Alien Lore No. 240—declassified documents detail 1956 Air Force plan to build a vertical take-off flying saucer

By Jack Brummet, Alien Lore Editor 

“I’ve been doing this for 20 years and it never ceases to amaze me what we find in the records,” Neil Carmichael of the government's National Declassification Center told Fox News.

An illustration from the report

Declassified documents from the U.S. Air Force detail their plan to build a round, vertical take-off and landing aircraft a/k/a flying saucer. Yes, we did try to build a flying saucer.  In the end, it just didn't work as expected.

The National Declassification Center in College Park, Md., opened one of more than 100 cardboard boxes from the Air Force recently and came across a 114-page document from 1956 that will tantalize everyone with any interest in UFOs or Alien Lore. 

"These records have been classified probably since their creation during the '50s," Neil Carmichael, director of the declassification review division  told Popular Mechanics (the first media outlet to post the news of the document). "It’s like somebody went into somebody’s office, emptied out a filing cabinet, stuck it in a box, sealed it, and sent it off to the federal records center. It was deemed permanently valuable at some point in its life and that’s why we have it today."

An NDC spokesman told FoxNews.com that the group is “in the process of digitizing” the entire document and has not yet released it onto its website.  “We have about 400 million pages to get through the executive order President Obama signed in 2009,” he said. “I tell my techs, 'If you find anything interesting, let us know.'”  And they did. 

The saucer had an ejector seat and was powered by a “ram jet” that was designed to propel it to a height of 100,000 feet. The Air Force contracted the construction of the craft to a Canadian company, Avro Aircraft Limited in Ontario.

According to the specification document, the saucer had “Six Armstrong Siddeley Viper turbo-jets -- 1,900 lb. thrust, 22.0” overall diameter, 525 lb weight each -- are mounted radially in the wing, exhausting inwards; and used as gas generators to drive a pair of contra-rotating centrifugal impellers by means of a radial inflow turbine."

Much of the report contains detailed descriptions and schematics of the propulsion system, as tested in a scale model seen in numerous photographs. As it turns out, the saucer worked on paper much better than the scale models did in real life. 

“The efficiency of the airframe at supersonic speed appears good and that of the engine reasonable, so that a long supersonic cruise range is also forecast,” according to the report. But in testing, the craft, which was actually just a Frenchified hovercraft, critically malfunctioned. 

“Apparently, as it gained in altitude, it would start to wobble uncontrollably,” Carmichael explained.

The report also didcusses plans to develop weapons suitable for the saucer, to equip it for reconnaissance, as an interceptor or tactical bomber. 

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Alien Lore No. 168 - New UFO file releases from Britain

As you may or may not know, Russia, France, and Great Britain have released much of their previously secret government files on UFO/alien-Grey sightings and investigations. Partly, this is due to pressure to open up what The People rightfully own, similar to the literally millions of documents released under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. Partly, I believe, they release these records to quell the growing sabre-rattling of the conspiracy theorists (both fringe and mainstream), and partly because they believe--probably rightly--that releasing the ravings of deranged saucer-freaks and conspiracy and cover-up wacks will speak for itself.

Thanks to Jeff Clinton for pointing out these stories.

The Brits recently released their fifth batch of records about unidentified flying objects. The Ministry of Defence and The National Archives have released the files as part of a project to open the files up to a broader audience.

This release is the largest so far, with more than 6,000 pages of material from 1994 to 2000.

The files include:

- A sighting by a man in Birmingham, England, in March 1997. He said he came home from work at 4 a.m. to see a large blue triangle-shaped craft hovering over his back garden. It "shot off and disappeared" after about three minutes, the report said, leaving behind a "silky-white substance" on the treetops, some of which he saved in a jar. The documents did not say what happened to the jar and its contents.

- One report, from January 1997, details a man driving home through south Wales one night when he saw "a 'tube of light' coming down from the sky," which at first seemed like a "massive star" coming toward him. The man's mobile phone and car radio failed (classic symptoms!), and the man got out of his car and was able to walk through the light. When he re-entered his car he started feeling sick, and later developed a skin condition.

- Another report talks about a group of people, in August 1997, who saw, from their fishing trawler in the North Sea, a round, flat, shiny object hover in the sky. The witnesses saw it both with the naked eye and through binoculars. The witnesses, the report says, were "very skeptical of UFOs." They followed the UFO on radar for several seconds before it completely vanished, the report said.

- Cops in Boston, England, and Skegness, on England's east coast, witnessed a UFO on video at the same time that the Royal Air Force (RAF) detected an "unidentified blip" on their radar. In the 1966 sighting, officers saw "strange rotating red, blue, green and white flashing lights in the sky," the report said. Another ship in a bay near Boston, also saw the lights, at the same time the RAF air defense radars picked up the blip. Press coverage of the incident led the RAF to look into the lights, which they identified as stars and bright planets. The radar blip, authorities said, were due to a "permanent echo" created by a nearby church spire.

- The release also contains several incidents involving UFOs and aircraft, like the near-miss that happened in January 1995 when a British Airways Boeing 737 was approaching Manchester airport. The captain and a crew member saw the object, but an investigation by the Civil Aviation Authority failed to identify it, the report said. It never happened! Really?

According to the CNN report, "The release highlights how the reported shapes of UFOs have changed during the past half-century, the National Archives said. Many of the reports in the latest file describe UFOs as big, black and triangular, whereas reports from the 1940s and '50s tended to be about saucers or disc-shaped objects."

"In the 1950s the next big leap in technology was thought to be a round craft that took off vertically, and it's intriguing to note that this is the same period when people began to report seeing 'flying saucers' in the sky," said David Clarke, author of a book called The UFO Files.

Relevant links:

CNN's report on the release of the files

A link to the British national UFO Archives

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