There have certainly been rumors circulating for many years that the German designs were actually man-made attempts to reproduce crashed real ‘flying saucers’ - attempts that failed because the engineers and scientists involved were unable to recreate the steering and propulsion systems of the alleged crashed craft.

 

One of the most impressive of those backing this claim is Colonel Philip J. Corso (Ret.) (left with Edwards O’Connor, Corso, Lt. Gen. Arthur Trudeau and Victor Fediay).

Corso published a book entitled ‘The Day After Roswell: A Former Official Reveals the US Government’s Shocking UFO Cover-up’ in which he makes a number of revelations. Corso’s background itself is formidable. He was Chief of the US Army’s Foreign Technology Division, and was a member of President Eisenhower’s National Security Council.

 

He later went on to work for Senator Strom Thurmond after retiring from the army in 1963. Corso was interviewed by Michael Lindemann of CNI News on 5th July 1997 and asked:

ML: There have been rumors and speculations that Roswell, and what came from Roswell – the way we exploited Roswell technology – might not have been the very first time such a thing happened. There have been indications or speculations that the Nazis had done such a thing, that some of their extraordinary technological developments may have come from a similar source. What do you think of that?


PC: Yes. True. I had German scientists on my team. I discussed this with them. I discussed this with Oberth, von Braun. I was part of ‘Project Paperclip’ with General Trudeau… There were crashes elsewhere, and they [the Germans] gathered material too.
The Germans were working on it. They didn’t solve the propulsion system. They did a lot of experiments on flying saucers. They had one that went up to 12,000 feet. But where all, we and they, missed out was on the guidance system. In R&D we began to realize that this being [a captured alien] was part of the guidance system, part of the apparatus himself, or itself, as it had no sexual organs."

In his book Corso also describes the UFO that crashed at Roswell and noted General Twinning’s observations regarding the design;

"The crescent-shaped craft looked so uncomfortably like the German Horten wings our flyers had seen at the end of the war that he had to suspect the Germans had bumped into something we didn’t know about. And his conversations with Werner von Braun and Willy Ley at Alamogordo in the days after the crash confirmed this. They didn’t want to be thought of as verruckt but intimated that there was a deeper story about what the Germans had engineered."
(Corso, Philip, ‘
The Day After Roswell’  1997)