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US Air Force's 1950s Supersonic Flying Saucer Declassified
MrSeb writes "Tighten the strap on your tinfoil hat: Recently declassified documents show that the US Air Force was working on, and perhaps had already built, a supersonic flying saucer in 1956. The aircraft, which had the code name Project 1794, was developed by the USAF and Avro Canada in the 1950s. One declassified memo, which seems to be the conclusion of initial research and prototyping, says that Project 1794 is a flying saucer capable of 'between Mach 3 and Mach 4,' (2,300-3,000 mph) a service ceiling of over 100,000 feet (30,500m), and a range of around 1,000 nautical miles (1,150mi, 1850km). According to declassified cutaway diagrams, the supersonic flying saucer would propel itself by rotating an outer disk at very high speed, taking advantage of the Coand effect. Maneuvering would be accomplished by using small shutters on the edge of the disc (similar to ailerons on a winged aircraft). Power would be provided by jet turbines. According to the cutaway diagrams, the entire thing would even be capable of vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL). The fact that there are no disc-shaped aircraft in the skies today, though, suggests that the USAF's flying saucer efforts probably never got past the prototype stage."
the photos look just like some of the descriptions from the last few decades. probably explains the lights too. if its US Government then they have to follow most of their own laws and put lights on an aircraft so others can see it
why would aliens put flashing lights on an interstellar space craft? what is the point of glass and flashing lights in space other than to be broken by tiny particles
The fact that there are no disc-shaped aircraft in the skies today
How did we prove this again?
"The fact that there are no disc-shaped aircraft in the skies today, though, suggests that the USAF's flying saucer efforts probably never got past the prototype stage."
or they work so good that only blurry and shaky videos exist of them flying around and terrorizing cows
The best test environment is production. - Me
chrome://browser/content/browser.xul
...with the last statement. There are many reportings of disk shaped objects in the sky. Although, they may have been replaced by the Flying V.
I wonder if this is a concept that was before it's time much like the flying wing. Early prototypes of flying wings failed and it was thought that the entire concept was discarded until the B-2 was exposed to the world.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
That's the Coanda Effect.
Curiously yours, crip.
Title of the article is unmitigated crap. The Avrocar, which was actually built, was a miserable failure which could barely lift off the ground, wallowing dangerously, with very poor control. It was abandoned as absolutely useless.
Yes, some blue sky dreamer in defense probably did dream up the mach 3 flying saucer, but it was never any closer to reality than any comic book or lurid magazine article.
Worst secret ever, I've seen this 'saucer' before, it's been in books and magazines since the 60s I even saw the video of them trying to hover it, which didn't work very well. This thing never worked properly and never made it past the initial design phase. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar http://books.google.ca/books?id=Apaa01aJLIcC&pg=PA26&lpg=PA26&dq=Avrocar&source=bl&ots=Qe24u-CGlp&sig=R44-T1xDEeQGMbUkX8YcVU33Q7A&hl=en&sa=X&ei=nwtzULChIIfFyAG76ICwDA&ved=0CFUQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=Avrocar&f=false
Invest in buying more shares in tin foil companies.
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
It worked very well, and R&D continued, resulting in flying saucers that are completely unexplainable by the popular science of today. I wouldn't put it past them.
Apparently the model was finished in 1956, so plans for it must have been drafted prior to this. So what was the inspiration for such a non aerodynamic experiment at the time? Roswell perhaps?
The 1950s were saucer crazy. And apparently the US government was too, at about the same time. So was this leakage from inside the weapons program showing up in Hollywood or were the engineers looking at Ed Wood movies and saying, "Yeah, let's give that a shot"?
1950: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flying_Saucer
1956: crazy USAF saucer design
1959: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Outer_Space
I wonder if this was an attempt to reverse engineer what the supposed aliens were doing, which didn't produce much usable technology. That is an interesting (if expensive) way to prove or disprove the existence of UFO's.
Obviously they are saying "yah it was us not aliens." NOTHING TO SEE HERE PEOPLE!!!! Obviously there are aliens and obviously they've caught them and have then trapped somewhere in new mexico. And obviously the alien army is on its way to earth to rescue it's POWs. Shit just got real.
That's what they want you to think!
"The fact that there are no disc-shaped aircraft in the skies today, though, suggests that the USAF's flying saucer efforts probably never got past the prototype stage." ... Or perfected to a point of being un-detectable. Not likely but possible.
Hasn't the USAF maintained that (some) saucer sitings/crashes have been experiment aircraft? The rest are surely just moonshine and swamp gas.
... about the kinds of craft that the military must have still in secret, if you consider that the current speed record is from the SR-71 Blackbird, like almost 40 years ago...
> [...] The fact that there are no disc-shaped aircraft in the skies today [...]
*smirks*
"The fact that there are no disc-shaped aircraft in the skies today, though, suggests that the USAF's flying saucer efforts probably never got past the prototype stage."
Or more likely, the fact that it was a huge success led the military to slap top secret over it and any aircraft maker selected to work on it was told of "permanent, irrevocable loss of DoD contracts", "lifetime bans on employment and security clearance", "intrusive FBI investigations and tax audits", "nationalization of defense critical assets" and "extremely likely criminal charges for treason, sedition or aiding the enemy tried in military courts with punishments handed out by military intelligence.."
OMG you guys. Don't fall for the government smokescreen! [/conspiracy]
Do you see what I did there?
Everyone in saucer design knows that the Coanda Effect also causes the outline to appear blurry and shaky.
It is the first step towards cloaking which was later perfected using techniques developed by Tesla.
No brain, no pain.
Great, another Ziff Davis article.
...as in re-arrange those digits and you get 1947, the year of the famous Roswell New Mexico UFO crash.
Coincidence?
You got it backwards, they claimed saucer sightings to cover up experimental aircraft crashes.
Do you people realize the significance of this? If this Project 1794 was the saucer that crashed 27 miles outside Roswell and was taken to Area 51...1794/(51+27)=
THE NUMBER TWENTY-THREE!!
Everything is better with chainsaws.
The 1950s were saucer crazy.
1947 being the year of the famous Roswell flying saucer crash.
Note that they named this "Project 1794"... just rearranged the digits of 1947.
Coincidence? I think not.
you forget: accidents, Lens flare, atmospheric refraction, military training activity, hoaxes and just flat crazy folks with vivid dreams.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I presume that these things were not that secret at the time.
At the end of the story it is revealed that the flying saucer is made by Avro Canada.
George Adamski's UFO also looks somewhat like this design.
Holy crap, Slashdot just fell off the deep end. Seriously, "News for Nerds", but edited by people that have never once watched the Discovery Channel? How the holy frack did this ever make the front page?
I'm sure some other bright-eyed individual has already mentioned it, but this "secret" project is called the AvroCar, and it's been declassified for at least 3 decades.
When Discovery Channel used to run a show called "Wings" (the is before there was a Wings Channel, which is now called the Military Channel), and the show was composed entirely of Public Domain file footage, they covered the Avrocar in great detail. It was a saucer that used a jet driven impeller to run the vehicle.
Its "on-paper" specs were all that you quoted in the summary, but the reality was, it never got more than a few feet off the ground. It was completely impractical and was scrapped.
Pretty damn sure there's a Wikipedia article, but it's all over the internet in other ways.
Dear Slashdot, please vet your articles. It would be nice if whoever is running this place were an actual geek. Otherwise we're bound to get news for nerds that sounds like a Billy Mays commercial "Wow, new chemical compound removes even the toughest stains!"
Meh!
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
This project is from Avro (A.V. Roe, a respected Canadian aircraft manufacturer in the 1950s) and is clearly a follow-on to the Avrocar. The Avrocar, of course, really was a flying saucer. But it could barely fly.
The Avrocar was an interesting idea, but presented control problems that couldn't be solved in the 1950s. Like all thrust-based VTOL craft, it was unstable. It turned out to be really unstable at the transition from ground effect to thrust lift. Getting it out of ground effect without crashing was very hard. Forward motion made the stability problem worse. Despite several redesigns, it remained unflyable.
A design like that probably could be made to work today, with computers, gyros, and control jets fighting to keep the thing stable. Toy-sized quadrotors are widely available now, and they have many of the same stability problems. It's not clear there's any advantage to a disc shape other than coolness, though.
Bear in mind why this was built. Nobody knew what a supersonic aircraft needed to look like, so lots of things were tried. The opposite extreme from the Avrocar was the X-3 Stilleto, probably the pointiest-nose aircraft ever built. It flew, but couldn't go supersonic. Flying wings were tried - they had stability problems not solveable with 1950s technology. Finally, it was figured out that swept-back wings could be made to behave at both subsonic and supersonic speeds, and that became the standard form for supersonic aircraft.
Take equal parts of
Fear
Ignorance
Greed
Enemy du jour about to take over the world
add in unlimited taxpayer support via the MIC and bake at 'hot air' temperature.
Back in the '90s
It was unstable out of ground effect, and only got a metre or so off the ground
Theres no way it would have been seen 'in the skies'
"the USAF's flying saucer efforts probably never got past the prototype stage"
Finally we know what really happened in Roswell.
When a friend of mine, ten years before, was writing some articles in a local Greek magazine for this NAZI German prototypes (with pictures, specifications and even the names of the engineers), i was thinking that he was going a litle crazy - well... time to write him an "mea culpa" email !
"The fact that there are no disc-shaped aircraft in the skies today, though, suggests that the USAF's flying saucer efforts probably never got past the prototype stage."
Not so! It in fact suggests that the Greys filed a cease-and-desist suit with the Galactic Court to stop humans from producing a craft in that shape. They won, and *that* was when the Americans really sat up and started taking notice of Patents.
Other galactic species are talking behind their back, though, because the Greys sued with a design patent based on "rounded corners" for a flying saucer...
While the fact that documents have been released that confirm it's existence and potential design is both new and interesting, the fact that Avro was working on a supersonic disc has been known for a while. I remember hearing it for the first time in a documentary about the history of the Avro in regards to the Avrocar and the Arrow if I recall correctly. Google Project Silverbug and you're likely to see some very similar looking design documents.
A quick Google search spawns this -
http://www.boomslanger.com/images/silverbug03.jpg
http://greyfalcon.us/restored/Project%20Silver%20Bug.htm
While the author has a penchant for Nazi UFOs - a bit of historicity that has since become wild myth - it clearly shows that this was known about for quite a while. Even showing mockups, models, and expected designs. The details of it and how far it came along though, have long since been a matter of debate.
So...... Don't shit on those saying they've seen this before.
The first thing that comes to mind is that a round craft might be good at hypersonic speeds. Instead of one leading edge taking all the heat, all sides would take a fraction of the heat. I wonder if they've run any models with rotating heat shields for re-entry capsules. Of course, anything that has to move like that is always somewhat risky. AFAIK, variable wing geometry for civilian supersonic transports was rejected for this reason. Variable geometry is used on fighters though, so it's not a total non-starter...
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
i bet these flying saucers will designs will be quite useful when we begin making those recently discussed warp-bubble-drives. the ufo saucers we have been seeing for decades are not alien...they are from the future.
So if they actually built this thing, I suppose that parts might later have been cannibalised for other projects, but isn't the shell of it still around somewhere? does anyone know what the protocol is with these projects when they finish? I'd like to think that it's sitting in someone's barn under a tarp.
http://berkeley.intel-research.net/arahimi/helmet/
~Bottom line: tin foil hats amplify microwave radiation, not block it.
Just so you know.
Alien Horshack left the project for TV.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
from his movie "The Day The Earth Stood Still" and it seems to me this was the first big film with a flying saucer and ever since then alien spacecraft were all lampshade design with pulse warble engines (that go "woo woo woo..." sound when traveling through the vacuum of space). OK maybe splitting hairs, Wise was the director so maybe not technically "his movie." Brilliant film, I still enjoy watching it. And to think Robert Wise directed a completely different film about 12 years later, The Sound of Music.
Going back to the USAF flying saucer, I didn't RTFA, reminded me of the Avrocar was designed for VTOL handling and highspeed and high altitude flight. However, designers learned the hard way of aerodynamics (they accidently developed hovercraft technology which is very useful for other vehicle applications). Paul Moller of Moller International and the controversial Moller Skycar he has been working for decades (currently his website http://www.moller.com/ vectors to http://4domfay.mrslove.com/), some years ago he published a paper on fan diameter vs. power. I found this AIAA (I think) in 1980s where he showed mathematical equations describing engine power to liftfan diameter and why the Avrocar was doomed from the start. His equations showed most efficient diameter for vertical flying is helicopter but helicopters require complex control mechanics. Moller's equations also showed Avrocar did not have enough liftfan diameter so no matter how much power they applied, the Avrocar would never get out of ground effect. Disclaimer: I'm regurgitating memories from the 20th century.
I also remember when he had his Skycar mockup on display for an airshow of sorts at Yolo County airport (also of Skydance Skydiving which I was making some jumps same day). I looked closely at the chips of some of the electronics and noticed they were 74xxx series and not milspec 54xxx, I asked Moller why consumer grade. His reply was for the mockup there is no need and reason why his skycar will sell for only $100,000 and not $100 million is Lockheed has only one customer, the government, which has no interest in maintaining costs. However, this was late 1980s, we're still waiting for the skycar.
mfwright@batnet.com
The link mentioned above, to "http://4domfay.mrslove.com/", is to a multi-frame document which tries to load "http://www.etehadiyeamlak.ir/components/com_media/helpers/media/www/index.php", which tries to download a plug-in. Although the domain is in the Iranian ccTLD, it's actually hosted by "webhostbox.net".
50s, god damn 50s!!
and its 62 years later NOW
Its no doubt the fucking liars and thieves of trillions of tax dollars HAVE mach6 craft and moon bases on the other side. And secret space force.
Yeah so much for your dumb ass "Govt cant keep secrets, secret", WTF is this then.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
People's brains are not especially good at identifying objects above the horizon. We typically determine the size and distance of distant objects with visual cues because our stereoscopic vision is limited to close range. For example, we are able to determine the distance of a person because we know (generally) how big a person is. If there's something next to him, we can then know it's size (by comparing it's apparent size to the apparent size of the person) and distance (it's about the same distance as the person). But in the absence of these visual cues, we are unable to determine the size and distance (as well as a host of related factors such as velocity and acceleration) of objects. Moreover, even the color of objects is determined by visual cues, since we color correct images to account for differences in lighting.
This leads to a lot of difficulty in identifying objects in the sky. Since flying objects are not arranged in a plane, we can't use their position in relation to the horizon to approximate their distance. Nevertheless, we often do. The moon seems to be much larger when it's near the horizon because we assume objects near the horizon are much farther away (the moon also appears larger due to atmospheric distortion, but this effect is minor).
Because those joking seem to have missed the obvious from this story. Namely that flying saucer craft using conventional aeronautical propulsion methods simply don't work very well and that includes project 1794 and the avrocar and other iterations. And it's primarily because the saucer shape doesn't lend itself to being able to efficiently move through an atmosphere using propellers or jet engines.
Using such methods on a saucer are as absurd as putting jet engines on a biplane and wondering why it doesn't work well. Or why every flying car which has primarily consisted of wings being literally stuck to the chassis of a regular car has never worked out.
One has to respect the shape of the aircraft or transportation and choose the most efficient propulsion method to use with it. So instead of jet engines one should use field propulsion with saucer shaped craft such as that done by Townsend Brown.
With the United States track record or aerospace engineering I literally almost pissed myself laughing at this. We're talking about a nation that bolts a space ship to a B747 because they couldn't foresee the years of #fail with their Hypersonic rocket plane and are giving up.
I might actually give into I continuance if that gets funding. There's a reason planes use Roles Royce engines and there's a reason they don't have access to Skylon.
Not that I'm an expert in this field...
-- David
I know tonnes of people from my home town who had grandparents at avro models and posters of that were not uncommon
They didn't invent a new branch of aviation engineering, metallurgy, engine manufacturing, materials science or a radical new way of flight never seen before or since.
BTW wingnuts the US abandoned intercontinental nuclear tipped supersonic cruise missiles in the early 1960's because it's actually a LOT HARDER to do that that than it is to launch heavy missiles into orbit or fractional orbit.
The fact that there are no disc-shaped aircraft in the skies today
What fact? Seems to me that there well could be, since we have further evidence that if anyone were to see one they would just be discredited by a lying government.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
"the supersonic flying saucer would propel itself by rotating an outer disk at very high speed, taking advantage of the Coand effect"
Ummm, no.
It propelled itself by forcing air from the central jet engine out through various shutters, using the airflow to effect the flow of the surrounding air. Nothing rotated (sheesh, didn't the author bother to read what he googled?!)
It didn't work. NACA wind-tunnel experiments showed they had increasing nose-down trim as speeds increased through the subsonic, and it became uncontrollable at any reasonable speed. It was then re-purposed as a helicopter-like aircraft, but was ineffective due to a variety of aerodynamic factors.
Just read the Wikipedia article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar
This is a very good, very detailed book about some of the most compelling UFO sightings, including stuff like the Belgium and Iranian air force dispatching fighter jets to intercept the UFO that were seen visually and tracked on radar. It also covers a bunch of sightings by high ranking military leaders in a multitude of countries including the US. Entire chapters are written first hand by some of the key personnel involved.
http://ufosontherecord.com/
oh crap, sorry guys. I saw nothing on my system, in fact it simply came up a blank page. I'll better use my brain next time.
mfwright@batnet.com
That is one translation. Their words were in an ancient language, and there probably is no EXACT translation.
Infuriate left and right
"The fact that there are no disc-shaped aircraft in the skies today, though, suggests that"
That is an unsupported assertion, not a fact.
It has never made sense to me that those who are skeptical of other areas are considered sane, rational, and prudent but those who are skeptical of government and government staff are immediately considered nuts. No matter how many times the government is caught in corruption and coverups, most often by their own admission declassified much later anyone suggesting they are currently corrupt and/or engaging in coverups is considered irrational. You can say this was a long time ago, but there is nothing to indicate anything has changed. This is only old news because the government gives itself an unusually long amount of time before it has to declassify information.
If you don't have anything to hide then what are you afraid of? It seems backwards. The government has to account to us, we are entitled to hide things from it. The reverse is not true. The government has no right to privacy from its people. It seems rational to assume that in all cases where the government does not operate in complete transparency it is probably obscuring things for a reason.
If it rotates a disk at high speed, how does it conserve angular momentum? Are there two contra rotating disks?
"The fact that there are no disc-shaped aircraft in the skies today, though, suggests that the USAF's flying saucer efforts probably never got past the prototype stage."
Or maybe it's because those aliens are afraid to fly around now that the kids have access to those high-powered lasers and shining them into the cockpits!
There are actually two different designs as far as I can tell from the images provided.
The first has an annular arrangement of conventional turbine-engines (6 by the looks of it) facing inward at the pilot which act as gas-generators to turn a large squirrel-cage turbine surrounding the cockpit. This turbine subsequently turns a pair of squirrel-cage compressors that drive high-pressure air from upper and lower intakes through ducts in the disk to the "flight control shutters" along the outer circumference.
The second of the two is far more interesting to me...Since turbine engines are inherently annular/radial these guys appear to have taken a stab at just building a huge disk-shaped turbine engine around a fuel-tank and cockpit. So they took the normal design of a gas-turbine engine and flattened so that the compressor, combustion chamber and turbine are all arranged in a planar-disk rather than an axial shaft. My concern would be gyroscopic forces acting on the turbocompressor disk, which I imagine would be pretty high. Keeping the rotor, stators, vanes etc within tolerances would be a nightmare too. If they got it to work then I imagine it would be capable of pretty high-speed flight (certainly not mach 4) but maybe mach 1-2, which is outstanding for a VTOL. It would also be very unstable, so something like this would only be feasible with today's fly-by-wire technology.
Just to hammer home what I mean...this is essentially a GE-90 engine squished flat with a little cockpit in the center. cool.
"Avro Canada, this company started in 1945 as an aircraft plant and became within thirteen years the third-largest company in Canada, one of the largest 100 companies in the world, and directly employing over 50,000."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada
Doesn't even exist anymore. Rumor is Dan Aykroyd had something to do with it's demise, probably at the behest of the Alien controled US governement.
The article is probably refering to this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada#Avro_STAT_.28SST.29
However take a look at this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Avrocar.gif
Apparently it couldn't go more than 3ft in the air however...
This could just as easily be just an old piece of counter intelligence work.