Unknown documents on UFOs from German intelligence

Over the years, the German government has consistently maintained that it has never officially been interested in collecting and studying reports on the observation of unidentified flying objects.

But the editor of the German blog GreWi.de, Andreas Müller, questioned this position of high-ranking officials, presenting to his readers a collection of classified UFO documents from the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND), obtained under rather interesting circumstances.

Declassified information completely changes the idea of ​​the attitude of the German government towards the UFO issue.

In 2008, the former Minister of the Interior, Dr. Wolfgang Schäuble, repeated what other officials had persistently presented to their citizens during the last decades when they asked about the official position on the issue of the German army's interest in the UFO theme:

"I do not know of any officially functioning service, institute or any other administrative body that would be engaged in research of flying objects known as UFOs, and I do not know about the existence of such research projects operating somewhere under the aegis of some governmental body ".

The folder marked with the seals of the German BND, which recently fell into the hands of the public, put the above statements of the German officialdom in a very embarrassing situation. The very headline of the collection of 67-page documents, the "UFO", and the subtitles: "Observations of unidentified flying objects over the border area of ​​West Germany with the GDR and Czechoslovakia", say the opposite.

From the archives of the German special services

Paradoxes of the law

These documents can be found by the keyword "UFO" in the German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv), located in Koblenz. From the legal point of view, all these papers should be stored under the stamp of secrecy for 30 years according to the data protection regulations in the Federal Archive, that is - until 2021. Paradoxically, this security system can be easily circumvented if you make a request to view documents before the official release date.

If someone has already passed the verification procedure to access them, then these files will also be available to subsequent candidates who are interested in them. All this indicates that, since these documents also contained information not related to UFOs and concerning many inessential information about the situation on the border of the GDR and FRG during the communist period, somebody had already received full access to them. But, despite this, these documents still do not appear in any of the government lists. In a word, officially they are classified as classified.

The documents in the archive with the identification code "B 206/1914 - Bestand B 206 des Bundesnachrichtendienstes", which led to a lively discussion, do not yet prove that the federal intelligence service investigated UFO reports from the point of view of some exotic or even extraterrestrial version of the origin of this phenomenon.

The issues of state security during the Cold War were above all. The location of Soviet troops in the GDR and Czechoslovakia, as well as espionage activity in general from the Warsaw Pact countries represented a threat.

There was also a potential possibility of violating the air border on non-traditional flying vehicles. So the majority of the collected messages concern the reports of border services and frontier patrol units. There are also several reports from civilians.

Close contact on Fehmarn Island

Although the overwhelming majority of the observations can be explained by Soviet drones, probes and balloons (such as the Tupolev M-141 type of drone used in the USSR), a small part of them did not have rational explanations.

At least for the eyewitnesses, what they saw with their own eyes did not fit into any known categories of earthly phenomena, and the conducted official investigations could not give these observations any satisfactory explanation.

The most interesting case occurred in 1986 on the island of Fehmarn (the third largest island on the Baltic Sea), which, after the post-war redistribution of borders, was part of the FRG. The documents of the German BND detail the event as follows:

"Early in the morning of August 26, 1986, between 03:00 and 03:30, three employees of the border guard service in Puttgarden, at night shift from the office window, observed an unknown object moving rather slowly towards the nearest ferry station, while the object was observed by a customs officer who was in 300 meters from the first group of eyewitnesses on the pier of the said station.After their thorough interrogation, the following circumstances of the case were established:

1. An unidentified object approached the ferry station on the west side (it did not resemble any of the known aircraft).

2. The object flew at an altitude of 50-60 m.

3. When he was directly over the station, he slowed down almost to a halt in the air.

4. At this very moment, the border guards heard the sound emitted by the object - "a quiet rumble like the noise of a working turbine".

5. Employees were not able to determine the approximate size, shape or color of the observed phenomenon for several reasons:

1) it was a dark night;
2) the object emitted a strong light, almost dazzling. One of the officers suggested that this was a conscious measure to prevent the identification of the object, because because of this it was impossible to distinguish any side lights;

6. Being above the ferry station, the object continued its movement at the same altitude in the easterly direction, flying near the Naval Base (about 600 m);

7. Attempts to obtain more information from other personnel were not successful. The inquiries were sent to the Navy bases at Westermakeldsdorf, Marienieuchte and Stabernuk (all on Fehmarn Island), as well as to the air squadron of the Border Guard Service, the control of the Puttgarden ferry station, the German ferries Deutschland and Karl Carstens and the Danish police in Rehbi.

Although eyewitnesses rejected the possibility of observing an airplane or a helicopter, the content of the above report does not exclude the possibility of observing a Soviet helicopter that was spotted on the same day at about 07:00 (3-4 hours later) above the German coast near Lübeck, that was also recorded in the local press. Renewed on the basis of this assumption, further investigation ended with a negative result.

The meaning of the BDN documents

Regardless of how ufologists and military experts react to these statements from the detected documents of the BDN, their significance regarding the manifestation of interest in the UFO subject by the German government is unprecedented. The very fact of the existence of such documents contradicts the well-known position of the German authorities, which for years has been presented through the media to ordinary people: that no government, bodies, ministries, institutions or military services have ever collected messages about UFOs.

Moreover, the fact of the existence of materials of the German special services for UFOs is a circumstance that supports the opinion of the independent Congress of Research and Science (Wissenschaftliche Dienste) in relation to the topic of UFOs and extraterrestrial life. In their official statement, you can read that:

"In connection with the vital interest of the UK and France (as well as several other countries) to the question of the potential existence of a UFO phenomenon and of extraterrestrial life in general, and the fact that these countries have expressed a desire to publish online with public access previously to the public secrecy documents on this topic, German federal bodies and ministries are also interested in this issue and conduct an analysis of the issues coming in the matter from citizens. "

It may seem strange that the above opinion of the Congress of Research and Science is currently the subject of an ongoing trial in which the administration of the German parliament stubbornly opposes disclosure of any information or classified documents in the UFO case contrary to the current law on freedom of information.

In fact, the BND documents directly indicate that the government's interest in the UFO issue has existed in the past (and, perhaps, still exists). Also, these records indicate that there were a number of procedures and legal mechanisms for reporting and analyzing reports of UFO sightings in Germany from civilians, military personnel and civil servants.

According to the submitted documents, it is clear that even the practice of sending requests for specific research procedures on the subject of UFOs was carried out, and some of them were sent directly to specific military units or to the Ministry of Internal Affairs regarding possible analysis assistance. In the same ministry, which for many years claimed that "in the case of a UFO can not say anything interesting."