Die Glocke: Did This Nazi Super Weapon Actually Exist?

We know the Nazis got into some weird stuff. Some of it was disgusting. Some of it was impressive. The Second World War was a massive kick up the bum for all sides involved in the race to make bigger, better weapons, vehicles and other technological support systems. Scientists and engineers were on the cutting edge of what was possible in the 1940s and some were even going beyond that into theoretical aircraft, missiles and even orbital weapons.

German engineers and scientists were so highly thought of, in fact, that the US saw a chance to utilize their brainpower for their own ends and gathered up over 1600 of them during Operation Paperclip, a secret mission carried out after the end of the war. These brainiacs, such as Wernher von Braun, were pivotal in helping the United States in their space program with others being instrumental in the fields of electronics, material science and medicine, although the vast majority ended up working in aeronautics and rocketry, any horrific stuff they might personally have been involved in quietly swept under the rug.

We know that there was some advanced stuff coming out of Nazi Germany during the Second World War, such as the first jet fighter and the first cruise missile and the first ballistic missiles. These, along with plenty of others, were known as “Wunderwaffe” or “wonder weapons” and formed a formidable, although as we know, ultimately unsuccessful stable of military weapons and vehicles. We also know that they were working on a load of other stuff that never made it onto the battlefield, whether because of timing, spiraling costs or because it was just not feasible to put into production.

We also know that the Nazis were highly secretive, using underground factories and constructing networks of tunnels, some of which have only started being explored in the last couple of years. We also know that Hitler’s line of supernatural thinking led to some horrifying conclusions and there were potentially secret groups working on things that we still don’t know much about. Take this supposed wunderwaffe, for example: “die glocke” translated as “the bell”, a supposed anti-gravity machine that could travel through time and might have been built with the help of some extraterrestrial technology.

The Legend of Die Glocke

Why is this even a thing? There has to be some sort of evidence in the first place to get these stories going, right? So here is the story of Die Glocke. It is so called because its shape is kind of bell-like and also because everything sounds a bit more menacing when it’s in German.

This project was allegedly run between the years of 1942 and 1944 and the object itself was about 12 feet high and 9 feet wide or about 3.5 metres high by about 3 metres wide. It was made of a ceramic material that was about 3 inches thick. Inside the bell were two cylinders that counter-rotated at high speeds and it was fueled by a purpley metallic liquid known as “xerum 525”.

Due to its similarity to the properties of mercury, it’s been suggested that this was some sort of radioactive version of mercury which had enhanced properties and may have even been capable of some kind of time travel. Author and researcher Igor Witkowski believes that Die Glocke was actually part of a larger propulsion system and was not intended to be an individual flying craft.

The main selling point of Die Glocke, though, was that it was an anti gravity device. According to a How Stuff Works article, antigravity: “involves lessening the effects of gravitational pull on an object”. The article also states: “Antigravity technology would revolutionize space exploration and energy production. It would slash the energy demands of travel and transportation.”

A strange circular structure which has been dubbed “Hitler’s Stonehenge” because of its resemblance to the famous standing stones on Salisbury Plain, was found above a network of secret tunnels in Lower Silesia in what was Nazi-occupied Poland. It has been suggested that this concrete structure was a place to tether die Glocke while it was being tested above ground.

Unfortunately, due to the radioactive nature of the fuel, many of the slave laborers who worked in the tunnels died from being exposed to it, as did the scientists involved in the project, if they weren’t killed afterwards to maintain the secrecy of Die Glocke. It has been theorized that the project was overseen by SS Obergruppenfuhrer Hans Kammler, a wily so-and-so who seemed to have slipped through the net as the Nazi’s plans came crashing down. He had been in charge of “secret weapons” projects and had also been one of the main people in charge of building the concentration camps so was happy to use thousands of prisoners to dig out the tunnels and construct the V1 and V2 rockets.

His fate has been shrouded in mystery with several different people giving several different accounts of his death in May 1945, however, it has also been suggested, most notably by Dean Reuter in his 2019 book “The Hidden Nazi”, that Wernher Von Braun tapped Kammler as a key asset for the US as, due to his position, personality and involvement in some of the Nazi’s most secret projects, he literally knew where all the bodies were buried. So the US scooped him up and gave him a new identity in exchange for basically keeping all his knowledge out of Russian hands. And what of the Nazi Bell? Maybe the US scooped that up too.

Seems far-fetched? Let’s talk about the Kecksburg Incident.

The Kecksburg Incident

In December 1965, people in Canada and across more than 6 US states spotted a burning fireball shooting through the sky. It crash landed in the woods of Kecksburg, a village about 30 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Locals reported seeing a bell or acorn-shaped object with hieroglyphic-like symbols carved into it before the military arrived and quickly sealed the area off. The Tribune Review ran an article headlined: “‘Unidentified Flying Object’ Falls Near Kecksburg - Army Ropes Off Area”.

An article called “Acorn from Space: The Kecksburg Incident” by Matthew Dinkel, quotes eyewitnesses to the event such as Bill Bulebush. He saw: “a 10 foot long acorn shaped object smoldering in the woods. The way it glowed, cracked, and sparked scared Bulebush, who says he did not get too close to the object and, when he heard people coming, ran home.”

Volunteer firefighter James Romansky was also on the scene and saw: “a mysterious metal object buried in the ground and covered in hieroglyphics. He claims he was then ordered to leave by mysterious men in trench coats and that he later saw the military carry the object away on a flatbed truck.”

While it seems obvious that it was probably a meteor or something similar to the Tunguska event that occurred, there has been much research into what actually crashed into the woods in Kecksburg with lots of contradictory results. At first it was reported to be a natural phenomenon but then the trajectory of the object was mapped and it was found that it wouldn’t have landed in Kecksburg.

NASA issued a statement about the incident saying that after studying metallic fragments found in the wooded area, they concluded that a Russian satellite had fallen out of orbit and crashed there. Most of the records they had from the time were lost, however, so there was no more detail to be had. Interestingly though, a more recent statement from NASA went back on this conclusion by stating that the satellite’s orbit was decaying earlier than the fireball witnessed and: “Other analyses of the spacecraft orbit definitively indicate it could not have been the Cosmos 96 spacecraft”. So what was it?

Could it have been Die Glocke out for a bit of a spin? A documentary made about this incident certainly thinks it could be. And it sheds further light on the mechanics of the Nazi bell. Apparently a UFO crashed into the Black Forest in Germany in 1936.

Hitler’s troops recovered the damaged craft and over the following years managed to reverse-engineer the anti-gravitational technology they found aboard. The documentary team also took the idea of a bell shaped time traveling device to a wind tunnel test site to see if the non-traditional shape could be any good at achieving high speeds and found that it’s actually very efficient, “about twice as efficient as a sphere” and surprisingly aerodynamically sound.

Remember author and researcher Igor Witkowski from earlier? He appears in this documentary to show the host authentic Third Reich documentation signed by Hans Kammler which talks about all the special projects the Nazis were throwing at the wall at the end of the war.

When visiting the site of the Kecksburg incident, a replica of the object is on display. According to local eyewitnesses at the time: “it looked like somebody took liquid metal and poured it into an acorn-shaped mold. There’s no rivets. There’s no seams. There’s no weld marks. There’s no fuselage, no windows, no doors. And on that raised up back area, what really caught (their) attention (…) were these unusual markings that were raised up off the surface and looked more like symbols and letters.”

Nothing more was heard of Die Glocke after the military took it away but Kecksburg is now known as “Pennsylvania’s Roswell” and has a festival every year.

Examining the Evidence

Let’s go back and pull apart everything we’ve just covered. We started off by asking: “Why is this even a thing?” and managed to patch together some assortment of eyewitness reports, official signed papers and a documentary to pad out the story. Well, did you see through the attempts to make this sound even slightly believable? The truth is, there is absolutely no evidence that Die Glocke was ever even a plan the Nazis had, let alone a fully functional anti gravity device.

For all the other projects they were working on, there were comprehensive blueprints and paperwork so for this extremely high-tech project to be carried out on scraps of paper or just engraved on the inside of the scientists’ brains is extremely unlikely. And here’s another thing: anti gravity technology does not even exist now, never mind over 80 years ago. And the reason it doesn’t exist is that, according to the scientific community at large, it’s impossible. We’d literally have to unlearn what we understand about physics in order to make it possible and as that’s something nobody really feels like doing right now, it’s safe to assume that the Nazis did not manage to squeak out an anti-grav machine in a tunnel in the middle of a world war using the Mission Impossible sounding “Xerum 525”.

This “xerum” has also been touted to be the mythical “red mercury”, a substance that has many strange properties and can apparently be used for everything from curing what ails ya to creating nuclear bombs. But red mercury isn’t a thing either. It’s a weird hoax that refuses to go away and does not actually exist. There is a red ore called mercury sulphide but this isn’t what everyone’s talking about when they’re talking about red mercury.

So the impossible machine is being powered by something that doesn’t exist which definitely doesn’t help its cause.

It’s also pretty handy that anyone involved with the project either died from radiation sickness or was killed to keep it a secret but then if everyone died, how do we still know about it? Could it be that someone just made it up and tried to insert it into the historical record thanks to Hitler’s known love of power mythology and the Nazi’s technological superiority? Stand up, author and researcher Igor Witkowski.

While stories about Nazi-created UFOs, alien technology co-opted by the Nazis and Nazis and aliens hanging out in the middle of our hollow Earth have all appeared previously in print, it was Igor Witkowski who first brought the idea that Die Glocke was real to the mainstream in his book “Prawda o Wunderwaffe” or “The Truth About the Wunderwaffe” which was published in the year 2000. Witkowski claims to have found references to Die Glocke in declassified documents, transcripts and also a signed confession from a General Jakob Sporrenberg stating he ordered the deaths of 60 people tied to the secret project. Even if this last bit were true, we only have Witkowski’s word for it.

He was shown the documents by an unnamed source in Polish intelligence and couldn’t make any copies of anything. Let’s frame this last sentence with a big old “allegedly”.

Witkowski’s claim about this wonder weapon didn’t make too many waves at first until Nick Cook published “The Hunt for Zero Point” in 2001. An award-winning aviation journalist, Cook was the aviation editor for Jane’s Defence Weekly which gave him something of a higher standing in the credulity stakes when he came out with this book about Die Glocke, springboarding off Witkowski’s earlier research. It didn’t take long for his efforts to be pooh-poohed, however, with some critics coming out with statements like: “what is instructive about the book is the insight we get into how conspiracy theories seduce otherwise reasonable people” from reviewer Kurt Kleiner and Skeptoid’s Brian Dunning saying “all we have in the way of evidence is a third-hand anecdotal account of something that’s desperately implausible, backed up by neither evidence nor even a corroborating account”. So yeah, no evidence, no evidence of any evidence and no real confirmed mentions of this thing until the 21st century.

Hitler’s Henge and Other Explanations

This strange concrete circular structure reminiscent of a complete Stonehenge was apparently what the bell would be tied to when outdoor experiments were carried out. Well, that’s obvious, what else could this structure possibly have been for? Was it, perchance, a support for a different Nazi UFO to take off from and land on? This is seriously what forensic engineer Robert Sparling has suggested it was used for.

Other, more level-headed people have said that it’s probably something that was used to test more mundane aircraft, such as helicopters, or even that it was the first part of an unfinished cooling tower built before the Germans decided to abandon attempts to make atomic bombs. One last theory is that it was purposefully created to be like Stonehenge, maybe as a monument to the occult leanings of some of the higher-ups in the Nazi party or just as a monument to the party in general. All of these explanations are far more likely that it being something to tether a time-traveling acorn to.

The lack of real people tied to this story obviously doesn’t help its claims for veracity. The sidebar of having Hans Kammler as the project leader is quite a good one though, as he was a complete monster. Here’s a grim statistic: under his program of mining the tunnels and manufacturing the V2 rocket, approximately 10,000 concentration camp laborers died which is estimated to be about double the number of people killed by the rockets when they were in action.

The story goes that Kammler managed to save himself by handing over Die Glocke to the Americans in exchange for a nice new life somewhere, probably in one of those favoured Nazi haunts of Argentina, Antarctica, the hollow Earth or the moon. While his fate is quite murky, it’s unlikely that he managed to use this purported antigrav device to barter his way out of anything. And would he have been the one to have it anyway?

While he was extremely ambitious and had a background in civil engineering, he wouldn’t really have had the scientific knowledge about how this thing worked. The main evidence against Kammler giving up the bell is that, if he handed over an anti gravity device to the US in the 1940s, how come nothing has been accomplished in this field since? Wouldn’t this technology have been utilized in some way, especially during the Space Race to give the Americans an upper hand?

Why has any research that’s been carried out at all into antigravity started from the ground up and not from a very handy already existing platform? Even more to the point, if the Nazis had this technology in a usable form during the course of the war, why didn’t they use it themselves? Is it because Die Glocke did not, in fact, exist?

The answer is almost certainly yes.

The Kecksburg Incident Revisited

This brings us back to the Kecksburg incident, which some people have conflated with Die Glocke being in American hands. The space acorn crash landed in the woods and a few people saw it before the military swooped in and hushed everything up. NASA originally said it was part of a Russian satellite, then later went back on it and said “it could not have been the Cosmos 96 spacecraft”. Mysterious, eh? Well, it’s probably not so mysterious after all.

Many people across North America saw a fiery light in the sky which was most likely a natural occurrence such as an exploding meteor or meteor bolide. As it’s so high up, it’s difficult for eyewitnesses to be able to tell where it is actually going, so unless you can track it all the way down to the ground, if it even gets that far, it’s quite hard to be able to say that the light and the thing that crashed at Kecksburg were even the same thing.

If something did crash at Kecksburg, which some people believe did happen as there was some damage to trees and a loud noise, for instance, it might have been part of a meteor. As we know from the Tunguska Event, if a meteor exploded in the atmosphere right above the woods, it would have caused damage to trees but not left much more of a trace. If this was the case it would have been a very small meteor or fragment as otherwise there would have been a massive amount of damage and a huge seismic wave.

Damage could also have come from much more mundane sources such as heavy ice or snow in the trees which is actually far more likely. What doubtless did not crash into the woods that December was a radioactive time traveling bell running on red mercury.

But what about those eyewitness accounts? We can take them with a pinch of salt as no other locals came forward at the time other than the couple mentioned earlier. Why did Bill Bulebush run away when other people were coming? Why did these other people not back up his story? And while James Romansky was presented as a volunteer firefighter to help make him seem more credible as a witness, the “Acorn from Space” article also notes that he had a criminal record.

Some people at the time didn’t even think anything had landed in Kecksburg and that anyone who thought they had seen a crash there was just a victim of an optical illusion and it actually landed somewhere else. This is confirmed by NASA who stated that “estimating the impact point of fireballs from eyewitness accounts is notoriously inaccurate” and also stated: “Investigations of photographs and sightings of the fireball indicated its path through the atmosphere was probably too steep to be consistent with a spacecraft re-entering from Earth orbit and was more likely a meteor in a prograde orbit from the vicinity of the asteroid belt, and probably ended its flight over western Lake Erie.”

So what about this documentary that featured Igor Witkowski, and tested out the aerodynamic capabilities of a bell shaped object? It was actually season one, episode two of “In Search of Aliens”, fronted by the shock-haired Giorgio A. Tsoukalos of Ancient Aliens fame. While Witkowski showed him a document signed by Hans Kammler, we’ve already mentioned that he was never allowed to make copies of any of the secret documents he was allegedly shown by his informant so this is just some general thing relating to special projects but does not make any reference to Die Glocke in any way.

The show throws out many theories but they’re all so far-fetched and barely connected that it’s pretty clear there’s nothing really going on here. In one scene, Tsoukalos is talking to apparent Kecksburg expert Stan Gordon and asks: “In your investigations, did you come across any reports whether or not there were any people inside this object? Because in the Roswell story, we always hear how they carried away bodies, and that one of those bodies allegedly was alive.

So is there anything similar in this particular case?” Talk about a leading question. Stan Gordon then replies: “There have been very interesting accounts…which suggest the possibility that someone or something may have been inside the object.”

But there is no more because Giorgio just carries on and asks a different question. From just looking at the guy’s face though, it seems that Stan is just throwing out a bone that he made up on the spot under pressure and doesn’t want to give too many details because he’s just in panic mode.

Conclusion

Did the Nazis have a program of advanced weapons during the late 1930s and early 1940s? Yes, yes they did. Were there also some ultra-secret high tech weapons on the list? Yes, yes there were. Did one of these involve using a made-up substance to power a bell-shaped object to incredible speeds so it reversed the effects of gravity and could travel through time? No, no it did not.

We also need to address the claim that the Nazis recovered a crashed alien spacecraft in 1936 which helped them work out the antigravity technology. There’s no evidence of this, of course, it comes from “In Search of Aliens” where it says it comes from a book called “Secret Societies and Their Power in the 20th Century” by Jan Van Helsing. That’s a pen name. He’s a rabble rouser touting hollow earth theories and the Hitler-in-Antarctica trope so it’s safe to say we can happily throw this bit of non-information down a well and walk away.

When it comes down to it, we only really have Igor Witkowski’s information about Die Glocke, the primary sources of which are handily not available for us to access. Because of the description of an “acorn” shaped thing at Kecksburg, this has been linked to Die Glocke but obviously only after Witkowski and Nick Cook’s books came out, some 35 years after the event as nobody had heard of it before then. Could it even be that the space acorn of 1965 inspired Witkowski rather than the other way around? We can’t say for certain, but we can file this one away as officially decoded: Die Glocke is a modern myth with no basis in historical fact.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Die Glocke?

Die Glocke, or ‘the bell,’ is a supposed Nazi super weapon described as an anti-gravity machine that could potentially travel through time. It was allegedly developed between 1942 and 1944 and was fueled by a mysterious substance called ‘xerum 525’.

What was the purpose of Die Glocke?

Die Glocke was purportedly designed as an anti-gravity device. According to theories, it could lessen the effects of gravitational pull on an object, which would revolutionize space exploration and energy production.

What was the shape and size of Die Glocke?

Die Glocke was described as being about 12 feet high and 9 feet wide, with a bell-like shape. It was made of a ceramic material approximately 3 inches thick.

What was the fuel for Die Glocke?

Die Glocke was allegedly fueled by a purpley metallic liquid known as ‘xerum 525,’ which was suggested to be a radioactive version of mercury with enhanced properties.

Who was involved in the development of Die Glocke?

The project was allegedly overseen by SS Obergruppenfuhrer Hans Kammler, who was in charge of ‘secret weapons’ projects and used slave labor to construct tunnels and develop the V1 and V2 rockets.

What happened to the workers and scientists involved in Die Glocke?

Many of the slave laborers and scientists involved in the project died from radiation sickness due to the radioactive nature of the fuel. Others were reportedly killed to maintain the secrecy of Die Glocke.

What is the Kecksburg Incident?

The Kecksburg Incident refers to an event in December 1965 where a burning fireball was seen in the sky and reportedly crashed in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania. Eyewitnesses described a bell or acorn-shaped object with hieroglyphic-like symbols.

What was the official explanation for the Kecksburg Incident?

NASA initially suggested that the object was a Russian satellite that had fallen out of orbit. However, they later retracted this statement, indicating that the satellite’s orbit decayed earlier than the observed fireball.

What is the connection between Die Glocke and the Kecksburg Incident?

Some theories suggest that the object seen in the Kecksburg Incident could have been Die Glocke. A documentary proposed that the Nazis reverse-engineered anti-gravitational technology from a crashed UFO in 1936, which led to the development of Die Glocke.

What is the current consensus on the existence of Die Glocke?

There is no concrete evidence to support the existence of Die Glocke. Theories about the device are largely based on unverified claims and lack comprehensive blueprints or documentation. The scientific community considers anti-gravity technology to be impossible with current understanding of physics.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: Die Glocke: Did This Nazi Super Weapon Actually Exist?
• Hero image source by thegetty / openverse, cc0.