In September 2012, Michael Rhodes, a technician at the National Declassification Center (NDC) in College Park, Md., donned white cotton gloves, entered a climate-controlled room, and opened a cardboard file box. It was time for the report inside—"Project 1794 Final Development Summary Report 2 April—30 May 1956"—to become public.

Rhodes's job is to read such documents, catalog them, and make them available to historians, journalists, and the curious. The paper was crisp, like new. Rhodes began to read.

He soon realized that the file box contained highly unusual material. "As I was processing the collection, I glimpsed this weird red flying-disc icon in the corners," Rhodes says. Inside the box was a trove of oddities: cutaway schematics of disc-shaped aircraft, graphs showing drag and thrust performance at more than Mach 3, black-and-white photos of Frisbee shapes in supersonic wind tunnels. The icon was a flying saucer on a red arrow—the insignia of a little-known and strange sideshow in aeronautical design. Rhodes was leafing through the lost records of a U.S. military flying saucer program.

"You can take a brick from the garden and make it fly."

A Canadian aviation firm began developing a disc-shaped aircraft for the U.S. military in the mid-1950s, and, though the details were secret, the project itself was not unknown. Popular Mechanics mentioned the Air Force's "vertical-rising, high-speed" craft in 1956 and published a photo in 1960. In the decades since the program was canceled in 1961, aviation buffs and UFO researchers have unearthed technical papers written near the end of America's flying saucer experiment, but the document that originally convinced the government to invest in a military flying disc has languished in the NDC under the SECRET designation. This recently discovered report describes in previously unknown detail how aviation engineers tried to harness what were then cutting-edge aerodynamic concepts to make their improbable creation fly. Although Avro's saucer never completed a successful flight, some of the most sophisticated aircraft flying today adopted many of the same technologies.



In 2001, U.S. Air Force personnel cleared the document cache for public release, according to Neil Carmichael, director of the declassification review division at the NDC, which is run by the National Archives and Records Administration. But it took 11 years to crack open the boxes in College Park and glimpse the saucer secrets within—the staff is buried in a backlog of nearly 2 billion pages of declassified material, some of it dating to World War II. "These records probably have been classified since their creation," Carmichael says. "It's like somebody emptied out a filing cabinet, stuck it in a box, sealed it, and sent it off to the federal records center."

In pop culture, flying saucers are the ride of choice for extraterrestrials. What the newly released documents show is that they actually came from Ontario, Canada. That's where a visionary aeronautical engineer at the now-defunct Avro Canada convinced his bosses to support the unlikely project. "During the Cold War the Army, Air Force, and Navy were experimenting with all sorts of things," Carmichael says. As the NDC releases its declassified documents, "the records are going to tell the rest of those stories." The most sensational of the disclosures so far—Project 1794.

Frost's Flying Discus

Avro Canada hired John "Jack" Frost in 1947, tapping the 32-year-old for a program to develop a supersonic aircraft called the Avro Arrow. While working on the Arrow program, Frost conducted experiments in the Avro labs on the way airflow tends to stick to gently curved surfaces, a phe- nomenon called the Coandă effect. The results showed that engine exhaust could be routed across the fuselage to the area just beneath a saucer, where it would form a cushion of air on which the craft could hover. Palmiro Campagna, an author and engineer with the Canadian Department of National Defence, wrote a book about Avro, Requiem for a Giant. "Frost believed that the Germans had developed some form of flying saucer–like aircraft," he says. "Part of that belief stemmed from stories and newspaper articles that appeared back in the 1950s."

The stories turned out to be bogus, but to Frost they seemed reasonable. During World War II, Hitler's engineers had outpaced the Allies in developing ballistic rockets and jet airplanes, and those advances had become spoils of war exploited by both the Soviet Union and the United States. Frost worried that equally important flying-disc technology could have been secreted away by Moscow. "He didn't want North Americans to lag behind," Campagna says.

After Frost talked up the results of his lab research to Omond Solandt, the head of the Canadian Defence Research Board, the government official introduced him to decision-makers in the Pentagon. Then, as now, the big money in military contracting was in the United States.

The American military was seeking a supersonic aircraft that could take off from primitive airfields to intercept Soviet long-range bombers. By 1955, the United States was ready to fund a million-dollar feasibility study. Aviation historians say they aren't surprised that the concept, which seems outlandish today, had proponents at the time. "The flying saucer configuration offers benefits," says Russell E. Lee, a curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. "It's totally symmetrical, so in theory it should be omnidirectional—if you can figure out how to redirect thrust in an instantaneous and efficient manner. Putting myself in the shoes of the designers in the early '50s, I would think it would be a viable candidate for further investigation."

Frost's design was detailed in a 117-page report—the same document that ultimately was unearthed by the NDC. The proposed craft featured a central turbine, called a turborotor, powered by six turbojet engines. The turborotor sucked in air that was directed through the body of the aircraft. The exhaust exited from vents placed along the circumference of the aluminum saucer; vanes and shutters directed the exhaust toward the ground to hover.

The engineers predicted that the 20,000 pounds of thrust produced by the jets' exhaust could be directed downward all around the disc's perimeter. "This jet-around-wing configuration produces a powerful take-off ground cushion so that the lift on the aircraft is increased to possibly 30,000 lb.," the report says, "and the aircraft rises to about 20 feet." Once in the air, the saucer's pilot would reroute the exhaust to one side of the craft to move laterally. The documents reveal the extravagantly rose-colored aspirations of the researchers. Frost predicted the saucer would travel at Mach 4 with "a ceiling of over 100,000 feet and a maximum range . . . of about 1000 nautical miles."



The Air Force and Army agreed to fund prototypes, and Avro had Frost set up a secret facility for construction and testing. The special projects group (SPG) was located at the Avro plant in Malton, Ontario, northwest of Toronto. Avro Canada, which employed 14,000 people at its height, spread its operations over several large buildings, empty lots, and aircraft hangars. (Today the location is adjacent to Toronto's Pearson International Airport.) Frank Harvey, current president of the Aerospace Heritage Foundation of Canada, worked on an Avro aircraft assembly line from 1956 to 1959. He was not part of SPG and recalls wondering what was going on within its walls. "Very few people got in there," he says. "If you walked anywhere near, there were security guards."

The precautions were well-founded. Soviet- era notes from a KGB major named Vasili Mitrokhin confirm that a spy did in fact operate at the Avro facility, seeking information on the Arrow program. Campagna says the Royal Canadian Mounted Police discovered the spy's identity but never disclosed the name.

Frost was not the only engineer in the early 1950s trying to master the use of unconventional shapes for high-speed flight. During that era, engineers with the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) were conducting tests of reentry space capsules. Vehicles that come from space to land on Earth must be designed to fly at a wide range of speeds and slow from hypersonic to a standstill. Avro's saucer, of course, was not intended to reach space, but it did have a flight profile similar to that of a reentry capsule.

Frost and NACA came to this conclusion: Rounded shapes fared best. Robert Braun, a Georgia Tech professor of space technology who served as NASA's chief technologist from 2010 to 2011, says this configuration provides two main benefits to high-speed craft. "If you wanted to go at supersonic speeds, heat is something you're going to have to deal with," he says. "Bowl-like shapes dissipate heat. And this same shape pro- vides predictable aerodynamics through all ofthose [speed] regimes." Braun cites the saucer shape on the rounded bottoms of space capsules. "From below," he says, "the Apollo capsule looks like a flying saucer."

In the Pentagon, hopes ran high for the Avro program. Bernard Lindenbaum, an honorary fellow of the American Helicopter Society (AHS) who died in 2002, participated in the fly- ing saucer program as an Air Force officer. In a paper for AHS, he recalled a Washington, D.C., meeting that he attended in the late 1950s to secure research money for the UH-1 "Huey" helicopter. After his meeting, he "overheard an Army general remark that the Huey was to be the last helicopter the army would buy."

Its replacement, according to the general? Avro's saucer.

Grounded by Reality

November 1959: The high-pitched scream of three turbojet engines fills the air of an industrial park at Avro's headquarters. Test pilot Wladyslaw "Spud" Potocki pulls back on the control stick and the 18-foot-wide flying saucer lifts from the ground, blasting snow and ice across a vacant lot. It is a miniature of the larger craft envisioned in Frost's study. While the final version will have six engines, the prototype now undergoing testing has only three.

The test occurs in the space between two buildings, away from prying eyes. Potocki had received the British Distinguished Flying Cross in World War II, and he also tested the Avro Arrow. Now the company has assigned him to pilot the Avrocar, their 5680-pound flying saucer, for its first flight independent of a three-cable tether.

"From below, the Apollo capsule looks like a flying saucer."

Getting off the ground is easy. Then it happens, as it always does: When the saucer rises above its 3-foot cushion of exhaust, it starts to buck like a rodeo bull. The researchers are crestfallen; they've seen this instability before. They call it hubcapping, after the circular way a car hubcap oscillates on its rim when dropped on hard ground. Potocki aborts the flight and sets the Avrocar down.

Over the years the engineers would test wide-ranging methods to control their craft: shaped nozzles, spoilers, skirts, bigger engine transition doors, vanes—even, at the suggestion of the Air Force, and to Frost's dismay, a tail. Nothing worked. The Avrocar never achieved stability in the air, and it never traveled faster than 30 knots or higher than 3 feet. So much for intercepting bombers.

Despite its beefy triple engines, the Avrocar suffered from a lack of power. As the airflow snaked through the saucer it lost potency. "They didn't understand the fluid dynamics," says Jeff Underwood, historian of the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. "The thing probably had plenty of power, it's just that all the thrust was being bled off in friction. As it was trying to push the air around, it was all being wasted."

Still, Avro was on to something. While Frost was engineering his saucer, a French airplane designer named Michel Wibault was also exploring aircraft steered by redirecting their exhaust. His concept for a fixed-wing fighter, the Gyropter, relied on four turbofans to take off vertically. His research would, by the late 1950s, form the foundation of the British Harrier Jump Jet. The engineers who created the Harrier found that swiveling the exhaust nozzle itself was more efficient than redirecting the airflow.

This concept survives in modern aircraft. The F-35B Lightning II rotates its exhaust 90 degrees to take off and land vertically. Many missiles and the F-22 Raptor warplane steer by angling their engine nozzles. "That's how the F-22 makes such sharp, high-speed turns," Underwood says.

Engineers today can design very maneuverable but aerodynamically unstable aircraft and expect computers to keep their creations airborne. Flight-control processors translate pilot instructions from the control stick to make countless adjustments of the engine nozzle and flight-control surfaces. "We're at the point with digital control, you can fly anything," Braun says. "You can take a brick from the garden and make it fly."

Ironically, one of the first production aircraft to use elec- tronic signaling to flight-control surfaces—called fly-by-wire—was the Avro Arrow, but the Avrocar team never tried to adopt the idea.

If the power issues could have been solved, such a system might have steadied the saucer's unstable flight. Instead, Frost sought a purely mechanical solution—and failed.

A Saucer's Requiem

The U.S. pulled the plug on the Avrocar in 1961. Jack Frost left Avro and moved to New Zealand to design innovative aircraft for that nation's airline. He never lost his drive to innovate. After retiring, he worked with local university students to design human-powered aircraft. Frost died of a heart attack in 1979, his ambitious visions of flight unrealized. Spud Potocki went to the United States, joined Rockwell as a test pilot, and retired to Ohio. He died in 1996 at age 77.

For its multimillion-dollar investment, the U.S. military kept the two Avrocar prototypes. One is stored, disassembled in crates, at Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Virginia under the cus- tody of the U.S. Army Transportation Museum. The Air Force prototype ended up in the care of the Smithsonian, where it sat for decades as a behind-the-scenes oddity. Then, in 2007, the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force at Wright- Patterson Air Force Base asked the Smithsonian for the aircraft in a swap.

The Air Force flew the prototype from Washington, D.C., to Wright-Patterson inside a C-5 Galaxy transport plane and trucked it to the museum. A restoration team fabricated pilot canopy bubbles, crafted seats, and touched up the rusted areas. In 2008, after a lifetime in the shadows, the Avrocar was ready to be shown.

Museum staff use Avro's saucer in lessons about vectored thrust, with the Avrocar playing the role of technological dead end. But dead ends count for something too. Dave Lazzarine, a restoration supervisor who worked on the Avrocar, says engineers at Wright-Patterson come to the museum for inspiration. "They get a feel for what people were doing back then," he says. "They are always trying to invent something that doesn't exist." Engineers know that aviation is an evolution, and understanding the risky dead ends is as important as admiring the successes.