There may well be a "German connection".
In April of 1950, the Joint Intelligence Council investigated the matter of flying saucers. In a report sent to the Canadian Defence Research Board (DRB) in 1953, the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) noted that German engineers had filed patents for flying-saucer-like craft they had supposedly developed towards the end of the war.
A number of former German soldiers claimed of having worked on saucer-like aircraft. In 1959, a book entitled, "German Secret Weapons of the Second World War," claimed the "Foo Fighters" were the product of Hitler's war machine. One individual who believed the Nazis had developed such, devices was aeronautical engineer John Carver Meadows Frost of A.V. Roe Canada Limited.
On February 20 1959, all AVRO projects were canceled (not just the VTOL discs), Avro Canada was closed. This immediately put over 50,000 people out of work at the plants and outside suppliers. A large number of engineers were immediately recruited to NASA.
Declassified top secret reports from the U.S. show they had a real concern that the West might be lagging behind the Soviets in this type of development, especially if the latter had inherited the work of captured German aeronautical specialists.
