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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."
You assume they'd use glass. You also assume that it's not a 'local' craft that would dock with a carrier for interstellar travel.
The lights on the craft could serve the same purpose as those on a airplane.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Excuse me sir you seemed to be confused on what the words prove, fact, no, and/or sky means.
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.
...as in re-arrange those digits and you get 1947, the year of the famous Roswell New Mexico UFO crash.
Coincidence?
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.
> They thought the same about flying wing designs in the 1950s. Indeed, they never did get the design to work right at the time.
Flying wings have been successfully built and flown since the 1930s. The problems with the B-35 and B-49 were inherent in the platform:
* Conic Instability - in a banked turn the outer wing goes faster than the inner one and gives more lift with increases the bank angle until it flips over and spins. I have seen film of a B-52 doing that.
* Nodding - The Northrops were designed for bombing and later for photo work. The wing 'nods' due to lack of pitch stability which makes it impossible to aim using a bomb sight, and difficult to get the photos to overlap correctly.
* Slewing - with no tail the wing does not care whether it is aligned with the flight path or skewed from it by several degrees. Bomb aiming is thus impossible.
The planes were actually very successful as flying machines (though the propeller gearboxes failed too often), but useless for the missions they were intended for. The B-2 fixed all those issues with computers compensating for the instabilities.
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
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).
Probably taken from German Reich designs. Don't forget that thousands of US bomber pilots saw foo fighters in WWII. The archives of the German Airforce are still lost.