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There is no mention of Reimar Horten, the second brother, in any of the hundreds of pages of documents released to Timothy Cooper as part of his Freedom of Information Act request—despite the fact that both brothers had been confirmed as located and interrogated. Nor is there any mention of what Reimar Horten did or did not say about the later-model Horten flying discs. But one memo mentioned “the Horten X” and another referred to “the Horten 13.” No further details have been provided, and a 2011 Freedom of Information Act request by the author met a dead end.

On May 12, 1948, the headquarters of European command sent the director of intelligence at the United States Forces in Austria a puzzling memo. “Walter Horten has admitted his contacts with the Russians,” it said. That was the last mention of the Horten brothers in the Army intelligence’s declassified record for Operation Harass.

Whatever else officially exists on the Horten brothers and their advanced flying saucer continues to be classified as of 2011, and the crash remains from Roswell quickly fell into the blackest regions of government. They would stay at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base for approximately four years. From there, they would quietly be shipped out west to become intertwined with a secret facility out in the middle of the Nevada desert. No one but a handful of people would have any idea they were there.

CHAPTER THREE

The Secret Base

It was a foggy evening in 1951 and Richard Mervin Bissell was sitting in his parlor in Washington, DC, when there was an unexpected knock at the door. There stood a man by the name of Frank Wisner. The two gentlemen had never met before but according to Bissell, Wisner was “very much part of our inner circle of people,” which included diplomats, statesmen, and spies. At the time, Bissell held the position of the executor of finance of the Marshall Plan, America’s landmark economic recovery plan to infuse postwar Europe with thirteen billion dollars in cash that began in 1948. Being executor of finance meant Bissell was the program’s top moneyman. All Bissell knew about Frank Wisner at the time was that he was a top-level civil servant with the new Central Intelligence Agency.

Wisner, a former Olympic competitor, had once been considered handsome. An Office of Strategic Services spy during the war, Wisner was rumored to be the paramour of Princess Caradja of Romania. Now, although not yet forty years old, Wisner had lost his hair, his physique, and his good looks to what would later be revealed as mental illness and alcoholism—but the true signs of his downfall were not yet clear. During the fireside chat in Richard Bissell’s Washington parlor, Bissell quickly learned that Frank Wisner was the man in charge of a division of the CIA called the Office of Policy Coordination, or OPC. At the time, not much was known about America’s intelligence agency because the CIA was only three and a half years old. As for the mysterious office called OPC, only a handful of people knew its true purpose. Bissell had heard in cocktail conversation that OPC was “engaged in the battle against Communism through covert means.” In reality, the bland-sounding Office of Policy Coordination was the power center for all of the Agency’s covert operations. All black and paramilitary operations ran through OPC. The office had been set up by the former secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, who was also the nation’s first secretary of defense.

Seated beside the fire in the parlor that foggy evening in 1951, Wisner told Bissell that the OPC needed money. “He asked me to help finance the OPC’s covert operations by releasing a modest amount of funds generated by the Marshall Plan,” Bissell later explained. Mindful of the gray-area nature of Wisner’s request, Bissell asked for more details. Wisner declined, saying that he’d already said what he was allowed to say. But Wisner assured Bissell that Averell Harriman, the powerful statesman, financier, former