Declassified: Air Force plans for a flying saucer


Black ops: Project 1794, as the saucer was known, was a vertical takeoff and landing craft designed by Canada's Avro. National Archives




The flying saucer was apparently meant to be contracted to now-defunct Avro Aircraft of Ontario, which is still famous in Canada for its Arrow, a supersonic fighter aircraft whose production was abruptly halted in 1959.

A National Archives blog post presents images from the Avro report, as seen in the gallery below. The company stated that Project 1794 was meant to be a vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) craft that could reach a top speed of Mach 4. It was to have a range of 1,000 nautical miles and a ceiling of more than 100,000 feet.

Aside from a flying saucer being too cool for school, why would the U.S. government want one? One reason could be that as Cold War tensions heated up, there were fears that ICBMs would wipe out air bases. Thus, a VTOL aircraft that could take to the skies from underground hangars without a runway would be essential.


It added a cost estimate of $3,168,000 for 18-24 months, which is about $26.6 million today.

A prototype variant of the saucer funded by the U.S. Army, which sought a low-flying VTOL craft, was known as the Avrocar.

It flew 3 feet off the ground, but performed poorly in testing, only reaching speeds of 35 mph, and was ultimately canceled in 1961. To the chagrin of Canadian aeronautical engineers, Avro was closed the following year. One of the Avrocar prototypes is now on display in a secure part of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

The Avro report coincided with the UFO sightings craze of the 1950s, which followed the 1947 Roswell Incident. The timing wasn't lost on the National Archives.

"Curiously," the post states, "these pictures bear a strong resemblance to 'flying saucers' in popular science fiction films made during the years these reports were created: 1956 and 1957."

So does this disprove all conspiracy theories about the government having access to alien tech? If it had really cannibalized a crashed UFO to build its own saucers, why would it have outsourced production to Canada?

Unless that was just a cover story. The truth -- and you know it's out there -- surely lies buried in the National Archives.

"The images here are from selected reports in just two boxes of this collection," the Archives blogger adds. "The entire series is available for historians to research."

(Via Wired)

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