Nathan Price’s V.T.O.L. design US Patent 3,103,324

But as far as even a modest performance is concerned, all of them have wondrous holes in common sense concerning both structure and claimed performance. Whilst the designs look appealing indeed, what are we to make of Nathan C. Price’s claim for a “High Velocity High Altitude VTOL Aircraft,” of 1953? This patent was filed for in January 1953, months before the Adamski pictures were published. Then, as now, the blurbs were as good as any in commercial breaks nowadays. Why was the velocity “High” we ask, and why was it “High Altitude” when USAF conventional prototypes at the time (such as the U-2) were struggling to get up to 80,000 feet? Was Price mad, or just optimistic? Certainly the symmetry and beauty of his drawings do not indicate mental instability. 

We might ask why Homer Streib’s 1953 machine was judged to be capable of “vertical and lateral flight” just as we might ask why the performance of a ship held up by rotating umbrellas (with rows of brass cannons aboard, no less) was described as a possible “warship of the skies” in 1870.

By 1956, Streib has improved his design. This time he tells us a little more about the power plant. It is a ducted fan, capable of being tilted to obtain a forward drive component. The heavy transmission gear required to do this is not illustrated, and neither is the power plant to drive such a large body and the equally heavy fan at the same time. Cooling, fuel space, electrics are not considered, and where, on this model, with its considerable under hang, any undercarriage could be retracted to is a good question. Given the weight, calculations concerning the amount of lift generated by the turning fan (little more than that for a child’s circus-ride) were optimistic.

John Fischer, 1954

Other designers were even more optimistic concerning practical engineering possibilities, an example being John Fischer’s 1954 design for a “rotating circular aircraft.” There are few details about how the rotation is to be achieved and what is its function is as regards flight and performance. In general, these designers ignore all matters concerning bearings, lubricants, fuels, petrol-electrics, transmissions, gearboxes, or control surfaces. That’s all for lesser men. As long as the machine looked like a Thunderbirds toy, then all is well. Style, not rationale, was the name of the game, although one supposes that few of these designers would ever admit that. This world appears to be in a state of ecstasy where rules of the lower earth do not mean a thing. The rule seems to be taken from one of the oldest engineering maxims: “if it looks good, it will be good.” Those males who are romantics concerning the female of the species will no doubt draw their own conclusions concerning the risks of such a claim.

Therefore power supplies are no problem, if only because in the cases we are considering, they did not exist as far as giving the claimed performances. But like love, dreams and fantasies are compulsive drives. They are not untruths so much as differing levels of approximation, all of which have great attractive power. We can no more get such things out of our minds than we can stop ourselves breathing. As human beings, if we haven’t got a particular piece of the puzzle, we either invent it usually, or ignore it, or simulate it, or often leaving an open space where “it” should be, and get on with less mundane matters. Perhaps we hope that the missing power plant will grow into the open space all by itself, and confounding us again, it indeed it appears often to do just that.

Certainly the circular design has always been most compulsive. Attempts to make a circular craft in defiance of any and every rule has, over a century consumed many lives, like the quest for alchemical gold or the Grail. Even the common sense folk of the Armed Forces of Canada, Britain, and the U.S. caught the magic bug of circularity and tried the principle in one form or another, and all their efforts came to nothing.

At left, in contrast to the above, is a professional civilian effort. As distinct from the examples given, this is a circular design brimful of calculations proper and not a little practical honest worth:

Note here that this very different thinker is going for the power supply, not the shape. These kind of experimental designs resulted finally in the moderate success of the Hovercraft and the single brilliant success of the Harrier jet fighter. But this somewhat limited destiny did not please the circular-shape stalwarts.

George Adamski’s book Flying Saucers Have Landed (co-authored with Desmond Leslie) was published in late 1953. Almost immediately, Adamski became a world-famous and influential figure. Here from his book, is the world-renowned photograph taken in Palomar Gardens.

Leonard Cramp’s orthographic projection of the Adamski ship and the Coniston saucer

It was obvious that those believers in the Adamski-type ships that had inspired generations were not going take no for an answer. They were determined to try and design and make a circular flying machine in the face of all rational considerations. The compulsion was such that patents were taking out for flying saucer shapes not intended even as flying machines, but as buildings, no less.

Donald Ordway’s 1961 “circular aircraft” John Sherwood’s “Vertical Lift Flying Machine” of 1967

Here are three examples:

The machines illustrated on the left were almost certainly built under the influence of the Adamski photographs

There should be a new science of examining these beasts in the manner that crustaceans are examined for form, development, and function. Mendel used beans, and the Galapagos finches to demonstrate the laws of Natural Selection. Here is a kind of Natural Selection operating within related families of possible industrial landscapes.

THE BROWN-BAHNSON ELECTRIC (Adamski type) UFO In the late 1950s and early 1960s Thomas Townsend Brown teamed up with Agnew H. Bahnson and James F. King to develop anti-gravity discs at the Bahnson research laboratory in Winston-Salem N.C. Through their combined ingenuity they developed Brown's ideas of electrokinetic levitation and progressively discovered, among other things: How to direct the craft's electric field so as to steer its movement. How to constrict, or confine, that electric field so as to amplify its thrust energy and make it more efficient. How improved ionization of, and its resonance within, the surrounding air-ambient increases thrust. And That voltage pressure was more important to the electrokinetic thrust effect than current flow (whereby, for instance, a 3-fold increase in voltage pressure gave a 17-fold increase in thrust). But it seems also that they had taken note of the work of Leonard G. Cramp who published, in 1954, in his book Space, Gravity and the Flying Saucer several technical drawings of George Adamski's ufo.

Their names were Orville and Wilbur Wright.

From 1903 on, the shapes improved, but they became functions of the petrol-driven internal combustion engine. In modern aeronautical practice, shapes are built around power plants, and not vice versa. More powerful engines mean more aerodynamic problems and the shapes of aircraft are attempts to solve these problems integrated with what power is available and of what type.

But then round about 1950, a very strange thing happened. This, in certain areas, led us back to the pre-Wright situation. Inspired by Arnold (1947) and Adamski (1953), many would-be designers began to sketch out circular or semi-circular shapes. But in the 1950s there was no power supply that was at all suitable for these particular shapes. Therefore, jet engines being new and rather uncertain things, this new generation of circular-form designers crammed in crude duct-fan apparatus just as the visionaries in the nineteenth century put steam engines in linen-covered bamboo carts and expected them to fly through the sky with the greatest of ease.

But the history of the circular shape wrapped regardless around conventional power plants has not been good. As the US Navy and the Canadians (and indeed the British) found out, there is simply no point in attaching such a configuration to known power units.

Vought V-173 / XF5U-1 "Flying Flapjack" or "Flying Pancake" One of the most unusual aircraft ever designed for the U.S. Navy was the Chance Vought V-173, also known as the Zimmerman "Flying Pancake". It was a prototype "proof of concept" aircraft that lacked wings, instead relying on its flat circular body to provide the lifting surface. This multi-million dollar project nearly became the first V/STOL (vertical takeoff and landing) fighter. The V-173 blueprints were shown to the Navy in 1939, with wind tunnel tests on full scale models being done in 1940-41. In January 1942 BuAer requested the proposal for two prototype airplanes of an experimental version of the V-173, known as the VS-135. This version had more powerful engines and was given the military designation XF5U-1. Flight testing of the V-173 went on through 1942 and 1943, resulting in reports of "flying saucers" from surprised Connecticut locals. Mock-ups of the XF5U-1 were done in the summer of 1943, but due to Vought's preoccupation with the Corsair and Kingfisher, the program proceeded slowly during the war. The arrival of the jet age saw the cancellation of the XF5U-1 contract by the Navy in March 1947, despite the fact that the aircraft was due to take its first test flight later that year. The XF5U-1 prototype was scrapped, though the V-173 prototype was saved and was given to the Smithsonian. To this day the V-173 / XF5U-1 project remains one of the more interesting anecdotes in aviation history.

An argument could be made saying that the British SVTOL Harrier “jump jet” fighter was the final expression of these ideas. Certainly, with its balanced computer-managed thrusters, it did (and still does) certain of the things the circular disk designers wanted their craft to do. But it did them with a conventional fighter-type body, which it retains as a warplane today, still in service with the RAF and the US Marine Corps.

Having achieved this, can we say that the search for the circular form is over? Well, no, not by any means. Yes, a thin lightweight screen could be put around the Harrier and it would perform as a pretty noisy and mediocre “flying saucer,” but its stability and performance would suffer. In any case, this would not be the performance our circular purists are seeking at all, a performance that has nothing to do with Harriers, Avrocars or Discojets.

The circular shapes in question relate to the scores of shapes that have been seen in the skies of the world practically every week for the past fifty years. As in the 19th century, our modern designers of circular craft either leave empty spaces that are waiting for another age, or use duct-fans that more often than not, are the aeronautical equivalent to a child’s windmill on a stick.

In a sense we are looking at the very last dreams of the 19th century. The dreams are struggling within an ever-widening penumbra of uncertainty that is finally going to destroy them. We can look upon these shapes as art form, pieces of concept-art that tell us as much as do conventional art-form as regards mood and character, individual destiny and national endeavor. Though these machines were never built, men dreamed of them as Quixote dreamed of the Enchanted Dulcinea. They were loved and caressed, men put their every hope in them as they sailed to their doom like paper boats in a in a rapid stream of time. In every sense here are cyber animals, pure species of information as a form of life.

Here then, still grazing in the dream fields of old technology: a kind of of the 1950s. Future generations will look upon the almost impossibilities as we now gaze upon a Mayan temple and looking at steps that lead nowhere, wonder why the temple was never finished.

Few have thought of forgotten technological guesses such as this as concept art. Far fewer even have thought of natural selection and indeed mutation within technological developments. Here are shapes that emerge from an anthropology of industrial ideology and material resources.

We dream in defiance of fact, and leave out some connections that are still forming under the hill of time. This simultaneous seeing and not-seeing provides the potential difference between the two vital faculties that drives the visions that come to pass. The psychology of discovery tells that without self-deception we are nothing. We create the future as a collage. It becomes a partner to act freely in forming and evolving consciousness.

In its attempt to describe the indescribable, indeed ufology can been seen as concept art. Conceived as art-form in the sense described here, it gave us insights into ourselves and places where equations cannot go.

Discojets, Avrocars and Skycars

The “levitating” Skycar is the brainchild of Chris Moller, who has spent $200 million trying to get his invention airborne. In 1974, Moller stated that the car needed only 35 feet to take off, but thanks to its 205hp engine it could climb at 2375 feet a minute and reach speeds of 200mph. By 2004 the improved performance figures were 365 mph at 15000 feet without oxygen or parachute.

We can state without irony, that there are few who could resist a thing as beautiful as this. As a piece of art, it certainly beats a dead fish on a brick on top of a sheet of corrugated iron. Moller himself is as optimistic as ever. Referring the above, he told BBC News Online:

The head of NASA says that in 10 years, 25% of the American population will have access to the Skycar. And he also says that in 25 years 90% of people will be using them.

Of course none of this could or will happen or was even supposed to happen in the first place. It is more than possible that Moller, like the makers of miracle engines, will not be heard of or seen again, bless him. This car is a mannequin: slim and perfect, provided she does not go outside and meet a light breeze. It is a mayfly, born without a mouth. The important feature of the vehicle is the same Doris Day honeymoon quilted bed of 1955. Like a retro toaster the thing is built not so much of matter but advertisements. It is a piece of kitsch, which is as valid an entrance into the consumer mysterium as any Gainsborough or a Reynolds.

This is the importance of people such as Chris Moller, and many like him. He is an artist, not an aerodynamicist. In this sense, his hopelessly impractical Skycar will be remembered long after more sober and sensible designs have left the air. When we enter the Skycar world at any point in its image time-line, we enter the world of Jane Mansfield and the chrome Cadillac bumper and its strip of psychedelic indicator lights. Asking this would be-aircraft to fly is like asking Warhol’s lithographs of Marilyn Monroe to speak, or his Soup Tin to contain soup.

In this sense, advertisements indeed are new forms of matter and consciousness. As concept artists, designers such as Moller get the advertisements right long before wretched product is launched. The resulting product, as in Moller’s case is often irrelevant and useless. It is merely a burnt-out catalyst whose function has been to induce a state of mind. Here is the engine room of the capitalist society, no less. Images like this hold it together In other words: we are watching TV whether or not we have a set. There is no OFF switch either for Jane Mansfield or indeed the shapes of Moller.

We leave Chris Moller, torn between Melville and Hemingway, a true American hero, with the spare bleached bones of his life in his hands. We leave him facing a mounting tide of litigation concerning the “reality” of his claims for flight. Like the space ships of George Adamski, Moller’s cars as information animals grazing on the cud of belief, having evolved into pure techno art form. In an age that consists almost entirely of corrupt and worthless things, such dream-machines, like Marilyn Monroe, will be perhaps all that will remain of any love and worth of our time. Strange that toys should have such an important destiny.

Other civilizations have given us the profound thought of men and saints, the intricate sand-grain counting of the scientists, and the tales of adventurers. But then the serious things didn’t work, and we found that even the beloved scientists were telling lies. Profundity was suspect. It led to the death camps, hysteria and (worse) religion. Few enjoyed profundity. You could not trifle with it, it meant a life of labour, and in any ase it all ended in tears.

Leonard Cramp 1954

But for a few seconds in hell, toys gave pleasure, and they didn’t tell lies. So the culture was built around them. That they did not work in the old sense was irrelevant. Toys are not supposed to do work. Perhaps when alien contact is made, we will be surprised at the extent to which toys and play make up an alien mind.

Aliens may look upon our own passing industrial “work=reality” phase as an age of mounds and barrows full of relics and skeletons, often built and conceived by men of genius..

In every sense, the prototypes are stars. They are expressions of personality and performance, being made of that pure advertisement-stuff that is virtually a new form of matter for our time. They belong hardly to an objective mechanical reality; they are, like George Adamski, pure star material to which the equations of a passing industrial world, with all its rigidities, facts, and concrete certainties hardly apply. These half-realized phantoms are in a transition stage from mechanism to media. The UFO itself is a similar larval form, a manifestation sculpted by the cultural tensions between fact and fiction, media and technology.

TOP TEN FLYING CARS The (London) Independent, Aug 24, 2004 1 Curtiss Autoplane (1917) The first "flying car", less than 15 years after the Wright Brothers' flight. The triplane three-seater featured a rear mounted propeller - but only managed a few short hops. 2 Arrowbile (1937) Studebaker-based flying car with a pusher propeller powered by a front mounted car engine and detachable wings for storage. A lack of funding killed the project. 3 Airphibian (1946) Robert Fulton's Airphibian was the first vehicle certified for air and road use. The wings, tail and propeller detached and a four-wheeled fuselage did up to 50 mph. 4 ConvAirCar (1947) A two-door saloon with a detachable wing and propeller unit. Owners were supposed to hire these to fly between airports. A crash on its third flight ended the project. 5 Avrocar (1959) An attempt by the US army to develop a flying jeep, the saucer- shaped Avrocar had a giant fan in its centre and two small cockpits. Very unstable in flight, axed in 1961. 6 Aerocar (1959) The second FAA-certified flying car used a four-wheeled fibreglass body with detachable wings and tail that could be towed behind the car. Shelved in 1970s oil crisis. 7 Moller M400 (2006) Paul Moller has dreamed of a flying car for 40 years and the wankel rotary powered, four-seat M400, which takes off and lands vertically, may one day make it into production. 8 AMC Matador (1974) An unlikely choice of vehicle for 007's nemesis Scaramanga, this model came with the option of wings and a jet engine, allowing the three-nippled villain to escape Bond. 9 Chitty Bang Bang (1967) Another Fleming creation, the film car was named after a 1920s Brooklands racer. Six cars were created and for the flying scenes, the car was hung from a helicopter. 10 Aerocar (2000) Spiritual successor to the ConvAirCar, the Aerocar 2000 is based on a Lotus Elise with a flight section with wings, tail and a propeller powered by a twin-turbo Lotus V8.