On today’s Good Trouble Show with Matt Ford, Chris Sharp brought up the Magenta, Italy crash-retrieval of 1933 that David Grusch referenced in his interview with Ross Coulthart in 2023 and again in the Congressional hearing and National Archives documents regarding the case
On today’s Good Trouble Show with Matt Ford, Chris Sharp brought up the Magenta, Italy crash-retrieval of 1933 that David Grusch referenced in his interview with Ross Coulthart in 2023 and again in the Congressional hearing and National Archives documents regarding the case
In Chris Sharp’s interview today on the Good Trouble Show with Matt Ford, amongst other mind-blowing claims, he references the 1933 Magenta crash that a couple of us have been focused on here.
In particular, something Sharp found on Reddit that a lead guy involved with the OSS in capturing Italy kept kept notes regarding a mission to “expedite the surrender of Italy, and they were capturing scientists, they were capturing Admirals…”
“When they got to Northern Italy, the mission to expedite the surrender of Italy, was moved into, I believe, was the US Army R&D (Research and Development). So why would a mission to expedite the surrender of Italy get moved to an R&D…that might be the same R&D division that the Manhattan Project came under as well. Did they come across the Magenta craft, and then did they decide to move that mission to…R&D…something totally different because they had to retrieve it, and get it to US soil perhaps to reverse-engineer it.”
“Some missing parts of that are kept within NARA. Although I believe some of those documents have been looked at by the CIA as well. Some elements of those might be missing or redacted by the CIA who actually went through them in the 1980s.”
Thanks to u/36_39_42, was this the Alsos Mission under Leslie Groves?
“A little-known operation of the Manhattan Engineer District took place in Europe. Code-named the “Alsos” Mission, these intelligence-gathering operations moved with the advancing Allies to learn firsthand how close Germany was to developing its own atomic weapon. Under the command of General Leslie Groves, these operations succeeded in capturing most of the key German scientists, stores of uranium ore and other nuclear raw materials, and thousands of research documents regarding the development of atomic energy.
When Groves learned the origins of the code name “Alsos,” he was infuriated: “The Manhattan Project always carefully avoided drawing undue attention to its work and to its people. Code names for our projects were deliberately innocuous. Imagine my horror, then, when I learned that the G-2 had given the scientific intelligence mission to Italy the names “Alsos,” which one of my more scholarly colleagues promptly informed me was the Greek word for “groves.” My first inclination was to have the mission renamed, but I decided that to change it now would only draw attention to it.”
A number of European physicists, including Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi, and Emilio Segre, were extremely worried about a German effort to build an atomic bomb. After all, uranium had been split for the first time in Nazi Germany in 1938 and German physicists such as Werner Heisenberg and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker were regarded as leaders in their field. Many believed that Germany might have as much as a two-year lead in the development of a nuclear weapon. Unless the United States had positive knowledge to the contrary, they assumed that the most competent German scientists and engineers were working on an atomic program with the full capacity of German industry at their disposal.”
# Alsos I: Italy
The objectives of the first Alsos mission in Italy was to obtain advance information regarding scientific developments in enemy research and development and to secure all important persons, laboratories, and scientific information immediately upon their becoming available. The Italian Mission was first assembled in Algiers on December 14, 1943. In addition to Lt. Col. Boris Pash, there was an executive officer, four interpreters, four CIC agents and four scientists: Maj. William Allis, Lt. Cdr. Bruce S. Old, Dr. James B. Fisk (OSRD) and Dr. John R. Johnson (also from the OSRD). Maj. Robert Furman and Morris “Moe” Berg were also included in this mission.
Intelligence officials were able to make contact with two Italian scientists, Edoardo Amaldi and Gian Carlo Wick. Both scientists admitted that they had not done any atomic research for the Germans or anyone else, and suspected that even if the Germans were working on an atomic bomb it would have taken them at least a decade to complete it. Though the mission was unable to obtain any conclusive information about Germany’s experimentation with atomic energy, several other scientific-type discoveries were of significant use to the Allies.
“Though the Manhattan District office in New York remained open until the end of the war, the Manhattan Project headquarters moved to Oak Ridge in August 1943, and Brigadier General Leslie Groves, appointed to command the Manhattan Project in 1942, established his office in Washington, DC.”
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In Chris Sharp’s interview today on the Good Trouble Show with Matt Ford, amongst other mind-blowing claims, he references the 1933 Magenta crash that a couple of us have been focused on here.
In particular, something Sharp found on Reddit that a lead guy involved with the OSS in capturing Italy kept kept notes regarding a mission to “expedite the surrender of Italy, and they were capturing scientists, they were capturing Admirals…”
“When they got to Northern Italy, the mission to expedite the surrender of Italy, was moved into, I believe, was the US Army R&D (Research and Development). So why would a mission to expedite the surrender of Italy get moved to an R&D…that might be the same R&D division that the Manhattan Project came under as well. Did they come across the Magenta craft, and then did they decide to move that mission to…R&D…something totally different because they had to retrieve it, and get it to US soil perhaps to reverse-engineer it.”
“Some missing parts of that are kept within NARA. Although I believe some of those documents have been looked at by the CIA as well. Some elements of those might be missing or redacted by the CIA who actually went through them in the 1980s.”
Thanks to u/36_39_42, was this the Alsos Mission under Leslie Groves?
[https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/alsos-mission/](https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/alsos-mission/)
“A little-known operation of the Manhattan Engineer District took place in Europe. Code-named the “Alsos” Mission, these intelligence-gathering operations moved with the advancing Allies to learn firsthand how close Germany was to developing its own atomic weapon. Under the command of General Leslie Groves, these operations succeeded in capturing most of the key German scientists, stores of uranium ore and other nuclear raw materials, and thousands of research documents regarding the development of atomic energy.
When Groves learned the origins of the code name “Alsos,” he was infuriated: “The Manhattan Project always carefully avoided drawing undue attention to its work and to its people. Code names for our projects were deliberately innocuous. Imagine my horror, then, when I learned that the G-2 had given the scientific intelligence mission to Italy the names “Alsos,” which one of my more scholarly colleagues promptly informed me was the Greek word for “groves.” My first inclination was to have the mission renamed, but I decided that to change it now would only draw attention to it.”
A number of European physicists, including Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi, and Emilio Segre, were extremely worried about a German effort to build an atomic bomb. After all, uranium had been split for the first time in Nazi Germany in 1938 and German physicists such as Werner Heisenberg and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker were regarded as leaders in their field. Many believed that Germany might have as much as a two-year lead in the development of a nuclear weapon. Unless the United States had positive knowledge to the contrary, they assumed that the most competent German scientists and engineers were working on an atomic program with the full capacity of German industry at their disposal.”
# Alsos I: Italy
The objectives of the first Alsos mission in Italy was to obtain advance information regarding scientific developments in enemy research and development and to secure all important persons, laboratories, and scientific information immediately upon their becoming available. The Italian Mission was first assembled in Algiers on December 14, 1943. In addition to Lt. Col. Boris Pash, there was an executive officer, four interpreters, four CIC agents and four scientists: Maj. William Allis, Lt. Cdr. Bruce S. Old, Dr. James B. Fisk (OSRD) and Dr. John R. Johnson (also from the OSRD). Maj. Robert Furman and Morris “Moe” Berg were also included in this mission.
Intelligence officials were able to make contact with two Italian scientists, Edoardo Amaldi and Gian Carlo Wick. Both scientists admitted that they had not done any atomic research for the Germans or anyone else, and suspected that even if the Germans were working on an atomic bomb it would have taken them at least a decade to complete it. Though the mission was unable to obtain any conclusive information about Germany’s experimentation with atomic energy, several other scientific-type discoveries were of significant use to the Allies.
More on Leslie Groves and the Manhattan Project:
[https://www.usace.army.mil/About/History/Historical-Vignettes/Military-Construction-Combat/113-Atomic-Bomb/](https://www.usace.army.mil/About/History/Historical-Vignettes/Military-Construction-Combat/113-Atomic-Bomb/)
“Though the Manhattan District office in New York remained open until the end of the war, the Manhattan Project headquarters moved to Oak Ridge in August 1943, and Brigadier General Leslie Groves, appointed to command the Manhattan Project in 1942, established his office in Washington, DC.”