FBI received a tip that the Nazis built a 21-foot saucer craft in 1944, and the engineer behind it vanished without a trace once the war ended

Declassified FBI files released as part of the Trump administration’s sweeping UAP transparency push contain a striking tip from the postwar era: a man named Paul Peyerl told the bureau that the Nazis had developed a secret saucer-shaped aircraft in the Black Forest of Austria in 1944. The document surfaced as part of a massive release of previously classified UFO-related files made public on May 8, 2026. As first highlighted by Fox News, the files are now publicly available for anyone to examine.

According to the declassified documents, Peyerl described the craft as roughly twenty-one feet in diameter and designed as a radio-controlled saucer. The engineering involved mounting several jet engines around the exterior, which would rotate around a stationary center dome. Peyerl also claimed it was his job to photograph the object during flight, stating he had held onto a negative of a photo taken at 7,000 meters, approximately 20,000 feet in the air. He additionally provided a still photograph he said he took at personal risk, showing the craft inside a hangar.

The project’s mastermind was identified as an engineer named Kuehr, who Peyerl said had been conscripted into the German draft and later apprehended by the Gestapo. After the war ended, Kuehr disappeared entirely. Peyerl assumed he had been taken into custody by Allied forces, but his final whereabouts have never been confirmed. The FBI noted that these documents contain neither recommendations nor conclusions from the federal agency.

The disappearing engineer fits a broader postwar pattern

The report connects to a well-documented chapter of postwar American history. The U.S. government ran Operation Paperclip, a classified program that brought more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians to the United States between 1945 and 1959. The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff officially established its precursor, Operation Overcast, on July 20, 1945, with the goal of leveraging German expertise for military research and denying that knowledge to the Soviet Union.

The effort extended well beyond rocketry, covering aerodynamics, aviation medicine, and high-speed flight research. Wernher von Braun, one of the program’s most notable recruits, later became central to the development of the Saturn launch vehicles used in the Apollo program. The program has remained controversial given the Nazi affiliations of many of its recruits. Amid that broader hunt for advanced German engineering talent, reports around Trump’s UFO disclosure push had previously raised questions about how much of the classified record on non-conventional aircraft programs was still being withheld.

There are also lingering theories about figures like Hans Kammler, a senior Nazi engineer whose fate after the war has never been publicly confirmed. Some accounts have speculated he was quietly taken into U.S. custody, though no official record has corroborated that claim. Kuehr’s disappearance fits a similar pattern of German technical personnel whose postwar whereabouts remain unresolved.

The FBI files containing Peyerl’s account make no determination about whether the described craft was real or functional. They represent the kind of raw intelligence tip the bureau was receiving during the chaotic period following the end of World War II, when Allied governments were actively trying to account for the Nazis’ most ambitious scientific programs. The full document release, which also includes footage of unexplained aerial objects and witness statements from law enforcement and military personnel, is hosted at war.gov/UFO and has drawn wide public attention, with debate continuing over what the records actually prove.