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Flying saucers real, but not mysterious at APG

By Jim Kennedy

Posted 4/01/11

The Army revealed this week that since the 1950s, it has kept a fleet of flying saucer-type craft in a top secret warehouse on the Edgewood area of Aberdeen Proving Ground.

But they’re not from outer space, and no alien life forms are associated with them.

“They were built at the old Glenn L. Martin Aircraft Co. just after World War II,” said Bill Shutt, manager of the Army’s Fabrication, Obfuscation and Oddities Limb, a little-known agency whose job it is to misdirect enemy intelligence agencies.

The agency, not coincidentally known by its acronym FOOL, grew out of the legendary First U.S. Army Group commanded by Gen. George Patton.

The First Army Group was used as part of an elaborate Allied effort to make Nazi Germany think the invasion of France was coming at a spot other than Normandy. It consisted of inflatable tanks, plywood equipment and audio-taped noises and bogus radio traffic, all with the high-profile Patton in command to give the patina of legitimacy to the nonexistent Army group.

“History books tell us it worked so well, the Germans delayed in responding to the D-day invasion, but what they don’t say is it worked so well we decided to do it again early on in the Cold War,” Shutt said.

The bogus flying saucers stored on APG were shipped all over the country during the late 1940s and well into the 1950s for purposes of generating rumors of alien space craft in hopes that those rumors would be picked up by Soviet spies and dutifully reported to the high command, Shutt explained.

The hope was that the Soviets would conclude the flying saucer reports were actually reports by Americans who saw test flights of very high tech aircraft — the likes of which would require a very advanced level of engineering. If all went according to plan, the Soviets would believe they were much further behind in technology than they actually were as the kinds of things the flying saucers could do were beyond the engineering capabilities of both sides.

“It’s hard to say how well it worked, as a lot of the hard-core intelligence records of that era remain part of the classified files of Russia and Ukraine. We’d like to think they were tricked, but we really don’t have a good handle on it,” Shutt said.

At its height during World War II, the Glenn L. Martin Aircraft Co., where the saucers were manufactured, employed about 53,000 people at its Middle River operation. It was subsequently moved to Seattle, Wash., and later the firm merged with Lockheed to form Lockheed Martin Corp.

As for why the fleet of flying saucers is being revealed now, Shutt explained the Cold War is long over and the need for perpetuating such a ruse is regarded as limited at best. In addition, he said, the Cold War relics take up a lot of space and that space is needed for other purposes.

When asked about if the elimination of the saucer fleet means the end of FOOL, Shutt said he could make no statements until after today, Friday, April 1.