The saucer will hover and propel itself using electrodes that cover its surface to ionize the surrounding air into plasma. Gases such as air, which has an equal number of positive and negative charges become plasma when energy such as heat or electricity causes some of the gas's atoms to lose their negatively charged electrons, creating atoms with a positive charge, or positive ions, surrounded by the newly detached electrons.
Using an onboard source of energy such as a battery, ultracapacitor , solar panel or any combination thereof , the electrodes will send an electrical current into the plasma, causing the plasma to push against the neutral noncharged air surrounding the craft, theoretically generating enough force for liftoff and movement in different directions depending on where on the craft's surface you direct the electrical current.
The concept sounds far-fetched, but U. At six inches Theoretically, Roy says, the flying saucer can be as large as anyone wants to build it, because the design gives the aircraft balance and stability. In other words, this type of aircraft could someday be built large enough to ferry around people. But, Roy says, "we need to walk before we can run, so we're starting small.
Roy is not sure what kind of energy source he will use yet. He anticipates that the craft's body will be made from a material that is an insulator such as ceramic, which is light and a good conductor of electricity. The choice of a power source that is powerful, yet lightweight is "probably going to be the thing that makes or breaks it. Roy began designing the WEAV in The following year, he and Colozza wrote a paper for the now-defunct NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts NIAC about the use of electrohydrodynamics, or ionized particles, as an alternative to liquid fuel for powering space vehicles.
If he's successful, Roy hopes to develop a more stable aircraft and a new form of fuel—air. Other craft that interact with the atmosphere have a problem: moving parts, whether jet engines, propellers or rotors. The officer then radioed the Midway, the only other ship in the vicinity, which also confirmed that no weather balloons were in the air or unaccounted for. Ruppelt and the Project Blue Book team followed up with the Navy and interviewed members of the flight-deck crew.
Some dismissed it as a weather balloon, while others had their doubts. It took place on September 19, as a British Meteor fighter jet was returning to the Topcliffe airfield from exercises over the North Sea. When the plane had descended to 5, feet, crew on the ground spotted a silvery, circular object traveling several thousand feet above the Meteor, but on its same trajectory. Then the object stopped suddenly in mid-air, rotated on its own axis and zipped off at incredible speeds over the horizon.
The movements of the object were not identifiable with anything I have seen in the air. The circus-like publicity surrounding the Topcliffe incident put the British military intelligence in a difficult spot.
A letter from Winston Churchill to the Secretary for Air, dated July 28, , requesting an explanation on flying saucers. One of the reasons flying saucers caught the Western public's imagination was that they tapped into a widespread fear of attack from communist enemies, says Starr - "the sleek uniformity of the shape, the shell containing something unpleasant".
The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung saw flying saucers as a mythical archetype, comparing their shape to that of the mandala, a ritual symbol in Buddhism and Hinduism. Jung saw them as "technological angels" for a secular age, on to which people could project their fears about nuclear conflict.
Just as the alien in the film The Day The Earth Stood Still emerged from his saucer to warn humankind not to destroy itself, they offered hope that scientific progress would deliver enlightenment and peace, not mutually-assured destruction. There were other, more prosaic reasons why Hollywood was keen to capitalise on widespread fascination with the flying saucer phenomenon.
During the s those interested in the phenomenon of possible extra-terrestrial sightings used the term "flying saucer" quite happily - hence the journal Flying Saucer Review, which reportedly counted Prince Philip among its subscribers. Today, however, ufologists "think you are taking the mickey out of them if you use that phrase", according to David Clarke of Sheffield Hallam University, who has spent more than three decades studying the culture around UFO sightings.
During the s the original expression fell out of fashion in favour of the more official-sounding "unidentified flying object", a phrase borrowed from the US Air Force. Over time UFO sightings, too, began to involve saucer shapes less frequently, says Clarke. Craft resembling stealth bombers and other angular shapes became more common - a phenomenon that mirrored the tendency over time of sci-fi films to eschew the traditional circular pattern.
Thus flying saucers became a somewhat kitsch symbol of the more whimsical end of the space age. But the notion of floating disc-shaped aircraft wasn't considered fanciful by governments and militaries around the world. The new LDSD is far from the first attempt by earthlings to construct a flying saucer-like aircraft. For instance, German engineer Georg Klein told the CIA he worked on a Nazi flying saucer for the Luftwaffe under designers Rudolf Schriever and Richard Miethe - a claim which prompted the Americans to study the possibility of creating one of their own.
In theory, as it travelled within the earth's atmosphere, a flying saucer of the classic s design would have quite an aerodynamic shape, according to space scientist Maggie Aderin-Pocock.
It should glide quite easily," she says. The problem was the propulsion system.
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