November 5, 2024 • 50 mins
Flying saucers are perhaps the most iconic genre of UFO -- since the 1940s they've become the mainstay vehicles for extraterrestrials in all sorts of fictional stories. But, according to declassified files, the US Government was intensely interested in building some flying saucers of its own. So far did they get? The answer may surprise you in tonight's Classic episode.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
All right, so let's be honest, the vaccine fact in
fiction classic episode probably ruffled a little feathers, probably bagged
a few badgers.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
There.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
We're going to return to you, fellow conspiracy realist, with
a non vaccine thing classic episode we call Project seventeen
ninety four. Do you guys remember this?
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (00:23):
For sure. It's a perfect material for a classic, for
it is a classic stuff they don't want you to
know type of topic, the iconic genre of UFOs.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
I'm looking at the final development report now, guys that
we looked at back in the day, and.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
Yeah, whoo this it was awesome.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
Can we build our own flying saucer? The US government has, like,
imagine the weirdest relative you have right in your family,
the weirdest person on your street, whatever it's me and
both of those situations that early oval just eccentric, all right,
the weirdest other folks. As you're imagining the weirdest one
(01:04):
other than you, imagine that person at trillions of dollars
and just loved the good elevator. Pitch oh uncle, elon, Yeah,
are you tired of not having your own flying saucer?
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Dog? Wait, is this the avrocar or is this a
different thing?
Speaker 1 (01:24):
I think we get we have to mention the avrocar
at some point.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
Okay, well, let's find out.
Speaker 4 (01:31):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
A production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my
name is Noman.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
They call me Ben Weird Away to as always with
our super producer Paul Mission control decad. Most importantly, you
are you. You are here, and that makes this stuff
they don't want you to know. We've been doing a
lot of our shows recently with a check in at
the beginning to make sure we're all in a cool
or at least tolerable place given the heat outside. So U, Matt,
(02:19):
how's it. How's it going?
Speaker 2 (02:20):
It's going really well. We're coming right off of Father's Day.
I got to spend some time with my son yesterday.
In fact, it was wonderful. We went to a waterfall
that's nearby.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
It's just it was awesome and a happy Father's Day
to both of you. Belated Well, thank you, Sarah. Sure
uh Noel, how about you.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
It's good. I went and visited my mom and she
made me a Father's Day dinner lego lamb, which fas
it is, and a little bit of what do we
have on the side, Oh was some stuffed mushrooms, also
a favorite. And then I got to take my kid
to Oh actually, I went and got a manicure and
a pedicure, and then I got upsold into getting my
eyebrows waxed.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
That's how it works.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
Yeah, it's kind of a bummer because the pedicure feels
so good and then the eyebrow waxing really hurts, so
it sort of negated the good feels of the pedicure.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
You know, honest, I have this thing with my feet
and if anyone ever tried to do anything to my
feet like that, like dude, I.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
Would kick them in the face.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
I would yeah, attack, Yeah, I would have to.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
Just a part where they take this cheese greater thing
and just like rub it in the middles of your feet,
and I have to bite my lip really hard to
keep from like losing it.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
God.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
So we also in an update behind the curtain here,
we'd like to welcome one of our newest producers to
the universe of this show, Maya Cole, thanks for coming
listening in. Gotta gotta woo there that you can't hear
outside of the studio. Let's also check in with mission control.
How you do a man thumbs up? Thumbs down? Okay,
(03:49):
I thought it was a sideway thumb it was. For
a second, it was middling to good. We're gonna call
that seventy five percent.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
How about you, mister Bolen.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
Thanks for asking. Men, so we also no kidding. Uh yeah,
things are happening.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
You know.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
I've been traveling some more, probably have some more travel
in the future.
Speaker 3 (04:05):
And I've been out of this this particular realm, this
particular astral plane. Really just gonna give me the demon
laugh and move on.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
By the way, did you did you listen to the
recent voicemail episode?
Speaker 1 (04:20):
Did I?
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Yeah? Okay, all right, Well sorry guys, he hasn't heard
the Oh that's okay, don't worry about it.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
Check it out.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
It's fine.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
I should listen to it.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
I should we go into a little bit of your lore?
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Oh boy, any anything I need to be aware of you?
Speaker 3 (04:37):
You really all knowing all samee? I have on type
of individuals, what you want.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Oh man, that's that's too that is too kind. I
listened to one of the voicemail episodes and Matt Knowle
that you did way back, is it over a year
now ago?
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Now?
Speaker 3 (04:53):
Exactly?
Speaker 1 (04:53):
Yeah? And that was really that was really good and
people really seem to enjoy it. So yeah, I'm sorry, apologize,
I'll listen to it.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Just just know that you were still included.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
That's very god, thank you so much. And if you
want to be included in today's show, you do not
have to wait until the show is over. You can
simply pause and call us directly with your thoughts, your opinions,
your hot takes. As they say in the late night shows.
Just keep it around three minutes or be ready to
(05:25):
call back and say and another thing.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
Yeah, I mean a hot take should technically be like
a verbal tweet kind of thing. So three minutes should
be plenty for a hot take.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
Yeah, then you're getting into rant territories Dennis Miller style.
Speaker 3 (05:38):
Although we like a good ram as well.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
Sometimes you know, you get stuck just applying Marty Garras
beads to a basket and you're just like, you know,
I need to call like three or four more times.
Just trust me, it happens.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
Some it happens.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
See. So what's that number for anyone who wants to call.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
It's one eight three three s WYTK.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
So you can't did like that.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Yes, yes, we're ritualizing, so go ahead and drop us
a line. Today we are returning to the world of
unidentified flying objects. Specifically, we're exploring the story of flying saucers,
not UFOs in general. Mind you, actual flying saucers. For decades,
(06:21):
these were some of the most widely reported mysterious aerial
phenomena in the Western world. Even today, when you hear
someone say the word alien or extraterrestrial or UFO, most
people will immediately conjure up an image of a flying saucer, right,
you know, you got the whole nine, got the little uh,
the then secure pin, yeah, you got the cockpit at
(06:43):
the top, maybe glass dome. And then of course it's
always shooting a tractor beam down over a cow and
an abandoned field at night somewhere turning.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Yes, I always have the Mars Attacks version in my head.
Speaker 3 (06:57):
Because that's the classic trophy version. Like Timbert was obsessed
with those kind of old comic representations of that kind
of imagery, the Martians themselves with the big dome, you know,
head things and all of that.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
Yeah, and Mars attacks. I'm gonna say I still enjoy it. Oh,
I do too, im mensely. It's a great documentary. Right, So,
but what are these things flying saucers? They've been described
as a widely misidentified mundane phenomenon. They've been described as
little more than collective hysteria.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
Right.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
Our question today is are they real? And to answer
that question we have to start from the beginning. So
here are the facts. Why do we call them flying saucers.
It's not like anyone nowadays, at least in the US
or Canada, uses the phrase saucer to describe the actual
(07:51):
little plate upon which one would place a cup or
a mug.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
What would you call it?
Speaker 1 (07:56):
What would I would I call that a little plate?
Speaker 3 (07:59):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (08:00):
All the way I really clip the tea's I say,
little plate or little cup?
Speaker 3 (08:04):
You have very good diction.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
Then I would be interested to know if any of
our British listeners, or anyone out in the UK or
around that area still uses the phrase saucer.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
No, they definitely do. Think about a saucer of milk
for a cat. It's certainly in the in the vernacular, that's.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
Those are the only two freezes. I hear it in though,
fine saucer or saucer of milk is the other one.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
Cup and saucer they call it. It's like, it's like
it's a set. They come together. It's the cup and
then the saucer.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Yeah, but are people walking around talking about it though?
Speaker 3 (08:30):
And saucer? Well, why you don't know. You don't pass
the saucer because you're passing the cup and it's on
the saucer.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
But if someone's like, if someone's like, no, that's the thing.
No one addresses it as a singular entity.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
You don't.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
You don't hear the word saucer floating around without being
attached to a cup, an alien, or a cat.
Speaker 3 (08:50):
It's basically a glorified drip pan. It's it's made to
catch the drippings from your tea. So presumably, if you're
not a total slob, you don't even need a saucer.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
There you go, I did what doesn't it depend on
the temptate? Okay, this is maybe a different show, but
we call these things flying saucers because of oddly enough,
skeet shooting.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
Back in eighteen ninety or so ever since then, flying
saucer was used to describe one of those clay pigeons
that they shoot off and you know, fire at and
then you high five each other when you hit one,
and that resembles a saucer, a classic UFO shape.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
Yeah, because the little device that they would we either
someone would throw the manuallyer. I think as technology advanced,
they would have little machines that would like you know,
hold them or like with a little arm and kind
of lob them. They'd go thoop, they'd go foop and
then smash right, Yeah, But it's because they're of a
shape that allows them to be thrown with a nice
directional velocity.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
Right, Yeah, like a frisbee.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
There you go.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
So for years and years and years and years, this
was a term that was kind of slaying in the
world of clay and shooting. But this phrase did not
describe UFOs until nineteen thirty and it didn't become popularized
until nineteen forty seven. In June twenty fourth of nineteen
(10:11):
forty seven, a guy named Kenneth Arnold had this highly
publicized UFO sighting, and it resulted in the popularization of
the term flying saucer in US newspapers and then later
the anglosphere and then later the world overall. So what
happened what made Kenneth Arnold go viral? Or at least
(10:32):
what did he see?
Speaker 3 (10:33):
So what Arnold said was he claimed to have encountered
flashes of light and nine different objects flying in some
sort of formation, occasionally flipping the way you might think
of the drone behavior hovering. You know, there's those drones
you can get that'll flip upside down like that or
do like a three sixty loop or whatever like that
without moving very far. So he followed them and found
(10:55):
that they were traveling at incredibly high speed and consisted
of various shapes each. They were not identical, they were
not uniform. Eventually he lost track of them, and he
landed sharing his experience and word spread and his account,
to use the kind of internet parlance, went viral.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
Yeah, he was as popular for a time as a
cat meme is today. So in these interviews with the press,
I like the point you're raising about the shapes being varied.
He described them a couple of different ways, and a
couple of different interviews. One he called a pie plate
and when he said oval in the front convects in
the rear. And what this means is that some editor
(11:38):
has lost to history now. And part of the reason
this story gained so much public traction is because Arnold
was a pilot, you know what I mean, he was
a credible source at the time, right, And still a
pilot is more credible than someone on the ground in
(11:59):
a lot of ways because they have simply more experience.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
Yeah, to mention, like, yet it's it's pretty hard to
competently pilot a plane if you're either mentally unstable or
under the influence of some kind of drugs or alcohol.
Typically frowned upon in the piloting community.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Yes, yes, And the.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
Biggest thing is just having an understanding of how aircraft function. Right,
That's true, that that's the biggest thing when when you
have a pilot, say, these things were flipping around or
doing this weird thing, and they were oval shaped and oblong,
it was really strange. But then he goes on in
further interviews to like describe them even more differently.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
Right, right, oval in the front and convex in the rear,
So it just like in the back in UFO parlance. Yeah, probably,
it really depends on whether you're an oval or a
convex guy.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
You know, that's a good point.
Speaker 4 (12:45):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
He described something as a pie plate, and then later
his story changes again. He describes one of the objects
as a crescent or flying wing, some as a big
flat disc, some as simply saucer like. And that's where
we hit on the etymology here, because while Arnold is
(13:07):
associated with this term, it was probably some editor lost
to history who's responsible for calling it a flying saucer.
And for a little while there was kind of a
pepsi coke thing going on with flying disc versus flying saucer,
but flying saucer clearly won out, and we still use
(13:28):
the phrase today sort of, yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
A little bit, but the phrase has kind of gone
away or at least been supplanted quite a bit. By this.
We're gonna call it a government created term because that's
what it is. Unidentified flying object or UFO.
Speaker 3 (13:46):
Or UFO as I like to say, and no one
else does.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
Yes, and these these aren't aliens necessarily, they're not extraterrestrials.
They're just something in the sky that people cannot identify.
Look up in the sky, it's bird played, it's Superman,
it's a weather blue. I don't know, I guess it's unidentified.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
Well, and we're gonna we're gonna continue to use the
term UFO here in this episode, but it should be noted,
as we noted not that long ago in an episode,
the military has now changed that as they like to
change their phrasing over time, to unidentified aerial vehicle.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
Yes, yes, yes, a UAV.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
I mean it's also sort of like that. They might
call something like that. The something comes up on the radar,
they call it a bogie or whatever, But that's sort
of if it's something they don't know the origin of,
they can't have eyes on it directly, then that could
be considered one of these as well, unidentified aerial vehicle.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
That's the problem with the acronym though, there must be
some of the initialism. There must be something missing, because
unmanned aerial vehicle is also UAV.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Yeah, there you go, or maybe I'm incorrect. I know
it's something similar.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
To that, but yeah, I mean Uncle Sam. Governments in
general big fans of abbreviations and initialisms. Today, flying saucers,
not just the phrase the thing has become this genre
of overall UFO sightings, and when you look at the
world of fiction, flying saucers still by far they're running
(15:14):
the game. You know, the problem is they're not represented
in a serious way. Mars Attacks spoiler alert is not,
in fact a documentary. You can see them in things
like sci fi series like The X Files, right, they'll
use the flying saucer appearance. You'll see it depicted in
a ton of nineteen fifties nineteen sixties fiction. You know,
(15:38):
we're talking Outer Limits, Twilight Zone and so on. But
what if there's more to the story. Is there any truth?
Two tales of actual flying saucers, Not clouds that look
like saucers, mind you, Not weird tricks of the light,
no atmospheric high jinks or strange ionospheric interference, real genuine
(16:01):
flying saucer. The answer is yes, there were real flying saucers,
and we built them.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
Don't toy with my emotions, Ben, It's true, and we're
gonna talk about the ones that at least we tried
to contract out afterward from our sponsor.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
Here's where it gets crazy.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
Enter Projects seventeen ninety four and related to this, the
Avro Canada VZ nine avrocar.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
Yes, let's talk about it. And before we get into that,
I have to make a quick edit to what I
said earlier. This is just everyone listening who said matt
UAVs are a thing. Ben is absolutely right, and you
are wrong. You are correct. It is. It's not even
called unidentified aerieal something. It's called unexplained aerial phenomena. So
that's you, ap yes, oh op, yeah, So apologies for
(17:02):
everyone who was really frustrated before the break. Let's continue on.
Speaker 3 (17:06):
I think they were shaking their fists at their I
hope someone caughtcast device.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
I know, I hope someone.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
Called and then they got done with their voicemail and
they listened through to the rest of the podcast.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
It just goes to show you, like, there's so many
things in my brain that I feel like I know
things about, but I only have bits and pieces human
condition my friends, But you know what I do know about?
Speaker 1 (17:25):
What do you know about?
Speaker 2 (17:26):
Because it's written down in this awesome outline that you
created that it's the story of this guy named John
Carver Meadows Frost and everybody you know his friends they
call him Jack. He worked in the aerospace industry for
quite a while, and in June of nineteen forty seven
he started working for this Canadian company called Avro Canada AVR. Oh, yeah,
(17:49):
that's right. And you know this dude's all about uh,
you know, dreaming big.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
He's a big picture guy, that's right.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
And he would he or he like, did this thing
that Avro called Blue Sky's Research. So like these are
when we say big picture things, ideas that are so
close to the edge of what science can do. They're
they're overlapping or just beyond what is possible. And that's
our boy, Jack nineteen forty seven, he's thinking on the edge.
Speaker 3 (18:21):
Jackie boy.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
That's right, Old Jack Frost himself. Yes, at Avro Canada,
he had already worked on something called the Avro CF
one hundred. This is a this is a craft that
is innovative, but not wild wild style Blue Skies. Yes,
(18:42):
Blue Sky's Research is stuff like in the world of aviation,
an example of something that would be considered experimental would
be the Howard Hughes design Spruce Goose, the largest plane
in history that we know of geese. Yes, and if
you look at pictures of that thing, it's it's enormous,
(19:05):
it's it's impractical.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
I think it's a I've seen it before. I feel like,
is it on display in like San Francisco. It's on
the West coast right, Oh, you know what it's a
it's actually the Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinnville, Oregon.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
Interesting, nice, well done McMinnville. So you can look at
pictures of this thing. It's built largely out of wood.
He called it the H four Hercules. It has the
name spruce Goose, which came about as an insult from
a skeptical press. The world of brainstorming is high risk,
high return, but this is the world that Jack wants
(19:41):
to live in. So after he's been working on the
AVROCF one hundred, he creates a research team called the
Special Projects Group or SPG, and he at first surrounded
himself with other people who thought like he did, out
of the box. You know what I mean, mavericks. So
(20:02):
this group SPG, Special Projects Group, was situated in their
main administration building, but then they relocated it to an
older structure across from the company headquarters and what was
called the Shafer Building, and their security went through the roof.
They had guards everywhere, lock doors, special unique pass cards.
(20:24):
They started doing serious stuff, you know what I mean.
The days of hanging out in the conference room with
a chalkboard were long gone.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
Nobody can see this chalkboard.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
Right right now. It's all secret chalk. Disappearing chalk?
Speaker 3 (20:37):
Is that a thing?
Speaker 1 (20:38):
They guess all chalk is disappearing theft eraser. So the
SPG operated out of this experimental hangar and they shared
space with other secretive AVRO project teams. Jack was personally fascinated,
along with a lot of other people, by something called
vertical takeoff and landing vehicles also known as VTOL because
(20:59):
are pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
Can you say vitol or we need to say vitole
I like Vito vitall craft.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
Right there might be somebody named Vitold listening now, and
if you are, you know hello.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
So for a VTOL aircraft, really think about a helicopter,
especially when you're thinking about taking off and landing, something
that vertically goes up and goes out and then can
come back and go down and you can get out
of the thing. And you know, for these aircraft, the
specific ones that Jack is interested in, it's having that
(21:35):
ability to take off vertically but then fly around like
an airplane. Wood or jet should then come right back
and then go back down.
Speaker 3 (21:43):
Like the X Men jet.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
Yeah, right with that has the rotating turbines, right, which
is a really cool feature, kind of like an osprey
I believe the craft are called.
Speaker 3 (21:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
So in the nineteen fifties, the US Air Force was
worried about the vulnerability of their bases because of a
couple of limiting factors of conventional aircraft.
Speaker 2 (22:06):
Right. Yeah, and then this is something we should talk
about that Ben and I were talking about offline here.
In nineteen forty seven is when the US Air Force
splits off or is officially split off from the army
from just as a separate military unit. And you know,
this is at this point post World War Two. But
(22:28):
they've got these bases that are all over the planet.
At this point, they're pretty isolated, and the Air Force
around this time in the nineteen fifties, they're really worried
that these bases are just gonna get destroyed because if
you imagine looking at one of these bases overhead, like
Google mapsing it or Google earthing it back in let's
(22:50):
say nineteen fifty four, you're just gonna see several huge
runways and then a bunch of extremely high value targets
just clustered around these runways.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
Eggs in a single basket exactly.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
And that's aircraft, of course, just sitting around the runways.
So they wanted to find a way to reduce either
the length and thickness of their runways, so it's not
such a like if you're flying overhead or a nearby
in an enemy vehicle. You can't just go, oh, hey,
look that's a military base, and we can wreak havoc
on their offensive and defensive capabilities if we attack that thing.
(23:24):
And they also wanted to well, so they wanted to
either reduce them, make them smaller, or just get rid
of them completely. So you could have basically a United
States Air Force base in the middle of nowhere and
it would be a little more hidden at least a bit.
The other thing they wanted to do is find a
way to deploy aircraft faster for both offensive and defensive capabilities.
(23:45):
So if your base is being attacked, you can send
you can send aircraft up that'll knock down all the
other planes that are coming in to attack you, or
you can send them off quicker to go attack nearby areas.
So reducing scramble time exactly. That makes sense. And this
the VTOL thing just what Jack is interested in. That
was one of the proposed solutions.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
The thing is, this sort of experimentation is spoiler alert
cartoonishly expensive. It's not uncommon, but it is expensive. And
because often these are some of the first people trying
to do this kind of thing ever, right, in any
any kind of hardware prototyping, often they are prone to failure.
(24:31):
And I don't mean like, oh good, lesson learn, I
mean this is a disaster. These people are dead. Why
did we lose millions of dollars on this?
Speaker 3 (24:39):
Remember that episode we did a ridiculous history Bend that
was about failed military technology, and one of them was
like a hoverboard kind of platform things. That was kind
of part of the technology for one of these vital jets, right,
it was the part that lifts the thing up off
the ground. But that was literally all these were. And
you would control it sort of like a segue by
like leaning into it or back or sideways, so you
looked really say, and it was it was very unwieldy
(25:02):
and heavy, and they weren't very good at like anything.
The flying platform flying platforms like you know, it had
this sci fi space vibe too, where like everyone's like
zipping around on these little discs. Yeah, like flying saucers,
but they just weren't very functional in a war situation.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Yeah, they were more they were more a rich person's toy,
I think ultimately. But also like a segue, like when
we think of when we think of these experiments, let's
also remember things like bat bombs. Let's remember things like
cyborg cats. That was a real thing. Rocket bullets, rocket bullets,
all all sorts of stuff in this spy dolphins, spy dolphins,
(25:39):
and that's not even getting into assassination attempts and equipment.
So they know they're in again, a high risk, high
reward situation. There's something else interesting that happens in society
at this time. So flying saucers are experiencing what pr
people here in twenty nineteen would call a moment. There
was a pro liferation of sightings flying saucers in the
(26:03):
West as a whole, but across the world, and there
is serious concern, not just it's not just newspaper publishers
trying to sell the next week's edition. It's not just
fringe theorists anymore. There are members of the US military
who are seriously anxious, concerned, terrified would be a fair word.
(26:24):
That Soviet forces may have beaten them to the punch,
creating their own top secret VTOL, in other words, creating
their own flying saucers. So these folks at the higher
echelons of the military and politics are essentially saying, what
if all these flying saucer sightings are real? And what
if they're you know, they're not spacemen or something, they're
(26:45):
not aliens, they're you know, well they would probably say
kamis or reds or something like that.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
Yeah. Well, so in the in late nineteen fifty three,
a group of defense experts took a little visit to Avro,
Canada to view this new thing that was called the
CF one hundred fighter jet. Because you know, you don't
just need crazy experimental things that might happen. You also
need real fighter jets when you're the military.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
And that's what Yeah, the US Air Force is there
just to see that jet. It's important to the story.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
Yeah, and we'll tell you what happened on their visit
after a word from our sponsor.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
And we're back. So midway through the tour or pal
Jack Frost busts in and hijacks them. Essentially, he takes
these visitors to the high security Special Projects area and
he does a little show and tell. He gives them
a look at a mock up of something he calls
Project y Too. This is a completely circular disc shaped aircraft.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
Yes, it's right. And the USAF visitors were pretty impressed
by what they saw. They took over funding for the
Special Projects Group and gave seven hundred and fifty thousand
American dollars in nineteen fifty five, which, if we inflation
calculated that by today's standards, it's a little over seven
million dollars.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
Pretty crazy, right.
Speaker 3 (28:14):
Mm hmm. And the next year AVRO decided to commit
to and a half million nineteen fifty five dollars to
build a prototype. So, as you said before, ben very
expensive to do this kind of out of the box
kind of thinking and research.
Speaker 1 (28:27):
Yeah yep.
Speaker 5 (28:28):
And they said the reward could be amazing, Yes, yes,
could be, or it could be relegated to the scrap
heap of history. It's it's marginally better than gambling.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
Yeah, you know what I mean. So this study encompassed
a wide variety of possible designs, but they all revolved
around this disc shape, this flying saucer shape, leading to
something called Project seventeen ninety four. The goal was to
build a supersonic large disc fighter aircraft jet that's also
(29:01):
a circle.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
Basically, yeah, and again, think about this, a flying disc,
a flying saucer then engages other aircraft in ground objects
like how crazy is that?
Speaker 1 (29:13):
Again, this is a real thing at this point. So
they eventually get to the level where they're doing what's
called wind tunnel testing with scale models. So they're studying
how these things move through the environment and what little
tweaks or big changes they can make to make it
less of a disaster.
Speaker 3 (29:30):
A wind tunnel simulating the conditions of high speed flight
without actually having to reach those speeds.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
Absolutely nail on the head.
Speaker 3 (29:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
They eventually decide that the reasonable estimate for this concept
would result in a vehicle that can go mock three
point five at one thousand foot altitudes or thirty thousand
meters for the rest of the world. This led to
something called the Avrocar, which is thing that you can
(30:00):
see today if you want to travel to a museum
and check it out. Highly recommended. Jack Frost built this
kills me. This guy's name is Jack Frost. How many Joe?
He must have been so cool. He built this as
a two seer personal car kind of concept, so it's
much smaller than what they were aiming to build seventeen
(30:21):
ninety four. And it showed, you know, it meant to
It was a proof of concept. It was meant to show, hey,
these things can work. We can actually put people in them.
They can take off, they can fly around, they can land.
Everybody will be alive. We'll high five each other. Awesome,
go us. And at the time, this was just a
step toward their ultimate goal, the supersonic flying saucer. How
(30:44):
do we know about this? How do we know this
is real and not a story? No one really knew.
No one officially knew about this until two thousand and twelve,
when declassified documents showed the rumors were true, which happens
all the time. How many people can you imagine who
were engineers on their deathbed telling their kids, like, no,
(31:05):
it's true, we kind of built flying saucers.
Speaker 3 (31:08):
Is there a statute limitations that allows things to be
things to be declassified? Is it sort of like a
copyright expiring or does someone just up high kind of
have to say, you know what, I don't think it's
a big deal anymore. People want to know. It'd probably
be fun to let this out there. What do you
think the protocol is fun? Not fun, but you know,
fun for the people, you know, for the UFO nerds.
You give them a little something to go on.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
I would just start I would start by saying, while
I don't know the exact parameters of that timeframe, I
do know that after a certain amount of time it
comes up as it can be reviewed essentially to be declassified.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
Or it can be reclassified. At that point it is
kind of like a kind of like a copyright. Yeah,
that's not a bad comparison, because there were things that
came out recently regarding or there were things up for
review excuse me, regarding the Kennedy assassination, some of which
were released and some of which were reclassifies, right, and
(32:02):
the problem is there. The criteria for that is is
it fun?
Speaker 2 (32:09):
That's number one?
Speaker 1 (32:10):
That's the number one. Are we all having a good time?
Number two is does this still pose a continued risk
to national security or to people or sorry, the exposure
of methods and technologies used to gain information or advantage,
get an edge. Yeah, and that's that's such a woefully
(32:33):
vague thing that happens all the time. What isn't national security?
You could stretch that to anything totally.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
But because of this twenty twelve declassified documentation, we got
to take a look for the first time at this
memo that comes from nineteen fifty six. That really shows
what the engineers there at Avro were attempting to build,
like the thing they wanted the end goal to be.
And it gets back to a saucer like view that
(33:00):
was capable of reaching quote between Mack three and Mark four,
a ceiling of over one hundred thousand feet, meaning it
can climb all the way up to over or around
over one hundred thousand feet and a maximum range with allowances.
This is still the quote of about one thousand nautical.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
Miles incredible bowsers and that's you know, that's nineteen fifty
six when the memo is written, So that is the
same year that Avro itself gives that two point five
million dollars in nineteen fifty six bucks as you said,
nol to the project. As far as we can tell,
this supersonic flying saucer it can's weird that this is
(33:40):
a real thing. Would propel itself by rotating an outer
disc at a very very high speed, and then maneuvering
would be accomplished by using small shutters on the edge
of the disc. It would be powered by jet turbines,
so no secret technology there. And according to the cutaway
diagrams you can see maybe four so digitized pictures of this.
(34:03):
According to those cutaway diagrams, the entire thing would be
able to take off and land vertically, so it would
move in a way that closely resembled the movements reported
of flying saucers.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
Can we just take a minute and look at this
cutaway together, because it is dang fascinating, really cool. And
there are some things that Ben and I were talking
about off air before you came in. In particular, the
cockpit area at the very center of this vehicle that
Ben was describing is directly surrounded by four large rings
(34:38):
of the fuel that runs the entire vehicle. So if
you're sitting inside this thing, you're literally surrounded by all
of the combustible stuff that is being.
Speaker 3 (34:48):
Used to run the Ooh, so if you take a
direct hit, you're just like you're just you're toast.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
You're sacrificing, You're sacrificing durability for flexibility or would be
a better word. Your main strategy is to not get hit.
Speaker 3 (35:04):
Well, it's like those U boats where they had the
toilets mounted right above the batteries that ran the whole thing,
So when the toilet's malfunction, it would like flood the
batteries and cause all these problems. It's sort of like,
you know, you take a hit on design in order
to or you take a hit maybe on safety in
order to like pack more features into a thing.
Speaker 1 (35:22):
It's just like a video game where you can choose
characters that are faster than average but weaker, or you
can choose characters that are absolute tanks but they're like slow.
Yeah yeah, yeah, Well.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
Then let's just talk about this really fast, because I
was fascinated by that design, and I am nowhere near
an engineer or a physicist or anything like that. But
you have to imagine the fuel tanks in a vehicle
like this are going to be like fairly heavy at
the beginning at takeoff, right when you're all fueled up.
Then by the end of your mission, it's going to
be the weight that the center of the vehicle is
(35:55):
going to be significantly reduced.
Speaker 3 (35:56):
To change the handling. Probably right, Well, I mean.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Because you're you know, literally the spinning disc part of
this is what's giving you not fully propulsion, but it's
what's stable standing the craft doing effect and keeping you
in the air. The whole thing blows my mind, and
I just want to hear from anybody out there listening
that understands the physics of it a little better. Please
(36:21):
please look at the Project seventeen ninety four documentation and
let us.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
Know here's a weird thing. Though it still is not
clear why to that original question one of us posts,
it still isn't clear why it's taken more than sixty
years for this to be declassified, especially if they didn't
actually build anything other than that little avrocar prototype. But
(36:51):
it follows on from the declassified news in two thousand
and eight that the US government has been monitoring UFO
activity for decades in secret, way after they said Project
Blue Book was over. And furthermore, there are apparently rumour
has that there are apparently two entire boxes of Projects
seventeen ninety four documents, but only a handful of images
(37:12):
have been digitized.
Speaker 2 (37:13):
Yeah, literally four that we were able to find in
making this episode.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
So here's the problem. The story gets murky, right. The
closest thing we have to a real prototype is that
VZ nine Avrocar, and that prototype, by all accounts, was
a stinker. It was originally specified for max speed of
three hundred miles per hour with a ceiling of ten
thousand feet instead of one hundred thousand, but in practice
(37:38):
it never got more than three feet off the ground.
Its top speed was thirty five miles per hour.
Speaker 2 (37:45):
This, yeah, I know.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
Despite the Avrocar's failures, which were clear and apparent, it's
also clear and apparent that the US government was indeed
working on aircraft in the nineteen fifties that resembled flying saucers.
Suffice to say, the US may have been working on
flying saucers back in the forties around the same time
as the Roswell UFO incident. Now we're going, whoa, we're
(38:08):
putting some strings together here.
Speaker 3 (38:09):
Well, that's what I was going to ask. I mean,
you know, let's presuppose that they did discover some kind
of craft at Roswell. Do you think it's possible that
they took a cue from some of that technology that
they found. If in fact this happened and then tried
to apply it to you know, the design.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
Maybe quite possibly.
Speaker 3 (38:26):
Yeah, and this that's why it was classified for so long,
even though they knew they weren't going to pursue it anymore,
because it would raise these questions.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
Maybe a Soviet saucer crashed and then they had to
make a whole dog and pony show about pretending to
invent the technology on their own. It's interesting, and that
kind of duplicity does play into international affairs. It's fascinating,
it's addictive and tempting to think of what could have been.
We do have an episode where we get as close
(38:55):
as we can to discerning the cause of that event
that's commonly called you know, roswell or groom leak, but
we don't want to spoil it for you.
Speaker 2 (39:06):
No, And I would highly yeah, I check it out.
I highly recommend the YouTube series that we made on
that tu Ben.
Speaker 1 (39:11):
We did a YouTube series well on time Flies.
Speaker 2 (39:15):
Well.
Speaker 1 (39:15):
Unlike other experimental projects of the same era, this project
was fully canceled in December nineteen sixty one. That leaves
us with some troubling questions, why would you pour all
of this money into something just a shelvet. Later, there
are a couple of possibilities. First, one obvious when we
could say it just didn't work, either because our engineering
(39:37):
ability or our technology at the time was just inadequate
to solve the problems, or because the physics involved were
beyond our ken as well.
Speaker 3 (39:48):
And again, like we're talking about earlier, we know this
happens all the time with military prototypes. Oh, like they
designed a circular ship. Remember that one terrible idea when
the guns would fire, it was shoot the ship around
in circles.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
You know.
Speaker 3 (40:02):
It was somebody, some general or something. It was really
hot for this idea and was high up enough in
the you know, the military, that he got the dollars,
but it was an embarras terrible idea. Could very well
be the case here. They don't like to admit defeat.
Speaker 1 (40:15):
And then yeah, and then there was that there was
that tank that was essentially a sphere that just had
three guns randomly pointing out what, Oh it's great, really ridiculous. Well,
you have to earn it, you know, you have to
earn these great innovations and not not everything is going
to be the goose the least the golden egg. But
we do know that the military pursued something like this,
(40:39):
and it's something that we're all familiar with today.
Speaker 2 (40:41):
Right. Oh yeah, well we've brought it up a little
bit already in the show. But helicopters if you're if
you want to have a vertical takeoff and landing solution,
well guess what we got these things called helicopters.
Speaker 3 (40:51):
You can have bigger helicopters that have multiple propellers.
Speaker 2 (40:54):
Right, that's right. You know, they can't do a lot
of the things that the military wanted to do.
Speaker 3 (40:58):
Dives and such evasive maneuver is probably more difficult.
Speaker 2 (41:02):
And specifically getting as high into the atmosphere as these
vehicles are go anywhere near as fast as they wanted
these vehicles to go. There's some fast helicopters, but nothing
like that. But what helicopters did do is fix that
problem that the military had, or at least the perceived
problem the military had, of these giant runways of their
far flung bases and needing to have defense of those
(41:24):
bases and as well as having aircraft that could deploy
quickly and go up and down quickly. Rather than having
to take off with a big runway.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
So maybe they just found a compromise then, right, they said,
this is what we can realistically do now.
Speaker 2 (41:39):
It certainly seems like it. And the timing makes a
lot of sense here too, because if this the avrocar
was canceled December nineteen sixty one. In early nineteen sixty two,
that's when the US Air Force really started ramping up
their training of personnel that can both fly and work
on helicopters, like mechanics essentially pilots and mechanics, because.
Speaker 3 (42:02):
They're like, this is the best we got, we better
just own it.
Speaker 2 (42:05):
Well, yeah, because again it's the Vietnam War really ramps up,
and that's when we see a lot more helicopters.
Speaker 1 (42:12):
Another possibility this was just one of many experiments or
dabblings that a terrified government participated in. Maybe not so
much because they thought it was practical, maybe more because
they were hoping to keep their ideological rivals, the USSR
at bay. So many weird things come from the psychological
(42:37):
mind games of the Cold War. You know, we experimented
with psychic powers esp astral travel, and were convinced many
people in the US military industrial complex. We're convinced that
not only were Soviet forces doing the same thing, but
that they were doing it successfully. So they were like,
more money, teach that guy how to kill things with
(42:58):
his mind.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
So I've got, I've got. This is what I believe.
I'm just going to tell you. I'm going to tell
you my opinion right now.
Speaker 3 (43:06):
Lay it on me.
Speaker 2 (43:07):
The reason why we only have four images, four pages
from Projects seventeen ninety four is because it, rather than
being a reaction to some Soviet thing that we thought
was happening, this is us trying to get the Soviet
Union to spend a crap load of money trying to
build one of these things, because we've already got this
(43:28):
design and it's going to do all these things. It's
our psychological manipulation of them.
Speaker 1 (43:33):
Counterpoint, it would have to have leaked in some controllable way.
Speaker 2 (43:37):
They leaked it on purpose, I think, to some mole
that they knew was around.
Speaker 1 (43:41):
Okay, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well that does lead us
to one one more possibility. What if this is a
cover story or something like it. You know, no, far
be it for us to sound two out there, but
it is common practice to run these games of deception.
(44:04):
You know, tanks were called tanks because they were originally
shipped under false you know, under false pretense, false papers.
They were called water tanks, right, And it turned out
that they were these rolling weapons of mass destruction for
the time, It's completely understandable that people would say there
(44:24):
was something else to the story. We have to keep
in mind additionally that the US government and other world
governments have had massive success suppressing technology in the past. Bombers,
especially stealth bombers.
Speaker 2 (44:38):
Right.
Speaker 1 (44:38):
We grew up in an era where they were this
open secret and every so often popular mechanics would write
a piece saying, oh, maybe it's true, but it's not.
And it turns out they were totally true, were totally true,
and they looked insane, like nothing you would ever see
so metal, you know what I mean. Right, So in conclusion, yes,
(45:01):
it turns out there are slash were real flying saucers.
They were built here on Earth, and according to the
official narratives, they were what we in the automotive world
would call lemons or real pieces is. However, the US
government and numerous aerospace companies have again proven themselves fully
(45:22):
capable of suppressing technology for some time. We just don't
know how long that time horizon is.
Speaker 3 (45:29):
They call them lemons, guys, I don't know. Lemons are nice?
What's wrong with lemons?
Speaker 2 (45:34):
Mmmm? It's just so sour?
Speaker 3 (45:36):
Maybe it implies if there's something wrong with it a
perfectly good lemon, is it's just that it's a lemon.
Speaker 1 (45:41):
According to the online Etymology Dictionary, no one really knows.
There are a couple. There are a couple of possibilities.
Lemon used to be slaying for a person who is
a quote loser or a simpleton, they would be dumb
as a lemon, I guess. And then there was British
pool hall slang where a lemon game was a game
that was played by someone hustling. You.
Speaker 2 (46:03):
Oh, that makes more sense to me. Yeah, if it's
a lemon, because the idea is you bottle lemon, right, not.
Speaker 3 (46:08):
What you see, it's what you get, right, Like you're
seeing this person who is looking like something but they're
actually something else.
Speaker 2 (46:15):
There you go, there, you go.
Speaker 3 (46:16):
Well, now that we went down the etymological rabbit hole.
Speaker 1 (46:19):
How much do you like lemon?
Speaker 2 (46:20):
Do you?
Speaker 1 (46:21):
Are you somebody who just straight up eats lemons?
Speaker 2 (46:22):
No?
Speaker 3 (46:23):
What I will tell you this. I bought these things.
They are called superberry pills. Have you heard about this? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
And they make sour things taste sweet. So you can
eat one of these pills and it fundamentally changes the
way your taste buds perceive sourness and sweetest. So you
can suck on a lemon and it tastes like sugar.
Speaker 1 (46:37):
I've been. I've been to the taste taste hacking parties too.
Those those things are pretty cool. It's an interesting experience
if you haven't tried it before, especially if you have
some form of goustatory synaesthesia. I can only imagine what
kind of colors you will see. It is completely possible
that at least some of those UFO sightings back in
(46:58):
the forties, well before the d classified memos mentioned AVRO,
could have been attributed to similar or other related projects.
What kind I know that a lot of us listening
now are saying, mention it. You guys, don't swindle us.
You have to mention it on air or whatever you
talk about this topic, Nazi UFOs, Nazi technology battle right right,
(47:20):
or the Horton right. There is compelling evidence of innovative
prototypes made by the Nazi regime around that time, and
we have various episodes all about it, so you can
check those out easily on our website stuff they don't
want you to know, or YouTube or wherever you find
your favorite shows and podcasts. All together though, factive flying saucers,
(47:48):
we're kind of real, yeah, even officially kind of real,
at least for a second. It makes you wonder what
else is up there in the atmosphere today, you know
what I mean.
Speaker 2 (47:57):
What do you think?
Speaker 3 (47:57):
Let us know?
Speaker 1 (47:58):
Also, let us know what you think about helicopters. Have you, guys,
ever been in a helicopter.
Speaker 2 (48:02):
Only once or twice once?
Speaker 3 (48:04):
They're great? Have you seen those Chinook for sevens? Yes,
those are the twin prop Yeah yeah, choppers yeah, and
they were actually in development not far off from when
this Avro deal was going on in nineteen fifty seven.
By the vert, all company.
Speaker 1 (48:21):
People are trying to solve the same problem different ways exactly.
There are also, depending on the city in which you live,
there are helicopter tours, So I would say, unless they're
super expensive, get on one if you can. It's a
great date idea.
Speaker 3 (48:35):
And apparently in New York now Uber is operating helicopters
where you can get an uber helicopter to pick you
up and take you to the airport. And it's only
about the cost of a flight, you know, two hundred
and fifty. Wow, But I'll tell you man, it's weird.
Flex a taking a lift or an uber to the
airport in New York City is a harrowing experience.
Speaker 1 (48:54):
It's an endeavor, yees say a long time. People who
drive regularly in New York have made their peace with
the afterlife here every time they hop in.
Speaker 3 (49:02):
Special kind of sadists as well.
Speaker 1 (49:04):
I would say kudos to you road warriors also, and
perhaps a little bit more in line with today's show,
let us know whether you think there is technology still
being suppressed today and if so, what we often hear
For instance that at least in the realm of software
and algorithms, the NSSAY is far ahead of what would
(49:27):
be considered viable or ethical in the public commercial sphere.
And that's our classic episode for this evening. We can't
wait to hear your thoughts.
Speaker 3 (49:42):
It's right, let us know what you think you can
reach to. They have a conspiracy stuff where we exist
on Facebook x and YouTube, on Instagram and TikTok or
Conspiracy Stuff Show.
Speaker 2 (49:51):
If you want to call us dial one eight three
three std WYTK. That's our voicemail system. You've got three minutes.
Give yourself a cool nick and let us know if
we can use your name and message on the air.
If you got more to say than can fit in
that voicemail, why not instead send us a good old
fashioned email.
Speaker 1 (50:09):
We are the entities to read every single piece of
correspondence we receive, be aware, yet not afraid. Sometimes the
void writes back conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (50:39):
Stuff they don't want you to know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
All right, so let's be honest, the vaccine fact in
fiction classic episode probably ruffled a little feathers, probably bagged
a few badgers.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
There.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
We're going to return to you, fellow conspiracy realist, with
a non vaccine thing classic episode we call Project seventeen
ninety four. Do you guys remember this?
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (00:23):
For sure. It's a perfect material for a classic, for
it is a classic stuff they don't want you to
know type of topic, the iconic genre of UFOs.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
I'm looking at the final development report now, guys that
we looked at back in the day, and.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
Yeah, whoo this it was awesome.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
Can we build our own flying saucer? The US government has, like,
imagine the weirdest relative you have right in your family,
the weirdest person on your street, whatever it's me and
both of those situations that early oval just eccentric, all right,
the weirdest other folks. As you're imagining the weirdest one
(01:04):
other than you, imagine that person at trillions of dollars
and just loved the good elevator. Pitch oh uncle, elon, Yeah,
are you tired of not having your own flying saucer?
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Dog? Wait, is this the avrocar or is this a
different thing?
Speaker 1 (01:24):
I think we get we have to mention the avrocar
at some point.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
Okay, well, let's find out.
Speaker 4 (01:31):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
A production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my
name is Noman.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
They call me Ben Weird Away to as always with
our super producer Paul Mission control decad. Most importantly, you
are you. You are here, and that makes this stuff
they don't want you to know. We've been doing a
lot of our shows recently with a check in at
the beginning to make sure we're all in a cool
or at least tolerable place given the heat outside. So U, Matt,
(02:19):
how's it. How's it going?
Speaker 2 (02:20):
It's going really well. We're coming right off of Father's Day.
I got to spend some time with my son yesterday.
In fact, it was wonderful. We went to a waterfall
that's nearby.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
It's just it was awesome and a happy Father's Day
to both of you. Belated Well, thank you, Sarah. Sure
uh Noel, how about you.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
It's good. I went and visited my mom and she
made me a Father's Day dinner lego lamb, which fas
it is, and a little bit of what do we
have on the side, Oh was some stuffed mushrooms, also
a favorite. And then I got to take my kid
to Oh actually, I went and got a manicure and
a pedicure, and then I got upsold into getting my
eyebrows waxed.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
That's how it works.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
Yeah, it's kind of a bummer because the pedicure feels
so good and then the eyebrow waxing really hurts, so
it sort of negated the good feels of the pedicure.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
You know, honest, I have this thing with my feet
and if anyone ever tried to do anything to my
feet like that, like dude, I.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
Would kick them in the face.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
I would yeah, attack, Yeah, I would have to.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
Just a part where they take this cheese greater thing
and just like rub it in the middles of your feet,
and I have to bite my lip really hard to
keep from like losing it.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
God.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
So we also in an update behind the curtain here,
we'd like to welcome one of our newest producers to
the universe of this show, Maya Cole, thanks for coming
listening in. Gotta gotta woo there that you can't hear
outside of the studio. Let's also check in with mission control.
How you do a man thumbs up? Thumbs down? Okay,
(03:49):
I thought it was a sideway thumb it was. For
a second, it was middling to good. We're gonna call
that seventy five percent.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
How about you, mister Bolen.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
Thanks for asking. Men, so we also no kidding. Uh yeah,
things are happening.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
You know.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
I've been traveling some more, probably have some more travel
in the future.
Speaker 3 (04:05):
And I've been out of this this particular realm, this
particular astral plane. Really just gonna give me the demon
laugh and move on.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
By the way, did you did you listen to the
recent voicemail episode?
Speaker 1 (04:20):
Did I?
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Yeah? Okay, all right, Well sorry guys, he hasn't heard
the Oh that's okay, don't worry about it.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
Check it out.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
It's fine.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
I should listen to it.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
I should we go into a little bit of your lore?
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Oh boy, any anything I need to be aware of you?
Speaker 3 (04:37):
You really all knowing all samee? I have on type
of individuals, what you want.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Oh man, that's that's too that is too kind. I
listened to one of the voicemail episodes and Matt Knowle
that you did way back, is it over a year
now ago?
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Now?
Speaker 3 (04:53):
Exactly?
Speaker 1 (04:53):
Yeah? And that was really that was really good and
people really seem to enjoy it. So yeah, I'm sorry, apologize,
I'll listen to it.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Just just know that you were still included.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
That's very god, thank you so much. And if you
want to be included in today's show, you do not
have to wait until the show is over. You can
simply pause and call us directly with your thoughts, your opinions,
your hot takes. As they say in the late night shows.
Just keep it around three minutes or be ready to
(05:25):
call back and say and another thing.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
Yeah, I mean a hot take should technically be like
a verbal tweet kind of thing. So three minutes should
be plenty for a hot take.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
Yeah, then you're getting into rant territories Dennis Miller style.
Speaker 3 (05:38):
Although we like a good ram as well.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
Sometimes you know, you get stuck just applying Marty Garras
beads to a basket and you're just like, you know,
I need to call like three or four more times.
Just trust me, it happens.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
Some it happens.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
See. So what's that number for anyone who wants to call.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
It's one eight three three s WYTK.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
So you can't did like that.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Yes, yes, we're ritualizing, so go ahead and drop us
a line. Today we are returning to the world of
unidentified flying objects. Specifically, we're exploring the story of flying saucers,
not UFOs in general. Mind you, actual flying saucers. For decades,
(06:21):
these were some of the most widely reported mysterious aerial
phenomena in the Western world. Even today, when you hear
someone say the word alien or extraterrestrial or UFO, most
people will immediately conjure up an image of a flying saucer, right,
you know, you got the whole nine, got the little uh,
the then secure pin, yeah, you got the cockpit at
(06:43):
the top, maybe glass dome. And then of course it's
always shooting a tractor beam down over a cow and
an abandoned field at night somewhere turning.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Yes, I always have the Mars Attacks version in my head.
Speaker 3 (06:57):
Because that's the classic trophy version. Like Timbert was obsessed
with those kind of old comic representations of that kind
of imagery, the Martians themselves with the big dome, you know,
head things and all of that.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
Yeah, and Mars attacks. I'm gonna say I still enjoy it. Oh,
I do too, im mensely. It's a great documentary. Right, So,
but what are these things flying saucers? They've been described
as a widely misidentified mundane phenomenon. They've been described as
little more than collective hysteria.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
Right.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
Our question today is are they real? And to answer
that question we have to start from the beginning. So
here are the facts. Why do we call them flying saucers.
It's not like anyone nowadays, at least in the US
or Canada, uses the phrase saucer to describe the actual
(07:51):
little plate upon which one would place a cup or
a mug.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
What would you call it?
Speaker 1 (07:56):
What would I would I call that a little plate?
Speaker 3 (07:59):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (08:00):
All the way I really clip the tea's I say,
little plate or little cup?
Speaker 3 (08:04):
You have very good diction.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
Then I would be interested to know if any of
our British listeners, or anyone out in the UK or
around that area still uses the phrase saucer.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
No, they definitely do. Think about a saucer of milk
for a cat. It's certainly in the in the vernacular, that's.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
Those are the only two freezes. I hear it in though,
fine saucer or saucer of milk is the other one.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
Cup and saucer they call it. It's like, it's like
it's a set. They come together. It's the cup and
then the saucer.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Yeah, but are people walking around talking about it though?
Speaker 3 (08:30):
And saucer? Well, why you don't know. You don't pass
the saucer because you're passing the cup and it's on
the saucer.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
But if someone's like, if someone's like, no, that's the thing.
No one addresses it as a singular entity.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
You don't.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
You don't hear the word saucer floating around without being
attached to a cup, an alien, or a cat.
Speaker 3 (08:50):
It's basically a glorified drip pan. It's it's made to
catch the drippings from your tea. So presumably, if you're
not a total slob, you don't even need a saucer.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
There you go, I did what doesn't it depend on
the temptate? Okay, this is maybe a different show, but
we call these things flying saucers because of oddly enough,
skeet shooting.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
Back in eighteen ninety or so ever since then, flying
saucer was used to describe one of those clay pigeons
that they shoot off and you know, fire at and
then you high five each other when you hit one,
and that resembles a saucer, a classic UFO shape.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
Yeah, because the little device that they would we either
someone would throw the manuallyer. I think as technology advanced,
they would have little machines that would like you know,
hold them or like with a little arm and kind
of lob them. They'd go thoop, they'd go foop and
then smash right, Yeah, But it's because they're of a
shape that allows them to be thrown with a nice
directional velocity.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
Right, Yeah, like a frisbee.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
There you go.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
So for years and years and years and years, this
was a term that was kind of slaying in the
world of clay and shooting. But this phrase did not
describe UFOs until nineteen thirty and it didn't become popularized
until nineteen forty seven. In June twenty fourth of nineteen
(10:11):
forty seven, a guy named Kenneth Arnold had this highly
publicized UFO sighting, and it resulted in the popularization of
the term flying saucer in US newspapers and then later
the anglosphere and then later the world overall. So what
happened what made Kenneth Arnold go viral? Or at least
(10:32):
what did he see?
Speaker 3 (10:33):
So what Arnold said was he claimed to have encountered
flashes of light and nine different objects flying in some
sort of formation, occasionally flipping the way you might think
of the drone behavior hovering. You know, there's those drones
you can get that'll flip upside down like that or
do like a three sixty loop or whatever like that
without moving very far. So he followed them and found
(10:55):
that they were traveling at incredibly high speed and consisted
of various shapes each. They were not identical, they were
not uniform. Eventually he lost track of them, and he
landed sharing his experience and word spread and his account,
to use the kind of internet parlance, went viral.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
Yeah, he was as popular for a time as a
cat meme is today. So in these interviews with the press,
I like the point you're raising about the shapes being varied.
He described them a couple of different ways, and a
couple of different interviews. One he called a pie plate
and when he said oval in the front convects in
the rear. And what this means is that some editor
(11:38):
has lost to history now. And part of the reason
this story gained so much public traction is because Arnold
was a pilot, you know what I mean, he was
a credible source at the time, right, And still a
pilot is more credible than someone on the ground in
(11:59):
a lot of ways because they have simply more experience.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
Yeah, to mention, like, yet it's it's pretty hard to
competently pilot a plane if you're either mentally unstable or
under the influence of some kind of drugs or alcohol.
Typically frowned upon in the piloting community.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Yes, yes, And the.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
Biggest thing is just having an understanding of how aircraft function. Right,
That's true, that that's the biggest thing when when you
have a pilot, say, these things were flipping around or
doing this weird thing, and they were oval shaped and oblong,
it was really strange. But then he goes on in
further interviews to like describe them even more differently.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
Right, right, oval in the front and convex in the rear,
So it just like in the back in UFO parlance. Yeah, probably,
it really depends on whether you're an oval or a
convex guy.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
You know, that's a good point.
Speaker 4 (12:45):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
He described something as a pie plate, and then later
his story changes again. He describes one of the objects
as a crescent or flying wing, some as a big
flat disc, some as simply saucer like. And that's where
we hit on the etymology here, because while Arnold is
(13:07):
associated with this term, it was probably some editor lost
to history who's responsible for calling it a flying saucer.
And for a little while there was kind of a
pepsi coke thing going on with flying disc versus flying saucer,
but flying saucer clearly won out, and we still use
(13:28):
the phrase today sort of, yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
A little bit, but the phrase has kind of gone
away or at least been supplanted quite a bit. By this.
We're gonna call it a government created term because that's
what it is. Unidentified flying object or UFO.
Speaker 3 (13:46):
Or UFO as I like to say, and no one
else does.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
Yes, and these these aren't aliens necessarily, they're not extraterrestrials.
They're just something in the sky that people cannot identify.
Look up in the sky, it's bird played, it's Superman,
it's a weather blue. I don't know, I guess it's unidentified.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
Well, and we're gonna we're gonna continue to use the
term UFO here in this episode, but it should be noted,
as we noted not that long ago in an episode,
the military has now changed that as they like to
change their phrasing over time, to unidentified aerial vehicle.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
Yes, yes, yes, a UAV.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
I mean it's also sort of like that. They might
call something like that. The something comes up on the radar,
they call it a bogie or whatever, But that's sort
of if it's something they don't know the origin of,
they can't have eyes on it directly, then that could
be considered one of these as well, unidentified aerial vehicle.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
That's the problem with the acronym though, there must be
some of the initialism. There must be something missing, because
unmanned aerial vehicle is also UAV.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Yeah, there you go, or maybe I'm incorrect. I know
it's something similar.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
To that, but yeah, I mean Uncle Sam. Governments in
general big fans of abbreviations and initialisms. Today, flying saucers,
not just the phrase the thing has become this genre
of overall UFO sightings, and when you look at the
world of fiction, flying saucers still by far they're running
(15:14):
the game. You know, the problem is they're not represented
in a serious way. Mars Attacks spoiler alert is not,
in fact a documentary. You can see them in things
like sci fi series like The X Files, right, they'll
use the flying saucer appearance. You'll see it depicted in
a ton of nineteen fifties nineteen sixties fiction. You know,
(15:38):
we're talking Outer Limits, Twilight Zone and so on. But
what if there's more to the story. Is there any truth?
Two tales of actual flying saucers, Not clouds that look
like saucers, mind you, Not weird tricks of the light,
no atmospheric high jinks or strange ionospheric interference, real genuine
(16:01):
flying saucer. The answer is yes, there were real flying saucers,
and we built them.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
Don't toy with my emotions, Ben, It's true, and we're
gonna talk about the ones that at least we tried
to contract out afterward from our sponsor.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
Here's where it gets crazy.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
Enter Projects seventeen ninety four and related to this, the
Avro Canada VZ nine avrocar.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
Yes, let's talk about it. And before we get into that,
I have to make a quick edit to what I
said earlier. This is just everyone listening who said matt
UAVs are a thing. Ben is absolutely right, and you
are wrong. You are correct. It is. It's not even
called unidentified aerieal something. It's called unexplained aerial phenomena. So
that's you, ap yes, oh op, yeah, So apologies for
(17:02):
everyone who was really frustrated before the break. Let's continue on.
Speaker 3 (17:06):
I think they were shaking their fists at their I
hope someone caughtcast device.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
I know, I hope someone.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
Called and then they got done with their voicemail and
they listened through to the rest of the podcast.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
It just goes to show you, like, there's so many
things in my brain that I feel like I know
things about, but I only have bits and pieces human
condition my friends, But you know what I do know about?
Speaker 1 (17:25):
What do you know about?
Speaker 2 (17:26):
Because it's written down in this awesome outline that you
created that it's the story of this guy named John
Carver Meadows Frost and everybody you know his friends they
call him Jack. He worked in the aerospace industry for
quite a while, and in June of nineteen forty seven
he started working for this Canadian company called Avro Canada AVR. Oh, yeah,
(17:49):
that's right. And you know this dude's all about uh,
you know, dreaming big.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
He's a big picture guy, that's right.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
And he would he or he like, did this thing
that Avro called Blue Sky's Research. So like these are
when we say big picture things, ideas that are so
close to the edge of what science can do. They're
they're overlapping or just beyond what is possible. And that's
our boy, Jack nineteen forty seven, he's thinking on the edge.
Speaker 3 (18:21):
Jackie boy.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
That's right, Old Jack Frost himself. Yes, at Avro Canada,
he had already worked on something called the Avro CF
one hundred. This is a this is a craft that
is innovative, but not wild wild style Blue Skies. Yes,
(18:42):
Blue Sky's Research is stuff like in the world of aviation,
an example of something that would be considered experimental would
be the Howard Hughes design Spruce Goose, the largest plane
in history that we know of geese. Yes, and if
you look at pictures of that thing, it's it's enormous,
(19:05):
it's it's impractical.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
I think it's a I've seen it before. I feel like,
is it on display in like San Francisco. It's on
the West coast right, Oh, you know what it's a
it's actually the Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinnville, Oregon.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
Interesting, nice, well done McMinnville. So you can look at
pictures of this thing. It's built largely out of wood.
He called it the H four Hercules. It has the
name spruce Goose, which came about as an insult from
a skeptical press. The world of brainstorming is high risk,
high return, but this is the world that Jack wants
(19:41):
to live in. So after he's been working on the
AVROCF one hundred, he creates a research team called the
Special Projects Group or SPG, and he at first surrounded
himself with other people who thought like he did, out
of the box. You know what I mean, mavericks. So
(20:02):
this group SPG, Special Projects Group, was situated in their
main administration building, but then they relocated it to an
older structure across from the company headquarters and what was
called the Shafer Building, and their security went through the roof.
They had guards everywhere, lock doors, special unique pass cards.
(20:24):
They started doing serious stuff, you know what I mean.
The days of hanging out in the conference room with
a chalkboard were long gone.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
Nobody can see this chalkboard.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
Right right now. It's all secret chalk. Disappearing chalk?
Speaker 3 (20:37):
Is that a thing?
Speaker 1 (20:38):
They guess all chalk is disappearing theft eraser. So the
SPG operated out of this experimental hangar and they shared
space with other secretive AVRO project teams. Jack was personally fascinated,
along with a lot of other people, by something called
vertical takeoff and landing vehicles also known as VTOL because
(20:59):
are pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
Can you say vitol or we need to say vitole
I like Vito vitall craft.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
Right there might be somebody named Vitold listening now, and
if you are, you know hello.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
So for a VTOL aircraft, really think about a helicopter,
especially when you're thinking about taking off and landing, something
that vertically goes up and goes out and then can
come back and go down and you can get out
of the thing. And you know, for these aircraft, the
specific ones that Jack is interested in, it's having that
(21:35):
ability to take off vertically but then fly around like
an airplane. Wood or jet should then come right back
and then go back down.
Speaker 3 (21:43):
Like the X Men jet.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
Yeah, right with that has the rotating turbines, right, which
is a really cool feature, kind of like an osprey
I believe the craft are called.
Speaker 3 (21:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
So in the nineteen fifties, the US Air Force was
worried about the vulnerability of their bases because of a
couple of limiting factors of conventional aircraft.
Speaker 2 (22:06):
Right. Yeah, and then this is something we should talk
about that Ben and I were talking about offline here.
In nineteen forty seven is when the US Air Force
splits off or is officially split off from the army
from just as a separate military unit. And you know,
this is at this point post World War Two. But
(22:28):
they've got these bases that are all over the planet.
At this point, they're pretty isolated, and the Air Force
around this time in the nineteen fifties, they're really worried
that these bases are just gonna get destroyed because if
you imagine looking at one of these bases overhead, like
Google mapsing it or Google earthing it back in let's
(22:50):
say nineteen fifty four, you're just gonna see several huge
runways and then a bunch of extremely high value targets
just clustered around these runways.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
Eggs in a single basket exactly.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
And that's aircraft, of course, just sitting around the runways.
So they wanted to find a way to reduce either
the length and thickness of their runways, so it's not
such a like if you're flying overhead or a nearby
in an enemy vehicle. You can't just go, oh, hey,
look that's a military base, and we can wreak havoc
on their offensive and defensive capabilities if we attack that thing.
(23:24):
And they also wanted to well, so they wanted to
either reduce them, make them smaller, or just get rid
of them completely. So you could have basically a United
States Air Force base in the middle of nowhere and
it would be a little more hidden at least a bit.
The other thing they wanted to do is find a
way to deploy aircraft faster for both offensive and defensive capabilities.
(23:45):
So if your base is being attacked, you can send
you can send aircraft up that'll knock down all the
other planes that are coming in to attack you, or
you can send them off quicker to go attack nearby areas.
So reducing scramble time exactly. That makes sense. And this
the VTOL thing just what Jack is interested in. That
was one of the proposed solutions.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
The thing is, this sort of experimentation is spoiler alert
cartoonishly expensive. It's not uncommon, but it is expensive. And
because often these are some of the first people trying
to do this kind of thing ever, right, in any
any kind of hardware prototyping, often they are prone to failure.
(24:31):
And I don't mean like, oh good, lesson learn, I
mean this is a disaster. These people are dead. Why
did we lose millions of dollars on this?
Speaker 3 (24:39):
Remember that episode we did a ridiculous history Bend that
was about failed military technology, and one of them was
like a hoverboard kind of platform things. That was kind
of part of the technology for one of these vital jets, right,
it was the part that lifts the thing up off
the ground. But that was literally all these were. And
you would control it sort of like a segue by
like leaning into it or back or sideways, so you
looked really say, and it was it was very unwieldy
(25:02):
and heavy, and they weren't very good at like anything.
The flying platform flying platforms like you know, it had
this sci fi space vibe too, where like everyone's like
zipping around on these little discs. Yeah, like flying saucers,
but they just weren't very functional in a war situation.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Yeah, they were more they were more a rich person's toy,
I think ultimately. But also like a segue, like when
we think of when we think of these experiments, let's
also remember things like bat bombs. Let's remember things like
cyborg cats. That was a real thing. Rocket bullets, rocket bullets,
all all sorts of stuff in this spy dolphins, spy dolphins,
(25:39):
and that's not even getting into assassination attempts and equipment.
So they know they're in again, a high risk, high
reward situation. There's something else interesting that happens in society
at this time. So flying saucers are experiencing what pr
people here in twenty nineteen would call a moment. There
was a pro liferation of sightings flying saucers in the
(26:03):
West as a whole, but across the world, and there
is serious concern, not just it's not just newspaper publishers
trying to sell the next week's edition. It's not just
fringe theorists anymore. There are members of the US military
who are seriously anxious, concerned, terrified would be a fair word.
(26:24):
That Soviet forces may have beaten them to the punch,
creating their own top secret VTOL, in other words, creating
their own flying saucers. So these folks at the higher
echelons of the military and politics are essentially saying, what
if all these flying saucer sightings are real? And what
if they're you know, they're not spacemen or something, they're
(26:45):
not aliens, they're you know, well they would probably say
kamis or reds or something like that.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
Yeah. Well, so in the in late nineteen fifty three,
a group of defense experts took a little visit to Avro,
Canada to view this new thing that was called the
CF one hundred fighter jet. Because you know, you don't
just need crazy experimental things that might happen. You also
need real fighter jets when you're the military.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
And that's what Yeah, the US Air Force is there
just to see that jet. It's important to the story.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
Yeah, and we'll tell you what happened on their visit
after a word from our sponsor.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
And we're back. So midway through the tour or pal
Jack Frost busts in and hijacks them. Essentially, he takes
these visitors to the high security Special Projects area and
he does a little show and tell. He gives them
a look at a mock up of something he calls
Project y Too. This is a completely circular disc shaped aircraft.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
Yes, it's right. And the USAF visitors were pretty impressed
by what they saw. They took over funding for the
Special Projects Group and gave seven hundred and fifty thousand
American dollars in nineteen fifty five, which, if we inflation
calculated that by today's standards, it's a little over seven
million dollars.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
Pretty crazy, right.
Speaker 3 (28:14):
Mm hmm. And the next year AVRO decided to commit
to and a half million nineteen fifty five dollars to
build a prototype. So, as you said before, ben very
expensive to do this kind of out of the box
kind of thinking and research.
Speaker 1 (28:27):
Yeah yep.
Speaker 5 (28:28):
And they said the reward could be amazing, Yes, yes,
could be, or it could be relegated to the scrap
heap of history. It's it's marginally better than gambling.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
Yeah, you know what I mean. So this study encompassed
a wide variety of possible designs, but they all revolved
around this disc shape, this flying saucer shape, leading to
something called Project seventeen ninety four. The goal was to
build a supersonic large disc fighter aircraft jet that's also
(29:01):
a circle.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
Basically, yeah, and again, think about this, a flying disc,
a flying saucer then engages other aircraft in ground objects
like how crazy is that?
Speaker 1 (29:13):
Again, this is a real thing at this point. So
they eventually get to the level where they're doing what's
called wind tunnel testing with scale models. So they're studying
how these things move through the environment and what little
tweaks or big changes they can make to make it
less of a disaster.
Speaker 3 (29:30):
A wind tunnel simulating the conditions of high speed flight
without actually having to reach those speeds.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
Absolutely nail on the head.
Speaker 3 (29:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
They eventually decide that the reasonable estimate for this concept
would result in a vehicle that can go mock three
point five at one thousand foot altitudes or thirty thousand
meters for the rest of the world. This led to
something called the Avrocar, which is thing that you can
(30:00):
see today if you want to travel to a museum
and check it out. Highly recommended. Jack Frost built this
kills me. This guy's name is Jack Frost. How many Joe?
He must have been so cool. He built this as
a two seer personal car kind of concept, so it's
much smaller than what they were aiming to build seventeen
(30:21):
ninety four. And it showed, you know, it meant to
It was a proof of concept. It was meant to show, hey,
these things can work. We can actually put people in them.
They can take off, they can fly around, they can land.
Everybody will be alive. We'll high five each other. Awesome,
go us. And at the time, this was just a
step toward their ultimate goal, the supersonic flying saucer. How
(30:44):
do we know about this? How do we know this
is real and not a story? No one really knew.
No one officially knew about this until two thousand and twelve,
when declassified documents showed the rumors were true, which happens
all the time. How many people can you imagine who
were engineers on their deathbed telling their kids, like, no,
(31:05):
it's true, we kind of built flying saucers.
Speaker 3 (31:08):
Is there a statute limitations that allows things to be
things to be declassified? Is it sort of like a
copyright expiring or does someone just up high kind of
have to say, you know what, I don't think it's
a big deal anymore. People want to know. It'd probably
be fun to let this out there. What do you
think the protocol is fun? Not fun, but you know,
fun for the people, you know, for the UFO nerds.
You give them a little something to go on.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
I would just start I would start by saying, while
I don't know the exact parameters of that timeframe, I
do know that after a certain amount of time it
comes up as it can be reviewed essentially to be declassified.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
Or it can be reclassified. At that point it is
kind of like a kind of like a copyright. Yeah,
that's not a bad comparison, because there were things that
came out recently regarding or there were things up for
review excuse me, regarding the Kennedy assassination, some of which
were released and some of which were reclassifies, right, and
(32:02):
the problem is there. The criteria for that is is
it fun?
Speaker 2 (32:09):
That's number one?
Speaker 1 (32:10):
That's the number one. Are we all having a good time?
Number two is does this still pose a continued risk
to national security or to people or sorry, the exposure
of methods and technologies used to gain information or advantage,
get an edge. Yeah, and that's that's such a woefully
(32:33):
vague thing that happens all the time. What isn't national security?
You could stretch that to anything totally.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
But because of this twenty twelve declassified documentation, we got
to take a look for the first time at this
memo that comes from nineteen fifty six. That really shows
what the engineers there at Avro were attempting to build,
like the thing they wanted the end goal to be.
And it gets back to a saucer like view that
(33:00):
was capable of reaching quote between Mack three and Mark four,
a ceiling of over one hundred thousand feet, meaning it
can climb all the way up to over or around
over one hundred thousand feet and a maximum range with allowances.
This is still the quote of about one thousand nautical.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
Miles incredible bowsers and that's you know, that's nineteen fifty
six when the memo is written, So that is the
same year that Avro itself gives that two point five
million dollars in nineteen fifty six bucks as you said,
nol to the project. As far as we can tell,
this supersonic flying saucer it can's weird that this is
(33:40):
a real thing. Would propel itself by rotating an outer
disc at a very very high speed, and then maneuvering
would be accomplished by using small shutters on the edge
of the disc. It would be powered by jet turbines,
so no secret technology there. And according to the cutaway
diagrams you can see maybe four so digitized pictures of this.
(34:03):
According to those cutaway diagrams, the entire thing would be
able to take off and land vertically, so it would
move in a way that closely resembled the movements reported
of flying saucers.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
Can we just take a minute and look at this
cutaway together, because it is dang fascinating, really cool. And
there are some things that Ben and I were talking
about off air before you came in. In particular, the
cockpit area at the very center of this vehicle that
Ben was describing is directly surrounded by four large rings
(34:38):
of the fuel that runs the entire vehicle. So if
you're sitting inside this thing, you're literally surrounded by all
of the combustible stuff that is being.
Speaker 3 (34:48):
Used to run the Ooh, so if you take a
direct hit, you're just like you're just you're toast.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
You're sacrificing, You're sacrificing durability for flexibility or would be
a better word. Your main strategy is to not get hit.
Speaker 3 (35:04):
Well, it's like those U boats where they had the
toilets mounted right above the batteries that ran the whole thing,
So when the toilet's malfunction, it would like flood the
batteries and cause all these problems. It's sort of like,
you know, you take a hit on design in order
to or you take a hit maybe on safety in
order to like pack more features into a thing.
Speaker 1 (35:22):
It's just like a video game where you can choose
characters that are faster than average but weaker, or you
can choose characters that are absolute tanks but they're like slow.
Yeah yeah, yeah, Well.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
Then let's just talk about this really fast, because I
was fascinated by that design, and I am nowhere near
an engineer or a physicist or anything like that. But
you have to imagine the fuel tanks in a vehicle
like this are going to be like fairly heavy at
the beginning at takeoff, right when you're all fueled up.
Then by the end of your mission, it's going to
be the weight that the center of the vehicle is
(35:55):
going to be significantly reduced.
Speaker 3 (35:56):
To change the handling. Probably right, Well, I mean.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Because you're you know, literally the spinning disc part of
this is what's giving you not fully propulsion, but it's
what's stable standing the craft doing effect and keeping you
in the air. The whole thing blows my mind, and
I just want to hear from anybody out there listening
that understands the physics of it a little better. Please
(36:21):
please look at the Project seventeen ninety four documentation and
let us.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
Know here's a weird thing. Though it still is not
clear why to that original question one of us posts,
it still isn't clear why it's taken more than sixty
years for this to be declassified, especially if they didn't
actually build anything other than that little avrocar prototype. But
(36:51):
it follows on from the declassified news in two thousand
and eight that the US government has been monitoring UFO
activity for decades in secret, way after they said Project
Blue Book was over. And furthermore, there are apparently rumour
has that there are apparently two entire boxes of Projects
seventeen ninety four documents, but only a handful of images
(37:12):
have been digitized.
Speaker 2 (37:13):
Yeah, literally four that we were able to find in
making this episode.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
So here's the problem. The story gets murky, right. The
closest thing we have to a real prototype is that
VZ nine Avrocar, and that prototype, by all accounts, was
a stinker. It was originally specified for max speed of
three hundred miles per hour with a ceiling of ten
thousand feet instead of one hundred thousand, but in practice
(37:38):
it never got more than three feet off the ground.
Its top speed was thirty five miles per hour.
Speaker 2 (37:45):
This, yeah, I know.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
Despite the Avrocar's failures, which were clear and apparent, it's
also clear and apparent that the US government was indeed
working on aircraft in the nineteen fifties that resembled flying saucers.
Suffice to say, the US may have been working on
flying saucers back in the forties around the same time
as the Roswell UFO incident. Now we're going, whoa, we're
(38:08):
putting some strings together here.
Speaker 3 (38:09):
Well, that's what I was going to ask. I mean,
you know, let's presuppose that they did discover some kind
of craft at Roswell. Do you think it's possible that
they took a cue from some of that technology that
they found. If in fact this happened and then tried
to apply it to you know, the design.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
Maybe quite possibly.
Speaker 3 (38:26):
Yeah, and this that's why it was classified for so long,
even though they knew they weren't going to pursue it anymore,
because it would raise these questions.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
Maybe a Soviet saucer crashed and then they had to
make a whole dog and pony show about pretending to
invent the technology on their own. It's interesting, and that
kind of duplicity does play into international affairs. It's fascinating,
it's addictive and tempting to think of what could have been.
We do have an episode where we get as close
(38:55):
as we can to discerning the cause of that event
that's commonly called you know, roswell or groom leak, but
we don't want to spoil it for you.
Speaker 2 (39:06):
No, And I would highly yeah, I check it out.
I highly recommend the YouTube series that we made on
that tu Ben.
Speaker 1 (39:11):
We did a YouTube series well on time Flies.
Speaker 2 (39:15):
Well.
Speaker 1 (39:15):
Unlike other experimental projects of the same era, this project
was fully canceled in December nineteen sixty one. That leaves
us with some troubling questions, why would you pour all
of this money into something just a shelvet. Later, there
are a couple of possibilities. First, one obvious when we
could say it just didn't work, either because our engineering
(39:37):
ability or our technology at the time was just inadequate
to solve the problems, or because the physics involved were
beyond our ken as well.
Speaker 3 (39:48):
And again, like we're talking about earlier, we know this
happens all the time with military prototypes. Oh, like they
designed a circular ship. Remember that one terrible idea when
the guns would fire, it was shoot the ship around
in circles.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
You know.
Speaker 3 (40:02):
It was somebody, some general or something. It was really
hot for this idea and was high up enough in
the you know, the military, that he got the dollars,
but it was an embarras terrible idea. Could very well
be the case here. They don't like to admit defeat.
Speaker 1 (40:15):
And then yeah, and then there was that there was
that tank that was essentially a sphere that just had
three guns randomly pointing out what, Oh it's great, really ridiculous. Well,
you have to earn it, you know, you have to
earn these great innovations and not not everything is going
to be the goose the least the golden egg. But
we do know that the military pursued something like this,
(40:39):
and it's something that we're all familiar with today.
Speaker 2 (40:41):
Right. Oh yeah, well we've brought it up a little
bit already in the show. But helicopters if you're if
you want to have a vertical takeoff and landing solution,
well guess what we got these things called helicopters.
Speaker 3 (40:51):
You can have bigger helicopters that have multiple propellers.
Speaker 2 (40:54):
Right, that's right. You know, they can't do a lot
of the things that the military wanted to do.
Speaker 3 (40:58):
Dives and such evasive maneuver is probably more difficult.
Speaker 2 (41:02):
And specifically getting as high into the atmosphere as these
vehicles are go anywhere near as fast as they wanted
these vehicles to go. There's some fast helicopters, but nothing
like that. But what helicopters did do is fix that
problem that the military had, or at least the perceived
problem the military had, of these giant runways of their
far flung bases and needing to have defense of those
(41:24):
bases and as well as having aircraft that could deploy
quickly and go up and down quickly. Rather than having
to take off with a big runway.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
So maybe they just found a compromise then, right, they said,
this is what we can realistically do now.
Speaker 2 (41:39):
It certainly seems like it. And the timing makes a
lot of sense here too, because if this the avrocar
was canceled December nineteen sixty one. In early nineteen sixty two,
that's when the US Air Force really started ramping up
their training of personnel that can both fly and work
on helicopters, like mechanics essentially pilots and mechanics, because.
Speaker 3 (42:02):
They're like, this is the best we got, we better
just own it.
Speaker 2 (42:05):
Well, yeah, because again it's the Vietnam War really ramps up,
and that's when we see a lot more helicopters.
Speaker 1 (42:12):
Another possibility this was just one of many experiments or
dabblings that a terrified government participated in. Maybe not so
much because they thought it was practical, maybe more because
they were hoping to keep their ideological rivals, the USSR
at bay. So many weird things come from the psychological
(42:37):
mind games of the Cold War. You know, we experimented
with psychic powers esp astral travel, and were convinced many
people in the US military industrial complex. We're convinced that
not only were Soviet forces doing the same thing, but
that they were doing it successfully. So they were like,
more money, teach that guy how to kill things with
(42:58):
his mind.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
So I've got, I've got. This is what I believe.
I'm just going to tell you. I'm going to tell
you my opinion right now.
Speaker 3 (43:06):
Lay it on me.
Speaker 2 (43:07):
The reason why we only have four images, four pages
from Projects seventeen ninety four is because it, rather than
being a reaction to some Soviet thing that we thought
was happening, this is us trying to get the Soviet
Union to spend a crap load of money trying to
build one of these things, because we've already got this
(43:28):
design and it's going to do all these things. It's
our psychological manipulation of them.
Speaker 1 (43:33):
Counterpoint, it would have to have leaked in some controllable way.
Speaker 2 (43:37):
They leaked it on purpose, I think, to some mole
that they knew was around.
Speaker 1 (43:41):
Okay, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well that does lead us
to one one more possibility. What if this is a
cover story or something like it. You know, no, far
be it for us to sound two out there, but
it is common practice to run these games of deception.
(44:04):
You know, tanks were called tanks because they were originally
shipped under false you know, under false pretense, false papers.
They were called water tanks, right, And it turned out
that they were these rolling weapons of mass destruction for
the time, It's completely understandable that people would say there
(44:24):
was something else to the story. We have to keep
in mind additionally that the US government and other world
governments have had massive success suppressing technology in the past. Bombers,
especially stealth bombers.
Speaker 2 (44:38):
Right.
Speaker 1 (44:38):
We grew up in an era where they were this
open secret and every so often popular mechanics would write
a piece saying, oh, maybe it's true, but it's not.
And it turns out they were totally true, were totally true,
and they looked insane, like nothing you would ever see
so metal, you know what I mean. Right, So in conclusion, yes,
(45:01):
it turns out there are slash were real flying saucers.
They were built here on Earth, and according to the
official narratives, they were what we in the automotive world
would call lemons or real pieces is. However, the US
government and numerous aerospace companies have again proven themselves fully
(45:22):
capable of suppressing technology for some time. We just don't
know how long that time horizon is.
Speaker 3 (45:29):
They call them lemons, guys, I don't know. Lemons are nice?
What's wrong with lemons?
Speaker 2 (45:34):
Mmmm? It's just so sour?
Speaker 3 (45:36):
Maybe it implies if there's something wrong with it a
perfectly good lemon, is it's just that it's a lemon.
Speaker 1 (45:41):
According to the online Etymology Dictionary, no one really knows.
There are a couple. There are a couple of possibilities.
Lemon used to be slaying for a person who is
a quote loser or a simpleton, they would be dumb
as a lemon, I guess. And then there was British
pool hall slang where a lemon game was a game
that was played by someone hustling. You.
Speaker 2 (46:03):
Oh, that makes more sense to me. Yeah, if it's
a lemon, because the idea is you bottle lemon, right, not.
Speaker 3 (46:08):
What you see, it's what you get, right, Like you're
seeing this person who is looking like something but they're
actually something else.
Speaker 2 (46:15):
There you go, there, you go.
Speaker 3 (46:16):
Well, now that we went down the etymological rabbit hole.
Speaker 1 (46:19):
How much do you like lemon?
Speaker 2 (46:20):
Do you?
Speaker 1 (46:21):
Are you somebody who just straight up eats lemons?
Speaker 2 (46:22):
No?
Speaker 3 (46:23):
What I will tell you this. I bought these things.
They are called superberry pills. Have you heard about this? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
And they make sour things taste sweet. So you can
eat one of these pills and it fundamentally changes the
way your taste buds perceive sourness and sweetest. So you
can suck on a lemon and it tastes like sugar.
Speaker 1 (46:37):
I've been. I've been to the taste taste hacking parties too.
Those those things are pretty cool. It's an interesting experience
if you haven't tried it before, especially if you have
some form of goustatory synaesthesia. I can only imagine what
kind of colors you will see. It is completely possible
that at least some of those UFO sightings back in
(46:58):
the forties, well before the d classified memos mentioned AVRO,
could have been attributed to similar or other related projects.
What kind I know that a lot of us listening
now are saying, mention it. You guys, don't swindle us.
You have to mention it on air or whatever you
talk about this topic, Nazi UFOs, Nazi technology battle right right,
(47:20):
or the Horton right. There is compelling evidence of innovative
prototypes made by the Nazi regime around that time, and
we have various episodes all about it, so you can
check those out easily on our website stuff they don't
want you to know, or YouTube or wherever you find
your favorite shows and podcasts. All together though, factive flying saucers,
(47:48):
we're kind of real, yeah, even officially kind of real,
at least for a second. It makes you wonder what
else is up there in the atmosphere today, you know
what I mean.
Speaker 2 (47:57):
What do you think?
Speaker 3 (47:57):
Let us know?
Speaker 1 (47:58):
Also, let us know what you think about helicopters. Have you, guys,
ever been in a helicopter.
Speaker 2 (48:02):
Only once or twice once?
Speaker 3 (48:04):
They're great? Have you seen those Chinook for sevens? Yes,
those are the twin prop Yeah yeah, choppers yeah, and
they were actually in development not far off from when
this Avro deal was going on in nineteen fifty seven.
By the vert, all company.
Speaker 1 (48:21):
People are trying to solve the same problem different ways exactly.
There are also, depending on the city in which you live,
there are helicopter tours, So I would say, unless they're
super expensive, get on one if you can. It's a
great date idea.
Speaker 3 (48:35):
And apparently in New York now Uber is operating helicopters
where you can get an uber helicopter to pick you
up and take you to the airport. And it's only
about the cost of a flight, you know, two hundred
and fifty. Wow, But I'll tell you man, it's weird.
Flex a taking a lift or an uber to the
airport in New York City is a harrowing experience.
Speaker 1 (48:54):
It's an endeavor, yees say a long time. People who
drive regularly in New York have made their peace with
the afterlife here every time they hop in.
Speaker 3 (49:02):
Special kind of sadists as well.
Speaker 1 (49:04):
I would say kudos to you road warriors also, and
perhaps a little bit more in line with today's show,
let us know whether you think there is technology still
being suppressed today and if so, what we often hear
For instance that at least in the realm of software
and algorithms, the NSSAY is far ahead of what would
(49:27):
be considered viable or ethical in the public commercial sphere.
And that's our classic episode for this evening. We can't
wait to hear your thoughts.
Speaker 3 (49:42):
It's right, let us know what you think you can
reach to. They have a conspiracy stuff where we exist
on Facebook x and YouTube, on Instagram and TikTok or
Conspiracy Stuff Show.
Speaker 2 (49:51):
If you want to call us dial one eight three
three std WYTK. That's our voicemail system. You've got three minutes.
Give yourself a cool nick and let us know if
we can use your name and message on the air.
If you got more to say than can fit in
that voicemail, why not instead send us a good old
fashioned email.
Speaker 1 (50:09):
We are the entities to read every single piece of
correspondence we receive, be aware, yet not afraid. Sometimes the
void writes back conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (50:39):
Stuff they don't want you to know is a production
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