Code Name "Silverbug"

[Dover]

The US military was testing and flying UFO design aircraft in the 40's and 50's. They had as many as 35 saucer projects with vertical lift off and descent. The most highly classified was known by code name Silverbug.

Near the end of WWII the allied forces had gained superiorty over the Germans. Or so it seemed. The Germans were looking for a superior craft. The SSE and Vril societies were building craft that looked like UFO's and were capable of vertical take-off's and landings because most of their runways had been destroyed.

The project was headed by Dr. Richard Mehta, sometimes known as the 'Father of Saucerology'. He was hired by the German air force to build a saucer shaped craft that could vertically ascend and shoot down allied planes with rockets. Allegedly the war ended before Metha developed his ship.

The American government recruited some of the German scientists after the war to go to Canada and continue their work. Dr. Metha was one of these men. He work on a secret aircraft project at AVROW Aeronautics in Canada. These were saucer type flying machines.

These saucers were designed to 2300 miles per hour at an altitude of 80,000 feet. Though designed in 1955 the papers describing these design were not declassified until 1995. For over 40 year America's #1 top flying saucer project was top secret.

In the 1950's in Canada Avro revealed the Avrocar to the public. ...snip...
The prototype was placed in a military museum at Fort Eustis, Virginia. One view was that the failed project was simply window-dressing to cover tests of a captured alien flying disc.










More:

http://www.voicenet.com/~wbacon/documents/silverbug.html

http://www.burlingtonnews.net/silverbug.html

[ClintonTyree]

1. The question begs to be asked.........

where did the technology come from to allow these scientists to design an aircraft that could reach those speeds and heights? Just wondering. :shrug:

[leveymg]

2. Notice it doesn't say it actually did Mach 3 and reached 80K ft

With a cross-section that large, with a single turboject, this thing might reach 450 mph. Also, I don't see any provision for vectored thrust, so it would only rise up vertically and come down at the same spot. Even if it did have a swivel thruster, it would still be slower than a conventional aircraft with the same engine because edge-on it presents a larger cross-section to the airstream.

[Uroboros]

3. Not that they would tell us if they did :)

Since the 1950s people have been seeing unidentified crafts/lights in the skies doing more then going straight up and traveling faster then 450 mph. Even if you assume that 90% of those reports have simple explanations; (and we'll forget about the alien craft theory for this argument) the other 10% seem to show that development went a lot further than these stories would lead one to believe.

Pure speculation I know :)

[Crayson]

4. Maybe adjustable weights

if the thing could somehow move some weights around inside it would lean to the one or other side and like that the thrust would be vectored...

[wakeme2008]

5. I think the name on the drawing says it all Avro Car

as another poster pointed out, there does not look to be anything for forward movement. So IMHO if it did move forward it would be slow like a car.

The :scared: part is there were no "small" computers back then so this would have been a pilot's nightmare.

[htuttle]

6. Aren't saucers just very unstable airfoils...

...unless they're spinning like frisbees, in which case the pilots would get extremely dizzy?

I've seen footage of various prototypes of these things, and calling them 'wobbly' would be a compliment.

[qazplm]

7. what if most of it were spinning

except for the center where the operator was?

[htuttle]

8. I think the only way to get that to work

would be to have a perpendicular tail rotor like on a helicopter. Without it, a 'stationary'center section would still spin around to a certain extent, but more slowly. (think of a helicopter doing an 'autorotation' type landing).

Even then, I'd question whether it was a superior airfoil. Without an alien 'anti-inertial device' of some kind, I think the idea is kind of a bust.

[benEzra]

9. Looks like a proof of concept...

and with that powerplant, you're looking at what would amount to a stealthy attack helicopter (low, slow, and agile), not an ultra-high-fast, ultra-high-altitude craft.

If these things could fly 2300 mph at 80,000 feet, then there would have been no need to secretly build the YF-12/SR-71 Blackbird, which was designed in the late '50's (as I recall) and flew in secret for decades. The Blackbird's distinctive GREEN afterburner exhaust (appeared green at night due to a special catalyst in the fuel) seen streaking across dark skies at night was responsible for many UFO sightings, I'm sure. I also understand the Blackbirds would do a "dipsy doodle" after refueling, power diving to go supersonic as quickly as possible and then switching to a steep supersonic climb, since the engines and aerodynamics were much more efficient at supersonic speeds for that plane. That would look really, really wierd if you saw a green light in the sky doing that...

[simonm]

10. flying saucers

http://jnaudin.free.fr/html/liftout.htm

[freethought]

11. These aircrafts never really worked out

The sauser design is aerodynamicly efficient, there isn't too much drag and the whole undersurface of the craft creates lift. The airforce tried to fly a number of these saucer crafts. There were damned near impossible to fly and very unstable.

If you are thinking about aricraft of the future think flying wing. Like the B-2 or the earlier flying wing craft built by Northrop. Early on in the development flying wing craft had problems with stability and yaw. This wasn't really overcome until years later with fly-by-wire technology and sophisticated on-board computers. One thing that that can't be denied about flying wings if the aerodynamic efficiency. The whole craft is a wing that creates lift as opposed to other planes that have two wings and a fuselage that creates no lift. In time you will probably see commercial aircraft following a similar design.