July 10, 2021 • 50 mins
Flying saucers are perhaps the most iconic genre of UFO -- since the 1940s they've become the mainstay vehicles for extraterrestrials in all sorts of fictional stories. But, according to declassified files, the US Government was intensely interested in building some flying saucers of its own. So far did they get?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Continuing our playlist celebrating the release of the government's U
A P Report. Uh. We wanted to share this episode
with you, fellow conspiracy realist. One of the big things
about UFOs, one of the big subjects of debate, is
whether anyone has actually found a physical craft, right, not
(00:20):
just some lights in the sky, not just some shapes
that appear to defy the laws of physics. Are their
real lifeline saucers? One of the big, you know, one
of the big theories that surfaces cyclically, is that what
we call UFOs, or what some people you know, perceived
to be UFOs, are in fact man made pieces of technology.
(00:40):
So we asked ourselves a while back, you know, has
anybody built a real lifeline saucer? And I think we
found one. Let's dive in from UFOs to psychic powers
and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You
can turn back now or learned this stuff they don't
(01:01):
want you to know. A production of I Heart Gradios
How Stuff Works. Welcome back to the show. My name
is Matt, my name is not They called me Ben.
We are joined as always with our super producer Paul
(01:22):
Mission Controlled Decade most importantly, you are you. You are here,
and that makes this stuff. They don't want you to know.
We've been doing a lot of 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, how's it. How's it going? It's
going really well. We're coming right off of Father's Day.
(01:43):
I got to spend some time with my son yesterday.
In fact, it was wonderful. We went to a waterfall
that's nearby. It's just it was awesome. Uh. And and
the happy Father's Day to both of you. Belated thank
you sir. Sure, uh no, how about you. It's good.
I went and visited my mom and she made me
a Father's Day dinner Lego lamb, which it is, and
(02:05):
a little bit of what do we have on the side, Oh,
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 pedicure feels so good, and then the
eyebrow waxing really hurts, so I sort of negated the
(02:27):
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, liked, 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, and I have to bite my
lip really hard to keep from like losing it. God.
(02:48):
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 got gotta woo there that you can't
hear outside of the studio. Let's also check in with
mission control. How you doing, man, thumbs up, thumbs down? Okay,
(03:09):
I thought it was a sidewayst it was. For a second.
It was middling too good. We're gonna call that, how
about you? Mr Ben Bolen, Thanks for asking man, so
we all 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 of this
this particular realm uh, this particular astral plane really just
(03:32):
gonna give me the demon laugh and move on. By
the way, did you did you listen to the recent
voicemail episode? Did I? Yeah? Okay, all right, well then
you guys, he hasn't heard the Oh that's okay, don't
worry about it. Check its 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
(03:55):
to be aware of? You already know all. You're the
all knowing all scenes I saw on type end it.
Oh man, that's that's two. That is two kinds. I
listened to one of the voicemail episodes and not know
that you did way back and is over a year
now ago. Now, yeah, and that was really that was
really good and people really seem to enjoy it. Um,
(04:18):
So yeah, I'm sorry. I apologize. I'll listen to it.
Were still included. That's very good. Thank you so much.
And if you want to be included in today's show,
you do not have to wait until the show is over.
You can simply pause and call us directly with your thoughts,
(04:38):
your opinions, you're hot takes, as they say on 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 take should technically be like 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
(04:59):
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 who wants to call.
It's one eight three three t d W y t K.
So we jumped like that on purpose. Yes, yes, we're ritualizing,
(05:22):
So go ahead and drop us a line. Today we
are returning to the world of unidentified flying objects. Specifically,
we're exploring the story of flying saucers, not UFOs in general,
mind you, actual flying saucers. For decades, these were some
of the most widely reported mysterious aerial phenomena in the
(05:45):
Western world. Even today, when you hear someone say the
word alien or extraterrestrial UFO. Most people will immediately conjure
up an image of a flying saucer, right, you know,
you got the whole nine and got the little uh,
the the nuts to pit. Yeah, you have the cockpit
at the top, maybe glass dome, and then of course
(06:06):
it's always shooting a tractor being 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 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,
(06:26):
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 what are these
things flying saucers? They've been described as a widely misidentified
mundane phenomenon. They've been described as little more than uh
(06:47):
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
least in the US or Canada, uses the phrase saucer
(07:09):
to describe the actual little plate upon which one would
place a cup or a mug. What 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
any of our British listeners or anyone out in the
(07:30):
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
talking about it though? Well, why you don't know? You
(07:53):
don't pass the saucer because you're passing the cup and
it's on the saucer. But someone's like if someone's like, no,
I 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 a glorified drip pan. It's it's
made to catch the drippings from your tea. So presumably,
(08:16):
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, back in or so ever
(08:38):
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 device that they would either
someone would throw the manually or I think as technology advanced,
they would have little machines that would like you know,
hold them or like with a little arm and kind
(08:59):
of lob them. They'd go, they'd go thhoop 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.
(09:21):
But this 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
(09:44):
uh the 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 lying in some sort of formation,
occasionally flipping the way you might think of the drone
(10:05):
behavior hovering. 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're not uniform. Eventually he lost track of them, and
uh he landed sharing his experience, and word spread and
(10:29):
his account um to use the kind of Internet parlance,
went viral. Yeah, he was as popular for a time
as a cat meme a 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,
(10:52):
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,
(11:15):
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 typerature frowned upon in the piloting community. Yes, yes,
(11:35):
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
(11:57):
the rear. So they in the front, party in the back.
U 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
(12:18):
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
(12:39):
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 Belie's been
supplanted quite a bit by this. Uh, we're gonna call
(12:59):
it a governor meant created term, because that's what it is.
Unidentified flying object or UFO or UFO is I like
to say, and no one else does, yes, and getting
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 plate, it's Superman,
(13:21):
it's a weather blue. I don't know. I guess it's unidentified. Well,
and we're gonna we're gonna continue to use the term
UFO here in this episode, but it should be noted,
as we noted not that long ago in an episode,
the military has now changed to that as they like
to change all their phrasing over time to unidentified aerial vehicle. Yes, yes, yes,
(13:43):
U a V. I mean it's also sort of like
that they might call something like that if something comes
up on radar they called a bogey or whatever. But
that's sort of if it's something they don't know the
origin of. They can't have eyes on it directly. Then
that could be considered one of these as well, an
identify fight aerial vehicle. That's the problem with the acronym though,
there must be some of the initialism. There must be
(14:04):
something missing, because unmanned areal vehicle is also U A B. Yeah,
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
(14:25):
this genre of overall UFO sightings. And when you look
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,
(14:48):
they'll use the flying saucer appearance. You'll you'll see it
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
(15:10):
that look like saucers, mind you, not weird tricks of
the light, no atmospheric high jinks or strange eye 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
(15:33):
to talk about the ones that at least um we
tried to contract out after award from our sponsor. Here's
where it gets crazy. Enter Projects seventeen four. Uh and
related to this, the Avro Canada VZ nine Avro car. Yes,
(15:58):
let's talk about And before we get to 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,
(16:21):
So apologies for everyone who was really frustrated before the break.
Let's continue on. I think they were shaking their fists
at their I hope someone cacast device 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,
(16:44):
but you know what I do know about? What do
you know about? Because it's written down in this awesome
outline 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 nine seven he
started working for this Canadian company called Avro Canada A
(17:07):
b R. Oh, yeah, that's right. And uh, you know
this dude's all about, you know, dream of 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 so
(17:29):
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, Old Jack Frost himself. Yes, at Avro Canada,
he had already worked on something called the Avro CF
(17:51):
one hundred. This is UH. This is a craft that
is innovative but not wild wild style Blue Skies, Blue
Skies 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, the largest
(18:16):
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.
(18:42):
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 of
the world that Jack wants to live in. So, after
he's been working on the Avro CF one hundred, he
(19:05):
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
(19:28):
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.
(19:52):
Nobody can see this chalkboard right now. It's all secret chalk.
Disappearing chalk is that I think? I guess chalk is
disappearing aracer. So the SPG operated out of this experimental
hangar and they shared space with other secretive Avro project teams.
Jack was personally fascinated, along with a lot of other people,
(20:14):
by something called vertical takeoff and landing vehicles also known
as v t o L that are pretty cool. Can
you say v tall or 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
(20:34):
for a VTOL aircraft, really 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
(20:58):
fly around like an airplane would or jet, then come
right back and then go back down like the X
Men jet. Yeah, right with the 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 US Air Force was worried about the
(21:18):
vulnerability of their bases because of a couple of limiting
factors of conventional aircraft. Right, yeah, and then this is
something we should talk about. The 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
(21:41):
military unit. And you know this is at this point
post World War two, 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
(22:02):
imagine looking at one of these bases overhead, like Google
mapsing it or Google earthing it, 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
(22:23):
that's aircraft of course, just sitting around the runways. So
they wanted to find a way to reduce either the
length and thickness of their runways so it's not such
a like, 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.
(22:44):
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 basically a United States
Air Force base in the middle of nowhere, and it
would be a little more hidden, at least a bit.
The other thing they wanted to do is find a
way to deploy aircraft faster for both offensive and defensive capabilities.
(23:05):
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 quicker to go attack nearby areas.
So we're doucing 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.
(23:27):
The thing is, this sort of experimentation is spoiler alert
cartoonishly expensive. It's not uncommon, but it is expensive. And
because often these are some of the first people trying
to do this kind of thing ever, right and in
any kind of any kind of hardware prototyping, often they
(23:49):
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 do we lose millions of dollars on this.
Remember that have a So 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
(24:11):
the thing up off the ground. But that was literally
all these were. And you would control it sort of
like a segue by like leaning into it or back
or sideways. So you looked really 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 it like,
you know, it had this sci fi space vibe to
or like everyone's like zipping around on these little discs,
(24:31):
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, 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
(24:53):
a real thing, rocket bullets, rocket bullets, all all sorts
of stuff and si dolphins, SPI dolphins, and that's not
even getting into assassination attempts and equipment. 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
(25:16):
twenty would call a moment. There is a proliferation of
sightings flying saucers in the West as a whole, but
across the world, and there is serious concern, not just
it's not just newspaper publishers trying to sell the next
week's edition. It's not just fringe theorist anymore. There are
members of the U. S. Military who are seriously anxious, concerned,
(25:42):
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, 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 sidings are real? And what if they're
(26:03):
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, 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
(26:26):
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, 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.
(26:50):
So midway through the tour, or pal Jack Frost bust
In and and hijacks them. Essentially, he takes these visitors
to the high security Special Projects area and he does
a little show and tell. He gives them a look
at a mock up of something he calls Project why too.
This is a completely circular disc shaped aircraft. Yes, right
(27:15):
in the USA. Have visitors were pretty impressed by what
they saw. They took over funding for the Special Projects
Group and gave seven hundred and fifty thousand American dollars
in nineteen fifty five, which, if we inflation calculated that
by today's standards, it's a little over seven million dollars.
Pretty crazy, right, And the next year avro Um decided
(27:37):
to commit two and a half million five dollars to
build a prototype. So, as you said before, ben very
expensive to do this kind of out of the box
kind of thinking and research. Yeah, and the reward could
be amazing, Yes, yes, 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
(28:01):
encompassed a wide variety of possible designs, but they all
revolved around this disc shape, this flying saucer shape, leading
to something called Project seventeen 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
(28:24):
think about this, 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
(28:46):
or 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
(29:10):
thousand 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
(29:33):
seer personal car kind of concept, so it's much smaller
than what they were aiming to build. Man, 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,
(29:53):
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
(30:17):
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.
(30:39):
What do you think? The protocol is not fun? But
you know, fun for the people you know, you can
give them a little something to go on here. 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.
If it can be reclassified at that point, it is
(31:02):
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.
And the problem is there. The criteria for that is
(31:26):
is it fun? That's number one? That's the number one.
Are we all having a good time? Uh? Number two
is does this still pose a continued risk to national security?
Or two people? Sorry, the exposure of methods and technologies
used to gain information or advantage get an edge. Yeah,
(31:50):
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 total. But because of
this two thousand and twelve declassified a documentation, we got
to take a look for the first time this memo
that comes from nineteen fifty six that really shows what
the engineers there at Avro were attempting to build the
(32:14):
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 or
around over a hundred thousand feet and a maximum range
with allowances. This is still the quote of about one
(32:36):
thousand nautical miles incredible bowers. 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 fifty six bucks. As
you said, nol uh to the project. As far as
we can tell, this supersonic flying saucer, it can weird
(33:00):
that there's a real thing, would propel itself by rotating
an outer disk, get a very very high speed, and
then maneuvering would be accomplished by using small shutters on
the edge of the disc. It would be powered by
jet turbines, so no secret technology there. And according to
the cutaway diagrams you can see maybe four four so
(33:21):
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 can we
just take a minute and look at this cutaway together
because it is dang fascinated. And there are some things
(33:44):
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 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
(34:05):
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 better word. Your
your main strategy is to not get hit. Well, it's
like those U boats where they had the toilets mounted
(34:27):
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
a video game where you can choose characters that are
faster than average but weaker, or you can choose characters
(34:49):
that are absolute tanks but slow. 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 is a sister or anything like that. But
you have to imagine the fuel tanks in a vehicle
like this are gonna be like fairly heavy at the
beginning at takeoff, right when you're all fueled up. Then
(35:11):
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 sting the craft to effect and keeping
you in the air. Um, the whole thing. It blows
(35:33):
my mind. Um, And I just want to hear from
anybody out there listening that understands the physics of it
a little better. Um, 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 not clear why
to that original question, one of US post It's still
(35:53):
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 thousand and
(36:14):
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 seventy nine documents,
but only only a handful of images have been digitized. Yeah,
(36:34):
literally four that we we were 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 specified for mac speed
of three hundred miles per hour with a ceiling of
(36:55):
ten thousand feet instead of a hundred thousand, but in
practice it never got more than three ft off the ground.
Its top speed was thirty five miles per hour. This, yeah,
you 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
(37:16):
that resembled flying saucers. Suffice to say, the US may
have been working on flying saucers back in the forties
around the same time as the Roswell UFO incident. Now
we're 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
(37:38):
a queue 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 I 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 and pony show about pretending to invent
(38:01):
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 commonly called you know, roswell or groom lak,
(38:24):
but we don't want to spoil it for you now.
And I would highly yeah, I check it out and
highly recommend the YouTube series that we made on that tube,
and 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. Why would you pour all of this
(38:47):
money into something just to shelve it later. There are
a couple of possibilities. First, one obvious one. We could
say it just didn't work, either because our engineering ability
or our 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, like we're talking about earlier,
(39:10):
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, it 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, but it was an embarrassable,
(39:31):
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 these great innovations and not uh
(39:52):
not everything is going to be the goose to the
least the golden egg. But we do know that the
military pursued something like this, and it's something we're all
familiar with, Jay, 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 have bigger helicopters that
(40:13):
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 are some fast helicopters,
but nothing like that. But what helicopters did do is
(40:33):
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 having to take off with a big runway.
So maybe they just found a compromise then, right, they said,
(40:56):
this is what we can realistically do now it certainly
seems like And then 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 can both fly and work on helicopters,
(41:20):
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 the Vietnam War really ramps up,
and that's when we see a lot more helicopters. Another possibility,
this was just one of many experiments or or dabblings
that a terrified government participated in. Maybe not so much
(41:42):
because they thought it was practical. Uh, maybe more because
they were hoping to keep their ideological rivals, the USSR
at bay. So many weird things come from the psychological
mind games of the Cold War. You know, we experimented
with psychic powers, esp astral travel, and were convinced many
(42:05):
people in the US, the U S Military industrial complex,
We're convinced that not only were Soviet forces doing the
same thing, but that they were doing it successfully. So
they were like, more money, teach that guy how to
kill things with his mind. So I've got, I've got.
This is what I believe. I'm just gonna tell you.
I'm gonna tell you my opinion right now. Late on me.
(42:27):
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
a crap load of money trying to build one of
these things. Because we've already got this design and it's
(42:49):
going to do all these things. It's our psychological manipulation
of them. Counterpoint, it would have to have leaked in
some controllable way. They leaked it on purpose, I think,
to some all that they knew was around. Okay, yeah, yeah,
Well that that does lead us to one one more possibility.
What if this is a cover story or something like it,
(43:13):
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
called tanks because they were originally shipped under false you know,
under false pretense, false papers. They were called water tanks, right,
(43:35):
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
government and other world governments have had massive success suppressing
technology in the past. Bombers, especially stealth bombers. Right. We
(43:58):
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
looked insane like nothing you would ever seem so metal,
you know what I mean? Metal? Right? So, in conclusion, yes,
(44:21):
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
government and numerous aerospace companies have again proven themselves fully
(44:42):
capable of suppressing technology for some time. We just don't
know how long that time horizon is. You know, they
call lemons guys. I don't know. Lemons are nice. What's
wrong with lemons? M it's just so sour. Maybe it
implies that there's something wrong with it. A perfectly good
lemon is just just it's just just that it's a lemon.
According to the online Etymology Dictionary, no one really knows.
(45:06):
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 slaying, where a lemon game was
a game that was played by someone hustling. You. Oh,
that makes more sense to me if it's a lemon,
(45:26):
because the ideas you bottle limen, it's 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 there, Well, now that we
went down the etymological rabbit hole, how much do you
like lemen? Do you? Are you somebody just straight up
eats lemons? Know what? I will tell you this? Um,
I bought these things that are called super berry pills.
(45:46):
Have you heard about this? Yeah? Yeah, And they make
sour things taste sweet. So you can eat one of
these pills and it fundamentally changes the way your taste
buds perceive sourness and sweetness. So you can suck on
a lemon and it tastes like sugar. I've been, I've
been to the Taste Taste Hack parties to those. Those
things are pretty cool. It's an interesting experience if you
haven't tried it before, especially if you have some form
(46:07):
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
know that a lot of us listening now are saying,
(46:30):
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
we have various episodes all about it, so you can
(46:54):
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,
at least for a second. It makes you wonder what
else is up there in the atmosphere today, You know
(47:16):
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 the 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
far off from when this Avro deal was going on
(47:38):
in n seven by the Vertal company. People are trying
to solve the same problem in different ways. There are
also depend on the city in which you live, there
are helicopter tours, so I would say, unless they're super expensive,
get on one if you can. It's a great date idea.
And apparently in New York now Uber is operating helicopters
(47:59):
where you can get Uber Helicopter to pick you up
and take you to the airport, and it's only about
the cost of a flight. 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
(48:20):
with the afterlife there every time they 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 n essay is
(48:45):
is far ahead of what would be considered viable or
ethical 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? Let us know, let
(49:05):
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 there's more. Yeah.
(49:26):
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 Bullet Natural Planes
comment no comment, Oh that's great and uh yeah, so
that's it. If you want to send an email to
(49:47):
us that we will see on our phones and computers
and all that stuff, just send us one too. Conspiracy
at iHeart radio dot com. Mmmmm, Stuff they Don't want
(50:15):
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.
Continuing our playlist celebrating the release of the government's U
A P Report. Uh. We wanted to share this episode
with you, fellow conspiracy realist. One of the big things
about UFOs, one of the big subjects of debate, is
whether anyone has actually found a physical craft, right, not
(00:20):
just some lights in the sky, not just some shapes
that appear to defy the laws of physics. Are their
real lifeline saucers? One of the big, you know, one
of the big theories that surfaces cyclically, is that what
we call UFOs, or what some people you know, perceived
to be UFOs, are in fact man made pieces of technology.
(00:40):
So we asked ourselves a while back, you know, has
anybody built a real lifeline saucer? And I think we
found one. Let's dive in from UFOs to psychic powers
and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You
can turn back now or learned this stuff they don't
(01:01):
want you to know. A production of I Heart Gradios
How Stuff Works. Welcome back to the show. My name
is Matt, my name is not They called me Ben.
We are joined as always with our super producer Paul
(01:22):
Mission Controlled Decade most importantly, you are you. You are here,
and that makes this stuff. They don't want you to know.
We've been doing a lot of 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, how's it. How's it going? It's
going really well. We're coming right off of Father's Day.
(01:43):
I got to spend some time with my son yesterday.
In fact, it was wonderful. We went to a waterfall
that's nearby. It's just it was awesome. Uh. And and
the happy Father's Day to both of you. Belated thank
you sir. Sure, uh no, how about you. It's good.
I went and visited my mom and she made me
a Father's Day dinner Lego lamb, which it is, and
(02:05):
a little bit of what do we have on the side, Oh,
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 pedicure feels so good, and then the
eyebrow waxing really hurts, so I sort of negated the
(02:27):
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, liked, 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, and I have to bite my
lip really hard to keep from like losing it. God.
(02:48):
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 got gotta woo there that you can't
hear outside of the studio. Let's also check in with
mission control. How you doing, man, thumbs up, thumbs down? Okay,
(03:09):
I thought it was a sidewayst it was. For a second.
It was middling too good. We're gonna call that, how
about you? Mr Ben Bolen, Thanks for asking man, so
we all 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 of this
this particular realm uh, this particular astral plane really just
(03:32):
gonna give me the demon laugh and move on. By
the way, did you did you listen to the recent
voicemail episode? Did I? Yeah? Okay, all right, well then
you guys, he hasn't heard the Oh that's okay, don't
worry about it. Check its 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
(03:55):
to be aware of? You already know all. You're the
all knowing all scenes I saw on type end it.
Oh man, that's that's two. That is two kinds. I
listened to one of the voicemail episodes and not know
that you did way back and is over a year
now ago. Now, yeah, and that was really that was
really good and people really seem to enjoy it. Um,
(04:18):
So yeah, I'm sorry. I apologize. I'll listen to it.
Were still included. That's very good. Thank you so much.
And if you want to be included in today's show,
you do not have to wait until the show is over.
You can simply pause and call us directly with your thoughts,
(04:38):
your opinions, you're hot takes, as they say on 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 take should technically be like 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
(04:59):
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 who wants to call.
It's one eight three three t d W y t K.
So we jumped like that on purpose. Yes, yes, we're ritualizing,
(05:22):
So go ahead and drop us a line. Today we
are returning to the world of unidentified flying objects. Specifically,
we're exploring the story of flying saucers, not UFOs in general,
mind you, actual flying saucers. For decades, these were some
of the most widely reported mysterious aerial phenomena in the
(05:45):
Western world. Even today, when you hear someone say the
word alien or extraterrestrial UFO. Most people will immediately conjure
up an image of a flying saucer, right, you know,
you got the whole nine and got the little uh,
the the nuts to pit. Yeah, you have the cockpit
at the top, maybe glass dome, and then of course
(06:06):
it's always shooting a tractor being 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 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,
(06:26):
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 what are these
things flying saucers? They've been described as a widely misidentified
mundane phenomenon. They've been described as little more than uh
(06:47):
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
least in the US or Canada, uses the phrase saucer
(07:09):
to describe the actual little plate upon which one would
place a cup or a mug. What 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
any of our British listeners or anyone out in the
(07:30):
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
talking about it though? Well, why you don't know? You
(07:53):
don't pass the saucer because you're passing the cup and
it's on the saucer. But someone's like if someone's like, no,
I 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 a glorified drip pan. It's it's
made to catch the drippings from your tea. So presumably,
(08:16):
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, back in or so ever
(08:38):
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 device that they would either
someone would throw the manually or I think as technology advanced,
they would have little machines that would like you know,
hold them or like with a little arm and kind
(08:59):
of lob them. They'd go, they'd go thhoop 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.
(09:21):
But this 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
(09:44):
uh the 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 lying in some sort of formation,
occasionally flipping the way you might think of the drone
(10:05):
behavior hovering. 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're not uniform. Eventually he lost track of them, and
uh he landed sharing his experience, and word spread and
(10:29):
his account um to use the kind of Internet parlance,
went viral. Yeah, he was as popular for a time
as a cat meme a 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,
(10:52):
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,
(11:15):
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 typerature frowned upon in the piloting community. Yes, yes,
(11:35):
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
(11:57):
the rear. So they in the front, party in the back.
U 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
(12:18):
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
(12:39):
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 Belie's been
supplanted quite a bit by this. Uh, we're gonna call
(12:59):
it a governor meant created term, because that's what it is.
Unidentified flying object or UFO or UFO is I like
to say, and no one else does, yes, and getting
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 plate, it's Superman,
(13:21):
it's a weather blue. I don't know. I guess it's unidentified. Well,
and we're gonna we're gonna continue to use the term
UFO here in this episode, but it should be noted,
as we noted not that long ago in an episode,
the military has now changed to that as they like
to change all their phrasing over time to unidentified aerial vehicle. Yes, yes, yes,
(13:43):
U a V. I mean it's also sort of like
that they might call something like that if something comes
up on radar they called a bogey or whatever. But
that's sort of if it's something they don't know the
origin of. They can't have eyes on it directly. Then
that could be considered one of these as well, an
identify fight aerial vehicle. That's the problem with the acronym though,
there must be some of the initialism. There must be
(14:04):
something missing, because unmanned areal vehicle is also U A B. Yeah,
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
(14:25):
this genre of overall UFO sightings. And when you look
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,
(14:48):
they'll use the flying saucer appearance. You'll you'll see it
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
(15:10):
that look like saucers, mind you, not weird tricks of
the light, no atmospheric high jinks or strange eye 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
(15:33):
to talk about the ones that at least um we
tried to contract out after award from our sponsor. Here's
where it gets crazy. Enter Projects seventeen four. Uh and
related to this, the Avro Canada VZ nine Avro car. Yes,
(15:58):
let's talk about And before we get to 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,
(16:21):
So apologies for everyone who was really frustrated before the break.
Let's continue on. I think they were shaking their fists
at their I hope someone cacast device 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,
(16:44):
but you know what I do know about? What do
you know about? Because it's written down in this awesome
outline 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 nine seven he
started working for this Canadian company called Avro Canada A
(17:07):
b R. Oh, yeah, that's right. And uh, you know
this dude's all about, you know, dream of 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 so
(17:29):
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, Old Jack Frost himself. Yes, at Avro Canada,
he had already worked on something called the Avro CF
(17:51):
one hundred. This is UH. This is a craft that
is innovative but not wild wild style Blue Skies, Blue
Skies 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, the largest
(18:16):
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.
(18:42):
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 of
the world that Jack wants to live in. So, after
he's been working on the Avro CF one hundred, he
(19:05):
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
(19:28):
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.
(19:52):
Nobody can see this chalkboard right now. It's all secret chalk.
Disappearing chalk is that I think? I guess chalk is
disappearing aracer. So the SPG operated out of this experimental
hangar and they shared space with other secretive Avro project teams.
Jack was personally fascinated, along with a lot of other people,
(20:14):
by something called vertical takeoff and landing vehicles also known
as v t o L that are pretty cool. Can
you say v tall or 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
(20:34):
for a VTOL aircraft, really 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
(20:58):
fly around like an airplane would or jet, then come
right back and then go back down like the X
Men jet. Yeah, right with the 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 US Air Force was worried about the
(21:18):
vulnerability of their bases because of a couple of limiting
factors of conventional aircraft. Right, yeah, and then this is
something we should talk about. The 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
(21:41):
military unit. And you know this is at this point
post World War two, 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
(22:02):
imagine looking at one of these bases overhead, like Google
mapsing it or Google earthing it, 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
(22:23):
that's aircraft of course, just sitting around the runways. So
they wanted to find a way to reduce either the
length and thickness of their runways so it's not such
a like, 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.
(22:44):
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 basically a United States
Air Force base in the middle of nowhere, and it
would be a little more hidden, at least a bit.
The other thing they wanted to do is find a
way to deploy aircraft faster for both offensive and defensive capabilities.
(23:05):
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 quicker to go attack nearby areas.
So we're doucing 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.
(23:27):
The thing is, this sort of experimentation is spoiler alert
cartoonishly expensive. It's not uncommon, but it is expensive. And
because often these are some of the first people trying
to do this kind of thing ever, right and in
any kind of any kind of hardware prototyping, often they
(23:49):
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 do we lose millions of dollars on this.
Remember that have a So 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
(24:11):
the thing up off the ground. But that was literally
all these were. And you would control it sort of
like a segue by like leaning into it or back
or sideways. So you looked really 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 it like,
you know, it had this sci fi space vibe to
or like everyone's like zipping around on these little discs,
(24:31):
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, 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
(24:53):
a real thing, rocket bullets, rocket bullets, all all sorts
of stuff and si dolphins, SPI dolphins, and that's not
even getting into assassination attempts and equipment. 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
(25:16):
twenty would call a moment. There is a proliferation of
sightings flying saucers in the West as a whole, but
across the world, and there is serious concern, not just
it's not just newspaper publishers trying to sell the next
week's edition. It's not just fringe theorist anymore. There are
members of the U. S. Military who are seriously anxious, concerned,
(25:42):
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, 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 sidings are real? And what if they're
(26:03):
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, 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
(26:26):
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, 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.
(26:50):
So midway through the tour, or pal Jack Frost bust
In and and hijacks them. Essentially, he takes these visitors
to the high security Special Projects area and he does
a little show and tell. He gives them a look
at a mock up of something he calls Project why too.
This is a completely circular disc shaped aircraft. Yes, right
(27:15):
in the USA. Have visitors were pretty impressed by what
they saw. They took over funding for the Special Projects
Group and gave seven hundred and fifty thousand American dollars
in nineteen fifty five, which, if we inflation calculated that
by today's standards, it's a little over seven million dollars.
Pretty crazy, right, And the next year avro Um decided
(27:37):
to commit two and a half million five dollars to
build a prototype. So, as you said before, ben very
expensive to do this kind of out of the box
kind of thinking and research. Yeah, and the reward could
be amazing, Yes, yes, 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
(28:01):
encompassed a wide variety of possible designs, but they all
revolved around this disc shape, this flying saucer shape, leading
to something called Project seventeen 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
(28:24):
think about this, 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
(28:46):
or 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
(29:10):
thousand 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
(29:33):
seer personal car kind of concept, so it's much smaller
than what they were aiming to build. Man, 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,
(29:53):
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
(30:17):
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.
(30:39):
What do you think? The protocol is not fun? But
you know, fun for the people you know, you can
give them a little something to go on here. 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.
If it can be reclassified at that point, it is
(31:02):
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.
And the problem is there. The criteria for that is
(31:26):
is it fun? That's number one? That's the number one.
Are we all having a good time? Uh? Number two
is does this still pose a continued risk to national security?
Or two people? Sorry, the exposure of methods and technologies
used to gain information or advantage get an edge. Yeah,
(31:50):
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 total. But because of
this two thousand and twelve declassified a documentation, we got
to take a look for the first time this memo
that comes from nineteen fifty six that really shows what
the engineers there at Avro were attempting to build the
(32:14):
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 or
around over a hundred thousand feet and a maximum range
with allowances. This is still the quote of about one
(32:36):
thousand nautical miles incredible bowers. 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 fifty six bucks. As
you said, nol uh to the project. As far as
we can tell, this supersonic flying saucer, it can weird
(33:00):
that there's a real thing, would propel itself by rotating
an outer disk, get a very very high speed, and
then maneuvering would be accomplished by using small shutters on
the edge of the disc. It would be powered by
jet turbines, so no secret technology there. And according to
the cutaway diagrams you can see maybe four four so
(33:21):
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 can we
just take a minute and look at this cutaway together
because it is dang fascinated. And there are some things
(33:44):
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 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
(34:05):
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 better word. Your
your main strategy is to not get hit. Well, it's
like those U boats where they had the toilets mounted
(34:27):
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
a video game where you can choose characters that are
faster than average but weaker, or you can choose characters
(34:49):
that are absolute tanks but slow. 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 is a sister or anything like that. But
you have to imagine the fuel tanks in a vehicle
like this are gonna be like fairly heavy at the
beginning at takeoff, right when you're all fueled up. Then
(35:11):
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 sting the craft to effect and keeping
you in the air. Um, the whole thing. It blows
(35:33):
my mind. Um, And I just want to hear from
anybody out there listening that understands the physics of it
a little better. Um, 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 not clear why
to that original question, one of US post It's still
(35:53):
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 thousand and
(36:14):
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 seventy nine documents,
but only only a handful of images have been digitized. Yeah,
(36:34):
literally four that we we were 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 specified for mac speed
of three hundred miles per hour with a ceiling of
(36:55):
ten thousand feet instead of a hundred thousand, but in
practice it never got more than three ft off the ground.
Its top speed was thirty five miles per hour. This, yeah,
you 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
(37:16):
that resembled flying saucers. Suffice to say, the US may
have been working on flying saucers back in the forties
around the same time as the Roswell UFO incident. Now
we're 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
(37:38):
a queue 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 I 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 and pony show about pretending to invent
(38:01):
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 commonly called you know, roswell or groom lak,
(38:24):
but we don't want to spoil it for you now.
And I would highly yeah, I check it out and
highly recommend the YouTube series that we made on that tube,
and 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. Why would you pour all of this
(38:47):
money into something just to shelve it later. There are
a couple of possibilities. First, one obvious one. We could
say it just didn't work, either because our engineering ability
or our 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, like we're talking about earlier,
(39:10):
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, it 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, but it was an embarrassable,
(39:31):
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 these great innovations and not uh
(39:52):
not everything is going to be the goose to the
least the golden egg. But we do know that the
military pursued something like this, and it's something we're all
familiar with, Jay, 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 have bigger helicopters that
(40:13):
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 are some fast helicopters,
but nothing like that. But what helicopters did do is
(40:33):
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 having to take off with a big runway.
So maybe they just found a compromise then, right, they said,
(40:56):
this is what we can realistically do now it certainly
seems like And then 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 can both fly and work on helicopters,
(41:20):
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 the Vietnam War really ramps up,
and that's when we see a lot more helicopters. Another possibility,
this was just one of many experiments or or dabblings
that a terrified government participated in. Maybe not so much
(41:42):
because they thought it was practical. Uh, maybe more because
they were hoping to keep their ideological rivals, the USSR
at bay. So many weird things come from the psychological
mind games of the Cold War. You know, we experimented
with psychic powers, esp astral travel, and were convinced many
(42:05):
people in the US, the U S Military industrial complex,
We're convinced that not only were Soviet forces doing the
same thing, but that they were doing it successfully. So
they were like, more money, teach that guy how to
kill things with his mind. So I've got, I've got.
This is what I believe. I'm just gonna tell you.
I'm gonna tell you my opinion right now. Late on me.
(42:27):
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
a crap load of money trying to build one of
these things. Because we've already got this design and it's
(42:49):
going to do all these things. It's our psychological manipulation
of them. Counterpoint, it would have to have leaked in
some controllable way. They leaked it on purpose, I think,
to some all that they knew was around. Okay, yeah, yeah,
Well that that does lead us to one one more possibility.
What if this is a cover story or something like it,
(43:13):
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
called tanks because they were originally shipped under false you know,
under false pretense, false papers. They were called water tanks, right,
(43:35):
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
government and other world governments have had massive success suppressing
technology in the past. Bombers, especially stealth bombers. Right. We
(43:58):
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
looked insane like nothing you would ever seem so metal,
you know what I mean? Metal? Right? So, in conclusion, yes,
(44:21):
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
government and numerous aerospace companies have again proven themselves fully
(44:42):
capable of suppressing technology for some time. We just don't
know how long that time horizon is. You know, they
call lemons guys. I don't know. Lemons are nice. What's
wrong with lemons? M it's just so sour. Maybe it
implies that there's something wrong with it. A perfectly good
lemon is just just it's just just that it's a lemon.
According to the online Etymology Dictionary, no one really knows.
(45:06):
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 slaying, where a lemon game was
a game that was played by someone hustling. You. Oh,
that makes more sense to me if it's a lemon,
(45:26):
because the ideas you bottle limen, it's 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 there, Well, now that we
went down the etymological rabbit hole, how much do you
like lemen? Do you? Are you somebody just straight up
eats lemons? Know what? I will tell you this? Um,
I bought these things that are called super berry pills.
(45:46):
Have you heard about this? Yeah? Yeah, And they make
sour things taste sweet. So you can eat one of
these pills and it fundamentally changes the way your taste
buds perceive sourness and sweetness. So you can suck on
a lemon and it tastes like sugar. I've been, I've
been to the Taste Taste Hack parties to those. Those
things are pretty cool. It's an interesting experience if you
haven't tried it before, especially if you have some form
(46:07):
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
know that a lot of us listening now are saying,
(46:30):
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
we have various episodes all about it, so you can
(46:54):
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,
at least for a second. It makes you wonder what
else is up there in the atmosphere today, You know
(47:16):
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 the 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
far off from when this Avro deal was going on
(47:38):
in n seven by the Vertal company. People are trying
to solve the same problem in different ways. There are
also depend on the city in which you live, there
are helicopter tours, so I would say, unless they're super expensive,
get on one if you can. It's a great date idea.
And apparently in New York now Uber is operating helicopters
(47:59):
where you can get Uber Helicopter to pick you up
and take you to the airport, and it's only about
the cost of a flight. 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
(48:20):
with the afterlife there every time they 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 n essay is
(48:45):
is far ahead of what would be considered viable or
ethical 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? Let us know, let
(49:05):
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 there's more. Yeah.
(49:26):
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 Bullet Natural Planes
comment no comment, Oh that's great and uh yeah, so
that's it. If you want to send an email to
(49:47):
us that we will see on our phones and computers
and all that stuff, just send us one too. Conspiracy
at iHeart radio dot com. Mmmmm, Stuff they Don't want
(50:15):
you to Know is a production of I heart Radio's
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Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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