Military Contractors Built Flying Saucers

January 16, 2013 at 2:00 am Chad Upton

By Chad Upton | Editor

I’ve been writing Broken Secrets for a little over 3 years and UFOs are something I wanted to cover at some point. It’s a difficult subject; there’s so much information, mostly poor or difficult to confirm information and little that seems reliable and interesting. But there are also some little gems that are compelling and enlightening.

A UFO is simply an Unidentified Flying Object. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s alien — just that you’re not going to find someone who knows what it is or be willing identify it if they are one of the few who may know.

In May of 2011, the public got an unplanned unveiling of the US Military’s “Stealth Hawk” Helicopter when it was damaged during the raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. Technically, it’s still a UFO since we don’t know exactly what it is — educated guesses are that it is a heavily modified Sikorsky MH-60M Black Hawk.

Back in 2007, another top secret stealth aircraft was discovered: the RQ-170 Sentinel spy drone. About a year later, Iran claimed to capture one — multiple news sources claim U.S. government sources have confirmed Iran’s possession of the drone. If it weren’t for the discovery a year earlier, it would have been considered a UFO too.

Stealth helicopters and drones are not what people typically think of when they hear “UFO”. The stereotypical UFO from the 1950s looks like a flying saucer. In recently declassified documents, it turns out there were in fact full sized flying saucers in development.

It’s widely known in aviation circles that the small flying saucer Avrocar was in development and being tested by the US military. But, the much larger designs seemed more like science fiction than reality.

Two Avrocars were delivered to the US military for testing. That was after extensive testing and development work was done on a larger scale flying saucer, the PV-704. The Avrocar was built when constant challenges facing the PV-704 test model warranted a smaller proof-of-concept be constructed.

The Avrocar worked. It took off vertically and moved forward but it was eventually scrapped because it was under-powered and difficult to control. It’s possible that today’s engines, building materials and computer systems might be able to make a better Avrocar.

In the recent declassified documents we see the drawings for the large “Project 1794” saucer and the sketches are quite beautiful. Since the proof-of-concept didn’t work well, the plans for the larger saucer designs were also scrapped.

60 years later, these declassified documents show that science fiction of the 1950s was pretty accurate about secret military projects of their time. When we look at today’s sci-fi, is that what they’re building behind closed doors now?

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Sources: national archives, abc news, defense reviews, wired, wikipedia (avrocar)

Photos: Wikimedia commons (public domain), national archives

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Entry filed under: Demystified, Despite Popular Belief. Tags: avrocar, flying saucer, ufo.