Revealed hoax"Die Glocke" / the Nazi-UFO mythos
aka "Die Glocke" / the Nazi-UFO mythos
'Die Glocke' ('The Bell') is an alleged Nazi anti-gravity device at the centre of a post-war 'Nazi UFO' mythology; the claim originates almost entirely with one Polish author (Igor Witkowski, 2000) from documents he says he saw but could not copy, was amplified by Nick Cook (who later recanted), and has no contemporaneous evidence — a manufactured myth built on real wartime tech, occult lore, and conspiracy publishing.
under-corroborated
Held documented-hoax. Die Glocke has no evidentiary substrate at all — no primary documents, no artifact, no corroborating witness, only one journalist's account of papers he cannot produce; the chief populariser recanted, the one physical claim (the 'Henge') resolves to a mundane cooling tower, and a key propagator (Zundel) reportedly admitted fabrication. The corpus's canonical example of MANUFACTURED BELIEF: real wartime technology + occult lore + citation-laundering conspiracy publishing producing a durable UFO-origin myth. The documented-hoax verdict applies to the anti-gravity / Antarctic-base / Die Glocke CLAIMS; the genuine aeronautics it co-opts (Me 262, Sack AS-6, the Avrocar, the real foo-fighter reports) is partitioned out as actual history.
status history (2)
2026-06-14 · new → documented-hoax
— seeded 2026-06-14 — corpus-growth pass (Nazi-UFO / Die Glocke mythology; manufactured-belief exemplar)
2026-07-01 · documented-hoax → under-corroborated
— propagating the 2026-07-01 neutrality re-audit (commit 6f8e407) from the dive dossier; the historical entry had silently diverged
The ‘Nazi UFO’ genre holds that the Third Reich built advanced disc-shaped or anti-gravity craft that (with their technology or crews) survived the war — feeding the foo-fighters lore, the ‘secret Antarctic base’ (Base 211 / New Swabia) and Operation Highjump conspiracy theories, and Vril/Thule occult-saucer claims. Its most specific artifact is ‘Die Glocke,’ a bell-shaped device allegedly using a substance ‘Xerum 525’ to produce an anti-gravity or exotic effect. The decisive point is the SOURCE PROBLEM: Die Glocke first appears in Igor Witkowski’s 2000 Polish book, sourced to documents (including an alleged Sporrenberg transcript) he says he was shown by an unnamed informant but not permitted to copy — and which no one else has located. Aviation journalist Nick Cook gave it credibility in ‘The Hunt for Zero Point’ (2001) but later acknowledged ‘there is no smoking gun’; Joseph Farrell elaborated it into a free-energy/Roswell/MAJIC-12 mythos. Skeptics (Jason Colavito identified the supposed test-rig ‘Henge’ as an ordinary industrial cooling tower; Brian Dunning, Robert Sheaffer) treat it as a third-hand myth, and Holocaust-denier Ernst Zundel — who sold Antarctic-saucer booklets in the 1970s — reportedly admitted the genre was a deliberate hoax. CRUCIAL PARTITION: real history (the Me 262 jet, V-weapons, the genuine but failed Sack AS-6 circular-wing prototype, the post-war Avro Avrocar, the real foo-fighter reports, and the real Operation Highjump expedition) is co-opted as a plausibility scaffold for claims that are pure post-war invention.