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US Air Force’s 1950s supersonic flying saucer declassified

291 points by Hellcat 14y ago

stcredzero 14y ago
What's with the Extremetech mobile site for iPad? There's nothing but black and a slow moving "ring of death" for like 30 seconds. Then I can see the page, but nothing responds for forever. Then after about a minute, the page is all there but then has to refresh again. What is this? Completely incompetent. Does anyone even test this? I'm on wired connection over 802.11n. There's no excuse for this dial up modem like performance!
- templaedhel 14y ago
  That would be onswipe [http://onswipe.com/ http://onswipe.com/]. They offer a plugin/integration that makes your site "mobile ready" and optimized, meanwhile displaying ads and getting revenue from that. Except they don't. They just overrule scrolling and cut off content and bombard you with ads. There is a lengthly bashing of them here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2699610 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2699610. "OnSwipe has become a perfect tool for preventing me from viewing content I'd otherwise happily read."
- freehunter 14y ago
  On mobile sites, I'm glad for the Stop button. Once I can see what I want to see, if the page is still trying to load something I just hit stop and in many cases, the content displays just fine without their layover ads or extra JS bullcrap.
- js2 14y ago
  Non-swipe link http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/137505-us-air-forces-1950s-supersonic-flying-saucer-declassified?onswipe_redirect=never http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/137505-us-air-forces-1950... (added as a sibling comment as well).
tinfoilman 14y ago
Yes and the US air force stole the designs from the Nazi's after ww2. There are a number of images floating around that showed the nazi's were testing designs with Saucers, that being said it is only really the tin foil hat crew that would believe this crazyness. http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/3546515/Hitler-ordered-fleet-of-Nazi-flying-saucers-capable-of-destroying-London-and-New-York.html http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/3546515/Hitler... http://www.naziufos.com/ http://www.naziufos.com/ https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=nazi+Saucers&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=nazi+Saucers&ie=utf-8&... yes yes some of these links are very questionable :/ But where the hell do you find information about hese things. Personally I have always had the option that there must be grains of truths in even the oddest conspiry theorys. tl:dr = nazi's started hte reseach, before the end of WW2 they destoryed most of it to stop the allies getting it. Allies saw it, tried to replicate it and failed badly. The Real tinhatcrew believes that the nazi's that escaped took this research to russia, how has also experimented with saucers. if i remember correctly the usa could only get them to hover about 12ft off the ground :/
- indiecore 14y ago
  I thought they escaped to Antarctica and went into the hollow earth through the polar openings.
  - tinfoilman 14y ago
    Then they went deep underground and met some greys who killed all but hilter and then he became their king. All the while using the technology of the acients that was trapped under the ice in the pole from the orignal Arc, which is the last bit of technology from the race of people that lived on earch before the big flood 5000 years ago, which started the mayan creation story AND gave birth to Noans arc story.
  - TeMPOraL 14y ago
    Last time I checked they went to Antarctica, but then to the dark side of the Moon. I've seen a movie about it!
- 14y ago
mainevent 14y ago
Some further info on the VZ-9 Avrocar referenced in the article: http://www.zl2al.com/blog/the-avro-flying-saucer http://www.zl2al.com/blog/the-avro-flying-saucer
ImprovedSilence 14y ago
Interesting article, also led me on a tangent to check out the Coanda effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coand%C4%83_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coand%C4%83_effect
- flurpitude 14y ago
  The explanation of what causes the effect is very poor on that page. Does anyone have a better one?
  - draggnar 14y ago
    so from what I understand, the air bends around a surface the way water sticks to the side of a teapot. The nozzle design has a "step", a little cutout at the top of the curve closest to where the air is exiting from. This little step causes a small vortex, or eddy, like in a river. The vortex causes an area of lower pressure which bends the stream of air. You can clearly see the exhaust nozzles on "fig-1" of the declassified documents: http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Fig-1-Cutaway.jpg http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Fig-1-... Figure 2 has labels cut off, but there seems to be 6 engines around the craft, forcing air to 6 points (note where it is labeled "engine access panel"): http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Fig-2-Cutaway-of-Aircraft-Structure-e1348157629308.jpg http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Fig-2-... The article that explains the effect: http://www.pdf-archive.com/2011/09/07/applications-of-the-coanda-effect-ocr/# http://www.pdf-archive.com/2011/09/07/applications-of-the-co...
junto 14y ago
It stands to reason that if I'd spent millions of public dollars on several failed black funded secret military projects trying to get a flying saucer in the air, then I'd also hide that fact from the public. Logically, if they were successful, they would have been spun off into a massive private corporate venture by now. To be honest I'm surprised they declassified it. Does anyone know if the the US military have a requirement to do so?
- jcurbo 14y ago
  It depends, but in general there is a time limit on classification. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declassification#United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declassification#United_States explains it pretty well, and http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13526 http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13526 is the executive order that governs the classification system used by the US Government.
- Dove 14y ago
  They do. The rules for classification of documents come from Executive Order 13526: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13526#Part_1 http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13526#Part_1 The upshot is that when a classified document is created, it comes with a declassification date. They can be 10 to 25 years in the future. There are also specific exemptions that come with 50 or even 75 year timers. After that it's automatically declassified unless a review determines that it's still sensitive. So you can generally expect to see declassified documents on a 50-, 25-, and 10-year delay. If you're worried about information being classified to prevent embarrassment, though, that's illegal: Sec 1.7 (a) In no case shall information be classified, continue to be maintained as classified, or fail to be declassified in order to: (1) conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error; (2) prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency; (3) restrain competition; or (4) prevent or delay the release of information that does not require protection in the interest of the national security. While that doesn't make it impossible that it happens, it does mean anyone with access to the information has a duty to report that sort of fraud to legal authorities if they encounter it.
anonymouz 14y ago
I'd like to see what became of the project and why it was apparently canceled. I disagree however with the last statement of the article: "If flying saucers were somehow faster or more efficient or capable of lifting heavier loads, we would almost certainly see them in a commercial setting." Just because flying saucers aren't used commercially doesn't necessarily imply that they are inefficient. It just means that the flying saucer technology we have at the moment is more inefficient than the fixed wing technology. Fixed wing technology could simply be ahead because it has seen a lot more iterative development. Endeavors of this kind, that carry a huge upfront investment in the initial technology compared to what's on the market now, tend to be things where a free market really performs badly.
- hammock 14y ago
  Technology moving from the military to the private sector is rarely a free market activity. It's much more common for the Pentagon to have bankrolled the upfront R&D costs of a defense contractor, who first provides it to the military and then transitions it to commercial use.
- deleted 14y ago
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- deleted 14y ago
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- starpilot 14y ago
  Saucers are fixed-wings. A saucer wing has a very low aspect ratio, which has very low aerodynamic efficiency in cruise. The high-aspect trapezoidal wing we commonly see today is used because it produces much less drag while providing sufficient wing area to lift the aircraft. This has been understood since the 1930s, if not earlier. I can't see why a saucer airframe would be desirable unless it spent a lot of time in backwards and sideways horizontal flight, where it might have better stability than a traditional wing. The complexity of the controls and thrust arrangement wouldn't seem outweighed by this though. Actual test performance of Avro's saucers never exceeded altitudes of a few feet and speeds of a few mph.
romaniv 14y ago
Maybe it's just me, but I find it very cool that people actually looked at alternative design of aircraft and stuff like Project Orion. Yes, it's a waste of money. But at least it's a fairly creative waste of money that could have produced some interesting technologies.
- sukuriant 14y ago
  People would generally only call it a waste of money when things don't work. If this had produced (or is producing and we don't know about it) great advances --- even the greatest advances, we could call it "the greatest use of money". It's strange how usefulness is sometimes defined as the end-result usefulness ... something they had no way of measuring until it was done, especially with something new.
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  Project Orion was only a waste of money in the short-term. Long-term nuclear pulse propulsion will probably be put to practical use. Potential Earth impacting asteroids are fairly easy to protect against, you spend a lot of effort cataloging them and then you find the ones that could hit Earth 50, 100, even a thousand years in the future and then you go and you nudge those asteroids just enough to put them onto a non-impacting course. But there are also long period comets that come in from the oort cloud. We may never have the technology to fully catalog all those objects (out to thousands of AU up to a light-year distant from the Sun). Which means that even our very much more technologically advanced future selves will almost certainly still be faced with the potential problem of having to intercept and divert an Earth-impacting oort cloud comet that has wandered into the inner Solar System. And to do so not with a century of lead time but with only a few years. And, worse yet, to have to trudge out to the outer Solar System in the first place just to have a chance to divert the thing in time. This calls for a vehicle with a stupendous amount of thrust and delta-V capability. Precisely what nuclear pulse propulsion excels at. More so, the "pulse units" can do double duty by being used to divert the comet (using thrust generated by ablation from stand-off explosions). So ultimately research into nuclear pulse propulsion is likely to be key to preventing the destruction of human civilization on Earth.
js2 14y ago
Non-swipe link: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/137505-us-air-forces-1950s-supersonic-flying-saucer-declassified?onswipe_redirect=never http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/137505-us-air-forces-1950...
- hnriot 14y ago
  thank you. I look forward to an internet without Swipe putting its nose into web pages. My iPad renders webpages just fine without this nonsense.
  - notatoad 14y ago
    personally, i like swipe. If i see it start loading, i know that there's virtually no chance of interesting content on the pages that follow, so i can back out quickly. It seems as though the only sites that use it are terrible blogspam sites like extremetech.
  - SoftwareMaven 14y ago
    I use iCab Mobile and have filtered out Swipe using its ad blocker. It is really a scourge, IMO.
  - raldi 14y ago
    If you install Chrome, there's a menu option for "Request Desktop Site"
jared314 14y ago
I wonder if you could reuse those old designs for drones.
zackmorris 14y ago
We desperately need some new ideas in aerospace. Here is one for an airship to orbit, that would use EHD thrusters to get to orbit electrically, maybe with energy beamed from the ground in microwaves: http://www.jpaerospace.com/ http://www.jpaerospace.com/ Here is more about the EHD effect and lifters, including the TT Brown effect: http://jnaudin.free.fr/ http://jnaudin.free.fr/ It's all real and has been replicated numerous times. I think it's a shame that it's not covered in history books. It would be straightforward to build a saucer or some other shape to get to the edge of space and then use conventional rockets to get to orbital speed. But research like that isn't funded for the same reason that green energy is barely funded - it's not sexy. There's little profit in it. And people with money just don't have the vision to pull it off. It breaks my heart that geeks are getting people to click ads or working as quants on wall street instead of picking the low lying fruit that could take us into the 21st century.
- rory096 14y ago
  Stratolaunch (funded by Paul Allen & Burt Rutan) is partnering with SpaceX to build an air-launched Falcon 9: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratolaunch_Systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratolaunch_Systems Why would a saucer or other shape make more sense than proven fixed-wing aircraft designs?
  - btyrad 14y ago
    Thanks for the link Rory, I had to go searching a little deeper to actually find an image of the Falcon 9 Air. Pretty cool: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/12/pictures-and-information-from.html http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/12/pictures-and-information-fr...
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  "It would be straightforward to build a saucer or some other shape to get to the edge of space and then use conventional rockets to get to orbital speed. But research like that isn't funded for the same reason that green energy is barely funded - it's not sexy." The link wasn't to a 'green' energy site, 'over unity' is a perpetual motion machine web site. I believe simple ways to get into orbit are not funded for the same reason that perpetual motion machines aren't funded, because if they actually work there is a simple path to riches with zero dollars, thus there is no need for funding of working concepts. The same is true for 'straightforward to the edge of space'. If you can combine free energy with easy access to high altitude you can put a cell phone repeater at 100,000' and sell phones with solid coverage in an 36 mile diameter circle for tons of money. Just putting a passive antenna up there that you could bounce UHF digital TV signals off of would get you tons of cash to fund even more 'unsexy' projects!
deleted 14y ago
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lectrick 14y ago
Art imitates life I guess. I'm fairly certain that projects of this nature were modeled after UFO reports (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo_fighter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo_fighter), and not the cause of them themselves (who would fly a top-secret aircraft in full view of the public, anyway?) (yes, to any younger folks out there who don't already know, the band of the same name was named after the phenomenon)
evantish 14y ago
I don't understand where the Coanda effect is coming into play here. From the first cutaway drawing (http://goo.gl/QKOJy http://goo.gl/QKOJy), it appears that the outer disk rotates independently of the main hub--possibly powered by the central turbines forcing air outward to the wing? It also shows the air in-take port(s) where you would expect outward thrusting air. And, it seems, like the Coanda effect relies on a more spherical shape, as opposed to the very flat sketch shown. How would that design produce the Coanda effect? I am basing my questions on what I could glean from Wikipedia and a couple Youtube videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPUAq3QObp4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPUAq3QObp4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqxJe-RMUsI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqxJe-RMUsI
kfury 14y ago
So with a top speed of 2,300-3,000 mph and a range of 1,000 miles, it could sustain top speed for what, 20-25 minutes, assuming no fuel required to achieve altitude or for landing? It's hard to imagine the mission profile such a vehicle would fit. ...other than doing a short-range, high-speed insertion of a bomb delivered from high altitude. In the 1950s. Oh, nevermind.
- njharman 14y ago
  Interceptors (a type of craft made obsolete buy long range surface-to-air missles) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt_Me_163 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt_Me_163
sprash 14y ago
So it turns out that all the "UFO" sighting descriptions near Area 51 were pretty accurate after all.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
I really chuckled at this. It almost reads like a disinformation campaign.
- marshray 14y ago
  I think the most likely explanation is some combination of a) the Pentagon wanted to throw money at some Canadian aircraft firms, and b) they wanted some authentic uselessness to leak to the Soviets.
CWIZO 14y ago
I'm not a conspiracy theorist and this is slightly off topic, but please bear with me. I'm just thinking out loud here. One of the main counter points to 9/11 government conspiracy, is that a operation of that scale just couldn't be keept a secret, since to many people would be involved (and the government is all together useless). Yet here we are with a freaking flying saucer that the government did make, and apparently keept secret for over 50 years! I don't know how many people ware involved, but I'd imagine that a lot. So ... I guess they can keep big secrets?
- intended 14y ago
  In a time before the Internet, and around the cold war. Both very important factors with cascading effects and repercussions.
- njharman 14y ago
  We don't know how secret this was? Did the KGB / other spy orgs know? It's possible many UFO saucer sightings were test flights of this or similar craft. Also, I've heard of the Avro saucer car before.
- signalsignal 14y ago
  They didn't keep it secret for 50 years. It even has a wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar
  - MBCook 14y ago
    That appears to be a different craft.
- Tycho 14y ago
  An another explanation for those sorts of conspiracies (9/11, JFK...) is that the conspirators were not the perpretrators. Instead, they were people who 'left the door open' and allowed an attack that otherwise would have been easily prevented by the security services. That would require far fewer people.
- 14y ago
joaorj 14y ago
"Ultimately, though, the fact that we use fixed-wing aircraft today is a good indicator that flying saucers, while cool, just aren’t that functional." This means that the article's author is very narrow minded. He's logic: We use fixed-wing aircraft today, so there is nothing we could discover tomorrow that would make us shift from fixed-wing to disc shape. Why do people think they know it all? Or why do people think that today's knowledge will be true tomorrow? Because this is the 16th century and we know the Geocentric model is true?
- slavak 14y ago
  No, he's saying that if the idea was viable it would probably have come to fruition within more than 60 years of research we apparently had time to do on it.
  - joaorj 14y ago
    I disagree, it probably wouldn't, unless it was something very simple. 60 years is nothing. In the next 6000 years most things u can barely dream off will be ancient history. If in last 60 years we didn't discovered something it doesn't mean in the next 600 we won't discovery something 10 times as good as it. If you are not the author you are as narrow minded as him.
nyrath 14y ago
The saucer looks suspiciously like "Project Silver Bug" http://www.foia.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-090218-169.pdf http://www.foia.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-090218-169.... It appeared in many of the popular magazines of the time http://blog.modernmechanix.com/issue/?magname=MechanixIllustrated&magdate=3-1956 http://blog.modernmechanix.com/issue/?magname=MechanixIllust... IIRC it was cancelled because it was incredibly unstable. Had a tendency to spin like a top.
nkurz 14y ago
I'm calling it as a fake. The drawings are in the too-good-to-be-true category, and the Flying Saucer logo is hilarious. No updates since Sept 20, and published with only 4 pages scanned? Is there any evidence for this other than the Wordpress blog on which it appears? Yes, I'll take small bets.
nazgulnarsil 14y ago
Roswell was huge disc shaped microphones listening for Soviet nuclear tests, the whole thing was declassified long ago.
Gravityloss 14y ago
What is new? What are the new sources? The Silver Bug (see this FOIA from 1997: http://www.project1947.com/fig/sb/sb_html.htm http://www.project1947.com/fig/sb/sb_html.htm ) and Avrocar have been known about for years. The headline seems like they just wanted clicks.

291 points by Hellcat 14y ago

What's with the Extremetech mobile site for iPad? There's nothing but black and a slow moving "ring of death" for like 30 seconds. Then I can see the page, but nothing responds for forever. Then after about a minute, the page is all there but then has to refresh again. What is this? Completely incompetent. Does anyone even test this? I'm on wired connection over 802.11n. There's no excuse for this dial up modem like performance!

templaedhel 14y ago
That would be onswipe [http://onswipe.com/ http://onswipe.com/]. They offer a plugin/integration that makes your site "mobile ready" and optimized, meanwhile displaying ads and getting revenue from that. Except they don't. They just overrule scrolling and cut off content and bombard you with ads. There is a lengthly bashing of them here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2699610 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2699610. "OnSwipe has become a perfect tool for preventing me from viewing content I'd otherwise happily read."
freehunter 14y ago
On mobile sites, I'm glad for the Stop button. Once I can see what I want to see, if the page is still trying to load something I just hit stop and in many cases, the content displays just fine without their layover ads or extra JS bullcrap.
js2 14y ago
Non-swipe link http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/137505-us-air-forces-1950s-supersonic-flying-saucer-declassified?onswipe_redirect=never http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/137505-us-air-forces-1950... (added as a sibling comment as well).

tinfoilman 14y ago

Yes and the US air force stole the designs from the Nazi's after ww2. There are a number of images floating around that showed the nazi's were testing designs with Saucers, that being said it is only really the tin foil hat crew that would believe this crazyness. http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/3546515/Hitler-ordered-fleet-of-Nazi-flying-saucers-capable-of-destroying-London-and-New-York.html http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/3546515/Hitler... http://www.naziufos.com/ http://www.naziufos.com/ https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=nazi+Saucers&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=nazi+Saucers&ie=utf-8&... yes yes some of these links are very questionable :/ But where the hell do you find information about hese things. Personally I have always had the option that there must be grains of truths in even the oddest conspiry theorys. tl:dr = nazi's started hte reseach, before the end of WW2 they destoryed most of it to stop the allies getting it. Allies saw it, tried to replicate it and failed badly. The Real tinhatcrew believes that the nazi's that escaped took this research to russia, how has also experimented with saucers. if i remember correctly the usa could only get them to hover about 12ft off the ground :/

indiecore 14y ago
I thought they escaped to Antarctica and went into the hollow earth through the polar openings.
- tinfoilman 14y ago
  Then they went deep underground and met some greys who killed all but hilter and then he became their king. All the while using the technology of the acients that was trapped under the ice in the pole from the orignal Arc, which is the last bit of technology from the race of people that lived on earch before the big flood 5000 years ago, which started the mayan creation story AND gave birth to Noans arc story.
- TeMPOraL 14y ago
  Last time I checked they went to Antarctica, but then to the dark side of the Moon. I've seen a movie about it!
14y ago

mainevent 14y ago

Some further info on the VZ-9 Avrocar referenced in the article: http://www.zl2al.com/blog/the-avro-flying-saucer http://www.zl2al.com/blog/the-avro-flying-saucer

ImprovedSilence 14y ago

Interesting article, also led me on a tangent to check out the Coanda effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coand%C4%83_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coand%C4%83_effect

flurpitude 14y ago
The explanation of what causes the effect is very poor on that page. Does anyone have a better one?
- draggnar 14y ago
  so from what I understand, the air bends around a surface the way water sticks to the side of a teapot. The nozzle design has a "step", a little cutout at the top of the curve closest to where the air is exiting from. This little step causes a small vortex, or eddy, like in a river. The vortex causes an area of lower pressure which bends the stream of air. You can clearly see the exhaust nozzles on "fig-1" of the declassified documents: http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Fig-1-Cutaway.jpg http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Fig-1-... Figure 2 has labels cut off, but there seems to be 6 engines around the craft, forcing air to 6 points (note where it is labeled "engine access panel"): http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Fig-2-Cutaway-of-Aircraft-Structure-e1348157629308.jpg http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Fig-2-... The article that explains the effect: http://www.pdf-archive.com/2011/09/07/applications-of-the-coanda-effect-ocr/# http://www.pdf-archive.com/2011/09/07/applications-of-the-co...

junto 14y ago

It stands to reason that if I'd spent millions of public dollars on several failed black funded secret military projects trying to get a flying saucer in the air, then I'd also hide that fact from the public. Logically, if they were successful, they would have been spun off into a massive private corporate venture by now. To be honest I'm surprised they declassified it. Does anyone know if the the US military have a requirement to do so?

jcurbo 14y ago
It depends, but in general there is a time limit on classification. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declassification#United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declassification#United_States explains it pretty well, and http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13526 http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13526 is the executive order that governs the classification system used by the US Government.
Dove 14y ago
They do. The rules for classification of documents come from Executive Order 13526: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13526#Part_1 http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13526#Part_1 The upshot is that when a classified document is created, it comes with a declassification date. They can be 10 to 25 years in the future. There are also specific exemptions that come with 50 or even 75 year timers. After that it's automatically declassified unless a review determines that it's still sensitive. So you can generally expect to see declassified documents on a 50-, 25-, and 10-year delay. If you're worried about information being classified to prevent embarrassment, though, that's illegal: Sec 1.7 (a) In no case shall information be classified, continue to be maintained as classified, or fail to be declassified in order to: (1) conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error; (2) prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency; (3) restrain competition; or (4) prevent or delay the release of information that does not require protection in the interest of the national security. While that doesn't make it impossible that it happens, it does mean anyone with access to the information has a duty to report that sort of fraud to legal authorities if they encounter it.

anonymouz 14y ago

I'd like to see what became of the project and why it was apparently canceled. I disagree however with the last statement of the article: "If flying saucers were somehow faster or more efficient or capable of lifting heavier loads, we would almost certainly see them in a commercial setting." Just because flying saucers aren't used commercially doesn't necessarily imply that they are inefficient. It just means that the flying saucer technology we have at the moment is more inefficient than the fixed wing technology. Fixed wing technology could simply be ahead because it has seen a lot more iterative development. Endeavors of this kind, that carry a huge upfront investment in the initial technology compared to what's on the market now, tend to be things where a free market really performs badly.

hammock 14y ago
Technology moving from the military to the private sector is rarely a free market activity. It's much more common for the Pentagon to have bankrolled the upfront R&D costs of a defense contractor, who first provides it to the military and then transitions it to commercial use.
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starpilot 14y ago
Saucers are fixed-wings. A saucer wing has a very low aspect ratio, which has very low aerodynamic efficiency in cruise. The high-aspect trapezoidal wing we commonly see today is used because it produces much less drag while providing sufficient wing area to lift the aircraft. This has been understood since the 1930s, if not earlier. I can't see why a saucer airframe would be desirable unless it spent a lot of time in backwards and sideways horizontal flight, where it might have better stability than a traditional wing. The complexity of the controls and thrust arrangement wouldn't seem outweighed by this though. Actual test performance of Avro's saucers never exceeded altitudes of a few feet and speeds of a few mph.

romaniv 14y ago

Maybe it's just me, but I find it very cool that people actually looked at alternative design of aircraft and stuff like Project Orion. Yes, it's a waste of money. But at least it's a fairly creative waste of money that could have produced some interesting technologies.

sukuriant 14y ago
People would generally only call it a waste of money when things don't work. If this had produced (or is producing and we don't know about it) great advances --- even the greatest advances, we could call it "the greatest use of money". It's strange how usefulness is sometimes defined as the end-result usefulness ... something they had no way of measuring until it was done, especially with something new.
InclinedPlane 14y ago
Project Orion was only a waste of money in the short-term. Long-term nuclear pulse propulsion will probably be put to practical use. Potential Earth impacting asteroids are fairly easy to protect against, you spend a lot of effort cataloging them and then you find the ones that could hit Earth 50, 100, even a thousand years in the future and then you go and you nudge those asteroids just enough to put them onto a non-impacting course. But there are also long period comets that come in from the oort cloud. We may never have the technology to fully catalog all those objects (out to thousands of AU up to a light-year distant from the Sun). Which means that even our very much more technologically advanced future selves will almost certainly still be faced with the potential problem of having to intercept and divert an Earth-impacting oort cloud comet that has wandered into the inner Solar System. And to do so not with a century of lead time but with only a few years. And, worse yet, to have to trudge out to the outer Solar System in the first place just to have a chance to divert the thing in time. This calls for a vehicle with a stupendous amount of thrust and delta-V capability. Precisely what nuclear pulse propulsion excels at. More so, the "pulse units" can do double duty by being used to divert the comet (using thrust generated by ablation from stand-off explosions). So ultimately research into nuclear pulse propulsion is likely to be key to preventing the destruction of human civilization on Earth.

js2 14y ago

Non-swipe link: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/137505-us-air-forces-1950s-supersonic-flying-saucer-declassified?onswipe_redirect=never http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/137505-us-air-forces-1950...

hnriot 14y ago
thank you. I look forward to an internet without Swipe putting its nose into web pages. My iPad renders webpages just fine without this nonsense.
- notatoad 14y ago
  personally, i like swipe. If i see it start loading, i know that there's virtually no chance of interesting content on the pages that follow, so i can back out quickly. It seems as though the only sites that use it are terrible blogspam sites like extremetech.
- SoftwareMaven 14y ago
  I use iCab Mobile and have filtered out Swipe using its ad blocker. It is really a scourge, IMO.
- raldi 14y ago
  If you install Chrome, there's a menu option for "Request Desktop Site"

jared314 14y ago

I wonder if you could reuse those old designs for drones.

zackmorris 14y ago

We desperately need some new ideas in aerospace. Here is one for an airship to orbit, that would use EHD thrusters to get to orbit electrically, maybe with energy beamed from the ground in microwaves: http://www.jpaerospace.com/ http://www.jpaerospace.com/ Here is more about the EHD effect and lifters, including the TT Brown effect: http://jnaudin.free.fr/ http://jnaudin.free.fr/ It's all real and has been replicated numerous times. I think it's a shame that it's not covered in history books. It would be straightforward to build a saucer or some other shape to get to the edge of space and then use conventional rockets to get to orbital speed. But research like that isn't funded for the same reason that green energy is barely funded - it's not sexy. There's little profit in it. And people with money just don't have the vision to pull it off. It breaks my heart that geeks are getting people to click ads or working as quants on wall street instead of picking the low lying fruit that could take us into the 21st century.

rory096 14y ago
Stratolaunch (funded by Paul Allen & Burt Rutan) is partnering with SpaceX to build an air-launched Falcon 9: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratolaunch_Systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratolaunch_Systems Why would a saucer or other shape make more sense than proven fixed-wing aircraft designs?
- btyrad 14y ago
  Thanks for the link Rory, I had to go searching a little deeper to actually find an image of the Falcon 9 Air. Pretty cool: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/12/pictures-and-information-from.html http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/12/pictures-and-information-fr...
ChuckMcM 14y ago
"It would be straightforward to build a saucer or some other shape to get to the edge of space and then use conventional rockets to get to orbital speed. But research like that isn't funded for the same reason that green energy is barely funded - it's not sexy." The link wasn't to a 'green' energy site, 'over unity' is a perpetual motion machine web site. I believe simple ways to get into orbit are not funded for the same reason that perpetual motion machines aren't funded, because if they actually work there is a simple path to riches with zero dollars, thus there is no need for funding of working concepts. The same is true for 'straightforward to the edge of space'. If you can combine free energy with easy access to high altitude you can put a cell phone repeater at 100,000' and sell phones with solid coverage in an 36 mile diameter circle for tons of money. Just putting a passive antenna up there that you could bounce UHF digital TV signals off of would get you tons of cash to fund even more 'unsexy' projects!

deleted 14y ago

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lectrick 14y ago

Art imitates life I guess. I'm fairly certain that projects of this nature were modeled after UFO reports (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo_fighter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo_fighter), and not the cause of them themselves (who would fly a top-secret aircraft in full view of the public, anyway?) (yes, to any younger folks out there who don't already know, the band of the same name was named after the phenomenon)

evantish 14y ago

I don't understand where the Coanda effect is coming into play here. From the first cutaway drawing (http://goo.gl/QKOJy http://goo.gl/QKOJy), it appears that the outer disk rotates independently of the main hub--possibly powered by the central turbines forcing air outward to the wing? It also shows the air in-take port(s) where you would expect outward thrusting air. And, it seems, like the Coanda effect relies on a more spherical shape, as opposed to the very flat sketch shown. How would that design produce the Coanda effect? I am basing my questions on what I could glean from Wikipedia and a couple Youtube videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPUAq3QObp4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPUAq3QObp4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqxJe-RMUsI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqxJe-RMUsI

kfury 14y ago

So with a top speed of 2,300-3,000 mph and a range of 1,000 miles, it could sustain top speed for what, 20-25 minutes, assuming no fuel required to achieve altitude or for landing? It's hard to imagine the mission profile such a vehicle would fit. ...other than doing a short-range, high-speed insertion of a bomb delivered from high altitude. In the 1950s. Oh, nevermind.

njharman 14y ago
Interceptors (a type of craft made obsolete buy long range surface-to-air missles) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt_Me_163 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt_Me_163

sprash 14y ago

So it turns out that all the "UFO" sighting descriptions near Area 51 were pretty accurate after all.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

I really chuckled at this. It almost reads like a disinformation campaign.

marshray 14y ago
I think the most likely explanation is some combination of a) the Pentagon wanted to throw money at some Canadian aircraft firms, and b) they wanted some authentic uselessness to leak to the Soviets.

CWIZO 14y ago

I'm not a conspiracy theorist and this is slightly off topic, but please bear with me. I'm just thinking out loud here. One of the main counter points to 9/11 government conspiracy, is that a operation of that scale just couldn't be keept a secret, since to many people would be involved (and the government is all together useless). Yet here we are with a freaking flying saucer that the government did make, and apparently keept secret for over 50 years! I don't know how many people ware involved, but I'd imagine that a lot. So ... I guess they can keep big secrets?

intended 14y ago
In a time before the Internet, and around the cold war. Both very important factors with cascading effects and repercussions.
njharman 14y ago
We don't know how secret this was? Did the KGB / other spy orgs know? It's possible many UFO saucer sightings were test flights of this or similar craft. Also, I've heard of the Avro saucer car before.
signalsignal 14y ago
They didn't keep it secret for 50 years. It even has a wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar
- MBCook 14y ago
  That appears to be a different craft.
Tycho 14y ago
An another explanation for those sorts of conspiracies (9/11, JFK...) is that the conspirators were not the perpretrators. Instead, they were people who 'left the door open' and allowed an attack that otherwise would have been easily prevented by the security services. That would require far fewer people.
14y ago

joaorj 14y ago

"Ultimately, though, the fact that we use fixed-wing aircraft today is a good indicator that flying saucers, while cool, just aren’t that functional." This means that the article's author is very narrow minded. He's logic: We use fixed-wing aircraft today, so there is nothing we could discover tomorrow that would make us shift from fixed-wing to disc shape. Why do people think they know it all? Or why do people think that today's knowledge will be true tomorrow? Because this is the 16th century and we know the Geocentric model is true?

slavak 14y ago
No, he's saying that if the idea was viable it would probably have come to fruition within more than 60 years of research we apparently had time to do on it.
- joaorj 14y ago
  I disagree, it probably wouldn't, unless it was something very simple. 60 years is nothing. In the next 6000 years most things u can barely dream off will be ancient history. If in last 60 years we didn't discovered something it doesn't mean in the next 600 we won't discovery something 10 times as good as it. If you are not the author you are as narrow minded as him.

nyrath 14y ago

The saucer looks suspiciously like "Project Silver Bug" http://www.foia.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-090218-169.pdf http://www.foia.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-090218-169.... It appeared in many of the popular magazines of the time http://blog.modernmechanix.com/issue/?magname=MechanixIllustrated&magdate=3-1956 http://blog.modernmechanix.com/issue/?magname=MechanixIllust... IIRC it was cancelled because it was incredibly unstable. Had a tendency to spin like a top.

nkurz 14y ago

I'm calling it as a fake. The drawings are in the too-good-to-be-true category, and the Flying Saucer logo is hilarious. No updates since Sept 20, and published with only 4 pages scanned? Is there any evidence for this other than the Wordpress blog on which it appears? Yes, I'll take small bets.

nazgulnarsil 14y ago

Roswell was huge disc shaped microphones listening for Soviet nuclear tests, the whole thing was declassified long ago.

Gravityloss 14y ago

What is new? What are the new sources? The Silver Bug (see this FOIA from 1997: http://www.project1947.com/fig/sb/sb_html.htm http://www.project1947.com/fig/sb/sb_html.htm ) and Avrocar have been known about for years. The headline seems like they just wanted clicks.