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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, 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
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
Excuse me sir you seemed to be confused on what the words prove, fact, no, and/or sky means.
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!
Hasn't the USAF maintained that (some) saucer sitings/crashes have been experiment aircraft? The rest are surely just moonshine and swamp gas.
"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.
How do you prove a negative? (you don't)
I think the point is that if this was a workable solution, we would likely have at least some flying examples of this design by now. Even after this many years we have no known flying saucer designs in either military or civilian use so it seems *unlikely* that anybody has one of these things.
Of course, it is possible to prove a positive, so if someone thinks something exists, I would insist on proof.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The British Rail (a railway company!) flying saucer has been public knowledge for years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail_flying_saucer
Of course, it never flew, as far as we know...
Watch those corners
Why would you want a fast plane nowadays? All it will do is burn fuel and cost so much you'll be afraid to deploy it. There were 32 SR-71's, for example, and 12 were lost in accidents. That's a pretty expensive cost for ... what? To get to the Middle East slightly quicker?
Blackbird is likely to remain the fastest plane for a long time, like the fastest horse-drawn carriage that ever existed. Nobody's going to splash that amount of cash to go in a circle at great expense when that same money would buy satellite constellations, ICBM's, sacrificial drone aircraft, or any number of other more useful things.
Speed isn't the only statistic when it comes to military aircraft.
...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.
"Not likely but possible."
No, very possible, even very likely. The very fact that we don't know about it, that they haven't publicly admitted the existence and regular use of these saucers, is proof of their existence and their effectiveness. Why, just last night aunt Bertha saw one of them things hovering over the local Wal-Mart. It then went to the Piggly Wiggly and some strange creature came out of the store carrying a six pack. The government knows. They just aren't telling you. Which is how you can know that they know.
I love my sig.
The fact that there are no disc-shaped aircraft in the skies today
How did we prove this again?
Probably proved impracticable. Higher cost over contemprary designs, reliability, serviceablity, things like that. Just strap a saddle on a turbine engine, tape on some wings and you're off and flying.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
Sorry, but if you are using inductive reasoning, there is no difference between proving a negative and proving a positive. The only thing that allows you to make a reasonable conclusion in those cases is statistics. For example: the if the Higgs boson was believed to be observed with a 5 sigma certainty, you can't prove absolutely that its apparent existence wasn't due to random interactions. Conversely, if it wasn't observed with a 5 sigma certainty, you can't prove absolutely that its apparent nonexistence wasn't due to random interactions. Only a belief in statistics will resolve this inherent problem with inductive reasoning.
Since we use inductive reasoning in the real world, saying that you can't prove a negative has no meaning if you don't provide context. Intelligent Design and Russel's Teapot are unlikely, but not impossible. Statistics allows us to throw these ideas in the trash. The fact that UFOs aren't identified often is another item that we can use to dismiss the existence of flying saucers still being flown by the USAF. The certainty isn't nearly as high as something like Russel's Teapot, but it isn't something to be ignored either.
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.
It then went to the Piggly Wiggly and some strange creature came out of the store carrying a six pack.
Strange creatures, indeed.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
SR-71 was a reconnaissance plane, designed to cruise above missile range and faster than missiles, which is why it went so fast. It meant the US could deploy spy planes over China and the Soviet Union (at the time) with impunity - unlike the earlier U-2, which ended up getting shot down once, IIRC.
No, but it is an important one, if you want to get on-target quickly. The point of the SR-71 was it could get much higher detail than a satellite more reliably and very quickly. Turns out that wasn't as important as the cost (and new missile system made it a bit less practical). There are still plenty of reasons to develop high-speed aircraft, from surveillance to first strike ability, which is why they are doing so, right now, with the X-51.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
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'
>
Speed isn't the only statistic when it comes to military aircraft.
That depends on what you intend the aircraft to actually do. You want a fighter? You need sustained turn rate first with as much speed as you can manage from there. You want to intercept oncoming aircraft? You need speed first, range and then turn rate You need to move cargo? You need VSTOL and lifting capacity and decent range but not speed. You want to deliver ordnance in support of ground forces? You better have the ability to lift lots of ordnance and loiter for hours but short field performance will likely win that contract. It's all about the *mission* of the platform.
As to why we would want a fast aircraft today? How useful would it be to be able to put a sensor or some ordnance on a target anywhere in the world in under an hour? I would think the USAF would pay dearly for that capacity. Add stealth and I'll wager they'd spend lots of money just doing R&D work on the possibility.
I would say that for most aircraft that the military would be interested in buying these days, speed is going to be pretty important.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Nice rant, really very impressive! However, I think it's worth pointing out that this (top speed of Mach 3 or Mach 4, service ceiling above 100,000 ft, range 1000 miles) is a bit different from the Avrocar (top speed less than 100 mph, service ceiling under 10,000 ft). Your rant is like complaining that the B2 wasn't really secret for decades because everyone knew the Germans were working on a flying wing design in WWII.
Which brings me to my own rant: I don't see very many flying wings flying through the air either, but obviously the flying wing research did in fact bear fruit. It's entirely possible that the saucer design did work but has been kept secret since for one reason or another. The shape certainly seems to lend itself toward stealth just looking at it, if they ever did make a design that could do Mach 3 while still being stealthy I could see that being kept under wraps for a very long time.
"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"?
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.
I'm afraid reality is a bit more complex than that -- what's more likely is that the larger Flying Saucer was the initial proposal, and then it was scaled down for a prototype; apparently both projects are called Project 1794, so it's likely the Avrocar was the proof of concept for the larger vehicle which obviously was never built since the Avrocar was such a profound disappointment.
As for "Flying Wings", Jack Northrop built a flying wing bomber for the air force in the 50's Footage of it flying is even used in the classic George Pal "War of the Worlds" feature film where they drop a nuke on the Martians but do no damage. Again, the TV show "Wings" covered it in great detail, it originally used pusher props, and was later converted to jet engines.
So, flying wings are no big secret, the only advantage the B2 has over the original design is the RAM (Radar Absorbing Material) and that it's fin-less (Jack's design had small vertical stabilizers), and that the engines are embedded to avoid heat-seekers.
I think the only "airplane" secret that the military has at this point is the Aurora, which should be declassified, since it was obviously retired over a decade ago. I think they experimented with pulse-detonation propulsion, but it wasn't deemed satisfactory.
Are for the Flying Saucers, remember that the Military was obsessed with the "flying soldier" concept. Millions were spent developing the Hydrogen Peroxide Rocket Belt (Bell), and then later the jet-propelled "platform", and the Avrocar. But what happened was the Military was considerably more pragmatic than most of us were willing to believe, because what they ultimately ended up with was the helicopter. The Bell Huey was the end of the Flying Soldier program.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Which would be why they gave it a name of 1794 (anagram of 1947).
http://berkeley.intel-research.net/arahimi/helmet/
~Bottom line: tin foil hats amplify microwave radiation, not block it.
Just so you know.
Another possibility is that the Air Force never intended to develop a saucer prototype. It could be that these "designs" were disinformation left where Soviet agents could discover them.
The timing is right for this being part of the effort to divert attention from the Air Force's super-secret Blackbird program. The Blackbird became operational in the 1960s and development began in the latter part of the 1950s. By the 1970s, after some 15 years of service, the Soviet Union was apparently aware that the USA had something that could go really high, really fast, and take lots of photos, but apparently they still had no clue about the design. That suggests that the Air Force had done a really good job of hiding the production of lots of titanium parts, etc-- capitalizing on the UFO craziness of the times would have been an excellent ploy.
And it is clear that releasing some of the documents used in disinformation strategems is part of the declassification process. However I do not believe there is anything that requires the US Government to say what was disinformation and what was factual. I rather think that they would leave that as an exercise for the reader.
Does anyone know the more recent history of the Blackbird? IIRC, the program was terminated around 1998, then there was talk about reactivating them for a time when we got into the Bush wars, and that's the last I remember hearing about it. Are any of these planes still flying?
Will
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?
Or they're all up on the moon, fighting Space Nazis!
I drank what? -- Socrates
Of course, it never flew, as far as we know...
Yeah, the whole 'powered by nuclear fusion' bit could put a bit of a damper on its R&D.
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).
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
There is one in the air and space museum near Dulles airport in Washington DC. Saw it a few months ago. Very cool.
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.
I am confused, did the merry pranksters who designed it in their spare time just happen to work for British Rail during the day, or was there really some bizarre space exploration department in BR?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
"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...
Papers by Paul Moller (none are what I first read of his comments on Avrocar):
Base Drag of a Thick Annular Jet
Paul S. Moller, University of California, Davis, Calif.
Richard L. Ellioit
The Boeing Company, Renton, Wash.
Journal of Aircraft, VOL. 9, NO. 7, July 1972
Griffith, Mike and Paul Moller Rotary Engine Powered Ducted Fan for Aircraft Applications. ESA Paper 90037
AIAA 985533 Airborne Personalized Travel Using "Powered Lift Aircraft"
Paul S. Moller, Moller International
mfwright@batnet.com
That would be the last Air Force flight. NASA kept theirs going another year making 1999 the last time a Blackbird was in the air.