "space debris," for according to witnesses, it stopped, stood still "for a few seconds" and then changed its course towards Pennsylvania.¹⁴

At this point, the Kecksburg saga begins in earnest, for at 4:47 PM, a Mrs. Jones called the local radio station WHJB in Greensburg and told reporter John Murphy that "a huge fireball has crashed in the woods about 1.5 miles from here."¹⁵ Her children had been playing outside when they first saw it, describing it as a burning star. Mrs. Jones, visiting a neighbor at that time on then porch, saw blue smoke coming from the forest and a bright light hovering above the area.¹⁶

In the meantime, the reporter John Murphy had already driven to the site, finding already a beehive of activity there, with two police cruisers and a fire engine from the local volunteer fire-department parked at the wood's edge. After questioning Mrs. Jones and her children, the local fire marshal and one of the policemen walked into the forest, and reemerged sixteen minutes later. In response to reporter Murphy's questions, the fire marshal directed him to his lawyer!¹⁷

What followed over the next few hours was genuinely bizarre, as the US Army and Air Force, and apparently some NASA scientists and technicians,¹⁸ literally moved in and placed the tiny village and its environs under virtual martial law:

Whatever it was that had crashed in the forest, the Army and Air Force marched up to deal with it. The military and state police cordoned off the forest area, stationed armed guards at all the roads and ways loading into the forest and transported a whole lot of equipment to the crash site. The Air Force took over the premises of the local voluntary fire station and set up a commando post there.

The firemen, now forbidden to enter the station, stood by watching while persons in military uniform brought in more equipment into the station, which included a huge radio transmitter. A little later, two large transport trucks, one of them bearing the insignia of the army, were seen driving into the forest. At about the same time, people living close to the nearby Latrobe Airfield saw a jet plane landing there, although the airfield itself had been closed to traffic for quite some time.¹⁹

14 Hesemann, op. cit, p. 167.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid., p. 168.

17 Ibid.

18 Q.v. Stan Gordon, Kecksburg: the Untold Story (DVD video production. Gordon is considered the expert on the Kecksburg case, and the video consists of a series of recorded interviews with surviving witnesses to the event. According to Mrs. Lillian Hayes, wife of a local farmer, and her son both stated that their house was visited several times that night by military personnel, and she reports having overheard them discussing the fact that NASA was already on the scene.

19 Hesemann, op. cit., p. 168.

Later, television, newspaper, and radio reporters arrived from Pittsburg, to be met with a wall of silence from the military.

But a police spokesman stated "there's an unidentified flying object in the woods." When the US Air Force's Project Blue book was contacted, Major Hector Quintanilla himself, then project head, informed the reporters that the Air Force's investigators were already at the site.²⁰

If it were only for the official statements and peculiar "overreaction" of the military in such a quick response to the event, and in placing an entire town and considerable portion of its environs under virtual martial law and placing a secure perimeter around a Pennsylvania wood, little else would have been known of the Kecksburg crash. However, a local who had been listening to the radio, Bill Bulebush, made his way to the crash site, thinking to offer help to local authorities and the presumed crash victims. When he arrived, however, he saw "something that threw him for a loop":

A metallic bullet-shaped object was sticking in the ground at the end of a trench, which it had obviously formed while landing.

"It looked like a big burned orange. It sparkled and twinkled, was about 9 feet wide and 12 feet long. Somehow it gave me the creeps and I got away quickly."

And when he read the Air Force explanation in the papers the next day, he knew they were lying. What he had seen had certainly not been a meteorite!²¹

20 Ibid., p. 169.

21 Ibid., emphasis in the original.

Suffice it to say, it strains credibility to have so many witnesses attest that the military showed up, placed an area of U.S. territory under martial law, and called in NASA specialists, to recover a mere meteorite. The meteorite theory made no sense to local UFO researcher Stan Gordon either, since UFOs ordinarily traveled at speeds in excess of those calculated for the object, and meteorites do not stop, stand still, and then change course.

Nonetheless, there the matter would have rested, until James Romansky came forward as a witness 2 years later (1987). Romansky had been 19 years old at the time of the incident, and a member of the volunteer firefighting team that had arrived first and been instructed to comb the woods for the wreckage of a crashed airplane.²²

Romansky gave a description of the object that was slightly different than Bulebush's in certain details:

It had the shape of an acorn, made of shining silvery metal which had a light touch of gold in it. Its bottom was surrounded by a kind of ring or, as Jim put it, a kind of metal bumper on which strange writing could be seen. Romansky described it later.

"They looked like Egyptian hieroglyphics, but without any animal signs. There were straight and broken lines, dots, squares and circles." ....

There was no glass, no propeller or jet nozzle, no burst tanks from which any fuel had leaked out, and not even the sign of a hatch or entrance.²³

22 Hesemann, op. cit., p. 169.

23 Ibid., emphasis in the original.

After Romansky's story was aired on an episode of the television show "Unsolved Mysteries", other witnesses emerged with their own accounts of the incident, and substantially confirmed the account, adding new details of their own.

One of these details was that a late-night convoy of trucks, one including a large flatbed semi-trailer with an object covered in a tarpaulin. Some witnesses report that the tarpaulin was pulled tightly around the object, and its "acorn" shape could clearly be seen. The object was next seen by witnesses at its first apparent destination, Lockborne Air Force base in Columbus, Ohio, where military police units were ordered to surround a hangar and shoot anyone who attempted to enter that did not have a top secret clearance.²⁴

It was next apparently seen by a witness, "Myron", who contacted Stan Gordon, and described a similar object. Hesemann's summary of Myron's story is worth citing in full, since it bears directly on my hypothesis:

(Myron) worked as a truck driver for a cement factory belonging to his family at Dayton, Ohio. Two days after the incident occurred at Kecksburg, his firm received a large order for specially glazed bricks from the Wright Patterson Air Field. A representative of the base had had a look at the bricks in stock at the factory and finally ordered 6,500 double-glazed processed bricks, which, he said, "were for building a double-walled shield around a recovered radioactive object. " ²⁵

Myron later glanced inside the hangar to view what was inside.

The object was silhouetted by floodlights behind large silk -parachute-like screens. Myron described "the shadowy outlines of a large bell-shaped object....perhaps about 9 feet wide and 12 feet high. Through a small opening in the tent, Myron could see that it was metallic, like some kind of whitish bronze."²⁶

24 Ibid, pp. 169-170.

25 Hesemann, pp. 179-170, emphasis added.

26 Ibid., p. 173.

C. Analysis

There are a number of curious data points that would appear to connect Kammler's "Bell" with Kecksburg's "Acorn". Hesemann's book, from which the above accounts and quotations were cited, was published in 1998, before Nick Cook's Hunt for Zero Point, with its summarization of SS General Sporrenberg's descriptions of the Bell were first made known to an English speaking audience. This means that the Kecksburg witnesses record something that sounds eerily like Kammler's Bell.

Consider the following list:

(1)

Both objects arc described in very similar terms, as "acorn" or "bell" shaped; the Pennsylvania witnesses could just as easily be describing Kammler's Hell, and Sporrenberg similarly, could just as easily be describing the Kecksburg Acorn;

(2)

Both objects are described as having similar, if not identical, dimensions, being approximately 9 to 12 feet in diameter and 12 to 15 feet in height;

(3)

Both objects had to be housed in a chamber made of "glazed" or "ceramic" bricks, because,

(4)

Both objects apparently gave off strong radioactivity or other strong field effects.

In fact, it is on only one point that the two objects differ, if indeed they are two distinct objects, and that is the consistent testimony by witnesses who actually saw the Kecksburg "acorn" UFO, that some strange form of writing existed around the "bumper" of the object, resembling hieroglyphics to some, "but without the animal and people pictures," as James Romansky puts it, and resembling geometrical forms according to a few others. No similar statements exist for Kammler's Bell.

But even this may not necessarily be a sufficient reason to dismiss the possible connection. The kind of writing described may have been a form of runes, a form of writing in which the occult-oriented SS was also interested.²⁷ These types of symbols can sometimes resemble geometric objects that some witnesses associate with the writing on the Kecksburg UFO. It is much more difficult, however, to find a resemblance between them and "hieroglyphic" writing.

27 For SS rune research, see Dusty Sklar, The Nazis and the Occult (Dorset Press, 1989), pp. 25-26, 28.

With regard to point (3), another significant question occurs: why did the Air Force so quickly decide that ceramic, or glazed, brick, would be the best means of shielding the object? There are other more effective, though more costly means of shielding, and cost may have been a leading factor in selection of this method. But the suddenness with which the decision is taken to shield it at Wright Patterson Field with such bricks also suggests a knowledge of and familiarity with the object, and, possibly, of its history as a Nazi secret weapons project. In any case, the swiftness of the military's reaction to assemble a recovery team at Kecksburg also indicates that the object had been tracked by the military for sometime as it flew over Canada and the eastern US. It is as if the military had been expecting it.

And finally, there is yet another odd point that may connect the Keckburg Acorn to the Kammler Bell. We have already seen that some "Nazi survival myths" have a secret German base close to the Arctic, operating at a remote location in Canada near Hudson Bay. While I discount the idea, it is perhaps worth noting that the trajectory of the Kecksburg Acorn as it tracked from Canada into the US to its final crash site in Pennsylvania, would, if extended north into Canada, place it along a line more or less where the "Arctic Nazi survival myth" places the alleged secret German base.

The Trajectory of the Kecksburg UFO 341

Near the end of his book, Nick Cook, recounts a meeting with a friend who had started him off on a quest that he knew would eventually lead Cook back to Nazi Germany.

"Markus"' words are a chilling warning:

When the Americans tripped over this mutant strain of non-linear physics and took it back home with them, they were astute enough to realize that their homegrown scientific talent couldn't handle it. That it was beyond their cultural terms of reference. That's why they recruited so many Germans. The Nazis developed a unique approach to science and engineering quite separate from the rest of the world, because their ideology, unrestrained as it was, supported a wholly different way of doing things.... The trouble was, when the Americans took it all home with them they found out, too late, that it came infected with a virus. You take the science on, you take on aspects of the ideology, as well.²⁸

28 Nick Cook, op. cit, p. 270.

In any case, it seems that there are enough points of similarity between Kammler's Bell and the Kecksburg Acorn to at least raise a third alternative as an explanation for it, in addition to the two approaches previously taken, namely, that it was a crashed extra-terrestrial craft or probe of some sort, or a crashed Soviet Cosmos satellite. It may have been a Nazi secret weapons project, that inadvertently got away from its testers, was brought back under control, and deliberately crashed, only to be retrieved again.

The Kecksburg incident raises the horrifying possibility that SS Obergruppenfuhrer Hans Kammler's Bell and his SS secret weapons Sonderkommando survived the war intact, metastasizing throughout the very secretive, and labyrinthine compartmentalization of America's black projects world. This raises the specter that some of "our" black projects may not be ours at all, but someone else's. We are just footing the bill.

Myron's "Bell" at Wright Patterson Air Force Base

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