The Rush to Develop a Craft with Saucer Performance UFO mania was everywhere in the 1950s. Saucer shaped craft had been sighted everywhere. Hollywood was churning out grade B flying saucer movies and even some that were considered quite good like the movie "The Day the Earth Stood Still". Not only people were wondering what those saucers in the sky were but secretly, governments were also wondering. There were reports saucers had penetrated the radar over Washington D.C. and saucers were hovering over the White House. Pursuit jets had gone after the saucers, but it was like a Model T car trying to catch a modern Ferrari, there was no competition. As soon as the jets would get within sighting distance, the saucers would then step on the gas and they were gone. It wasn't only Washington that had the saucer problem, but it existed all over the world. It was natural governments would be interested and scared, even though they continued to say it was just misidentification of temperature inversions and the like. Secretly these governments were investigating the phenomena, while some were even trying to copy the performance of the saucers. The craft they were trying to develop didn’t necessarily have to look like a saucer, it only had to have some of its abilities in flight. As a matter of fact, the rough drawing of the craft in this article looks more like a boat shape. One of the things those interested in UFO performance wanted to try and crack was the Holy Grail of flight, that being the ability of a pilot to not only fly an exceptionally fast craft but also be able to match the performance of the maneuvers without killing himself. If one were to try and match those maneuvers the blood in the pilot’s body would rush to one spot and the force of gravity would crush him. I am talking about turning on a dime at high speeds and such. The idea was not necessarily to build a spacecraft, which would have been ideal, but to build a highly maneuverable craft which could fly faster than the other guys. It was thought if we could do this, we could dominate the skies in wartime. We felt this way because we had tried to shoot down the UFOs or saucers without much success. There are stores we caught one or two napping and succeeded, but when they were aware of us it was impossible to do this. We would have loved to have craft which were impervious to attack. This is why we have been secretly working on saucer like craft for almost 60 years, even though we deny doing it. That was what Area 51 was for. It seems three countries were cooperating on the project to build a flying saucer. These countries were Great Britain, the United States and Canada. The project to build the saucer was known by various names, but the most popular seems to be Project Y. In order to hide what they were really doing, they let it leak out they were working on a saucer type aircraft, but the aircraft they showed was the AVRO Car. This was a silly looking, saucer shaped craft that had a large fan under it so it could hover (but not too well) and it was a small craft. Pictures abounded of this thing swaying back and forth trying to hover and different laughing pilots sitting in the cockpit. The truth of the matter is they were really working on the AVRO plane, a vehicle they hoped would fly over 2500 mph. I don't have a picture of the plane, but I made a sketch (very rough since I am not an artist) just to give you an idea of what it looked like.  If the public would have ever know the truth at the time, they would have been astounded. The facts seem to indicate the plane was being constructed in Canada by a British engineer named John Frost along with other engineers such as Ray Gibson of AVRO. The project was supposed to build a saucer aircraft with the best performance possible, but it changed during experimentation into a sleek plane. AVRO was a British company that had a subsidiary in Canada. One of the things that was to make this plane revolutionary were small jet nozzles which were designed to give the aircraft increased thrust making the plane fly faster. The goal was Mach 5 or five times the speed of sound. This seemed impossible in the early fifties. The plane would take off by standing on its tail. It is hard to see in the picture but notice the flat area on the tail.
AVRO had injected over five million dollars into a secret project including 2 million from the U.S. Today this would have been chump change, but in the early 1950s this was serious money. On December 3, 1954, The Leader Post, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, ran a front page headline declaring "Saucer project cost too large". The Canadian defense department had cancelled the project stating it was impractical at the time. Some of the engineers thought the plane could have eventually attained at least some of its goals and were remorseful at the cancellation. Were these engineers just disappointed at the cancellation of a project they had invested years of their lives in, or did the project actually show some promise? Some people have said the AVRO plane had some similarities to our stealth aircraft. I am not an engineer, but the only thing I can see is the absence of harsh lines and folds that register on radar. Of course, the SR-71 Blackbird, a plane that even today holds many of the world's speed records did come out in the sixties, but how many know that the A12 was a plane that looked almost exactly like the SR-71, was a little faster and first constructed in 1962 and had its engine tested as early as 1958? Was the A12 built from lessons learned in building the AVRO plane? We may never know the answer, but I am not a big believer in coincidence in these matters. The A-12's speed is classified but a speed over Mach 3 is admitted to, very close to the 2500 mph of the AVRO project. Was the U.S. taking the best of one project and using it in another project of its own? I can't say for sure, but the front of the A12 and the front of the AVRO plane, both seem to have shovel shaped fronts.
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