The History Channel, Sunday 12th February 2006 In the latest episode of UFO Files, we are taken on a tour of man-made flying saucers from World War II to the present day and asked to consider the possibility that all UFO sightings are of top secret, terrestrial aircraft. As defeat loomed for Hitler’s Germany in 1944-45, Nazi scientists were tasked with developing new and exotic weapons that might turn the tide of the war. The most famous of these new super weapons were the V-1 and V-2 rockets developed and launched from Peenemünde on the Baltic Sea. However other projects were also underway. A man named Viktor Schauberger designed a flying disc-type aircraft. It was hoped that this craft would manoeuvre like a helicopter, using magnetic rotation to create lift, but also be able to travel at supersonic speeds and be undetectable to the enemy. Working with other brilliant engineers and scientists, several disc designs were tested and even flown. As the war drew to a close, German science worked feverishly to develop these new weapons: flying saucers, rockets, jet aircraft and who knows what else, but time was running out for them. Allied bombing raids were causing great damage and Allied troops were closing in on all fronts. As Germany surrendered, a frantic scramble between the western powers and the Soviet Union began to capture the brilliant German scientists behind what was at the time the most advanced aviation technology on the planet. The US managed to capture factories that were producing V-2 rockets and men such as Wernher von Braun, while the Soviets got their hands on the latest Nazi jet aircraft and a good number of rocket scientists. After the war, Schauberger and other flying saucer designers such as Rudolf Schriever and Walter Miethe ended up working for the Americans, while their former comrade, Andreas Epp, is said to have worked for the Soviet Union. As the struggle for global nuclear dominance intensified, flying disc research continued in secret. Then in 1947, the UFO sighting of pilot, Kenneth Arnold, made headlines around the world. He described nine, crescent-shaped craft travelling at over twelve-hundred miles per hour, a speed almost unheard of in those days. ‘UFO fever’ gripped America and thousands of reports began to flood in. Military officials appeared on television, calming public fears, but also declaring that they were not testing or flying saucer-shaped rockets or aircraft. Then in July of that year, a flying disc was reported to have crashed near Roswell, New Mexico. It was quickly explained away as being a weather balloon. In private, US generals were concerned that these UFO sightings could be secret aircraft from the Soviet Union, designed by their captured German scientists. Many blueprints and plans for Nazi jet aircraft had been captured at the end of the Second World War and one of these was the Horton 229, a flying wing jet that bore a striking resemblance to Arnold’s crescent-shaped UFOs. It was feared that the Soviets had developed a flying, supersonic version of this jet. As the Cold War evolved in the 1950s, and the Korean conflict brought the world to the brink of nuclear destruction, the public’s paranoia was reflected in popular movies such as Earth Vs The Flying Saucers and Invaders from Mars. The US military used this fear as a smokescreen to hide its top secret projects in places such as Area 51 in Nevada, where tests of all kinds of exotic aircraft, rockets, balloons, high-altitude parachute drops and satellites were performed. Project Mogul, the use of high-altitude balloons with trains of radar reflectors designed to detect Soviet atomic testing, came out of this era and was the final explanation for what crashed in Roswell. With the Soviets taking the lead in jet fighter technology in the Korean War, the Americans needed to catch up and radar-invisible, supersonic flying saucers were one avenue of possibility. In 1952, the US Air Force became aware of a project by the Canadian avionics company, Avro, to build a flying saucer. British designer, John Frost, was the mastermind of the idea, inspired by UFO sightings from all over the world. He learned of Nazi flying saucer projects and eventually met with Walter Miethe., who said he had worked for ten years on German saucers and also showed Frost plans and photographs of his work. With a $10 million grant from the USAF, Frost set up his special projects division at Avro and began work on a supersonic flying saucer. The first attempt was with ‘Project Y’, a spade-shaped aircraft that would serve as a tail-less, supersonic, vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) jet interceptor. After several failed tests, Project Y was abandoned. Frost’s next attempt was to create a circular aircraft that utilised rotary engines set along the outside edge of the airframe. This was called ‘Project Y-2’. A test of a 50-foot, six-engined design almost ended in disaster for the entire team when the tethered engines spun out of control, almost destroying the hangar. The supersonic Y-2 project was suspended and a smaller, test design was commissioned. This was to become known as the Avrocar. The Avrocar was designed to fly forwards at 300 mph at thirty-thousand feet and to land and take off vertically. In 1959, the first two prototypes were rolled out. It was hoped that this design could become a kind of flying Jeep for the US military. Early test flights proved that the craft could fly, although it only moved a few inches above the ground. Problems were also discovered when it flew over grassy areas, with the engine intakes sucking up all sorts of debris. The circular design was also very difficult for the pilot to handle, making the craft unwieldy and problematic to steer. Despite attempts to make the Avrocar more stable, the program was eventually scrapped in 1961. Flying Saucers - For Real! The secret truth behind U.S. built flying wing disc aircraft   This official flying disc (or "flying saucer") illustration is taken from an Air Force Manual, AFM 200-3, Chapter 9, Page 3. The caption at the bottom of the page states, "The Air Technical Intelligence Center is responsible for the prevention of technological surprise". Forty years ago, Jack Pickett, a publisher of American military magazines, was visiting MacDill AFB in Florida when he saw what appeared to be four flying saucers parked outside in a restricted area. They ranged in size from twenty to a hundred and nineteen feet in diameter and perfectly circular. Pickett was shown photographs of the craft in flight, sometimes with conventional jet escorts. He was told that the craft, which had a large, vertical tail section, were capable of 15,500 mph and had even achieved space flight. Pickett asked why such an amazing project had been discontinued (the craft were in a section for scrapped airplanes) and was told that better, more stable designs had replaced them. During the 1960s, UFO reports continued to make the news headlines. Alan Brown was the chief engineer of the US stealth project at the Lockheed Skunkworks. He is convinced that all UFO reports can be attributed to secret US military aircraft. He maintains that the amount of testing that went on at Area 51 made it inevitable that people would see strange-shaped aircraft in the skies from time to time. In 1978, Warren Botz was attending a flight reunion at Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio, when he saw disc-shaped aircraft parked in a hangar. His description of the craft almost exactly matches that of Jack Pickett’s circular aeroplanes. In 1988, the USAF revealed to the world the F-117 stealth fighter. Alan Brown said that the only reason that this remarkable aircraft was unveiled was because they had to begin flying it in daylight because of several night-flight test accidents that had resulted in the loss of pilots. It was hoped that confirming the existence of this plane to the world would reduce the number of UFO reports. Not surprisingly, reports of triangular UFOs began to appear in the news. With the end of the Cold War, it wasn’t until the Gulf War in 1991 that the F-117 saw its first action, impressing the world with its stealth capabilities and accurate bombing power. Despite all of its success, though, the stealth fighter still had to be piloted by a human being. The next phase of aerial combat will be with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Already, we have UAVs designed for reconnaissance, such as the Sikorsky Aerobot, but the future lies with UAVs that can perform in combat. It is likely that such craft are already in existence and have probably already been used in the ‘War on Terror’. If supersonic flying saucer technology has been abandoned in favour of triangular stealth aircraft and slow-moving, circular drones, how does this explain the continued raft of UFO sightings that contain disc-shaped objects moving at unbelievable speeds and defying the known laws of physics? Are the US military still developing flying saucers? This program offered a brief glimpse into the world of secret aviation development and the craft described are incredible feats of engineering, but to suggest that all UFO reports can be explained as test flights of these craft is absurd. What about close-up sightings on the ground where non-human figures are seen? What about sightings in orbit by US astronauts and Russian cosmonauts? If the US military has craft that can achieve orbit so easily, why are we still sending people and equipment up on the top of a gigantic firecracker? It is clear that the more we try to answer these questions, the more questions we create from the answers.   Stranger Than Fiction: THE REAL FLYING SAUCERS What if flying saucers were real? What if Hitler had a saucer and planned an attack on New York? What if America developed a radar-invisible flying saucer and the CIA used alien invaders as a cover for top secret military experiments? For fifty years the world has been flying saucer crazy. Many more western people now believe in aliens than in god. The truth is rather more complex. Flying saucers do exist. But they don't come from outer space; they come from earth, and the darkest shadows of military research. It all began in 1932 in Bucharest, when a flight engineer called Henri Coanda, made an extraordinary discovery using a disc shaped flying object.   Radu Maniticedes was a twenty year old aeronautical student when he witnessed Coanda's first experiments: The saucer lifted itself off the ground, reached the ceiling of the room and would remain there. I thought it was something extraordinary. It would never have crossed my mind. You know I was only used to the idea of normal flying.   Young Radu had just witnessed the world's first flying saucer. And this is how it worked. If you draw air down and over a curved shape like a saucer it follows that shape. By literally sucking the air from above his saucer, and allowing it to follow round and underneath, Coanda found he could simultaneously lower the air pressure above and raise it below, causing the craft to levitate. This became known as the Coanda effect. It is the principle at the heart of saucer flight. Radu Maniticedes: It was a very simple idea, but of course, you had to have thought of it in the first place.   Then something happened that was to change the entire course of saucer development. War broke out, and the world rushed headlong into a search for new weapons, and new ways of deploying them. Coanda's simple idea was about to have its day. At first Germany led the way in new weapons development, under Nazi technology chief, Wernher von Braun, who operated from top secret headquarters in Peenemünde in Germany. Here he developed state of the art weapons of terror like the V2 rocket. This was the central location from which all projects were run for quite a long time.   What few people knew was that 260 miles away in Prague the Nazis had an even more secret research establishment – and they were working on a fantastic new flying craft. And the firm at the heart of these frightening new developments? - Skoda. The SS and air force were using Skoda to manufacture aircraft of all sorts.   But by 1944 things were going badly wrong for Hitler. He needed to reassure his allies, chief amongst them Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Hitler told Mussolini he had spectacular new aircraft that could change the course of the war. He called them his Wunderwaffen.   In July 1944 Hitler invited Mussolini to Germany with his chief advisor on weapons technology Luigi Romersa. Later Romersa was taken to the top secret Skoda base where the new aircraft was being developed. Today Luigi Rromersa is 84 and living in Italy. He describes what he saw that day: Yes i saw it. For me, it was something exceptional. Round with the central cockpit made in Plexiglas, and with all the jets all around it that made up the means of propulsion. Luigi Romersa had seen the world's first production flying saucer. And it was a Skoda:  Well, you see the pilot drawn in the cockpit. The pilot would drive the disc standing. One of the men who actually helped create that flying saucer is Andreas Epp. Epp had invented a disc shaped flying gunnery target, and sent the prototype to the Luftwaffe high command, suggesting it could be adapted for manned flight. Before his death in 1997, Epp described how he began to suspect his designs had been stolen. Over and over again, I heard reports of the people who were working on construction in Prague of flying disks and progress in this field was actually being made. Furious over being sidelined, Epp drove to the Prague test ground to find out what was going on: I had my Leica camera with me when suddenly i saw such a flying saucer. It had no wings, absolutely none. I took a photo and wound on the film but it was already directly over me then I took a second photo, and I could see it was a flying saucer. Epp was devastated by what he felt was the theft of his saucer. Epp would get his own back later, but in the meantime the Germans had a flying saucer. It actually flew and it flew pretty well. It was based on the flying saucer principle, the effect discovered by Henri Coanda, whereby the ship created an area of low pressure above it and literally sucked itself into the air. But it combined this with other new technology such as the helicopter and the jet engine. It was fast, versatile and could potentially carry a heavy payload of bombs underneath. But perhaps most important in a country which had lost so many of its runways to allied bombing, it could take off vertically. These saucers worked like a helicopter in that they had rotating veins. The veins would rotate underneath the saucer and were powered by the same jet that moved the saucer forward, would move to spin the veins to give it lift.   Luigi Romersa: They were to be used as bomber. Every machine built in those years was a war weapon. They were to be used as a response to the allies in what it was to be the final battle of the Third Reich. According to Romersa, an increasingly desperate and deluded Hitler plotted to use his new secret weapon, in a devastating attack on New York: Hitler said once: 'God forgive me for the last 5 minutes of the war.' He wanted to unleash these weapons they were accumulating.   It never happened of course. The Russians were advancing on Prague, and while the German rearguard fought desperately on the streets, the scientists in the Skoda plant tried to destroy the evidence of their research.   Luigi Romersa: The pressure of the enemy was unbearable, and the airfield was blown up with dynamite, and the saucer blew up with the rest of the equipment. They pushed the saucers from their hangars onto the tarmac, put explosive charges in, blew it up, and let them burn, right there on the tarmac in front of everyone.They had destroyed the physical evidence of their saucer research. But the Nazi scientists survived, and the victorious allies turned on each other in their race for them. So who would win the fight for the secrets of the saucer men? In 1947, pilot Kenneth Arnold was flying over mountains in Washington state when he saw nine objects shooting across the sky at incredible speeds. He thought that they traveled at a motion that he compared to saucers being skipped on water, which is an unusual analogy but that name stuck, which is why they became flying saucers. This sighting has become celebrated as the moment the flying saucer age was born. It sparked a frenzy of public excitement, but it was a frenzy fuelled by paranoia. Because this was the start of the cold war. The allies of the Second World War were now enemies.The former coalition was to be torn asunder. Already an iron curtain had descended around Poland. In public, west and east mounted huge displays of their biggest and best military hardware. But there was a secret war too, a ruthless competition to acquire Nazi science and Nazi scientists. Whoever controlled this technology from World War Two would really be ahead militarily. So there was a scramble between the allied powers, the Russians, the French the British, even though they had been allies, to obtain as much of this technology as possible for their own side. That is why the US government was so alarmed by the flying saucers seen by pilot Kenneth Arnold. It meant Russia had acquired German flying saucer technology, and was building them.The Germans had been so far advanced of the US they thought that if the Russians had captured scientists or installations responsible for these secret weapons then maybe the Soviets were now ahead too. The Americans were right. The Russians were building flying saucers. And to help them they had spirited someone very useful from Germany. Andreas Epp, the German saucer engineer. Immediately after the war, Andreas Epp decided that he wanted to work in the Soviet union. So he moved to Vostock, and was contacted there by Soviet agents, and the Soviet agents seemed to know who he was. And of course Epp liked this a lot, because somebody was acknowledging that he was of some value, whereas before he had been minimized:  I thought to myself, I have to carry on, I owe it to people who worked on it, and I started to build a flying disc. Epp worked primarily on the steering mechanism of the Soviet saucer. His specialty was the guidance part of this type of saucer. In other words, making it respond to controls, the controls of the saucer mechanism itself. According to Epp, the Russian saucer was extraordinarily maneuverable. But it was also versatile. And it had to be. It was a jet and they wanted something that they could use in polar regions.The reason for that was obvious. The quickest way to North America was over the pole. That was a fact not lost on an increasingly paranoid America. Even Hollywood suspected the Russians were up to something  - The first country that learns the secret of the flying saucer will control the skies of the world, and the Americans did not want that country to be Russia. A lot of the sightings were in the northwest part of the US. It was near the Boeing plant in Seattle, where all of the us bombers were built. It was also near the Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington state, where the plutonium for the nuclear bombs was produced. They were very strategically sensitive parts of the United States. And it was the closest part of the United States to the Soviet Union, so it is where they would have expected planes to come. By now saucers were appearing everywhere. Hardly a city centre or movie set was safe. The government needed to put a lid on the speculation. To do that, the Pentagon's psychological warfare department came up with an elegant two-part plan. First, a senior military figure would firmly deny that anything was happening at all. But as a backup, they'd set rumours flying that the saucers came from outer space. The plan was launched at press conference in the pentagon. It was in June of 1952, and a definitive moment in the history of spin. It was Major General John A. Sandford, director of intelligence,  United States air force who conducted the conference. It was his job to deny there was anything significant about the reported sightings: It does not contain any pattern or purpose of consistency that we can relate to any threat to the United States. To argue the alien invader theory, they put a pulp magazine writer, retired Major Donald Keyhoe, on the same platform as the General: Major Keyhoe, as author of the book Flying Saucers Are Real, what is your opinion of these new sightings of unidentified flying objects? Major Keyhoe: With all due respect to the air force, I believe some of them will prove to be of interplanetary origin. It was very clever, and very simple. Now anyone who saw a military saucer would be encouraged to believe they had seen an alien. And the rest of us would laugh at them. The press loved the aliens story and ran it with enthusiasm… the very edition of Life magazine which launched Marilyn Monroe as a star also launched the career of many a Man from Mars. In that article a number of anonymous government and military experts were interviewed, and made statements supporting the idea that the saucers could not be man-made objects, the alternative seemed to be that they were from another planet.   The writings of Donald Keyhoe directly inspired Earth versus the Flying Saucers made by the legendary Hollywood animator Ray Harryhausen:   The concept was taken from one of his books on flying saucers. I understand the government has made a lot of experiments with round flying objects, which they've kept quiet, and have possibly encouraged the idea that there were aliens from outer space.   Indeed it appears the government were so interested, that the film's producer Charles Schneer was reporting directly to them. Ray Harryhausen: Of course once it was written the script was out of my hands and I’m sure Charles submitted it to the front office as well as various space people.   But while American citizens looked to the skies in wonder, the Men in Black were looking closer to home. They were desperate for their own saucers. And just like the Russians they were looking for former Nazi scientists to help them.   When the Nazis surrendered in 1945, the USs military was worried about the German scientists falling into the hands of the soviets, and the us military was also interested in exploiting the knowledge of these scientists. So the United States set up programs called Overcast and Paperclip to collect these scientists and bring them to the united states.   In some respects the Americans did very well. They snatched Nazi technology boss Wernher von Braun and made him into an invaluable member of the American war machine. They also acquired a great deal of German V2 rocket technology. But while they played with these new toys, with rather more enthusiasm than skill, they knew there was a serious gap in their new armoury. They had no German saucers. But then one day in 1957 they had a stroke of luck and once again it involved the German saucerman, Andreas Epp, now living in East Germany.   At some point, he had a falling out with life in eastern Germany,  it may have been a divorce. And he ended up in the west. He crossed the border  and said, hi, here I am. I was spying for the Soviets and I want to tell you everything I know. And the Americans immediately threw him in jail and began interrogating him. And while he was in jail he started writing and drawing from memory what he had done for the Soviets: the Soviet saucer plan and what it was going to be used for. With the help of Epp and others, America began its programme in earnest.   It's an interesting fact that by the late 50s and early 60s almost all the major aerospace contractors, including Boeing, Convair, Lockheed and North American, were working on concepts for saucer shaped vehicles for various applications. Lockheed’s California division, a  senior member of the Lockheed family and birthplace of an always exciting family of wings, was working on a number of saucer designs for the US air force.   They all have a central engine that would point downward and the aircraft would take off straight up, transition in the horizontal flight, accelerate to a very high speed, and then fly at over a hundred thousand feet. This was very advanced thinking for the time. The Lockheed engineers were working on a saucer which used a central jet driving a rotor to create the Coanda, or flying saucer effect. Once airborne, it re-directed its jet to travel horizontally at supersonic speeds. But Lockheed wasn't the only US engineering corporation working on this technology. Convair was one of the major aircraft companies in the 1950s and 60s. Like Lockheed,  Convair had both secret projects and a public face; in this case Hollywood star James Stewart: Well, that was quite a day I had there, and believe me, that's quite an aeroplane. In the fifties and sixties, Bob Widmer was a senior designer for Convair and a key member of the team which built the B58 Hustler. In the early 1960s it was the fastest plane on earth. James Stewart: That really got me excited. After all the bird flies at Mach 2. Mach 2, that's two times the speed of sound… But Bob Widmer didn't just design jet aircraft. In 1957, he was given a stunning new brief: to design an aircraft which was invisible. Invisible at least, to radar:  You had to be able to be non-detectable at three hundred and sixty degrees, because even at that time, the Russian radars began being hooked up together, the only way that that could really be solved was by coming up with a thing that was shaped like a disc or a discus.   In other words, Bob had to build a flying saucer, because the military had realized that a flying saucer would make a perfect stealth craft. Conventional planes are detectable by radar because surfaces at right angles to a radar beam reflect back. A disc, or a flying saucer, on the other hand sends back diffuse and confusing signals. The prospect of a radar-invisible aircraft caused great excitement in senior military circles. One day some shadowy figures called on Bob: “When they first came, i didn't know who they were. They didn't tell me hey, I’m coming here from the CIA. Look at my badge.” James Stewart: “Oh… they made me a member of the club. I didn't know it was the CIA who came. That tells you how god damn secret that they were.”   In fact the CIA was being even more mysterious than usual. Because they weren't just fighting America’s enemies, they'd been fighting each other, a secret turf war with the US air force over who should run spy planes.   Bob Widmer: They cheat, they lie, they're crooks, they disguise. To meet with them for example, I’d have to go to buildings that were half finished in Washington. Airline reservations were made with fake names, it was hard on me and my wife to live this thing and all. The whole bunch of fake stuff and also where you couldn't tell realism from what was just a phony.   Bob reluctantly agreed to work on the project, the design of a radar-invisible saucer-shaped object: I never would want to do it again, to have to live under that kind of a climate. You couldn't talk to anybody except at certain places that they selected. The project was so highly classified, it was not supposed to exist: a condition of absolute deniability known as a black project. There's all kinds of black. I'm talking about the extreme black. I have lived the extreme black.   Bob's project has never been declassified, the CIA removed all his records and designs. James Stewart: Well I guess that just about sums up the story. Or does it? Because while the CIA were keeping Bob in the dark, another craft was being brought into the light. In 1961 the world was shown what its builders claimed was the first real flying saucer, invented by John Frost. The army was interested in a vehicle which could fly close to the ground, which couldn't be stopped by roadblock or rivers, and which could jump over rivers and trees. There were however real problems with the Avrocar, as Doug Garland, one of the wind tunnel engineers, remembers: We tested the Avrocar in the tunnel, but it was very unstable. You know, if you throw a hubcap or a plate on the ground, it will roll around like this, and the Avrocar had a tendency to do that. In fact when the Avrocar was revealed to the public, the whole project had actually already been abandoned. In truth the Avrocar was not a flying saucer at all. It was actually the world's first hovercraft. It was also the almost accidental by-product of a very secret, and far more ambitious, project. A project which had everything to do with flying saucers.   John Frost didn't believe in flying saucers from Mars. But he did believe in flying saucers, because secretly he was building one.   A film, made strictly for the eyes of security-cleared military personnel, recorded the work of Avro's top secret special projects team, led by John Frost. The six piper engine test assembly was built by Avro Aircraft Ltd to develop a power plant for an aeroplane of circular plan form. It consisted of a basic airframe of six sections excluding the outer wing, operators cab, air intake routes and the flying controls. Frost was building a huge jet powered supersonic flying saucer code-named project Y2 or weapons system 606a. And it too utilized German saucer technology.   John Frost was aware of wartime research that the Germans had carried out, in an area of flying saucer developments that were possibly the basis of what he saw as the real flying saucers in the sky. That almost came at a time when the CIA was funding some research into a design concept much like the flying saucer he had in mind. US military was excited by the vision that Frost presented. These original secret project specs for the saucer showed it could fly higher and faster than any craft – or weapons system – then available. The military enthusiastically pumped huge quantities of money into his project. The special projects group became an entity onto itself. It was given a place in the flight test area and now began to work on what Frost had started to look on as the ideal shape; the most coveted design of all aviation, a completely enclosing bodied aircraft; a flying disc. Everything Frost had in mind was always a circle. He never wanted to change the plan form. He thought it was ideal because it was a vertical take off.   But in truth the fantastic supersonic flying saucer of Frost's imagination was a long way from becoming reality. His design was one of the purest uses of the Coanda or flying saucer effect yet, and had six powerful jets which sucked the air over the saucer shape. These provided the saucer with its lift, but also by varying the power from each individual jet, provided its maneuverability. But testing this craft, and in particular its six powerful jets, was not going to be easy or safe. Ray Tanecuchi was put in charge of building a full scale test rig: It was just a six sided shape, and then we put the rig on top of it, the inner portion of the 606a on there, with the Viper engines.   Another special projects engineer was Ken Lockwood: I was a performance engineer, and i had been working on supersonic projects in England, and when i went in for the first time, I was kind of incredulous at the project, it was so unconventional.   It was in fact a full sized full scale aircraft built into a concrete building, to be testing the engines and systems for what would be weapon systems 606a.   Then came the testing period. What they were trying to do was tie down one of the most powerful supersonic aircraft ever built. It was a daunting task. When John Frost had, in fact, one run away with full power, the building was cleared with the imminent threat of an explosion. Once the fuel cells in the aircraft would blow up, the entire building would be destroyed. It was terrifying moment. The engine was out of control and about to destroy the entire saucer project. One of the engineers happening upon the scene, walked into the building and simply removed the fuel line from the runaway engine. It gradually comes to a stop. Ken Lockwood: After that it was deemed rather dangerous to run it, so they abandoned that.   But things were also beginning to go badly wrong for the Avro Corporation itself. In 1959 its main conventional contract, a massive project to build a supersonic jet, the Arrow, was suddenly cancelled, and the company went into financial meltdown. John Frost was removed from his own project. The maverick genius behind the Avro flying saucer left the company forever, and moved with his family to New Zealand. But the American air force were far from happy. They still wanted a saucer. And if Avro wouldn't build it for them, they would have it built themselves. John Frost's supersonic flying saucer, like so many others, was about to disappear into the blackest recesses of the American military machine. Last heard pf the 606a was that it went to Bell Aircraft in Fort Erie. From then on all that remained was rumours.   In the years following the disappearance of Frost's saucer, sightings, many laughably unconvincing, continued to grow. But some turned out not to be a product of fevered imaginations at all.   The CIA’s Uu2 spy plane was a classic black project. It operated in absolute secrecy for over 8 years – and it would have remained secret to this day had it not been for the dramatic events of 1960 when U2 pilot Gary Powers was shot down over Russia and then held for two years before being traded for a Russian spy. The CIA’s own history of the U2 program makes the statement that 50 per cent of the UFO sightings were caused by the U2. The U2 flew on the edge of space, higher than anyone believed a plane could fly. Hardly surprising then that any glimpse, particularly from another plane, would provoke wonder, and fear. If the U2 debacle proved one thing it was that unless your secret craft actually crashes or is shot down, alien flying saucers make a fantastic cover story. And if your secret craft actually is a flying saucer, you can keep the pretence up for years.   As Frost's saucer disappeared into the intense blackness of official secrecy, various amateur UFO spotters moved up a gear. In Washington, a private unofficial group known as NICAP, National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena called a news conference, re opened up an old argument with the air force. NICAP was the main voice of the alien flying saucer theory. It was led by the pulp fiction writer who had first launched the idea at that extraordinary press conference back in 1952. 14 years later, he was still hunting aliens.   NICAP's director Major Donald E. Keyhoe, retired marine corps officer, insisted that the air force knew more than it was telling: We are being observed by some type of device which is ahead of us, far ahead of us, probably controlled by a highly advanced superior civilisation. And for the umpteenth time in as many years, the air force called before a congressional hearing said that it was hiding nothing.   It all seemed so straightforward: the amateurs accuse the military of covering up an imminent alien invasion, and the military deny it. So no one looks at the third possibility, that the UFOs are military craft. How lucky for the government that these enthusiastic amateurs were so well organised. Except that their organisation wasn't a product of luck at all. NICAP was led by men from the shadows. The first manager was Nicholas de Rochefort, of the CIA’s psychological warfare division. Board members included Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the CIA’s first director, and CIA operative Bernard J. Carvelho. And when Keyhoe reigned as chairman of NICAP, he was replaced by Joseph Bryan, also of the CIA’s psychological warfare staff. But what of Keyhoe himself? Was he a genuine believer in alien flying saucers or did he himself have any connection with America’s military research into German flying saucer technology? One man who might know, was the German saucer engineer, Andreas Epp, who had gone over to the Americans. In an  interview in 1997, he came up with a remarkable answer to this question: “From the beginning, from the very beginning. Major Keyhoe was at the pentagon in the UFO department, and they found out that Germany was building flying disks.”   But whoever was behind the campaign to propagate the alien myth, it was spectacularly successful. Nowhere more than in the land of dreams: Hollywood. Across the world excited earthlings rushed out to look for UFOs. It even sparked a fashion craze, and some even made strenuous attempts to communicate with their new alien friends.The problem was that these flying saucer spotters were looking in the wrong place. The real UFO's were somewhere very different, and of more earthly origin.   Gulf Breeze, Florida. Here, on the 11th of November 1987, successful businessman called Ed Walters saw a strange light above his garden. He grabbed his camera and took a photograph. It was the first of dozens of sightings over the next few years. When they were enhanced, they seemed to show something which looked remarkably like a flying saucer. The saucers were witnessed by hundreds of people from policemen to priests. And some more excitable witnesses even suggested they had met the aliens. But then one man, Boyd Bushman saw the photos and reached a rather different conclusion; he thought he recognized what was powering these saucers. And he recognized it because he himself had worked on the technology. Bushman had spent 35 years in the forefront of weapons design, inventing the prototype of the Stinger missile before moving to Lockheed, at the heart of the American military saucer industry. While he was there, he and his team began experimenting with a radical new source of energy: This is no more than two hundred and fifty turns of number thirty wire. And we took the leads and plugged it into standard house current.   What happened next astonished everyone. Even now Boyd doesn't fully understand how it works. But when he saw the photographs of the Gulf Breeze saucers, he began to wonder if they were using the same technology. Boyd's experimental coil becomes extremely hot within seconds and he believes that explains the white glow inside the Gulf Breeze saucers, which he thinks are unmanned drones: If you modify voltages and the frequencies, this configuration may well fly, and should fly perfectly well, and we believe that's what the people in the Gulf Breeze experiment did.   So who were those people? Boyd believes they must have been from another black project within the US military research establishment: It was probably nothing more than another branch of us. I think it could be that they, or our people, we have many, many little caveats of top secret areas, I’ve been in many of them. I didn't indeed stumble across this, and probably did develop it, and they did choose that area to demonstrate this technology. They are devious and capable of doing this and worse.   They've certainly been devious before. In the 1970's there were a series of dramatic sightings of UFO's. But these sightings were different. Many seemed to be triangular rather then circular. Speculation among the UFO spotters became frenzied. But then this man came on the scene. His name is Jim Goodall, and he is by day a curator at the museum of flight in Seattle. Goodall has also written more than 20 books on military aviation. But in his spare time, he does something else: I go out in the desert when i have a chance. I've been out there over the last 15 years about 80 some odd times.   Jim visits top secret us military aviation sites to photograph America’s covert black projects in the air: The best way to avoid being spotted is to rent a vehicle that's neutral in colour. I had some infra red suppressive camouflaged netting. I throw that over the vehicle, put some sage brush on top of it, and when they look around, they don't see anything that's obvious.”   In 1986, Jim took a photograph of a craft that had been shrouded in the blackest secrecy for over ten years: I had my cameras out, I heard something take off, saw a T-38 in the air, which I identified and then over my head came an F117.   The Ff117 Nighthawk is the stealth fighter. For over a decade it had been flying in the skies over America, and elsewhere, any sightings conveniently explained away by the alien myth.   Jim Goodall: I went through a 36 exposure roll of Kodachrome and had two frames that went fuzzy or blurred. I was shaking so much because it was one of the most exciting times of my life…   With his photograph Jim had revealed the truth of the triangular sightings. If you look at an F117 head-on, it looks like a flying saucer. If you can't identify it, it's an unidentified thing. So if you don't know what it is, and it's in the air, it's a UFO, an unidentified flying object. In the years following Jim’s photograph, and once the existence of the F-117  became public in November 1988.   the flurry of triangular sightings abated. But sightings of circular craft did not. It has been reported that "Kelly" Johnson, Lockheed's chief designer, had initially favored a circular design.   Jim Goodall: A dear friend of mine named Ben Rich. He replaced Kelly Johnson at the Lockheed Skunkworks. About ten days before he died, I was speaking to Ben on the telephone at the USC Medical Center in Los Angeles. And he said, Jim, we have things out in the desert that are fifty years beyond what you can comprehend. They have about forty five hundred people at the Lockheed Skunkworks. What have they been doing for the last eighteen or twenty years? They're building something.