How to Build a Flying Saucer

     At the end of the nineteenth century, the most distinguished scientists
and engineers declared that no known combination of materials and locomotion
could be assembled into a practical flying machine.  Fifty years later another
generation of distinguished scientists and engineers declared that it was
technologically infeasible for a rocket ship to reach the moon.  Nevertheless,
men were getting off the ground and out into space even while these words were
uttered.

     In the last half of the twentieth century, when technology is advancing
faster than reports can reach the public, it is fashionable to hold the
pronouncements of yesterday's experts to ridicule.  But there is something
anomalous about the consistency with which eminent authorities fail to
recognize technological advances even while they are being made.  You must
bear in mind that these men are not given to making public pronouncements in
haste; their conclusions are reached after exhaustive calculations and proofs,
and they are better informed about their subject than anyone else alive.  But
by and large, revolutionary advances in technology do not contribute to the
advantage of established experts, so they tend to believe that the challenge
cannot possibly be realized.

     The UFO phenomenon is a perversity in the annals of revolutionary
engineering.  On the one hand, public authorities deny the existence of flying
saucers and prove their existence to be impossible.  This is just as we should
expect from established experts.  But on the other hand, people who believe
that flying saucers exist have produced findings that only tend to prove that
UFOs are technologically infeasible by any known combination of materials and
locomotion.

     There is reason to suspect that the people who believe in the existence
of UFOs do not want to discover the technology because it is not in the true
believer's self interest that a flying saucer be within the capability of
human engineering.  The true believer wants to believe that UFOs are of
extraterrestrial origin because he is seeking some kind of relief from debt
and taxes by an alliance with superhuman powers.

     If anyone with mechanical ability really wanted to know how a saucer
flies, he would study the testimonies to learn the flight characteristics of
this craft, and then ask, "How can we do this saucer thing?"  This is probably
what Werner Von Braun said when he decided that it was in his self-interest to
launch man into space: "How can we get this bird off the ground, and keep it
off?"

     Well, what is a flying saucer?  It is a disc-shaped craft about thirty
feet in diameter with a dome in the center accommodating the crew and,
presumably, the operating machinery.  And it flies.  So let us begin by
building a disc-shaped airfoil, mount the cockpit and the engine under a
central canopy, and see if we can make it fly.  As a matter of fact, during
World War II the United States actually constructed a number of experimental
aircraft conforming to these specifications, and photographs of the craft are
published from time to time in popular magazines about science and flight.  It
is highly likely that some of the UFO reports before 1950 were sightings of
these test flights.  See how easy it is when you 'want' to find answers to a
mystery?

     The mythical saucer also flies at incredible speeds.  Well, the speeds
believed possible depend upon the time and place of the observer.  As stated
earlier, a hundred years ago, twenty-five miles per hour was legally
prohibited in the belief that such a terrific velocity would endanger human
life.  So replace the propeller of the experimental disc airfoil with  a
modern aerojet engine.  Is mach 3 fast enough for believers?

     But the true saucer not only flies, it also hovers.  You mean like a
Hovercraft?  One professional engineer translated Ezekiel's description of
heavenly ships as a helicopter-cum-hovercraft.

     But what of the anomalous electromagnetic effects manifest in the space
surrounding a flying saucer?  Well, Nikola Tesla demonstrated a prototype of
an electronic device that was eventually developed into the electron
microscope, the television screen, an aerospace engine called the Ion Drive.
Since World War II, the engineering of the Ion Drive has been advanced as the
most promising solution to the propulsion of interplanetary spaceships.  The
drive operates by charging atomic particles and directing them with electro
magnetic force as a jet to the rear, generating a forward thrust in reaction.
The advantage of the Ion Drive over chemical rockets is that a spaceship can
sweep in the ions it needs from its flight path, like an aerojet sucks in air
through its engines.  Therefore, the ship must carry only the fuel it needs to
generate the power for its chargers; there is no need to carry dead weight in
the form of rocket exhaust.  There is another advantage to be derived from ion
rocketry: The top speed of a reaction engine is limited by the ejection
velocity of its exhaust.  An ion jet is close to the speed of light.  If space
travel is ever to be practical, transport will have to achieve a large
fraction of the speed of light.

     In 1972 the French journal Science et Avenir reported Franco-American
research into a method of ionizing the airstream flowing over the wings to
eliminate sonic boom, a serious objection to the commercial success of the
Concorde.  Four years later a picture appeared in an American tabloid of a
model aircraft showing the current state of development.  The photograph shows
a disc-shaped craft, but not so thin as a saucer; it looks more like a flying
curling stone.  In silent flight, the ionized air flowing around the craft
glows as a proper ufo should.  The last word comes from an engineering
professor at the local university; he has begun construction of a flying
saucer in his backyard.

     To the true believer, the flying saucer has no jet.  It seems to fly by
some kind of antigravity.  As antigravity is not known to exist in physical
theory or experimental fact in popular science, the saucer is clearly alien
and beyond human comprehension.  But antigravity depends upon what you
conceive gravity to be, doesn't it?

     For all practical purposes, you do not have to understand what Newton and
Einstien mean by gravity.  Gravity is an acceleration downward, to the center
of the earth.  Therefore, antigravity is an acceleration upward.  As far as
practical engineering is concerned, any means to achieve a gain in altitude is
an antigravity engine.  An airplane; a balloon; a rocket; a stepladder; all
are antigravity engines.  See how easy it is to invent an antigravity engine?

     There are three basic kinds of locomotive engines.  The primary principle
is traction.  The foot and the wheel are traction engines.  The traction
engines depend upon friction against a surrounding medium to generate
movement, and locomotion can proceed only as far and as speedily as the
surrounding friction will provide.  The second principle is displacement.  The
balloon and the submarine rise by displacing a denser medium; they descend by
displacing less that their weight.  The tertiary drive is the rocket engine.
A rocket is driven by reaction from the mass of material it ejects.  Although
a rocket is most efficient when not impeded by a surrounding medium, it must
carry not only it's fuel but also the mass it must eject.  As a consequence,
the rocket is impractical where powerful acceleration is required for extended
drives.  In chemical rocketry, ten minutes is a long burn for powered flight.
What is needed for practical antigravity locomotion is a fourth principle
which does not depend upon a surrounding medium or ejection of mass.

     You must take notice that none of the principles of locomotion required
any new discovery.  they have all been around for thousands of years, and
engineering only implemented the principle with increasing efficiency.  A
fourth principle of locomotion has also been around for thousands of years: It
is centrifugal force.  Centrifugal force is the principle of the military
sling and the medieval catapult.

     Everyone knows that centrifugal force can overcome gravity.  If directed
upward, centrifugal force can be used to drive an antigravity engine.  The
problem engineers have been unable to solve is that centrifugal force is
generated in all directions on the plane of the centrifuge.  It won't provide
locomotion unless the force can be concentrated in one direction.  The
solution of the sling, of releasing the wheeling at the instant the
centrifugal force is directed along the ballistic trajectory, has all the
inefficiencies of a cannon.  The difficulty of the problem is not real,
however.  There is a mental block preventing people from perceiving a
centrifuge as anything other than a flywheel.

     A bicycle wheel is a flywheel.  If you remove the rim and tire, leaving
only the spokes sticking out of the hub, you still have a flywheel.  In fact,
spokes alone make a more efficient flywheel than the complete wheel; this is
because momentum only goes up only in proportion to mass but with the square
of speed.  Spokes are made of drawn steel with extreme tensile strength, so
spokes alone can generate the highest level of centrifugal force long after
the rim and tire have disintegrated.  But spokes alone still generate
centrifugal force equally in all directions from the plane of rotation.  All
you have to do to concentrate centrifugal force in one direction is remove all
the spokes but one.  That one spoke still functions as a flywheel, even though
it is not a wheel any longer.

     See how easy it is once you accept an attitude of solving one problem at
a time as you come to it?  You can even add a weight to the end of the spoke
to increase the centrifugal force.

     But our centrifuge still generates a centrifugal force acceleration in
all directions around the plane of rotation even though it doesn't generate
acceleration equally in all directions at the same time.  All we have managed
to do is make the whole ball of wire wobble around the common center of mass
between the axle and free end of the spoke.  To solve this problem, now that
we have come to it, we need merely to  accelerate the spoke through a few
degrees of arc and then let it complete the cycle of revolution without power.
As long as it is accelerated during the same arc at each cycle, the locomotive
will lurch in one direction, albiet intermittently.  But don't forget that the
piston engine also drives intermittently.  The regular centrifugal pulses can
be evened out by mounting several centrifuges on the same axle so that a pulse
from another flywheel takes over as soon as one pulse of power is past it's
arc.

     The next problem facing us is that the momentum imparted to the
centrifugal spoke is carries it all around the cycle with little loss of
velocity.  The amount of concentrated centrifugal force carrying the engine in
the desired direction is too low to be practical.  Momentum is half the
product of mass multiplied by velocity squared.  Therefore, what we need is a
spoke that has a tremendous velocity with minimal mass.  They don't make
spokes like that for bicycle wheels.  A search through the engineers' catalog
however, turns up just the kind of centrifuge we need.  An electron has no
mass at rest (you cannot find a smaller minimum mass than that); all it's mass
is inherent in its velocity.  So we build an electron raceway in the shape of
a doughnut in which we can accelerate an electron to a speed close to that of
light.  As the speed of light is approached, the energy of acceleration is
converted to a momentum approaching infinity.  As it happens, an electron
accelerator answering our need was developed by the University of California
during the last years of World War II.  It is called a betatron, and the
doughnut is small enough to be carried comfortably in a man's hands.

     We can visualize the operation of the Mark I from what is known about
particle accelerators.  To begin with, high energy electrons ionize the air
surrounding them.  This causes the betatrons to glow like an annular neon
tube.

     Therefore, around the rim of the saucer a ring of lights will glow like a
string of shining beads at night.  The power required for flight will ionize
enough of the surrounding atmosphere to short out all electrical wiring in the
vicinity unless it is specially shielded.  In theory, the top speed of the
Mark I is close to the speed of light; in practice there are many more
problems to be solved before relativistic speeds can be approached.

     The peculiar property of microwaves heating all material containing the
water molecule means that any animal luckless enough to be nearby may be
cooked from the inside out; vegetation will be scorched where a saucer lands;
and any rocks containing water of crystallization will be blasted.  Every
housewife with a microwave knows all this; only hard-headed scientists and
soft-headed true believers are completely dumbfounded.  The UFOnauts would be
cooked by their own engines, too, if they left the flight deck without
shielding.  This probably explains why a pair of UFOnauts, in a widely
published photograph, wear reflective plastic jumpsuits.  Mounting the
betatrons outboard on a disc is an efficient way to get them away from the
crew's compartment, and the plating of the hull shields the interior.  At high
accelerations, increasing amounts of power are transformed into radiation,
making the centrifugal drive inefficient in strong gravitational fields.  The
most practical employment of this engineering is for large spacecraft, never
intended to land.  The flying saucers we see are very likely scouting craft
sent from mother ships moored in orbit.  For brief periods of operation, the
heavy fuel consumption of the Mark I can be tolerated, along with radiation
leakage - especially when the planet being scouted is not your own.

     When you compare the known operating features of particle centrifuges
with the eyewitness testimony, it is fairly evident that any expert claiming
flying saucers to be utterly beyond any human explanation is not doing his
homework, and he should be reexamined for his professional license.

     For dramatic purpose, I have classified the development of the flying
saucer through five stages:
     Mark I   - Electronic centrifuges mounted around a fixed disc, outboard.
     Mark II  - Electronic centrifuges mounted outboard around a rotating
                disc.
     Mark III - Electronic centrifuges mounted outboard around a rotating
                disc, period of cycles tuned to harmonize with ley lines, for
                jet assist.
     Mark IV  - Particle centrifuge tuned to modify time coordinates by faster
                than light travel.
     Mark V   - No centrifuge.  Solid state coils and crystal harmonics
                transforms ambient field directly for dematerialization and
                rematerialization at destinations in time and space.

     Now that the UFO phenomenon has been demystified and reduced to human
ken, we can proceed to prove the theory.  If your resources are like those of
the PLO, you can go ahead and build your own flying saucer without any further
information from me, but I have nothing to work with except the junk I can
find around the house.

     I found an old electric motor that had burned out, but still had a few
turns left in it.  I drilled a hole through the driving axle so that an eight
inch bar would slide freely through it.  I mounted the motor on a chassis so
that the bar would rotate on an eccentric cam.  In this way in end of the bar
was always extended in the same direction while the other end was always
pressed into the driving axle.  As both ends had the same angular velocity at
all times, the end extending out from the axle would always have a higher
angular momentum.  This resulted in a concentration of centrifugal
acceleration in one direction.  when I plugged the in the motor, the sight of
my brainchild lurching ahead - unsteadily, but in a constant direction, - gave
me a bigger thrill than my baptism of sex - lasted longer, too.  But not much
longer.  In less than twenty seconds the burned-out motor gasped its last and
died in a puff of smoke; the test run was broadcast on radio microphone but
the spectacle was lost without television.  Because my prototype did not
survive long enough to run in two directions I had to declare the test
inconclusive because of mechanical breakdown.  So, what the hell, the Wright
brothers didn't get far off the ground the first time they tried either.  Now
that I know the critter will move, it is worthwhile to put a few bucks in to a
new motor, install a clutch, and gear the transmission down.  One problem at a
time is the way it goes.

     A rectified centrifuge small enough to hold in one hand and powered by
solar cells, based on my design, could be manufactured for about fifty dollars
(depending on production and competitive bids).  Installed on Skylab, it would
be sufficient to keep the craft in orbit indefinitely.  A larger Hyperspace
Drive (as I call this particular design) will provide a small but constant
acceleration for interplanetary spacecraft that would accumulate practical
velocities over runs of several days.

     It is rumored that a gentleman by the name of Dean invented another kind
of antigravity engine sometime during the past fifty years, but I have been
unable to track down any more information except that its design consists of
wheels within wheels.  A gentleman in Florida, Hans, Schnebel, sent me a
description of a machine he built and tested that is similar in principle to
the Dean drive.  Essentially, a large rotating disk has a smaller rotating
disc on one side of the main driving axle.  The two wheels are geared together
so that a weight mounted on the rim of the smaller wheel is always at the
outside of the larger wheel during the same length of arc of each revolution,
and always next to the main axle during the opposite arc.  What happens is
that the velocity of the weight is amplified by harmonic coincidence with the
large rotor during one half of its period of revolution, and diminished during
the other half cycle.  This concentrates momentum in the same quarter
continually, to rectify the centrifuge.  The result is identical to my
Hyperspace Drive, but has the beauty of continuously rotating motion.  Now, if
the Dean drive is made with a huge main rotor, - like about thirty feet in
diameter - there is enough room to mount a series of smaller wheels around the
rim, set in gimbals for attitude control, an Mr. Dean himself has himself a
model T Flying Saucer requiring no license from the AEC.

     In 1975, Professor Eric Laithwaite, Head of the Department of Electrical
Engineering at the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London,
England, invented another approach to harnessing the centrifugal force of a
gyroscope to power an antigravity engine - well, he almost invented it, but he
did not have the sense to hold onto success when he grasped it.  Professor
Laithwaite is world-renowned for his most creative solutions to the problems
of magnetic-levitation-propulsion systems, and the fruit of his brain is
operating today in Germany and Japan, his railway trains float in the air
while traveling at over three hundred miles per hour.  If anyone can present
the world with a proven anti gravity engine, it must be the professor.

     Laithwaite satisfied himself that the precessional force causing a
gyroscope to wobble had no reaction.  This is a clear violation of Newton's
Third Law of Motion as 'generally conceived'.  Laithwaite figured that if he
could engage the precessional acceleration while the gyroscope wobbled in one
direction and release the precession while it wobble in other directions, he
would be able to demonstrate to a forum of colleagues and critics at the
college a rectified centrifuge that worked as a proper antigravity engine.
His insight was sound but he did not work it out right.  All he succeeded in
demonstrating was a 'separation between action and reaction,' and his engine
did nothing but oscillate violently.  Unfortunately, neither Laithwaite or his
critics were looking for a temporal separation between action and reaction, so
the loophole he proved in Newton's Third Law was not noticed.  Everyone was
looking for action without reaction, so no one saw anything at all.
Innumerable other inventors have constructed engines essentially identical to
Laithwaite's, including a young high school dropout who lives across the
street from me.

     Another invention described is U.S. Patent disclosure number 3,653,269,
granted to Richard Foster, a retired chemical engineer in Louisiana.  Foster
mounted his gyroscopes around the rim of a large rotor disc, like a two
cylinder flying saucer.  Every time the rotor turns a half cycle, the
precessional twist of the gyros in reaction generates a powerful force.
During the half cycle when Foster's gyros were twisting in the other
direction, his clutch grabbed and transmitted the power to the driving wheels.
During the other half cycle, the gyros twisted freely.  Foster claims his
machine traveled four miles per hour until it flew to pieces from centrifugal
forces.  After examining the patents, I agreed that it looked like it would
work, and it certainly would fly to pieces because the bearing mounts were not
nearly strong enough to contain the powerful twisting forces his machine
generated.  Foster's design, however, cannot be included among antigravity
engines because it would not operate off the ground.  He never claimed it
would, and Foster always described his invention truthfully as nothing more
than an implementation of the fourth principle of locomotion.

     What Laithwaite needed was another rotary component, like the Dean drive,
geared to his engine's oscillations so that they would always be turned to
drive in the same direction.  As it happens, an Italian by the name of
Todeschini recently secured a patent on this idea, and his working model is
said to be attracting the interest of European engineers.

     When the final rectifying device is added to the essential Laithwaite
design, all the moving parts generate the vectors of a vortex, and the
velocity generated is the axial thrust of the vortex.  Therefore I call
inventions based on this design the Vortex Drive.

     By replacing the Hyperspace modules of the Mark I Flying Saucer with
Vortex modules, still retaining the essential betatron as the centrifuge,
performance is improved for the Mark II.  To begin with, drive is generated
only when the main rotor is revolving, so the saucer can be parked with the
motor running.  This eliminates the agonizing doubt we all suffered when the
Lunar Landers were about to blast off to rejoin the command capsule: Will the
engine start?  This would explain why the ring of lights around the rim of s
saucer is said to begin to revolve immediately prior to lift off.  A
precessional drive affords a wider range of control, and the responses are
more stable than a direct centrifuge.  But the most interesting improvement is
the result of the 'structure' of the electromagnetic field generated by the
Vortex drive.  By amplifying and diminishing certain vectors harmonically, the
Mark III flying saucer can ride the electromagnetic current of the Earth's
electromagnetic field like the jet stream.  And this is just what we see UFO's
doing, don't we, as they are reported running their regular flight corridors
during the biennial tourist season.  Professor Laithwaite got all this
together when he conceived of his antigravity engine as a practical
application of his theory of "rivers of energy running through space"; he just
could not get it off the drawing board the first time.

     The flying saucer consumes fuel at a rate that cannot be supplied by all
the wells in Arabia.  Therefore we have to assume that UFO engineers must have
developed a practical atomic fusion reactor.  But once the Mark III is
perfected, another fuel supply becomes attainable, and no other is so
practical for flying saucer.  The Moray Valve converts the Mark III into a
Mark IV Flying Saucer by extending its operational capabilities through 'time'
as well as space.  The Moray Valve, you see, functions by changing the
direction of flow of energy in the Sun's gravitational field.  It is the
velocity of energy that determines motion, and motion determines the flow of
time.  We shall continue the engineering of flying saucers in the following
essays.

     My investigation into antigravity engineering brought me a technical
report while this typescript was in preparation.  Dr. Mason Rose, President of
the University for Social Research, published a paper describing the
discoveries of Dr. Paul Alfred Biefeld, astronomer and physicist at the
California Institute for Advanced Studies, and his assistant, Townsend Brown.
In 1923 Biefeld discovered that a heavily charged electrical condensor moved
toward its positive pole when suspended in a gravitational field.  He assigned
Brown to study the effect as a research project.  A series of experiments
showed Brown that the most efficient shape for a field propelled condensor was
a disc with a central dome.  In 1926 Townsend published his paper describing
all the construction features and flight characteristics of a flying saucer,
conforming to the testimony of the first flight witnessed over Mount Rainer
twenty-one years later and corroborated by thousands of witnesses since. (The
Biefeld-Brown Effect explains why a Mark III rides the electromagnetic jet
stream.)

     We may speculate that flying saucers spotted from time to time may not
only include visitors from other planets and travelers through time, but also
fledglings from an unknown number of cuckoo's nests in secret experimental
plants all over the world.  The space program at Cape Canaveral may be nothing
more than a supercolossal theatre orchestrated by Cecil B. Demille to reassure
Americans that they are still 'numero uno' after Russia beat our atomic ace by
putting Sputnik into orbit.  We need not doubt that the Apollo spaceships got
to the Moon, but we may wonder if Neil Armstrong was the first man to land
there.  The real space program may have been conducted in secret as a spin-off
from the Manhattan Project since the end of World War II, and Apollo 13 may
have been picked up by a sag wagon to make sure our team scored a home run
every time they went to bat.  The exploration of space is the most dangerous
enterprise ever taken on by a living species.  Don't you ever wonder why the
Russians are losing men in space like a safari being decimated in headhunter
country, while nothing ever happens to our boys except accidents during ground
training?
-T.B. Pawlicki

Well, I hope you enjoyed that.  Coming soon in our series of informational
speculations:  Build your own Time Machine,  Build your own Pyramid or
Megalith, Turn lead into gold, Create a worldwide communications network, and
my personal favorite, How to build an atomic bomb.  Now if someone knows how
we can clone a person using household materials, that would be the topper of
the toppers.  Keep your mind open, but not so open that your brains fall
out...