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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
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.
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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
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.
"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.."
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.
the b2 has advantages over other designs. what is the advantage of a flying saucer compared to wing based aircraft? at least on earth
The primary thing that made the B-2 doable over previous flying wings is the microprocessor and the ability of modern computers to stabilize the aircraft in flight. The computers make constant changes to the control surfaces that would overwhelm human pilots.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
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
...as in re-arrange those digits and you get 1947, the year of the famous Roswell New Mexico UFO crash.
Coincidence?
Helicopters are usually extremely loud and, most importantly, simply unable to fly faster than 300mph or so: any faster and the supersonic shockwaves from the rotors tips (keep in mind those are traveling at helicopter speed + rotational velocity) destroys it's ability to fly. This could go much, much faster, as fast as you want, and probably be a fair bit more maneuverable.
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"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
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.
Helicopters are usually extremely loud and, most importantly, simply unable to fly faster than 300mph or so: any faster and the supersonic shockwaves from the rotors tips (keep in mind those are traveling at helicopter speed + rotational velocity) destroys it's ability to fly.
Only the rotors on the side of the helicopter moving in the direction of travel are going aircraft speed + rotational velocity. An equally serious problem is the rotors on the other side are going aircraft speed - rotational velocity. The faster the chopper flies, the more imbalanced it becomes as the lift from one side increases while on the other side it decreases. If the chopper reached the speed of its own blades, it would lose all lift on one side as the blades would be essentially motionless on one side.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
" what is the advantage of a flying saucer compared to wing based aircraft? at least on earth"
To completely screw with the enemy.
Broadcast loudly "ACK! ACKACK!" from loudspeakers while you only use lime green lighting.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
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
That is another issue, although that problem can largely be solved by using a co-axial rotor system, so it isn't an insurmountable problem.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
"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...
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
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".
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).
More likely an attempt to reverse engineer experimental craft or designs for such captured by the allies near the end of WWII. Long range guided missiles, line-of-site remote controlled bombs, helicopter gunships, CCTV, the assault rifle, jet fighters and the Uranium used in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were all conceived, designed, built and with the exception of nuclear weapons, deployed by the Germans. This technology and the scientists who ended up on the western half of the iron curtain were employed to develop America's nuclear deterrent of ICBMs and the space program.
If Japan had not attacked Pearl Harbor and if Hitler had not attacked Russia, Germany would probably still occupy most of Europe and would have placed a NAZI flag on the moon in 1959.