The year was 1945. Even as it became apparent that the tide of the war was turning in favor of the Allies, German scientists working for the Nazis still had a few tricks up their sleeves. Secret devices were being built in the labs and factories of the underground complexes in the Harz Mountains and elsewhere.
Late in the war, Allied pilots began to see unusual lights and silvery globes flying at their wingtips. They nicknamed these foo fighters and kraut fireballs thinking they were some new secret weapon of the Nazis. The objects, however, never attacked an allied plane, they just flew near them.
These feuerballs were unmanned, remote controlled devices whose main purpose was to jam the radar of the Allied planes and to confuse and intimidate them. They would have been great offensive weapons, but no satisfactory method of arming them was found in time. A larger, manned version, called the kugelblitz, was being built and tested, but the war ended before it could put into service.
In 1938, Hitler had sent an expedition headed by Captain Alfred Richter to the part of Antarctica just opposite the tip of South America to locate a site for a secret base, and by 1945 the base was completed. In the spring of 1945, when the fall of the Third Reich had become inevitable, the untested kugelblitz, along with the engineers overseeing its construction, were loaded into a submarine, the U-977, and taken to this ultra-secret underground Nazi base. After delivering this cargo, the U-977 and those of the crew who did not wish to spend the rest of their lives in an underground base put in at Mar del Plata, Argentina on August 17, 1945.
The U-977 crew thought that they would get a friendly reception in Argentina, but they were immediately turned over to the United States as prisoners of war. They were thoroughly interrogated several times by the Americans and the British before going through the normal prisoner of war process.
As a result of these interrogations, the United States invaded Queen Maud Land in January 1947 to determine for sure whether or not there was a Nazi secret base there. Led by Admiral Richard E. Byrd, the force consisted of thirteen ships, two seaplane tenders, an aircraft carrier, twelve other aircraft, six helicopters, and a force of 4,000 men. The expedition was called Operation Highjump, and its cover mission was that of mapping the entire Antarctic coastline.
Byrd lost many men and several aircraft to the Nazis the first day. The expedition, which had been planned to last for several months, was cut short after a few weeks.
According to the newspaper Brisant, Byrd reportedly told a reporter later:
"...it was necessary for the USA to take defensive actions against enemy air fighters which come from the polar regions.." "...fighters that are able to fly from one pole to the other with incredible speed."
The United States then withdrew from the Antarctic for several years, and UFOs began to be seen around the world in increasing numbers.
It's certainly true that the Nazis were working on secret weapons all through the war and that they had underground complexes in the Harz Mountains and elsewhere. There was evidence that they planned to make their last stand, if necessary, in a huge underground complex in the Alps called the Alpine Redoubt. However, those plans never materialized and the complex was never finished.
It's also true that Allied pilots saw unusual lights and objects in the skies over Europe and the Far East. However, while the Allies thought these were Nazi secret weapons, the German pilots saw them too and thought they were Allied secret weapons. No explanation for these foo fighters was ever found.
The feuerball story is one of several regarding Nazi flying disks and it comes from the writings of Renato Vesco. Vesco's book Intercept UFO was released as a collaboration with David Hatcher Childress and re-titled Man-Made UFOs 1944-1994. Vesco was a member of the Italian Air Force during World War Two who became interested in UFOs and German secret weapons after the war. He claims to have obtained his information from British war documents.
His thesis of the purpose of foo fighters being to jam radar doesn't really pan out. There are no reports that radar jamming occurred when foo fighters were in the area. If the Nazis had actually had such craft, it seems more likely that they would have packed them full of explosives, flown them near an Allied plane, and then detonated them. However, flying such a craft at high altitudes and making the reported maneuvers of the objects by remote control would have been close to impossible with the technology available at the time.
Hitler may have sent an expedition to the Antarctic in 1938 and claimed part of Queen Maud Land for Germany as Neuschwabenland, but there's little documented information about such an expedition to be found. Nor is there any evidence that a secret base was ever built there. The area is claimed by Norway today.
There was certainly an Operation Highjump led by Admiral Richard E. Byrd in 1947. The expedition took over 70,000 aerial photographs of the Antarctic coastline. The numbers of ships, planes, and men given is correct, but it was hardly an invasion force. Just after the war ended, ships and planes were surplus. There was little else for them to be used for, so the navy was happy to send them to Antarctica with Byrd. As for the expedition losing many men & planes, that's an exaggeration. One PBM flew too low, grazed the surface, and exploded. Three men died as a result, and the rest of the crew was rescued. Byrd, who had never lost any men on any of his expeditions, was so upset over the loss of life that he cut the expedition short.
Operation Highjump did discover an area free of ice that contained unusually colored "lakes", that they called an oasis. A sample of the lake water was obtained and on analysis it was found that the water was brackish, indicating that the "lakes" were connected to the sea. The color came from abundant algae growth. The press seized on this discovery before it was shown that the water was salty and the "oasis" was later touted as evidence for not only a secret base, but as evidence for an opening into a hollow interior of the Earth as well.
There's no evidence that Byrd ever actually made the statements attributed to him by the Brisant.
The U-977 did indeed dock at Mar del Plata , Argentina on August 17, 1945, months after the war was over. The reason, while fascinating, was not because they carried Nazi UFOs and scientists to Antarctica. The real reason was that many of the crewmembers did not wish to surrender to the Allies in Germany. After secretly dropping off those that did, Captain Schaeffer took his U-boat from Germany to Argentina, spending sixty days submerged during the voyage. Argentina was expected to be a safe haven for them. Due to the fact that the Russians captured Berlin and the remains of Hitler's corpse, some people in Allied intelligence thought he was still alive. Those skeptical of Hitler's death suspected Schaeffer and U-977 of spiriting Hitler out of Germany, and that's why he was interrogated at such great length.