Early 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 ordinary 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 saucers, but it was like a Model T car trying to catch a modern Ferrari, there was really no competition. As soon as the primitive jets would get within sighting distance of the discs, 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 this phenomenon while some were even trying to copy it. They really couldn’t explain the saucers which appeared over the White House on and off for several days, so that wasn’t mentioned very much after the headlines in the newspapers died out. 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 that they were working on a saucer type aircraft, but the aircraft they showed everyone 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 was a small craft. This vehicle had absolutely nothing to do with space travel, and it seemed it was only shown to us to further mock the true UFO sightings which were really being made. 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 that 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. As you can see, they thought the best they could do was develop a fast plane using some data they gathered from crashed UFOs and such. The idea at the time of developing a true spaceship had no way of being carried out, because of the state of technology at the time.
Rough Sketch of AVRO Plane If the public would have ever known the truth, 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 couldn’t be accomplished so the emphasis 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 was 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. One always wonders when government’s cancel projects, if they are really cancelled or just become black projects so we won’t know what is going on. 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 has 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 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? When a new plane is being experimented with things are learned and usually applied to other aircraft, so even if the AVRO plane was cancelled, it doesn’t mean we didn’t learn things which we then applied to developing aircraft. 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, which could be a lot faster, not that far from 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 notice the front of the A12 and the front of the AVRO plane, both seem to have shovel shaped fronts.
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