Walther Johannes Riedel

Walther Johannes Riedel (23 January 1903 – 16 November 1974) was a German rocket engineer whose name appears in the early American UFO press. He is well documented in rocketry history. His link to ufology is documented in contemporary sources, but whether the man quoted in 1952 was the rocket engineer with the Peenemünde résumé is disputed.

Rocketry and Paperclip

Riedel graduated from the Technische Hochschule in Berlin in 1929. From 1936 to 1946 he directed the development of liquid-fuelled rockets at Peenemünde, the Baltic test site where the V-2 was built. Wikipedia describes him as chief of design on the V-2 and says he also worked on the Wasserfall anti-aircraft missile. He was detained during the American occupation and brought to the United States under Operation Paperclip. One account places his arrival at Fort Bliss, Texas, in January 1947, as part of the German team that transferred rocket know-how to the US (Patrick Gross's UFO encyclopedia). North American Aviation (NAA) then employed him to recreate and improve the V-2 at its Southern California plant. He returned to West Germany and died in Hamburg in 1974.

The Civilian Saucer Investigation

The Civilian Saucer Investigation (CSI) was a private UFO study group in Los Angeles, active from about 1951 to 1954 and organised by Edward J. Sullivan. Riedel was a member. A CIA memorandum reproduced by Project 1947 describes “Dr. Walter Riedel” as “formerly Chief Designer at the German Experimental Rocket Center at Peenemuende” who “has been in the US as a ‘paperclip’ scientist for some years.” The memo records that NAA “suggested politely and perhaps indirectly” that he disassociate himself from the group. It also says Riedel described a planned CSI hoax over Los Angeles to test public reaction, and suggests that the Malibu sightings reported on 30 January 1953 might have been that hoax.

LIFE magazine’s feature of 7 April 1952 photographed Sullivan and Riedel and presented CSI as a civilian collector of sighting reports, inviting readers to write to a Los Angeles post-office box (Obscurantist). Wikipedia quotes Riedel from the same article: “I am completely convinced that they have an out-of-world basis,” and he said UFO manoeuvres were ones “only a pilot could perform but that no human pilot could stand.” The same article also reports that he analysed George Adamski’s photographs and judged them faked. The Wikipedia article itself rates the Adamski claim as weakly sourced.

Identity questions and assessment

The main complication is identity. The Riedel quoted in LIFE, and in Popular Mechanics in 1954, appears to have been the NAA engineer working on the V-2 in California. Obscurantist notes that some sources say Walter “Papa” Riedel, the Peenemünde design-office head, emigrated to England and never worked in or visited the United States. Other sources treat Walther Johannes Riedel as the same man. The CIA memo fits the NAA-employed engineer, but it does not settle whether the Peenemünde chief designer and the LIFE-era Riedel were one person.

The case shows how Paperclip-era German expertise and early Cold War UFO enthusiasm overlapped in private study groups. It also shows how quickly a credential could become a source of authority in 1950s coverage. Riedel’s own statements in the 1952 article are the main evidence of his belief, and they rest on a magazine caption and a government memo rather than on any published work of his own. Credibility is rated contested.