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1997
from
Thule Website
recovered through
WayBackMachine Website
This design study for a flying saucer fighter was prepared for
LOOK by Thomas Turner, a 30
year old British aeronautical engineer now employed by
Republic Aviation Corp.
A Canadian saucer project that may
resemble it in some details has long been rumored. Turner points out
that the design could be arrived at independently and is only one of
several possible approaches to the construction of a saucer craft.
Future airports built for vertically rising flying saucers would
have no need of the long, vulnerable runways today's fighters
require.
The complete operation could go
underground. Tunnels with take-off shafts set into the ground,
complete with maintenance bays, fuel and crew quarters, would be
bombproof shelters for a saucer squadron.
The shafts would be sealed after
take-off for camouflage and protection.
Prone-pilot cockpit provides better streamlining than conventional
seat arrangement. To bail out in an emergency, pilot releases
canopy, ejects seat bed. Lack of tail structure on saucer would cut
risk to a pilot during bail-out.
Close-up of one of the many jet exhaust ports around the saucers
circumference shows how lift is achieved. When the lower flap is
deflected, the jet blast is diverted downward.
Air above the saucer then flows down with the jet stream. This
reduces pressure on the top surface and the pressure difference
between the upper and lower surfaces causes the saucer to rise.
Deflected jets provide additional lift.
"Saucer’s many-fingered jet pipes
provide lift and directional control for craft."
ALL TEXT EXACTLY AS
FOUND IN "LOOK" ARTICLE
VOLUME 19, JUNE 14, 1955
DESPITE HUNDREDS OF "eyewitness"
accounts of flying saucers, none has been captured and no
government has come forward to take credit (or blame) for their
reported aerial shenanigans.
So, barring the possibility that the
saucers are from other planets (a theory ardently supported by
science-fiction fans), it seems reasonable to conclude that
"there ain't no such animal."
But persistent and fairly credible rumors recur that a Canadian
aircraft manufacturer,
A.V. Roe, Canada, Ltd., has had
a saucer design under development for two years. One report has
it that the project was abandoned by the Canadian government
because it would cost over $75 million to get a prototype flying
model into the air.
The A.V. Roe people maintain a
confusing silence about the whole thing. They can't deny the
project has been abandoned because they never announced it had
begun. Our own Air Force offers "no comment."
At a recent meeting of engineers, it was indicated that, while
flying saucer or sphere projects may still be purely
hypothetical, new air-defense problems are setting up
requirements for aircraft performance that would seem to be most
ideally met by a saucer craft such as illustrated above.
One problem, recently stated by Brig. Gen. Benjamin Kelsey,
deputy director of research and development of the Air Force, is
this:
"Airplanes today spend too much
time gathering speed on the ground and not enough flying in
the air."
Today's fighters, he pointed out,
need extremely long runways and there are few in existence that
are now long enough.
These few, and the concentration of
the planes using them, provide a worth-while target for an
A-bomb. With a single blow, the enemy might cripple a
substantial portion of our air defense.
Planes that could take off vertically would not need long
runways, which cost millions of dollars. They could be dispersed
widely and safely. In this country, four vertical-rising
aircraft already have been revealed. All but one, however, are
modifications of conventional plane designs.
None yet approaches the performance
a true saucer might be capable of.
What are the requirements of an ideal defense fighter?
-
ability to take off and land
vertically
-
high speed of over Mach 2.
(more than 1500 mph)
-
high rate of climb
-
excellent maneuverability
-
heavy armament
-
ability to operate at 60,000
feet
These sketches indicate a highly
educated guess of what a flying saucer to fulfill these
requirements would look like. It provides for a one-man crew,
housed in a glass bubble that would provide excellent
visibility.
The prone position of the pilot not only allows improved
streamlining but also enables the pilot to withstand high
accelerations and quick turns.
The design contemplates use of
cannon, rockets or guided missiles. Exact armament would depend
on the mission. The target would be sighted by radar, and the
actual firing would be computed and accomplished electronically,
as in several interceptors now in operation.
Power unit is key to design. The whole success of the saucer
design depends on the unusual engine. The sketched design is
remarkably similar to a conventional jet engine but is many
times larger. It consists of a set of combustion chambers and a
large turbine. These produce blasts of propulsive air around the
circumference of the saucer. Air entering the intakes around the
pilots cockpit is deflected to the engine.
This pressurized air is swept up by
the impeller, with a subsequent rise in pressure and
temperature.
Next, the air goes to the combustion
chamber, where fuel is added and ignited and a propulsive gas is
formed. The hot gases rush through the turbine blades, in the
process turning the impeller wheel. The gas then expands and
exhausts at high velocity through the many-fingered jet pipes.
The large turbine acts as a stabilizing gyroscope keeping the
plane level even when it is hovering.
Design is structurally strong. The saucer shape lends itself to
engineering for strength much more readily than a conventional
aircraft does, with its long fuselage, thin wings and
troublesome tail unit.
The simple saucer shape makes structural rigidity much less of a
problem. New materials will also come into the picture.
Titanium, for example, is 60 per
cent heavier than aluminum but with qualities of steel and is
not as vulnerable to temperature effects as the light alloys now
used in supersonic planes.
Landing problems are simple. In contrast to present vertical
take-off designs, the saucer need not make a touchy stall-type
landing. It is already in the correct flight attitude for
landing and only the forward jets need be switched on and all
jets deflected downward to provide the necessary lift to hover
and land.
This description is brief and highly simplified. Military
security and rapidly changing defense problems not only cloud
many details of a project like this but also obscure whether
anything comparable actually exists.
But based on the current
requirements of our defense effort and the demonstrated
abilities of our designers, an educated guess is that a flying
saucer much like this one may well be flying within the next few
years.
END
COMMENT
Soon after this 1955 LOOK Magazine article, news releases covered
the story of the clunky "AVRO Aircar", driven by a couple of fan
blades that wobbled. The thing didn't get more than 4 feet off the
ground.
This seemed to satisfy the "public need
to know" about saucers being produced at A.V. Roe Company.
At the end of WWII, three weeks before the U.S. went to Peenemunde
to nab the V-2s and the scientists, including Werner Von Braun,
the Brits went into the underground redoubts of the Nazis in
Austria, the Black Forest and Thuringia. The results were THREE top
secret trains, one of them 8 miles long (that one train alone was
655 box cars and flat cars).
The Brits also grabbed the disk
engineers, including Herr Miethe (later traced to the employ
of A.V. Roe).
The trains took the stuff, some of which
was too large to fit in box cars and had to be covered by tarpaulins
on its way to the coast of Brittany (France), there to be loaded on
board ships, taken through the Panama Canal up the coast to
Vancouver, B.C., and from there by train inland to the newly
constructed surface facility of the A.V. Roe Company. 150 pre-fab
factory buildings were sent from England to the same site.
By 1947 it was dug completely
underground.
An underground facility with vertical shaft as pictured in the LOOK
article, still exists cobwebbed and silent about 150 miles East of
Vancouver, British Columbia.
In 1952, the U.S. probably traded the H-bomb secrets to Great
Britain in return for all the saucer technologies and wind tunnel
research done in Canada. By 1958 the technology had developed
silent, electro-gravitational,
Biefeld-Brown type drive.
The "motors" inside the remotely flown, pilotless craft, are drawing
their power from electrical current fed into
the Schumann cavity (an area
between the surface of the Earth and 50 miles up from the surface).
The electrical and magnetic fields set up inside the craft are not
conducive to life.
"Alien" looking pilots are being
cloned and produced at the deep (7-levels, Andromeda Strain)
underground bio-genetic lab on the Jicarillo Apache Indian
Reservation
near Dulce, New Mexico.
These clones do not "live" long, and so
are perfect for placing in the craft as "artificial" pilots.
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