Giuseppe Belluzzo

Giuseppe Belluzzo (1876–1952) was an Italian mechanical engineer and steam turbine designer who served as Minister of National Economy and then Minister of Public Education under Benito Mussolini and sat in the Senate of the Kingdom of Italy from 1934. In March 1950 he told the Italian press that disc-shaped aircraft had been designed in Italy and Germany from 1942 and that he had himself drawn up plans for one for Hitler and Mussolini; Henry Stevens calls the report possibly the first mention of the subject in the American press. It is the first of the two 1950 statements, the second being Rudolf Schriever's Der Spiegel interview six days later, that Michael Salla's Exopolitics Briefing Document cites as the first public revelation of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany collaborating in the reverse engineering of flying saucer technologies, a collaboration Salla traces to the study of debris from the 1933 Magenta UFO crash under Guglielmo Marconi.

Stevens and Salla treat Belluzzo as a senior Fascist-era figure whose statement is a participant's public record, Stevens placing him in a Miethe–Belluzzo project, while Nick Cook finds his claims unverifiable; the military historian Gerhard Wiechmann treats the early-1950s disc stories as fictions of the press, notes that Belluzzo's 2012 biography contains no word about flying-disc experiments, and reports that the Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv holds no documents on German disc projects; and General Ranza of the Italian Air Force denied the story within a week. The wire text of the statement describes a spinning disc whose plans Belluzzo said were drawn up in 1942 and lost with Mussolini in 1943, and names no recovered craft.

Engineer and minister

Belluzzo was born in Verona on 25 November 1876 into a family of workers, took the gold medal as best graduate of the Politecnico di Milano, held the chair of thermal and hydraulic engine construction in Milan from 1910 and moved to the engineering school in Rome in 1929. Thirteen of Italy's largest warships carried turbines of his design, and Stevens describes him as an expert in steam turbines and no junior scientist. Mussolini made him Minister of National Economy on 10 July 1925; he moved to Public Education in July 1928, became Minister of State in October 1929 and was named senator on 1 March 1934. In 1949 he devised an engine meant to roughly triple the range of aircraft, and he died in Rome on 21 May 1952, aged 75.

The March 1950 statement

Belluzzo spoke while Europe was experiencing its first wave of UFO reports of the year; several Italian dailies carried his statement and the Associated Press picked it up on 24 March. In the United Press version he said designs for "flying saucers" had been prepared for Hitler and Mussolini in 1942, that he had personally drafted plans for a disc 32 feet across that he said disappeared with Mussolini when the latter fled to northern Italy in 1943, and that "the idea was born in Italy about the same time it was heard of in Germany." He described two opposed jet pipes fed with compressed air and naphtha that would set the whole apparatus revolving, said such discs could carry explosives or an atomic bomb, and added that it had passed his mind that some great power was experimenting with flying discs.

According to the research site naziufos.com, the Italian dailies ran the story on 25 March, Il Mattino dell'Italia Centrale printed a sketch of the disc on 27 March, and Il Corriere d'Informazione published a denial by General Ranza of the Italian Air Force on 29–30 March; a reader named Lino Saglioni then wrote that he had trained as a British commando for a mission against German disc work in northeast Norway, and was never investigated, and Alberto Fenoglio repeated the story in the magazine ALI in 1951.

Cook reports him as saying he had worked on disc-shaped "flying bombs" during the war and passed them to the Germans, who developed them into working prototypes, while Wiechmann's study, in Andreas Anton's summary, has him claiming to have invented in 1941 an aircraft with a rotating disc meant as an attack weapon that never saw use. Cook also notes that Belluzzo started talking a few days before Schriever, and that his claims, like Schriever's, remain unverifiable. Anton adds that Der Spiegel took up the story shortly afterwards with Schriever.

The Miethe–Belluzzo project and later accounts

Rudolf Lusar's 1956 book on German secret weapons named "the German experts Schriever, Habermohl and Miethe, and the Italian Bellonzo" as the designers of the first flying discs, begun in 1941; Cook found that Lusar had misspelled the Italian's name, and Anton reports Wiechmann's finding that Lusar followed the press articles of the early 1950s closely, in which "Belluzo" had already become "Bellonzo." Stevens, drawing on Georg Klein and Joseph Andreas Epp, describes a Miethe–Belluzzo project begun in 1942 that worked at Dresden, Breslau and Letov near Prague, with Klein overseeing it for Albert Speer; Anton reports that Klein's role as Speer's special commissioner cannot be verified, and Stevens reproduces Belluzzo's obituary of 22 May 1952 from The New York Times, which he writes again mentions German flying discs.

Salla's 2018 Antarctica's Hidden History cites Stevens's pages on the two men for "key interviews" in which each "almost simultaneously went on the public record in March 1950 about their participation in German flying saucer programs," and says the scope of the German programmes has proven elusive because intelligence agencies keep a tight hold on documentation that would show success, while noting that official documents and newspaper reports point to the Germans having failed to develop any prototype that could be successfully operated. Anton notes that records of German weapons development were either destroyed or in Allied hands, which made such claims hard to check. Salla's 2026 briefing then attaches the Magenta recovery and Marconi's study of its debris to the two 1950 statements. One popular web retelling of the Magenta story credits "Dr. Guiseppe Belluzzo" with autopsies of the craft's occupants.

Open questions

References

Source ratings:

(

[1 Wikipedia-grade]

·

[2 Questionable]

·

[3 Reporting/Analysis]

·

[4 Speculative/Hearsay]

·

[5 Ungrounded]

). (To change source ratings,

edit this page

.)