Real-Life UFOs, From Flying Flapjacks to Mystery Missiles (these may explain a lot of sightings)

If you listen to the Air Force tell it, there are simply no such things as UFOs. A two-decade investigation called Project Blue Book determined in 1969 that no extraterrestial life has made contact with Earth. And no unexplained aerial phenomena have exceeded humanity's scientific grasp, let alone threatened national security.

The "do they or don't they exist" debate won't be settled until someone from far away asks to be taken to our leaders. And the controversy makes it easy to forget that a UFO isn't actually a ship full of little green men. It's a placeholder for a puzzle the mind can't solve. So, it's also easy to forget that, much like the Insane Clown Posse observed about miracles, UFOs are all around us.

From weird drones to cheeky satellites to things that manifest themselves to the naked eye as little more than plumes of smoke, the skies can be a mysterious, congested place. Here, we take a look at the most striking curiosities of aviation, both foreign and domestic, including actual flying saucers.

That's the trouble with aliens: the misdirection. You spend too much time tracking down intergalactic visitors and you'll miss the oddities that humans invented for getting around our home planet.

The Canuck Flying Saucer

The best engineering minds in two countries couldn't quite figure out how to make the Canuck Flying Saucer work. A joint venture in the 1950s between the U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force and the Canadian aviation company Avro, the VZ-9 Avrocar was supposed to be a "revolutionary" supersonic ship that brought extraterrestrial style to the military-industrial complex. The 18-to-25-foot pancake was to lift off vertically, thanks to a five-foot fan in its belly. The "focusing ring" around its exterior would push air outward in the opposite direction its pilot wanted to fly. Manufacturers called it "Ground Effect Takeoff and Landing," or GETOL.

And it did pretty well if you only wanted to go five or six feet off the ground. Higher altitudes would cause the craft to pitch wildly, a flaw its engineers couldn't overcome. After about 10 years and as many million dollars, the military pulled the plug in 1960. But visitors to the Army's transportation museum at Fort Eustis, Virginia, check out the prototype and imagine what might have been.

Spy Blimps the Size of Football Fields
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Anything larger and you'd have the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier. In June, Northrop Grumman got a $517 million contract from the Army to build three enormous airships as floating intelligence centers. The Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle is supposed to carry 2,500 pounds worth of "sensors, antennas, data links and signals intelligence equipment" to Hoover up information beneath its corpulent husk. Why does the Army need something like that? It would be the first air asset in its arsenal that can remain at 20,000 feet for up to 21 days. One Army official judges it would take 12 Reaper drones to do an equivalent amount of spying.

Its first destination: Afghanistan, next summer, where eagle-eyed locals might be forgiven for thinking they're seeing an alien mothership.

Month-Long Flight of the Voltron Drone
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What could be more UFO-like than a flying robot that can spend a solid five years up in the air? That's what Darpa, the Pentagon's out-there research branch, is trying to pull off with its "Project Vulture." That's a long way away, so Darpa is taking it slow — one month at a time.

The challenge of keeping an unmanned aircraft aloft for a month — well, and the $155 million contract at stake — got the aerospace industry working overtime. Aurora Aerospace, one of the bidders, submitted this design, dubbed "Odysseus." It's three 160-foot drones in one that would meet in flight and interlock like Voltron. Powered largely by sunlight during the day, Odysseus would latch into the Z-formation pictured here to maximize light absorption through its solar panels. At night, it'd flatten out to make more efficient use of its collected energy.

This fall, Darpa opted against Odysseus and went with Boeing's similarly-solar-powered SolarEagle, a design only slightly less crazy. The SolarEagle is a thin, white drone with a 400-foot wingspan — the David Bowie of unmanned planes — with four long fingers to carry a payload instead of a traditional fuselage. Boeing's got till 2014 to keep the SolarEagle aloft for a month at 65,000 feet, about three times as high as most drones.

Naval Aviation Gets Flapjacked
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Charles H. Zimmerman was a can-do guy. An engineer for a precursor of NASA, in the 1930s, he figured he could increase a plane's efficiency by making it mostly wing. That was the origin story of one of the odder designs in the history of naval aviation: the Vought-173 "Flying Flapjack," basically a flying saucer with two big propellers, sending airflow over the wings even when the Flapjack slowed. Conventional fixed-wing aircraft couldn't do that, and struggled to maintain altitude at slow speeds. But its sleek design made it "a sure bet to lead the field in the race to smash the supersonic barrier," marveled Modern Mechanix in a 1947 cover story.

It wasn't to be. While the Navy commissioned a a prototype in the late '30s, it decided to go with jet aircraft during the Second World War, and the same year Modern Mechanix put the Flapjack on its cover, the Navy pulled the plug. Still, it wasn't all a failure: The Vought-173 ultimately climbed to 5,000 feet, despite its funny-looking fuselage, and earned the respect of Charles Lindbergh, who even flew it once.

Source: www.wired.com... 28Top+Stories+2%29%29&utm_content=Google+International&pid=165


I don't know what to say. Looking at these few examples alone makes me re-think many of the sightings I have read about. I will have to time cross-reference them to the known dates of these projects and the bases they carried the test/flights out of. 10-1 most, if not all, are within a report UFO sighting area and time frame.

Look at the wiggling thing. Come on now. Tell me they don't have even more interesting stuff now-since they letting this out to the public.

I think maybe the average man's mind won't be able to handle a huge leap in technology. Please go check out the article and other things id'd there. Very interesting stuff.

Maybe some type of Disclosure is coming---but maybe not what we think it will be. hmmm

I don't think anyone can disagree that there are a lot of strange man made flying objects moving around in our sky. But I certainly also do not agree that these strange man made objects account for the entire UFO phenomenon. I recognize that you are not presenting that argument here, but I can see how some might read what you are saying and try making that conclusion for you.

reply to post by VeniVidi


No, I wasn't making that arguement but now.... I think it can be made.

Here is a test. Show me one UFO (not of this earthly world) as close up and operating as these photos/video show-THAT CAN BE 100% sure isn't man-made. I'll wait.

reply to post by anon72


Certainly there are plenty of UFO photos in lot of posts on this site a lone. By UFO I mean unidentified flying object. Not everyone claims that every UFO is alien. Although I personally believe that some are. If you are asking me for a smoking gun photo or video I don't have one. If I did then it would no longer be an unidentified flying object. No, I can not present you with a smoking gun. Can you present to me evidence that one of the photos you have shown has been claimed by someone as an alien ship? Or even show me an instance where someone has claimed one of your photos as an unidentified flying object.
Now I am waiting.

reply to post by VeniVidi



LOL good reply. I will be working on something about sightings and Air Force tech etc. I will go out on a limb and say I think I have a better chance of proving my side of it as to your side of the arguement.

The one that strikes me most and could be related to sightings-one I think I will try to figure out first, is the one about the ballons the size of football fields. I have heard/seen several sightings reports of UFO craft the size of a football field.

You have to admit, these things shown (and some in the source article) would/could cause alarm. Especially in the 60's/70's.

Don't get me wrong. I do believe but it is just that, a belief-not a sure thing. Take care.

Originally posted by anon72

If you listen to the Air Force tell it, there are simply no such things as UFOs. A two-decade investigation called Project Blue Book determined in 1969 that no extraterrestial life has made contact with Earth. And no unexplained aerial phenomena have exceeded humanity's scientific grasp, let alone threatened national security.

That's not true. Project Blue Book concluded that there were things they investigated that could not be identified. A surprisingly high percentage, actually. Their main conclusion, which has been the Air Force's official line forever, is that the phenomenon "does not appear to represent a threat to national security." Which has proven so far to be true. But that's hardly the same thing as saying no ET life has made contact with Earth. They're just saying that there doesn't seem to be a threat.

And of course, some unusual experimental aircraft could be UFOs. But they don't explain the really super high-strangeness cases involving close encounters with entities or time shifts or a lot of other stuff:

Parker Hickson Abduction 1973

A lot of stuff still defies explanation.

project blue book was a farce and j allen hynec exposed that years ago.

I remember a few references about how 95% of the sighting reports are dismissible, and that's from a few decades ago. With advances in aerospace, internet and ubiquity of digital cameras, that figure can easily jump to 99.9%. I think ET-UFOs are real, but true occurrences are few and far in between. Add to that, the odds of the witnesses who bothers to document and document them well and the odds of the documentations surviving history unaltered, you can see that true, solid evidences are hard to come by.

Just got this off of cnn.com

Object shot out of sky above Israeli nuclear plant, military says

Here is the link:

www.cnn.com...

reply to post by TinkererJim


Excellent reply.

I concur.

Not to mention, toss in a Gov't or two that doesn't want anything exposed and you just added to the precentages of it being lost, mis-translated or falsely dedunked.