July 5, 2019 • 49 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?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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. A
production of I Heart Gradios How Stuff Works. Welcome back
(00:25):
to the show. My name is Matt, my name is
they call me Ben. We are joined as always with
our super producer Paul Mission controlled decade. Most importantly, you
are you. You are here, and that meets this stuff
they don't want you to know. We've been doing a
lot of 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 Matt,
(00:48):
how's it. How's it going? 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. Uh. It's just
it was awesome. Uh. And and the happy Father's Day
to both of you. Belated thank you suh. No, how
about you. It's good. I would and visited my mom
(01:08):
and she made me a Father's Day dinner Lego lamb
which is it is? And a little bit of what
do we have on the side. I was some stuffed mushrooms,
also a favorite, and then I got to take my
kid to Actually I went and got a manicure and
a pedicure, and then I got up sold into getting
my eyebrows waxed. It's kind of a bummer because the
(01:30):
pedicure feels so good and then the eyebrow waxing really hurts,
so it sort of negated the good feels of the pedicure.
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 would uh kick them
in the face. I would attack. I would have to.
There's apart where they take this cheese greater thing and
just like rub it in the middles of your feet,
(01:52):
and I have to bite my lip really hard to
keep from like losing it. God. 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 and gotta gotta
woo there that you can't hear outside of the studio.
(02:12):
Let's also check in with mission control. How you doing man,
thumbs up, thumbs down. Okay, I thought a sideways. It
was for a second, it was middling too good. We're
gonna call that. How about Mr Benolen? Thanks for asking? Man,
so we also not kidding. Uh yeah, things are happening.
You know. I've been traveling some more and probably have
some more travel in the future. And I've been out
(02:34):
of this this particular realm uh, this particular astral plane
really just gonna give me the demon laugh and move on.
By the way, did you did you listen to the
recent voicemail episode? Did I? YEA? Okay, all right, you guys,
he hasn't heard the Oh that's okay, don't worry about it.
(02:56):
Check it's fine, it's fine. I should listen to it.
I should we go into a little bit of your lore?
Oh boy, any anything I need to be aware of?
You already know? Are the all knowing all? Say what
you want? Oh man, that's that's two. That is two kinds.
I listened to one of the voicemail episodes, and Matt
(03:17):
know that you did way back? Is it over a
year now? Ago? Now? Yeah? And that was really that
was really good and people really seem to enjoy it. Um,
so yeah, I'm sorry, I apologize. I'll listen to it.
That you were still included. That's very good, Thank you
so much. And if you want to be included in
(03:37):
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. You are hot takes,
as they say in the late night shows. Just keep
it around three minutes or be ready to call back
and say and another thing. Yeah, I mean a hot
(03:58):
take should technically be a verbal tweet kind of thing.
So three minutes should be plenty for a hot take. Yeah,
then you're getting into rant territory Dennis Miller style. We
like a good rant as well. Sometimes you know, you
get stuck just applying Marty garrab beads to a basket
and you're just like, you know what, I need to
call like three or four more times. Just trust me,
it happens. It happens. So what's that number for anyone
(04:21):
who wants to call. It's one eight three three s
T d W y t K. So we chanted like
that on purpose. 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
(04:42):
story of flying saucers, not UFOs in general, mind you,
actual flying saucers. For decades, 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 fo most people will immediately conjure up an
(05:02):
image of a flying saucer. Right. Well, you know you
got the whole night and got the little uh, the
the nuts to cockpit. Yeah, you got the cockpit at
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 potentially. Yes, you always
have the Mars Attacks version in my head, because that's
(05:26):
the classic trophy version. Like Tim Burton 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 them. Yeah, and Mars Attacks. I'm
gonna say I still enjoy it. I do too, mentally.
It's a great documentary. Right, So, but when are these
things flying saucers. They've been described as a widely misidentified,
(05:51):
mundane phenomenon. They've been described as little more than uh
collective hysteria. Right Uh. 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
(06:14):
least in the US or Canada, uses the phrase saucer
to describe the actual little plate upon which one would
place a cup or a mug. Would you call it?
What would I? What would I call that a little plate?
I say it all the way. I really clip the tease.
I say little plate or little cup. You have very
good addiction. Then I would be interested to know if
(06:37):
any of our British listeners or anyone out in the
UK or around that area still uses the phrase saucer.
They definitely do. Think about a saucer of milk for
a cat. It's certainly in the in the vernacular. That's
those are the only two phrases I hear it in
the flying saucer or saucer of milk is the other one,
cup and saucer. They just call it. It's like, it's
like it's a set. They come together. It's the cup
and then the saucer. Yeah, but are people walking around
(06:58):
talking about it though, and could use it? These 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. But
if someone's like, if someone's like, no, that's the thing.
No one addresses it as a singular entity, don't. You
don't hear the word saucer floating around without being attached
to a cup, an alien, or a cat. It's basically
(07:19):
a glorified drip pam. It's it's made to catch the
drippings from your tea. So presumably, if you're not a
total slab, you don't even need a saucer. There you go,
I give what doesn't it depend on the temper? Okay,
this is maybe a different show, but but we call
these things flying saucers because of oddly enough, skeet shooting. Yeah,
(07:44):
back in nine 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 because the
little vice that they would either someone would throw the
manual layer. I think as technology advanced, they would have
little machines that would like, you know, hold them like
(08:07):
with a little arm and kind of lobbed them. They'd
they'd go thoop and then smash, right. But it's because
they're of a shape that allows them to be thrown
with a nice directional velocity, right, Yeah, like a frisbee.
There you go. So for years and years and years
and years, this was a term that was kind of
slaying in the world of clay pigeon shooting. But this
(08:30):
phrase did not describe UFOs until nineteen thirty and it
didn't become popularized until nineteen forty seven. In June 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 uh the
(08:53):
Anglo sphere, and then later the world overall. So, so
what happened what made Kenneth Arnold go viral? Or at
least what did he see? 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.
(09:15):
You know, there's those drones you can get that will
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 that they were traveling
at incredibly high speed um and consisted of various shapes.
Each of each were not They were not identical, they
were not uniform. Eventually he lost track of them, and
uh he landed sharing his experience, and words spread and
(09:38):
his account um to use the kind of internet parlance,
went viral. Yeah, he was as popular for a time
as a cat meme is today. So in uh, 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 when he said, uh,
(10:01):
oval in the front, convex in the rear. And what
this means is that some editor has lost to history now.
And part of the reason this story gains so much
public traction is because Arnold was a pilot, you know
what I mean, he was a credible source at the time, right,
(10:23):
And still a pilot is more credible than someone on
the ground in a lot of ways because they have
simply more experience to imagine, Like, yeah, it's it's pretty
hard to competently pilot a plane if you're either meant
mentally unstable or under the influence of some kind of
drugs or alcohol. Frowned upon in the piloting community. Yes, yes,
(10:44):
the biggest thing is just having an understanding of how
aircraft function, right, That that's the biggest thing when when
you have a pilot, say, these things were flipping around
and 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,
right right, Uh, oval in the front and convex in
(11:06):
the rear. So in UFO parlance, probably it really depends
on whether you're an oval or a convex guy, you know. Uh.
He described something as a pipe plate, and then later
his story changes again. He describes one of the objects
as a crescent or flying wing, some as a big
(11:27):
flat disc, some as simply saucer like, And that's where
we hit on the etymology here, because while Arnold is
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
(11:48):
Pepsi coke thing going on with flying disc versus flying saucer,
but flying saucer clearly one out. And we still use
the phrase today sort of yeah, a little bit, but
the phrase has kind of gone away or at least
been supplanted quite a bit by this. Uh, we're gonna
call it a government created term because that's what it is.
(12:11):
Unidentified flying object or UFO or UFO is I like
to say, and no one else does, Yes, and get
these these aren't aliens, necessarily, not extraterrestrials. They're just something
in the sky that people cannot identify. Look up in
the sky. It's a bird, it's a plague, it's Superman,
it's a weather blue. I don't know. I guess it's unidentified. Well,
(12:34):
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 all their phrasing over time to unidentified aerial vehicle. Yes, yes, yes,
U A V. I mean it's also sort of like that.
(12:55):
They might call something like that if something comes up
on radar they called a bogey or what her. 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. That's the problem with the ACROYM though. There
must be some of the initialism. There must be something missing,
because unmanned aerial vehicle is also U A B. Yeah,
(13:17):
there you go, Or maybe I'm incorrect. I know it's
something similar 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
(13:38):
at the world of fiction, flying saucers still by far
they're running the game. You know. The problem is they're
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 you'll see it
(14:01):
depicted in a ton of nineteen fifties nineteen sixties fiction.
You know, we're talking outer Limits, Twilight Zone and so on.
But what if there's more to the story. Is there
any truth to tales of actual flying saucers? Not clouds
that look like saucers, mind you, Not weird tricks of
(14:22):
the light, no atmospheric high jinks or strange I hoo
spheric interference, a real genuine flying saucer. The answer is yes,
there were real flying saucers, and we built them. Don't
toy with my emotions, Ben, It's true. And we're going
(14:42):
to talk about the ones that at least um we
tried to contract out after a word from our sponsor.
Here's where it gets crazy. Enter Projects seventeen uh and
related to this, the Avro Canada VZ nine Avro car. Yes,
(15:07):
let's talk about 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, you a
v s are a thing. Ben is absolutely right, and
you are wrong. You are correct it is. Uh, it's
not even called unidentified aerial something. It's called unexplained aerial phenomena.
So so that's you a p yes, you up up. Yeah,
(15:30):
So apologies for everyone who was really frustrated before the break.
Let's continue on. You think they were shaking their fists
at their I hope someone coodcast device. I hope someone
called and then they got done with their voicemail and
they listened through to the rest of the podcast. 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,
(15:52):
But you know what I do know about? What do
you know about? 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
ninety seven he started working for this Canadian company called
(16:14):
Avro Canada a v R. Oh, yeah, that's right. And uh,
you know this dude's all about, you know, dreaming big.
He's a big picture guy, that's right, And Uh, he
would Um, he worked in or he like did this
thing that AVRO called Blue Skies research. So like these
are when we say big picture things ideas that are
(16:37):
so close to the edge of what science can do,
they're they're overlapping or just beyond what is possible. Um,
and that's our boy, Jack, he's thinking on the edge,
Jackie boy. That's right. Well Jack Frost himself, Yes, at
Avro Canada, he had already worked on something called the
(16:58):
Avro cf An hundred. This is uh. This is a
craft that is innovative, but not wild wild style Blue Skies.
Blue Sky's research is stuff like uh. In the world
of aviation, an example of something that would be considered
experimental would be the Howard Hughes designed uh Spruce Goose,
(17:24):
the largest plane in history that we know of, spruce geese. Yes,
and if you look at pictures of that thing, it's
it's enormous, It's it's impractical. I think it's 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 um mcmonville Oregon. Interesting, nice, well done mcmonville.
(17:51):
So you can look at pictures of this thing is
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 to live in. So after
he's been working on the AVRO CF one hundred, he
(18:14):
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, improvisers. So this group SPG, Special
Projects Group, was situated in their main administration building, but
(18:37):
then they relocated it to an older structure across from
the company headquarters and what was called the Schaefer Building,
and their security went through the roof. They had guards everywhere,
locked doors, special unique pass cards. 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.
(19:01):
Nobody can see this chalkboard right right now. It's all
secret chalk, disappearing chalk. Is that I thing salt chalk
is disappearing racer. 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
(19:21):
of other people, by something called vertical takeoff and landing
vehicles also known as v t O L. That's a
pretty cool can you say V tall or did we
need to say I like tall craft? Right? There might
be somebody named vital listening now and if you are,
you know, hello, so um for a VTOL aircraft, really
(19:45):
think about a helicopter, um, especially when you're thinking about
taking off and landing something that vertically goes up and
goes out and then you can come back and go
down and you can get out of the thing. Um
and you know. And for these aircraft, the specific ones
that Jack is interested in, it's having that ability to
take off vertically but then fly around like an airplane
(20:08):
would or jet, then come right back and then go
back down like the X Men jet. 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 Yeah. So in the nineteen fifties, the
U s. Air Force was worried about the vulnerability of
their bases because of a couple of limiting factors of
(20:33):
conventional aircraft. Right, yeah, and then this is something we
should talk about, Ben and I were talking about off
offline here in seven is when the US Air Force
splits off or is officially split off from the army
from just as a as a separate military unit. And
you know, this is at this point post World War Two.
(20:56):
But they've got these bases that are all over the planet.
At this point, they're they're pretty isolated, and the Air
Force around this time in the nineteen fifties, they're really
worried that these these bases are just gonna get destroyed
because if you if you imagine looking at one of
these bases overhead, like Google mapsng it or Google earthing it.
(21:16):
Uh back in let's say nine, Um, you're just gonna
see several huge runways and then a bunch of extremely
high value targets just clustered around these runways in a
single basket exactly. 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,
(21:39):
so it's not such a like Um, if you're flying
overhead or 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. Um And they also wanted to so
they wanted to either reduce them, make them smaller, or
just get rid of them completely. So you could have
(22:00):
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. So if your base is
being attacked, you can send you can send aircraft up
that will knock down all the other planes that are
coming into attack you, or you can send them off
(22:22):
quicker to go attack nearby areas. So we're do seeing
scramble time exactly. That makes sense, And this the v
t O L thing, just what Jack is interested in.
That was one of the proposed solutions. The thing is,
this sort of experimentation is spoiler alert cartoonishly expensive. It's
(22:43):
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, and in any kind of
any kind of hardware prototyping, often they are prone to failure.
And I don't mean like, oh good, lesson learned. I
mean this is a disaster. These people are dead. Why
(23:05):
did we lose millions of dollars on this? 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 face 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
(23:27):
looked really silly, and it just was. It was very
unwieldy and heavy, and they weren't very good at like anything,
the flying platform flying platforms, and like you know, it
had this sci fi space vibe to or like everyone's
like zipping around on these little discs, you know, like
flying saucers, but they just weren't very functional in a
war situation. Yeah, they were more. They were more a
rich person's toy, I think ultimately, but also like a segue,
(23:52):
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, and SPI dolphins.
And that's not even getting into assassination attempts and equipment.
(24:13):
So they know they're in again, a high risk, high
rewards situation. There's something else interesting that happens in society
at this time. So flying saucers are experiencing what pr
people here in would call a moment. There is a
proliferation of sightings of flying saucers in the West as
a whole, but across the world, and there is serious concern,
(24:36):
not just it's not just newspaper publishers trying to sell
the next week's edition. It's not just fringe theorist anymore.
There are members of the U. S. Military who are
seriously anxious, concerned, terrified would be a fair word. That
Soviet forces may have beaten them to the punch, creating
their own top secret vt O L. In other words,
(25:00):
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 spaceman or something,
they're not aliens there, you know, Well they would probably
say commies or reds or something like that. Yeah. Well,
(25:21):
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 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. And that's what Yeah,
(25:42):
the U. S. Air Forces there just to see that jet.
It's important to this story. Yeah, and we'll tell you
what happened on their visit after a word from our
sponsor and we're back. So midway through the tour, or
pal Jack Frost bust In and and hijacks them. Essentially,
(26:05):
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 Why too this is a completely circular
disc shaped aircraft. Yes, right in the USA have visitors
were pretty impressed by what they saw. They took over
(26:28):
funding for the Special Projects Group and gave seven hundred
and fifty thousand American dollars in nineteen fifty five, which, uh,
if we inflation calculated that by today's standards, it's a
little over seven million dollars. Pretty crazy, right, And the
next year avro Um decided to commit two and a
half million ninety five dollars to build a prototype. So,
(26:50):
as you said before, ben very expensive to do this
kind of out of the box kind of thinking and research. Yeah,
and they said the reward could be amazing, Yes, yes,
could be, could be or could be relegated to the
scrap heap of history. It's it's marginally bedder than gambling,
you know what I mean. So this study encompassed a
(27:11):
wide variety of possible designs, but they all revolved around
this disc shape, this flying saucer shape, leading to something
called Project seventeen nine four. The goal was to build
a supersonic large disc fighter aircraft, so a fighter jet
that's also a circle basically. Yeah, and again, think about this,
(27:33):
a flying disc a flying saucer then engages other aircraft
and ground objects. Like how crazy is that? 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
(27:55):
big changes they can make to make it less of
a disaster. A wind tunnel simulating the conditions of high
speed flight without actually having to reach those speeds absolutely
nail on the head. Yeah. 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
(28:19):
foot altitudes or thirty thousand meters for the rest of
the world. This led to something called the Avro Car,
which is a real thing that you can 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 he must
have been? So cool? He built this as a two
(28:42):
seer personal car kind of concept, so w it's much
smaller than what they were aiming to build, and it showed,
you know, and 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,
(29:02):
will high five each other. Awesome, go us. And at
the time this was just a step towards their ultimate goal,
the supersonic flying saucer. How 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
(29:26):
rumors were true. Which happens all the time. How many
people can you imagine who are engineers on their deathbed
telling their kids, like, no, it's true. We we kind
of built flying saucers. Is there a statute of limitations
that allows things to be things to be declassified as
it's 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.
(29:48):
What do you think the protocol? Is that fun? But
you know, fine for the people you know, can give
them a little something to go on. I would just
start I would start by saying, while I don't know
the exact parameters of that time frame, I do know
that after a certain amount of time it comes up
as it can be reviewed essentially to be declassified or
(30:08):
it can be reclassified. At that point. It is kind
of like a 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, Uh,
some of which were released and some of which were reclassified.
(30:30):
And the problem is there. The criteria for that is
is it fun? That's number one. 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 two people? Sorry, the exposure of methods and technologies
(30:55):
used to gain information or advantage get an edge. Yeah,
and that's that's such a woefully vague thing that that
happens all the time. What isn't national security? You could
you could stretch that to anything totally. But because of
this two thousand and twelve declassified a documentation, we got
to take a look for the first time at this
(31:16):
memo that comes from nineteen fifty six. That really shows
what the engineers there at Avro were attempting to build
the like the thing they wanted the end goal to be.
And it gets back to a saucer like vehicle that
was capable of reaching quote between Mack three and Mark
four a ceiling of over one hundred thousand feet means,
meaning it can climb all the way up to over
(31:38):
or around over a hundred thousand feet and a maximum
range with allowances this is still the quote of about
one thousand nautical miles. Incredible browsers. And that's you know,
that's nineteen fifties six when the memo is written, so
that is the same year that Avro itself gives that
two point five million dollars in nineteen five six bucks.
(32:00):
As you said, nol uh to the project. As far
as we can tell, this supersonic flying saucer, it canst
weird that there's 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
(32:22):
by jet turbines, So no secret technology there, and according
to the cutaway diagrams, you can see maybe four four
so digitized pictures of this. 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. Can we
(32:45):
can we just take a minute and look at this
cutaway together, because it is dang fascinated, really cool. And
there are some things that Ben and I were talking
about off air before you came in all uh. In particular,
the cockpit area at the very center of this vehicle
that Ben was describing is directly surrounded by four large
(33:06):
rings 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 used to
run the fool. So if you take a direct hit,
you're just like you're just your toast. You're sacrificing, Uh,
You're sacrifice endurability for flexibility or agility would be a
(33:29):
better word. Your your main strategy is to not get hit. Well,
it's like those U boats where they had the toilets
mounted right above the batteries. That ran the whole thing.
So in the toilets malfunction, that would like flood the
batteries and cause all these problems because it's sort of like,
you know, you take a hit on design in ordered
or you take a hit maybe on safety in order
to like pack more features into it. It's just like
(33:51):
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 yeah, well then let's 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
(34:13):
are gonna be like fairly heavy at the beginning at takeoff,
right when you're all fueled up. Then by the end
of your mission that's gonna be the weight at the
center of the vehicle is going to be significantly reduced
to change the handling probably right, well, I mean, because
you're you know, literally the spinning disk part of this
is what's giving you not fully propulsion, but it's what's
(34:37):
sting the craft to effect and keeping you in the air. Um.
The whole thing blows my mind. Um, and I just
want to hear from anybody out there listening that understands
the physics of it a little better. Please please look
at look at the project documentation and let us know
here's a here's a weird thing. Though it still is
(34:58):
not clear why to that original question, one of us supposed,
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 avro car prototype.
But it follows on from the declassified news in two
(35:22):
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
rumors that they are apparently two entire boxes of Projects
sevent d documents, but only only a handful of images
have been digitized. Yeah, literally four that we we were
(35:44):
able to find in making this episode. So here's the problem.
The story gets murky, right. The closest thing we have
to a real prototype is that VZ nine avro car,
and that prototype, by all accounts, was a stinker. It
was originally special five for mac speed of three hundred
miles per hour with a ceiling of ten thousand feet
(36:04):
instead of a hundred thousand, but in practice it never
got more than three feet off the ground. Its top
speed was thirty five miles per hour. This, yeah, I know.
In 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
(36:25):
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 we're
going we're putting some strings together here, That's what I
was gonna ask. I mean, you know, let's let's presuppose
that they did discover some kind of craft at Roswell.
Do you think it's possible that they took a queue
(36:47):
from some of that technology that they found, if in
fact this happened, and then tried to apply it to
you know, the design, maybe quite possibly. Yeah. And this uh,
and 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. Maybe a Soviet saucer
crashed and then they had to make a whole dog
(37:08):
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 to think of what could have been. We do
have an episode where we get as close as we
can to discerning the cause of of that event that's
(37:30):
commonly called you know, Roswell or groom Lake, but we
don't want to spoil it for you. No, and I
would highly yeah, I check it out, highly recommend the
YouTube series that we made on that tube. We did
a YouTube to wow on time flies. Well. Unlike other
experimental projects of the same era, this project was fully
canceled in December nine. That leaves us with some troubling questions.
(37:54):
Why would you pour all of this money into something
just to shelve it later. There are a couple of possibility. First,
one obvious one. We could say it just didn't work,
either because our engineering ability or technology at the time
was just inadequate to solve the problems, or because the
physics involved. We're beyond our ken as well. And again,
(38:17):
like we're talking about earlier, we know this happens all
the time with military prototypes. Like they designed a circular ship.
Remember that one terrible idea when the guns would fire,
they would shoot the ship around in circles. You know.
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,
(38:38):
but it was an embarrassable, terrible idea. Could very well
be the case here. They don't like to admit defeat.
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, Oh it's great. Well, you
have to earn it, you know, you have to earn
(38:58):
these great innovations and not uh not everything is going
to be the goose that leads the golden egg. But
we do know that the military pursued something like this,
and it's something that we're all familiar with today. Right.
Oh yeah, well we can't. 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. You can
(39:20):
have bigger helicopters that have multiple propellers, right, that's right.
You know, they can't do a lot of the things
that the military wanted to do, dives and such, and
evasive maneuver is probably more difficult, and specifically getting as
high into the atmosphere as these vehicles or go anywhere
near as fast as they wanted these vehicles to go.
There's some fast helicopters, but nothing like that. But what
(39:40):
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 bases and as well as
having aircraft that could deploy quickly and you know, go
up and down quickly rather than have to take off
with a big runway. So maybe they just found a
(40:02):
compromise then, right, and they said this is what we
can realistically do now. It certainly seems like it. And
the timing makes a lot of sense here too, because
if this the Avro car was canceled December nine. In
early nineteen sixty two, that's when the U. S. Air
Force really started ramping up their training of personnel that
(40:25):
can both fly and work on helicopters, like mechanics essentially
pilots and mechanics, because they're like, this is the best
we got. We better just known it. Well, yeah, because
again it's the Vietnam War really ramps up, and that's
when we we see a lot more helicopters. Another possibility,
this was just one of many experiments or or dabblings
(40:47):
that a terrified government participated in. Maybe not so much
because they thought it was practical. Uh, maybe more because
they were hoping to keep their ideological rivals, the SSR,
at bay. So many weird things come from the psychological
mind games of the Cold War. You know, we experimented
(41:09):
with psychic powers, esp astral travel, and we're convinced, many
people in the US, the U. S. Military industrial complex,
we're convinced that not only we're 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 his mind. So I've got, I've got.
(41:31):
This is what I believe I'm just gonna tell you.
I'm gonna tell you my opinion right now late on me.
The reason why we only have four images, four pages
from projects 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
(41:53):
a crap load of money trying to build one of
these things. Because we've already got this design and it's
going to do all these things. It's our or psychological
manipulation of them. Counterpoint, it would have to have leaked
in some controllable way. They leaked it on purpose, I think,
to some mold that they knew was around. Okay, yeah, yeah,
(42:13):
Well that that does lead us to one one more possibility.
What if this is a cover story or something like it.
You know, I mean, now, far be it for us
to sound two out there, but it is common practice
to run these games of deception. You know, tanks were
(42:35):
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 was something else to the story.
We have to keep in mind additionally that the US
(42:58):
government another world fronts have had massive success suppressing technology
in the past. Bombers, especially stealth bombers. Right, 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. They were totally true, and they
(43:21):
looked insane, like nothing you would ever seem so metal,
you know what I mean? Right, So, in conclusion, yes,
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 issues. However, the US
(43:46):
government and numerous aerospace companies have again proven themselves fully
capable of suppressing technology for some time. We just don't
know how long that time horizon is. You know what
they call lemons, guys, Lemons are nice? What's wrong with lemons?
M it's just so sour. Maybe it implies that there's
(44:06):
something wrong with it. A perfectly good lemon is just
it's just it's just just that it's a lemon. 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. Uh, they would be dumb
as a lemon, I guess. And Uh. Then there was
British pool hall slang where a lemon game was a
(44:29):
game that was played by someone hustling. You. Oh, that
makes more sense to me if it's a lemon, because
the ideas you bottle lemen, right, and not what you see.
It's what you get, right, Like you you're seeing this
person who is looking like something, but they're actually like
something else. There you go, Well, now that we went
down the how etymological rabbit hole? How much do you
like lemen? Do you? Are you somebody just straight up
(44:50):
eats lemons? Know what I will tell you this? Um,
I bought these things. They are called super berry pills.
Have you heard about this? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, And they
make sour things taste sweet. So you can eat one
these pills and it fundamentally changes the way your taste
buds perceive sourness and sweetness, so you can suck on
a lemon and it tastes like sugar. I've been, I've
been to the taste taste hacking parties to those those
things were pretty cool. It's an interesting experience if you
(45:12):
haven't tried it before, especially if you have some form
of uh gustatory synesthesia. 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 the forties,
well before the declassified memos mentioned AVRO, could have been
attributed to similar or other related projects. What kind I
(45:35):
know that a lot of us listening now are saying
mention it. You guys, don't swindle list You have to
mention it on air. Whatever you talk about this topic,
Nazi UFOs, Nazi technology. Do you mean some battle right right?
Or the horton right? There is compelling evidence of innovative
prototypes made by the Nazi regime around that time, and
(45:59):
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, FACTI flying saucers.
We're kind of real, yeah, even officially kind of real,
(46:20):
at least for a second. It makes you wonder what
else is up there in the atmosphere today, you know
what I mean? What do you think? Let us know? Also,
let us know what you think about helicopters. Have you, guys,
ever been in a helicopter only once or twice once?
They're great? Have you seen those Chinook Those are the
twin Prop. Yeah, and they were actually in development not
(46:43):
far off from when this Avro deal was going on
in ven by the Vertal company. People are trying to
solve the same problem in different ways. There are also
depend on in 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.
And apparently in New York now, Uber is operating helicopters
(47:07):
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. But I'll
tell you, man, it's weird flex taking a taking a
lift or an Uber to the airport in New York
City is a harrowing experience. It's an endeavor yet a
long time people who drive regularly in New York have
made their peace with the afterlife every every time they
(47:30):
hop in special kind of sadists as well, I would
say kudo ce 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
(47:52):
n essay is is far ahead of what would be
considered viable or ethical in in the public commercial sphere.
So what what kind of stuff do you think is
out there? We're we're interested and please send any corresponding
links or evidence you have. Do you think it's all
a bunch of bunk? Do you think this is mass hysteria?
(48:13):
Let us know, let us know what and why? That's right?
Find us on Facebook and Twitter where we're conspiracy stuff.
Find us on Instagram where we're conspiracy stuff show. If
you don't want to do that, leave us a message.
Like we said at the top, we are one eight
three three st d w y t K. And if
you don't want to do any of that, stuff. There's more, Oh,
(48:34):
there's more. Yeah. You can find me and Ben individually
on Instagram if you so choose. I am at how
Now Noel Brown. You can find me getting kicked into
and out of various airports, countries and regions at Ben
Bowling Natural Planes comment, no comment, Oh that's great and
uh yeah, so that's it. If you want to send
an email to us that we will see on our
(48:58):
phones and computers and all that's stuff, just send this
one to conspiracy at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff they
(49:23):
Don't want you to Know is a production of I
heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my
heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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. A
production of I Heart Gradios How Stuff Works. Welcome back
(00:25):
to the show. My name is Matt, my name is
they call me Ben. We are joined as always with
our super producer Paul Mission controlled decade. Most importantly, you
are you. You are here, and that meets this stuff
they don't want you to know. We've been doing a
lot of 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 Matt,
(00:48):
how's it. How's it going? 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. Uh. It's just
it was awesome. Uh. And and the happy Father's Day
to both of you. Belated thank you suh. No, how
about you. It's good. I would and visited my mom
(01:08):
and she made me a Father's Day dinner Lego lamb
which is it is? And a little bit of what
do we have on the side. I was some stuffed mushrooms,
also a favorite, and then I got to take my
kid to Actually I went and got a manicure and
a pedicure, and then I got up sold into getting
my eyebrows waxed. It's kind of a bummer because the
(01:30):
pedicure feels so good and then the eyebrow waxing really hurts,
so it sort of negated the good feels of the pedicure.
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 would uh kick them
in the face. I would attack. I would have to.
There's apart where they take this cheese greater thing and
just like rub it in the middles of your feet,
(01:52):
and I have to bite my lip really hard to
keep from like losing it. God. 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 and gotta gotta
woo there that you can't hear outside of the studio.
(02:12):
Let's also check in with mission control. How you doing man,
thumbs up, thumbs down. Okay, I thought a sideways. It
was for a second, it was middling too good. We're
gonna call that. How about Mr Benolen? Thanks for asking? Man,
so we also not kidding. Uh yeah, things are happening.
You know. I've been traveling some more and probably have
some more travel in the future. And I've been out
(02:34):
of this this particular realm uh, this particular astral plane
really just gonna give me the demon laugh and move on.
By the way, did you did you listen to the
recent voicemail episode? Did I? YEA? Okay, all right, you guys,
he hasn't heard the Oh that's okay, don't worry about it.
(02:56):
Check it's fine, it's fine. I should listen to it.
I should we go into a little bit of your lore?
Oh boy, any anything I need to be aware of?
You already know? Are the all knowing all? Say what
you want? Oh man, that's that's two. That is two kinds.
I listened to one of the voicemail episodes, and Matt
(03:17):
know that you did way back? Is it over a
year now? Ago? Now? Yeah? And that was really that
was really good and people really seem to enjoy it. Um,
so yeah, I'm sorry, I apologize. I'll listen to it.
That you were still included. That's very good, Thank you
so much. And if you want to be included in
(03:37):
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. You are hot takes,
as they say in the late night shows. Just keep
it around three minutes or be ready to call back
and say and another thing. Yeah, I mean a hot
(03:58):
take should technically be a verbal tweet kind of thing.
So three minutes should be plenty for a hot take. Yeah,
then you're getting into rant territory Dennis Miller style. We
like a good rant as well. Sometimes you know, you
get stuck just applying Marty garrab beads to a basket
and you're just like, you know what, I need to
call like three or four more times. Just trust me,
it happens. It happens. So what's that number for anyone
(04:21):
who wants to call. It's one eight three three s
T d W y t K. So we chanted like
that on purpose. 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
(04:42):
story of flying saucers, not UFOs in general, mind you,
actual flying saucers. For decades, 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 fo most people will immediately conjure up an
(05:02):
image of a flying saucer. Right. Well, you know you
got the whole night and got the little uh, the
the nuts to cockpit. Yeah, you got the cockpit at
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 potentially. Yes, you always
have the Mars Attacks version in my head, because that's
(05:26):
the classic trophy version. Like Tim Burton 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 them. Yeah, and Mars Attacks. I'm
gonna say I still enjoy it. I do too, mentally.
It's a great documentary. Right, So, but when are these
things flying saucers. They've been described as a widely misidentified,
(05:51):
mundane phenomenon. They've been described as little more than uh
collective hysteria. Right Uh. 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
(06:14):
least in the US or Canada, uses the phrase saucer
to describe the actual little plate upon which one would
place a cup or a mug. Would you call it?
What would I? What would I call that a little plate?
I say it all the way. I really clip the tease.
I say little plate or little cup. You have very
good addiction. Then I would be interested to know if
(06:37):
any of our British listeners or anyone out in the
UK or around that area still uses the phrase saucer.
They definitely do. Think about a saucer of milk for
a cat. It's certainly in the in the vernacular. That's
those are the only two phrases I hear it in
the flying saucer or saucer of milk is the other one,
cup and saucer. They just call it. It's like, it's
like it's a set. They come together. It's the cup
and then the saucer. Yeah, but are people walking around
(06:58):
talking about it though, and could use it? These 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. But
if someone's like, if someone's like, no, that's the thing.
No one addresses it as a singular entity, don't. You
don't hear the word saucer floating around without being attached
to a cup, an alien, or a cat. It's basically
(07:19):
a glorified drip pam. It's it's made to catch the
drippings from your tea. So presumably, if you're not a
total slab, you don't even need a saucer. There you go,
I give what doesn't it depend on the temper? Okay,
this is maybe a different show, but but we call
these things flying saucers because of oddly enough, skeet shooting. Yeah,
(07:44):
back in nine 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 because the
little vice that they would either someone would throw the
manual layer. I think as technology advanced, they would have
little machines that would like, you know, hold them like
(08:07):
with a little arm and kind of lobbed them. They'd
they'd go thoop and then smash, right. But it's because
they're of a shape that allows them to be thrown
with a nice directional velocity, right, Yeah, like a frisbee.
There you go. So for years and years and years
and years, this was a term that was kind of
slaying in the world of clay pigeon shooting. But this
(08:30):
phrase did not describe UFOs until nineteen thirty and it
didn't become popularized until nineteen forty seven. In June 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 uh the
(08:53):
Anglo sphere, and then later the world overall. So, so
what happened what made Kenneth Arnold go viral? Or at
least what did he see? 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.
(09:15):
You know, there's those drones you can get that will
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 that they were traveling
at incredibly high speed um and consisted of various shapes.
Each of each were not They were not identical, they
were not uniform. Eventually he lost track of them, and
uh he landed sharing his experience, and words spread and
(09:38):
his account um to use the kind of internet parlance,
went viral. Yeah, he was as popular for a time
as a cat meme is today. So in uh, 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 when he said, uh,
(10:01):
oval in the front, convex in the rear. And what
this means is that some editor has lost to history now.
And part of the reason this story gains so much
public traction is because Arnold was a pilot, you know
what I mean, he was a credible source at the time, right,
(10:23):
And still a pilot is more credible than someone on
the ground in a lot of ways because they have
simply more experience to imagine, Like, yeah, it's it's pretty
hard to competently pilot a plane if you're either meant
mentally unstable or under the influence of some kind of
drugs or alcohol. Frowned upon in the piloting community. Yes, yes,
(10:44):
the biggest thing is just having an understanding of how
aircraft function, right, That that's the biggest thing when when
you have a pilot, say, these things were flipping around
and 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,
right right, Uh, oval in the front and convex in
(11:06):
the rear. So in UFO parlance, probably it really depends
on whether you're an oval or a convex guy, you know. Uh.
He described something as a pipe plate, and then later
his story changes again. He describes one of the objects
as a crescent or flying wing, some as a big
(11:27):
flat disc, some as simply saucer like, And that's where
we hit on the etymology here, because while Arnold is
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
(11:48):
Pepsi coke thing going on with flying disc versus flying saucer,
but flying saucer clearly one out. And we still use
the phrase today sort of yeah, a little bit, but
the phrase has kind of gone away or at least
been supplanted quite a bit by this. Uh, we're gonna
call it a government created term because that's what it is.
(12:11):
Unidentified flying object or UFO or UFO is I like
to say, and no one else does, Yes, and get
these these aren't aliens, necessarily, not extraterrestrials. They're just something
in the sky that people cannot identify. Look up in
the sky. It's a bird, it's a plague, it's Superman,
it's a weather blue. I don't know. I guess it's unidentified. Well,
(12:34):
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 all their phrasing over time to unidentified aerial vehicle. Yes, yes, yes,
U A V. I mean it's also sort of like that.
(12:55):
They might call something like that if something comes up
on radar they called a bogey or what her. 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. That's the problem with the ACROYM though. There
must be some of the initialism. There must be something missing,
because unmanned aerial vehicle is also U A B. Yeah,
(13:17):
there you go, Or maybe I'm incorrect. I know it's
something similar 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
(13:38):
at the world of fiction, flying saucers still by far
they're running the game. You know. The problem is they're
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 you'll see it
(14:01):
depicted in a ton of nineteen fifties nineteen sixties fiction.
You know, we're talking outer Limits, Twilight Zone and so on.
But what if there's more to the story. Is there
any truth to tales of actual flying saucers? Not clouds
that look like saucers, mind you, Not weird tricks of
(14:22):
the light, no atmospheric high jinks or strange I hoo
spheric interference, a real genuine flying saucer. The answer is yes,
there were real flying saucers, and we built them. Don't
toy with my emotions, Ben, It's true. And we're going
(14:42):
to talk about the ones that at least um we
tried to contract out after a word from our sponsor.
Here's where it gets crazy. Enter Projects seventeen uh and
related to this, the Avro Canada VZ nine Avro car. Yes,
(15:07):
let's talk about 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, you a
v s are a thing. Ben is absolutely right, and
you are wrong. You are correct it is. Uh, it's
not even called unidentified aerial something. It's called unexplained aerial phenomena.
So so that's you a p yes, you up up. Yeah,
(15:30):
So apologies for everyone who was really frustrated before the break.
Let's continue on. You think they were shaking their fists
at their I hope someone coodcast device. I hope someone
called and then they got done with their voicemail and
they listened through to the rest of the podcast. 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,
(15:52):
But you know what I do know about? What do
you know about? 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
ninety seven he started working for this Canadian company called
(16:14):
Avro Canada a v R. Oh, yeah, that's right. And uh,
you know this dude's all about, you know, dreaming big.
He's a big picture guy, that's right, And Uh, he
would Um, he worked in or he like did this
thing that AVRO called Blue Skies research. So like these
are when we say big picture things ideas that are
(16:37):
so close to the edge of what science can do,
they're they're overlapping or just beyond what is possible. Um,
and that's our boy, Jack, he's thinking on the edge,
Jackie boy. That's right. Well Jack Frost himself, Yes, at
Avro Canada, he had already worked on something called the
(16:58):
Avro cf An hundred. This is uh. This is a
craft that is innovative, but not wild wild style Blue Skies.
Blue Sky's research is stuff like uh. In the world
of aviation, an example of something that would be considered
experimental would be the Howard Hughes designed uh Spruce Goose,
(17:24):
the largest plane in history that we know of, spruce geese. Yes,
and if you look at pictures of that thing, it's
it's enormous, It's it's impractical. I think it's 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 um mcmonville Oregon. Interesting, nice, well done mcmonville.
(17:51):
So you can look at pictures of this thing is
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 to live in. So after
he's been working on the AVRO CF one hundred, he
(18:14):
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, improvisers. So this group SPG, Special
Projects Group, was situated in their main administration building, but
(18:37):
then they relocated it to an older structure across from
the company headquarters and what was called the Schaefer Building,
and their security went through the roof. They had guards everywhere,
locked doors, special unique pass cards. 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.
(19:01):
Nobody can see this chalkboard right right now. It's all
secret chalk, disappearing chalk. Is that I thing salt chalk
is disappearing racer. 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
(19:21):
of other people, by something called vertical takeoff and landing
vehicles also known as v t O L. That's a
pretty cool can you say V tall or did we
need to say I like tall craft? Right? There might
be somebody named vital listening now and if you are,
you know, hello, so um for a VTOL aircraft, really
(19:45):
think about a helicopter, um, especially when you're thinking about
taking off and landing something that vertically goes up and
goes out and then you can come back and go
down and you can get out of the thing. Um
and you know. And for these aircraft, the specific ones
that Jack is interested in, it's having that ability to
take off vertically but then fly around like an airplane
(20:08):
would or jet, then come right back and then go
back down like the X Men jet. 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 Yeah. So in the nineteen fifties, the
U s. Air Force was worried about the vulnerability of
their bases because of a couple of limiting factors of
(20:33):
conventional aircraft. Right, yeah, and then this is something we
should talk about, Ben and I were talking about off
offline here in seven is when the US Air Force
splits off or is officially split off from the army
from just as a as a separate military unit. And
you know, this is at this point post World War Two.
(20:56):
But they've got these bases that are all over the planet.
At this point, they're they're pretty isolated, and the Air
Force around this time in the nineteen fifties, they're really
worried that these these bases are just gonna get destroyed
because if you if you imagine looking at one of
these bases overhead, like Google mapsng it or Google earthing it.
(21:16):
Uh back in let's say nine, Um, you're just gonna
see several huge runways and then a bunch of extremely
high value targets just clustered around these runways in a
single basket exactly. 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,
(21:39):
so it's not such a like Um, if you're flying
overhead or 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. Um And they also wanted to so
they wanted to either reduce them, make them smaller, or
just get rid of them completely. So you could have
(22:00):
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. So if your base is
being attacked, you can send you can send aircraft up
that will knock down all the other planes that are
coming into attack you, or you can send them off
(22:22):
quicker to go attack nearby areas. So we're do seeing
scramble time exactly. That makes sense, And this the v
t O L thing, just what Jack is interested in.
That was one of the proposed solutions. The thing is,
this sort of experimentation is spoiler alert cartoonishly expensive. It's
(22:43):
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, and in any kind of
any kind of hardware prototyping, often they are prone to failure.
And I don't mean like, oh good, lesson learned. I
mean this is a disaster. These people are dead. Why
(23:05):
did we lose millions of dollars on this? 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 face 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
(23:27):
looked really silly, and it just was. It was very
unwieldy and heavy, and they weren't very good at like anything,
the flying platform flying platforms, and like you know, it
had this sci fi space vibe to or like everyone's
like zipping around on these little discs, you know, like
flying saucers, but they just weren't very functional in a
war situation. Yeah, they were more. They were more a
rich person's toy, I think ultimately, but also like a segue,
(23:52):
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, and SPI dolphins.
And that's not even getting into assassination attempts and equipment.
(24:13):
So they know they're in again, a high risk, high
rewards situation. There's something else interesting that happens in society
at this time. So flying saucers are experiencing what pr
people here in would call a moment. There is a
proliferation of sightings of flying saucers in the West as
a whole, but across the world, and there is serious concern,
(24:36):
not just it's not just newspaper publishers trying to sell
the next week's edition. It's not just fringe theorist anymore.
There are members of the U. S. Military who are
seriously anxious, concerned, terrified would be a fair word. That
Soviet forces may have beaten them to the punch, creating
their own top secret vt O L. In other words,
(25:00):
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 spaceman or something,
they're not aliens there, you know, Well they would probably
say commies or reds or something like that. Yeah. Well,
(25:21):
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 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. And that's what Yeah,
(25:42):
the U. S. Air Forces there just to see that jet.
It's important to this story. Yeah, and we'll tell you
what happened on their visit after a word from our
sponsor and we're back. So midway through the tour, or
pal Jack Frost bust In and and hijacks them. Essentially,
(26:05):
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 Why too this is a completely circular
disc shaped aircraft. Yes, right in the USA have visitors
were pretty impressed by what they saw. They took over
(26:28):
funding for the Special Projects Group and gave seven hundred
and fifty thousand American dollars in nineteen fifty five, which, uh,
if we inflation calculated that by today's standards, it's a
little over seven million dollars. Pretty crazy, right, And the
next year avro Um decided to commit two and a
half million ninety five dollars to build a prototype. So,
(26:50):
as you said before, ben very expensive to do this
kind of out of the box kind of thinking and research. Yeah,
and they said the reward could be amazing, Yes, yes,
could be, could be or could be relegated to the
scrap heap of history. It's it's marginally bedder than gambling,
you know what I mean. So this study encompassed a
(27:11):
wide variety of possible designs, but they all revolved around
this disc shape, this flying saucer shape, leading to something
called Project seventeen nine four. The goal was to build
a supersonic large disc fighter aircraft, so a fighter jet
that's also a circle basically. Yeah, and again, think about this,
(27:33):
a flying disc a flying saucer then engages other aircraft
and ground objects. Like how crazy is that? 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
(27:55):
big changes they can make to make it less of
a disaster. A wind tunnel simulating the conditions of high
speed flight without actually having to reach those speeds absolutely
nail on the head. Yeah. 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
(28:19):
foot altitudes or thirty thousand meters for the rest of
the world. This led to something called the Avro Car,
which is a real thing that you can 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 he must
have been? So cool? He built this as a two
(28:42):
seer personal car kind of concept, so w it's much
smaller than what they were aiming to build, and it showed,
you know, and 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,
(29:02):
will high five each other. Awesome, go us. And at
the time this was just a step towards their ultimate goal,
the supersonic flying saucer. How 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
(29:26):
rumors were true. Which happens all the time. How many
people can you imagine who are engineers on their deathbed
telling their kids, like, no, it's true. We we kind
of built flying saucers. Is there a statute of limitations
that allows things to be things to be declassified as
it's 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.
(29:48):
What do you think the protocol? Is that fun? But
you know, fine for the people you know, can give
them a little something to go on. I would just
start I would start by saying, while I don't know
the exact parameters of that time frame, I do know
that after a certain amount of time it comes up
as it can be reviewed essentially to be declassified or
(30:08):
it can be reclassified. At that point. It is kind
of like a 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, Uh,
some of which were released and some of which were reclassified.
(30:30):
And the problem is there. The criteria for that is
is it fun? That's number one. 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 two people? Sorry, the exposure of methods and technologies
(30:55):
used to gain information or advantage get an edge. Yeah,
and that's that's such a woefully vague thing that that
happens all the time. What isn't national security? You could
you could stretch that to anything totally. But because of
this two thousand and twelve declassified a documentation, we got
to take a look for the first time at this
(31:16):
memo that comes from nineteen fifty six. That really shows
what the engineers there at Avro were attempting to build
the like the thing they wanted the end goal to be.
And it gets back to a saucer like vehicle that
was capable of reaching quote between Mack three and Mark
four a ceiling of over one hundred thousand feet means,
meaning it can climb all the way up to over
(31:38):
or around over a hundred thousand feet and a maximum
range with allowances this is still the quote of about
one thousand nautical miles. Incredible browsers. And that's you know,
that's nineteen fifties six when the memo is written, so
that is the same year that Avro itself gives that
two point five million dollars in nineteen five six bucks.
(32:00):
As you said, nol uh to the project. As far
as we can tell, this supersonic flying saucer, it canst
weird that there's 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
(32:22):
by jet turbines, So no secret technology there, and according
to the cutaway diagrams, you can see maybe four four
so digitized pictures of this. 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. Can we
(32:45):
can we just take a minute and look at this
cutaway together, because it is dang fascinated, really cool. And
there are some things that Ben and I were talking
about off air before you came in all uh. In particular,
the cockpit area at the very center of this vehicle
that Ben was describing is directly surrounded by four large
(33:06):
rings 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 used to
run the fool. So if you take a direct hit,
you're just like you're just your toast. You're sacrificing, Uh,
You're sacrifice endurability for flexibility or agility would be a
(33:29):
better word. Your your main strategy is to not get hit. Well,
it's like those U boats where they had the toilets
mounted right above the batteries. That ran the whole thing.
So in the toilets malfunction, that would like flood the
batteries and cause all these problems because it's sort of like,
you know, you take a hit on design in ordered
or you take a hit maybe on safety in order
to like pack more features into it. It's just like
(33:51):
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 yeah, well then let's 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
(34:13):
are gonna be like fairly heavy at the beginning at takeoff,
right when you're all fueled up. Then by the end
of your mission that's gonna be the weight at the
center of the vehicle is going to be significantly reduced
to change the handling probably right, well, I mean, because
you're you know, literally the spinning disk part of this
is what's giving you not fully propulsion, but it's what's
(34:37):
sting the craft to effect and keeping you in the air. Um.
The whole thing blows my mind. Um, and I just
want to hear from anybody out there listening that understands
the physics of it a little better. Please please look
at look at the project documentation and let us know
here's a here's a weird thing. Though it still is
(34:58):
not clear why to that original question, one of us supposed,
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 avro car prototype.
But it follows on from the declassified news in two
(35:22):
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
rumors that they are apparently two entire boxes of Projects
sevent d documents, but only only a handful of images
have been digitized. Yeah, literally four that we we were
(35:44):
able to find in making this episode. So here's the problem.
The story gets murky, right. The closest thing we have
to a real prototype is that VZ nine avro car,
and that prototype, by all accounts, was a stinker. It
was originally special five for mac speed of three hundred
miles per hour with a ceiling of ten thousand feet
(36:04):
instead of a hundred thousand, but in practice it never
got more than three feet off the ground. Its top
speed was thirty five miles per hour. This, yeah, I know.
In 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
(36:25):
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 we're
going we're putting some strings together here, That's what I
was gonna ask. I mean, you know, let's let's presuppose
that they did discover some kind of craft at Roswell.
Do you think it's possible that they took a queue
(36:47):
from some of that technology that they found, if in
fact this happened, and then tried to apply it to
you know, the design, maybe quite possibly. Yeah. And this uh,
and 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. Maybe a Soviet saucer
crashed and then they had to make a whole dog
(37:08):
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 to think of what could have been. We do
have an episode where we get as close as we
can to discerning the cause of of that event that's
(37:30):
commonly called you know, Roswell or groom Lake, but we
don't want to spoil it for you. No, and I
would highly yeah, I check it out, highly recommend the
YouTube series that we made on that tube. We did
a YouTube to wow on time flies. Well. Unlike other
experimental projects of the same era, this project was fully
canceled in December nine. That leaves us with some troubling questions.
(37:54):
Why would you pour all of this money into something
just to shelve it later. There are a couple of possibility. First,
one obvious one. We could say it just didn't work,
either because our engineering ability or technology at the time
was just inadequate to solve the problems, or because the
physics involved. We're beyond our ken as well. And again,
(38:17):
like we're talking about earlier, we know this happens all
the time with military prototypes. Like they designed a circular ship.
Remember that one terrible idea when the guns would fire,
they would shoot the ship around in circles. You know.
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,
(38:38):
but it was an embarrassable, terrible idea. Could very well
be the case here. They don't like to admit defeat.
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, Oh it's great. Well, you
have to earn it, you know, you have to earn
(38:58):
these great innovations and not uh not everything is going
to be the goose that leads the golden egg. But
we do know that the military pursued something like this,
and it's something that we're all familiar with today. Right.
Oh yeah, well we can't. 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. You can
(39:20):
have bigger helicopters that have multiple propellers, right, that's right.
You know, they can't do a lot of the things
that the military wanted to do, dives and such, and
evasive maneuver is probably more difficult, and specifically getting as
high into the atmosphere as these vehicles or go anywhere
near as fast as they wanted these vehicles to go.
There's some fast helicopters, but nothing like that. But what
(39:40):
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 bases and as well as
having aircraft that could deploy quickly and you know, go
up and down quickly rather than have to take off
with a big runway. So maybe they just found a
(40:02):
compromise then, right, and they said this is what we
can realistically do now. It certainly seems like it. And
the timing makes a lot of sense here too, because
if this the Avro car was canceled December nine. In
early nineteen sixty two, that's when the U. S. Air
Force really started ramping up their training of personnel that
(40:25):
can both fly and work on helicopters, like mechanics essentially
pilots and mechanics, because they're like, this is the best
we got. We better just known it. Well, yeah, because
again it's the Vietnam War really ramps up, and that's
when we we see a lot more helicopters. Another possibility,
this was just one of many experiments or or dabblings
(40:47):
that a terrified government participated in. Maybe not so much
because they thought it was practical. Uh, maybe more because
they were hoping to keep their ideological rivals, the SSR,
at bay. So many weird things come from the psychological
mind games of the Cold War. You know, we experimented
(41:09):
with psychic powers, esp astral travel, and we're convinced, many
people in the US, the U. S. Military industrial complex,
we're convinced that not only we're 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 his mind. So I've got, I've got.
(41:31):
This is what I believe I'm just gonna tell you.
I'm gonna tell you my opinion right now late on me.
The reason why we only have four images, four pages
from projects 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
(41:53):
a crap load of money trying to build one of
these things. Because we've already got this design and it's
going to do all these things. It's our or psychological
manipulation of them. Counterpoint, it would have to have leaked
in some controllable way. They leaked it on purpose, I think,
to some mold that they knew was around. Okay, yeah, yeah,
(42:13):
Well that that does lead us to one one more possibility.
What if this is a cover story or something like it.
You know, I mean, now, far be it for us
to sound two out there, but it is common practice
to run these games of deception. You know, tanks were
(42:35):
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 was something else to the story.
We have to keep in mind additionally that the US
(42:58):
government another world fronts have had massive success suppressing technology
in the past. Bombers, especially stealth bombers. Right, 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. They were totally true, and they
(43:21):
looked insane, like nothing you would ever seem so metal,
you know what I mean? Right, So, in conclusion, yes,
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 issues. However, the US
(43:46):
government and numerous aerospace companies have again proven themselves fully
capable of suppressing technology for some time. We just don't
know how long that time horizon is. You know what
they call lemons, guys, Lemons are nice? What's wrong with lemons?
M it's just so sour. Maybe it implies that there's
(44:06):
something wrong with it. A perfectly good lemon is just
it's just it's just just that it's a lemon. 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. Uh, they would be dumb
as a lemon, I guess. And Uh. Then there was
British pool hall slang where a lemon game was a
(44:29):
game that was played by someone hustling. You. Oh, that
makes more sense to me if it's a lemon, because
the ideas you bottle lemen, right, and not what you see.
It's what you get, right, Like you you're seeing this
person who is looking like something, but they're actually like
something else. There you go, Well, now that we went
down the how etymological rabbit hole? How much do you
like lemen? Do you? Are you somebody just straight up
(44:50):
eats lemons? Know what I will tell you this? Um,
I bought these things. They are called super berry pills.
Have you heard about this? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, And they
make sour things taste sweet. So you can eat one
these pills and it fundamentally changes the way your taste
buds perceive sourness and sweetness, so you can suck on
a lemon and it tastes like sugar. I've been, I've
been to the taste taste hacking parties to those those
things were pretty cool. It's an interesting experience if you
(45:12):
haven't tried it before, especially if you have some form
of uh gustatory synesthesia. 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 the forties,
well before the declassified memos mentioned AVRO, could have been
attributed to similar or other related projects. What kind I
(45:35):
know that a lot of us listening now are saying
mention it. You guys, don't swindle list You have to
mention it on air. Whatever you talk about this topic,
Nazi UFOs, Nazi technology. Do you mean some battle right right?
Or the horton right? There is compelling evidence of innovative
prototypes made by the Nazi regime around that time, and
(45:59):
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, FACTI flying saucers.
We're kind of real, yeah, even officially kind of real,
(46:20):
at least for a second. It makes you wonder what
else is up there in the atmosphere today, you know
what I mean? What do you think? Let us know? Also,
let us know what you think about helicopters. Have you, guys,
ever been in a helicopter only once or twice once?
They're great? Have you seen those Chinook Those are the
twin Prop. Yeah, and they were actually in development not
(46:43):
far off from when this Avro deal was going on
in ven by the Vertal company. People are trying to
solve the same problem in different ways. There are also
depend on in 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.
And apparently in New York now, Uber is operating helicopters
(47:07):
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. But I'll
tell you, man, it's weird flex taking a taking a
lift or an Uber to the airport in New York
City is a harrowing experience. It's an endeavor yet a
long time people who drive regularly in New York have
made their peace with the afterlife every every time they
(47:30):
hop in special kind of sadists as well, I would
say kudo ce 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
(47:52):
n essay is is far ahead of what would be
considered viable or ethical in in the public commercial sphere.
So what what kind of stuff do you think is
out there? We're we're interested and please send any corresponding
links or evidence you have. Do you think it's all
a bunch of bunk? Do you think this is mass hysteria?
(48:13):
Let us know, let us know what and why? That's right?
Find us on Facebook and Twitter where we're conspiracy stuff.
Find us on Instagram where we're conspiracy stuff show. If
you don't want to do that, leave us a message.
Like we said at the top, we are one eight
three three st d w y t K. And if
you don't want to do any of that, stuff. There's more, Oh,
(48:34):
there's more. Yeah. You can find me and Ben individually
on Instagram if you so choose. I am at how
Now Noel Brown. You can find me getting kicked into
and out of various airports, countries and regions at Ben
Bowling Natural Planes comment, no comment, Oh that's great and
uh yeah, so that's it. If you want to send
an email to us that we will see on our
(48:58):
phones and computers and all that's stuff, just send this
one to conspiracy at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff they
(49:23):
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