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“Hitler invented stealth,” says Gene Poteat, the first CIA officer in the Agency’s history to be assigned to the National Reconnaissance Office, or NRO. Gene Poteat’s job was to assess Soviet radar threats, and to do this, he observed many spy plane tests at Area 51. “Hitler’s stealth bomber was called the Horten Ho 229,” Poteat says, “which is also called the Horten flying wing. It was covered with radar-absorbing paint, carbon embedded in glue. The high graphic content produced a result called ‘ghosting,’ which made it difficult for radar to see.”

The Horten Ho 229 to which Poteat refers was the brainchild of two young aircraft designers who worked for Hitler’s Luftwaffe, Walter and Reimar Horten. These are the same two brothers who, in the fall of 1947, became the subject of the U.S. Army Intelligence’s massive European manhunt called “Operation Harass”—the search for a flying-saucer-type aircraft that could allegedly hover and fly.

Whatever happened to the Horten brothers? Unlike so many Nazi scientists and engineers who were recruited under Operation Paperclip, Walter and Reimar Horten were originally overlooked. After being captured by the U.S. Ninth Army on April 7, 1945, at their workshop in Göttingen, they were set up in a guarded London high-rise near Hyde Park. There, they were interrogated by the famous American physicist and rocket scientist Theodore Von Kármán, who decided the Horten brothers did not have much to offer the U.S. Army Air Forces by way of aircraft technology—at least not with their flying wing. After being returned to Germany, Reimar escaped to Argentina, where he was set up in a beautiful house on the shores of Villa Carlos Paz Lake, thanks to Argentinean president and ardent Nazi supporter Juan Perón. Walter lived out his life in Baden-Baden, Germany, hiding in plain sight.

The information about the Horten brothers comes from the aircraft historian David Myhra, who, in his search to understand all-wing aircraft, industriously tracked down both Horten brothers, visited them in their respective countries in the 1980s, and recorded hundreds of hours of interviews with them on audiotape. These tapes can be found in the archives of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

“Reimar had me agree to two restrictions before I went to South America to interview him,” Myhra explains. “One was that I couldn’t ask questions about Hitler or the Third Reich.” And the second was that “he said he didn’t want to talk about the CIA. Reimar said there was this crazy idea that he’d designed some kind of a flying saucer and that the CIA had [supposedly] been looking for him.” Myhra says Reimar Horten was adamant in his refusal to discuss anything related to the CIA. “The subject was off-limits for him,” Myhra says. The conversation with Reimar Horten that Myhra refers to took place in the decade before Army Intelligence released to the public its three-hundred-page file on Operation Harass. This is the file that discusses the U.S. manhunt for the Horten brothers and their so-called flying disc. The Operation Harass file makes clear that someone from an American intelligence organization made contact with Reimar in the late 1940s to interrogate him about the flying disc. More than forty years later, Reimar Horten still refused to talk about what was said. A 2010 Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of the Army, Office of the General Counsel, Army Pentagon, issued a “no records response.” A secondary appeal was also “denied.”

If Stalin really did get the Horten brothers’ flying disc, either from the brothers themselves or from blueprints they had drawn, how did Stalin get their flying disc to hover and fly on like that? What became of the craft’s hover technology, powered by some mysterious power plant, which was also so fervently sought by Counter Intelligence Corps agents during Operation Harass? The EG&G engineer says that while he does not know what research was conducted on the “equipment” when it was at Wright-Patterson, beginning