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Post by Dennis the menace on Aug 26, 2008 1:49:41 GMT -5
What are flying saucers? Surely they can't be all just mass hysteria. Where they developed during world war 2, or do they come from another world? Are they just some aviation experiment, like the helicopter and autogyro was many years ago? And a final question, if you did see one land, would you approach it, or even dare I ask, enter it? Here we can see a prototype for one, disc shaped, with ailerons and a propeller. It appears to have fixed gear, and a single rudder. It's very interesting to see the horizontal stabilizer buried in the wing body. Nice to know the first flying saucer was a prop plane there is plenty more on this site I ran across: www.nexusboard.net/showthread.php?siteid=6365&threadid=234604&showpage=1I think if I saw one land, I would most likely approach it. They might be smart enough to build one and be able to fly it to Earth, but they most likely won't be able to fully understand GMAX Mike
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Post by ozbeowulf on Aug 26, 2008 2:53:57 GMT -5
Well, everyone sees what they want to see, I guess, but my two "sightings" have satisfied me that most "flying saucers" are mis-identified objects that are quite normal but outside the average expectation. I said "most," so I figure the remainder are light refractions through windows, etc, and the old favorite commonly observed in open country where car headlights a few miles away reflect off a low cloud and seem to be light racing up over a hill straight toward the observer.
Anyway, my "saucer" stories go like this...
#1. 1974 or so, SFO to LAX in a DC-3 freighter, over the mountains in the wee hours on a clear night. It came up moving from left to right in a shallow-ish arc. It looked all the for world like a disk lighted from below.. i.e. exactly like a glowing saucer shape. I turned the aircraft and told the FO to open his window so we could watch through air, not glass. He did. The object did not change appearance. It looked like it was the size of a 747 and about five miles away as it continued that shallow arc and eventually disappeared from sight. Queried ATC and learned a Saturn missile test launch from the Vandenburg area had been launched and was headed down range into the Pacific. So, despite a picture perfect representation of a glowing disk five miles away, it was a humungous rocket flame 100 miles or so away.
#2. Australia. Another DC-3, over Bass Strait this time, out of Melbourne for Tasmania at 9,000 feet. This time I was forewarned when I filed the flight plan that there was a brightly lighted Japanese squid boat in the Strait. Couldn't miss it when we flew almost right over it. (They use gigantic floodlights to draw the squid to the surface.) It, too, looked like a large disk with light radiating in all directions. I thought it was pretty easy to see it was a squid boat (after being tipped off, of course) but my FO insisted it was a flying saucer hovering about 3,000 feet below.
So I'm a sceptic. I also agree with that Air Force general's comment when Project Bluebook was shut down many years ago. He said, "Governments leak like a sieve! Do you really think we could keep anything a secret for fifty years?"
It is interesting, though, how many attempts there were to build a saucer-shaped aircraft.
Cheers,
Glenn
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Post by emfrat on Aug 26, 2008 3:08:49 GMT -5
My old family doc was lucky enough to visit the flight deck of a 747, over the Pacific at night. ( Back when you could do that) Afterwards, he always said "There is no way you can see a sight like that, and still hold the view that we are the only sentient beings in the universe." So yes, I am waiting to see a flying saucer. I just hope we were not assessed in the 50's as being not worth further investigation.
Cheers, Earthlings!
MikeW
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Post by Piston Paul on Aug 26, 2008 3:28:30 GMT -5
Almost thought I had a Close Encounter of the Third Kind at the Texel Taildragger Fly-In this year!! cheers, Paul
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Post by Adrian Wainer on Aug 26, 2008 3:48:29 GMT -5
Well the Chance Vought aircraft was the same basic concept as the Nazi item pictured at the start of the thread, but at a much a more sophisticated level. www.aviastar.org/air/usa/chance_skimmer.phpand sophistication is the issue, in that the Nazi aircraft is primitive even by the standard of the 1930s and the Chance Vought is pretty much state of the art for circa 1945, but even jet power aircraft, shaped like traditional flying saucers, as exampled in some of the claimed end of War Nazi designs for flying saucers are like a hobbyists remote control control balsa aircraft to a Boeing 747 in comparison to the sort of technology a real flying saucer crewed by aliens would need to have. In fact the most sophisticated aircraft we have today e.g. the Airbus A380 or the F-22 would be nearer to a hobbyist balsa wood remote control aircraft than it would be to a real flying saucer. There is no big issue, about getting around in space, we were able to do it with 1960s technology ie Apollo and all the things seen in 2001 a Space Odyssey, such as a giant space station, a moon base and and shuttle space liner are all things which could be done today. The issue is with the Alien space craft if they exist is that, "the Aliens" unless they are hiding from us, must come from another star system. Now one is in a whole new ball game, when one attempts to travel between stars as opposed to between the planets of a star. www.astro.wisc.edu/~dolan/constellations/extra/nearest.htmlThe highest speed at which any spacecraft has ever escaped from the Earth is 35,800 mph (57,600 km/h) in the case of the New Horizons probe, which was launched in January 2006 and is now heading toward Pluto. www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/F/fastest_spacecraft.htmlThe approximate value of 3×108 m/s is commonly used in rough estimates (the error is 0.07%). In imperial units, the speed of light is about 670,616,629.4 miles per hour or 983,571,056.4 feet per second (roughly one foot per nanosecond), which is about 186,282.397 miles per second. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_lightNow, if we could get to a substantive fraction of the speed of light, it would make interstellar journeys a practical affair but my understanding is and I do not understand much about this type of stuff, is if one could get anyway near the speed of light all the well known aspects of reality start to change, so that in attempting even a fraction of the speed of light one would quite literally be entering a new dimension of human experience. So the problem is, we have no readily available technology to get us from our present 35,000 miles per hour to a substantive fraction of 186,000 miles a second and even if we did find an ingredient X that could accelerate us to such speed, we do not know what would happen to the crew of a spaceship traveling at such speed. Not, only with our present technology do we not have any way of reaching such speeds but we can not even in theory work out how we might go about reaching such speeds. So if we can't do it now and we can't even come up with a concept of how to obtain such speeds, then it is obvious that aliens could not have come here from another star, to visit us, well no it is possible. One possibility is a generations starship, this is a ship about the size of a large city and though it would travel relatively slowly though much faster than we are capable of, its inhabitants would spend their lives aboard the starship and generations might live and die whilst ship journeyed between stars. Well that would have to be a big thing and we would have spotted one if came near the earth, well no if they did not want to be seen. The US with the Stealth bomber is able to neutralize enemy radar surveillance and the US might be only ten or twenty years ahead in technology of the country its radar the Stealth bomber is neutralizing. A civilization that could produce even the relatively slow generations starship would be maybe tens of centuries ahead of us and would have no problem in evading any sort of surveillance we had, as it passed through our solar system or even say parked in Orbit round Mars and sent a landing party in a shuttle to earth. For the smaller sort of spacecraft it would probably of necessity need to travel a lot faster ie closer to the speed of light or perhaps several times the speed of light, for the reason that whilst there are several stars not too far away in terms of light years, it is likely that only some star systems would have a planet with some forms of higher life on it and by higher life I mean something as advanced as a mouse or cockroach and a very few would have human level beings on it and fewer again would have reached the heights of technical achievement that might make interstellar travel a possibility. But, given the huge number of stars even though relative few in comparison to the total number of stars, there must be very many star systems that have life as advanced as mankind and possibly several centuries in advance of mankind in respect of technology. The problem is even if there is a ingredient X that makes inter stellar travel feasible at near light speeds the distances to be traveled are still a major obstacle. Taking such aspects in to consideration without coming up with some sort of complex theory as to why things are as they are, UFO sightings do not seem to make sense in that we are probably too far away from the nearest inhabited star with an advanced technological civilization capable of building starships for it to be practical for them to visit us even if they had spacecraft capable of running at a substantial fraction of light speed and if they were nearer so they needed less speed or they had faster spacecraft, it does make sense that people would spot their ship and crew because if they had the technology to make those sort of journeys, they could do stuff like be totally invisible to people whilst standing beside them in the street in broad daylight. Best and Warm Regards Adrian Wainer
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Post by Wolfgang on Aug 26, 2008 11:53:27 GMT -5
Hi
Tunneleffect ? Dimension shifting ?
There are more possibilities Adrian
Best Regards
Wolfgang
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Post by chris_c on Aug 26, 2008 12:40:30 GMT -5
Using intelligently piloted vehicles from an extra-terrestrial origin as a definition, my opinion is that they do not exist and probably never have. On the other hand: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avrocar_(aircraft)Unidentified Flying Objects are another matter entirely but the fact that something might remain unknown does not preclude a rational explanation for which evidence might be lacking. While I might believe that space aliens have be the agents behind why single socks vanish from the dryer, I also think research towards faster than light travel is not an entirely wasted effort. That which is mundane today would have been considered impossible by the greatest thinkers of past ages and our present will be somebody else's history. I like to keep an open mind with a generous application of Occum's Razor. Chris (Edited for spelling)
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Post by Adrian Wainer on Aug 26, 2008 13:06:40 GMT -5
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Post by Wolfgang on Aug 26, 2008 13:19:22 GMT -5
On the other side, these german "flying discs" are an old nazi myth...nothing more. Velocity of 12.000 km/h....a bad joke:P Fact is that many projects were checked and some are build. But nothing as far advanced like a stellar flying disc. Examples are the Kramer X-4 ( wire command guided air to air missile ) V2 ( Aggregat 4 ) ground to ground missile. V1 Pulsopropelled ground to ground and air to ground unmanned vehicle. C2 Wasserfall ground to air missile. Gotha Go 229 all wing jet design aircraft Focke-Wulf Ta 183 Jetfighter and....and....and But nothing as much advanced like an flying saucer with interstellar capacity. Now I have to go into my bathroom to get away this brown coloured....... Best Regards Wolfgang
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Post by emfrat on Aug 26, 2008 15:25:07 GMT -5
Unidentified Flying Objects are another matter entirely but the fact that something might remain unknown does not preclude a rational explanation for which evidence might be lacking. Chris (Edited for spelling) I remember in the late 1960s, less than 10 years after Gary Powers was shot down, China began reporting that their radar was tracking an unknown aircraft travelling at around Mach 3 at very high altitude. NATO just as regularly was saying 'Not us, we don't have anything like that - must be a UFO'. About another five years down the track, one of these UFOs did NY to London inside two hours, and the SR-71 was revealed to the world. So what I want to know is, what are you guys running now? BTW, on the other point, towards the end of the last century, it was demonstrated conclusively that the missing sock is actually the larval form of the wire coathanger ;D MikeW
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Post by capflyer on Aug 27, 2008 8:16:17 GMT -5
I remember during High School having a bunch of reports of UFOs during the 1970s coming out in Europe. People claiming that they saw them near dusk, including one person who lived under the landing pattern for a Military Airfield. They took a picture of one of these "UFOs". What was it? A British Vulcan Bomber! The landing lights being as far spread as they are was what caused the "mis-identification" and by increasing the contrast of the image, you could clearly see the outline of the fuselage and massive cranked delta wing. I sent this to both the website purporting to be showing a UFO and the news agency that had used that image and got a retraction published because people don't do enough due diligence to make sure it really is Unidentifiable and not just Unidentified.
I believe that we're not the only ones out there, but I also don't think that 95%+ of the "sightings" are of extraterrestrial beings. I think a lot are faked, some are natural phenomenon that people don't realize, and many are just "weird" looking aircraft or aircraft doing things that they don't "think" they can do but "can" due to perspective issues.
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Post by Dennis the menace on Aug 27, 2008 12:13:19 GMT -5
When I was in Germany in the 1980s (gee, that seems like such a long time ago now ) there were senior citizens I talked to who were in Berlin during the war, and they swore up and down that they saw UFOs landing and taking off from Berlin in the last couple of weeks of the war. Some even claimed that Hitler and Eva Braun and others got on board one, and flew off to some place called Neu Schwabenland (New Schwabia), or even to another planet. I'm not saying there is any truth to these claims, but it demonstrates how far people will believe tales that the mind creates. I have seen disc shaped objects flying at high speed in the California desert, and creating sonic booms. I have no idea what they were. I would suspect that they are some secret USAF project that is based at Groom Lake, Nevada. I suspect most of this is captured technology from Germany after the war, and then work on these projects continued over here. In the link above, it's interesting to see the photo of a flying saucer shooting down a P-51 Mustang. Who knows what we will ever know Mike
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Post by Adrian Wainer on Aug 27, 2008 12:56:21 GMT -5
On the other side, these german "flying discs" are an old nazi myth...nothing more. Velocity of 12.000 km/h....a bad joke:P Fact is that many projects were checked and some are build. But nothing as far advanced like a stellar flying disc. Best Regards Wolfgang You really sure about that Wolfgang? www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KEueJnsu80Best and warm Regards Adrian Wainer
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Post by Dennis the menace on Aug 27, 2008 14:23:49 GMT -5
Herr Dr. Dip. Ing. Hugo Junkers was working on a magnetic pulse engine in Dessau that was said to be able to generate enough force to levitate objects. In the laboratory, it could and did fly around.
One can easily see how any such scaled up engine would be able to lift an object of several tons and project it through the air in any direction.
It isn't just coincidence that all these flying saucers where only seen AFTER world war 2 and initially in allied countries. We removed hundreds of tons of research and thousands of scientists to continue their work here for us.
I suspect that a great deal of phony UFO photographs are actually developed in government labs and then sent out as disinformation to discredit the entire subject. One famous such photo shows a UFO over a house in 1958, hovering. The government was quick to send it out to the press, and only the next day sent out a press release to say it was a fake photo, and once you blew up the chrome disk, you could read the letters B U I C K on it, it was only a hubcap suspended upside down by a string. Disinformation is a common government method used to discredit any subject the authorities do not approve of the public gaining insight into.
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Post by Adrian Wainer on Aug 27, 2008 14:28:31 GMT -5
When I was in Germany in the 1980s (gee, that seems like such a long time ago now ) there were senior citizens I talked to who were in Berlin during the war, and they swore up and down that they saw UFOs landing and taking off from Berlin in the last couple of weeks of the war. Some even claimed that Hitler and Eva Braun and others got on board one, and flew off to some place called Neu Schwabenland (New Schwabia), or even to another planet. I'm not saying there is any truth to these claims, but it demonstrates how far people will believe tales that the mind creates. I have seen disc shaped objects flying at high speed in the California desert, and creating sonic booms. I have no idea what they were. I would suspect that they are some secret USAF project that is based at Groom Lake, Nevada. I suspect most of this is captured technology from Germany after the war, and then work on these projects continued over here. In the link above, it's interesting to see the photo of a flying saucer shooting down a P-51 Mustang. Who knows what we will ever know Mike Hi Mike, I did not speak to the people you spoke to but if I had spoken to somebody of the wartime generation in Germany and they had come out with a story of Herr Hitler and Eva Braun exiting the Third Reich aboard a flying saucer it would raise suspicions in my mind that they were somewhat sympathetic to the ideology of the Third Reich and thought the wrong side had won the War. As for captured Nazi technology shipped to the US, personally I do not believe it was anything more exotic than jet engines and advanced conventional aircraft designs. There is a rather silly sense of awe in which some people hold Nazi technology, the reason why they were relatively more advanced in several fields than the Allies was that: [1] Germany started preparing for War before the Allies. [2] Hitler decided the War had been won by 1940/41, so the German state believed it could afford the luxury of investing in long term projects. [3] When the War went seriously wrong for Germany, they were desperate for a technology fix that would offset American and Russian numerical superiority. [4]NASA needed to promote itself and having got hold of Verner Von Braun would not have exactly been out to convince people that there was nothing special about the Nazi scientific achievements and or that had US and British rocket engineers and scientists had the Government funding the Third Reich scientists had in the 1930s they could have produced a V2 equivalent, not that the V2 had any actual positive military application during World War 2, it was basically pointless when used without a nuclear warhead. [5]Because the Third Reich allowed many people and organizations to compete against one another, whilst this was exactly the wrong way to run a wartime economy and military research effort, it did of course generate numerous leading edge research projects. As for the idea that the Nazis developed, a working spacecraft using a non-conventional drive, whilst anything is possible, one would have to ask why the Americans or the Russians never got around using this technology. Best and Warm Regards Adrian Wainer
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