Germany lost the Battle of Britain partly thanks to the British radar. The fat baton-bearing lunatic and chief of the Luftwaffe Hermann Göring turned to the Horten brothers to develop something that would give the German air force superiority. They came up with the most advanced plane of the war, one that surpassed everything else out there by three decades but fortunately never had the time to be produced in any kind of significant numbers: The Horten 2-29, an airplane unlike anything else out there, which—as this reconstruction shows—looks alien in its design.

Northrop Grumman's black-op engineers—who usually work in top secret USAF projects like the B-2 Stealth Bomber, Ho 2-29's design heir—analyzed (again?) the remains of the only surviving plane, reconstructed it, and tested its stealth capabilities. It's probably not the first time they have done that, but this time they did it for a National Geographic TV documentary.

As it turns out, Hitler had an stealth fighter in the Ho 2-29. Thanks to the use of wood and carbon—which increased its radar absortion—jet engines integrated into the fuselage, and its blended surfaces, the plane could have been in London eight minutes after the British radar system detected it. In comparison, other planes took 19 minutes since detection to target, which gave the RAF fighter enough time to scramble and hunt down the bastards. The Ho 2-29 would have made the interception almost impossible, if at all.

The bad news is that this plane could have completely changed the course of the war if Germany only had one or two extra years of lead time. Not only in the fight against Britain, but also against the US and the Soviet Union. The Horten brothers had another design based on the Ho 2-29. A design for a intercontinental strategic bomber, the Ho 18.

The 142-foot wingspan bomber was submitted for approval in 1944, and it would have been able to fly from Berlin to NYC and back without refueling, thanks to the same blended wing design and six BMW 003A or eight Junker Jumo 004B turbojets. As the documentary shows, had the Nazis extended the war in 1946 and developed the atomic bomb as planned, the Ho 18 could have been their Enola Gay.

The good news: That's a lot of ifs, the Allies decided to invade Normandy soon enough, and we are all here without wearing stupid outfits, swastikas, and funny moustaches.

Life is good, people, life is good. [Fight Global—Ho XVIII A renderings by Gino Marcomini]

Yes, this is a Caterpillar quickly reducing one of the most groundbreaking fighter aircraft the world has seen to a smoking heap of scrap. Because while they will always look like they're from the future, the Nighthawk's facet-based stealth tech has its origins in the 1970s, and will be replaced by the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning's more advanced systems, which are also cheaper to maintain. What is it about seeing stealth aircraft in a less-than-together state? Reassuring to know such scary-good tech is human, after all? [Ares]