"They flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water",this was how pilot Kenneth Arnold described an encounter he had while flying near Mount Rainier, Washington, on the 24th June 1947. The media immediately pounced on the description and the term "Flying Saucer" was born.[ three days earlier, a Mr Harold Dahl had reported a similar encounter, but has been practically forgotten]

Arnold's encounter marked the beginning of a phenomenon of reported sightings, encounters of the first, second and third kind [and,in the case of Brazilian farmer Antonio Villas Boas, an encounter of the fourth kind]. Many were simple cases of misidentification, others hoaxes some pure cranks. However, there is a small percentage, often made by experienced observers lke pilots and policemen which remain unexplained.

Are these unexplained sightings an as yet unidentified natural occurrence, some form of ball lightning perhaps, or is some type of intelligence behind them ?

I wonder if the yet unidentified life forms that inhabit the moon and mars are asking the same questions about the strange beings that came, drove around for a bit, had a picnic and roared off in a cloud of mystery from the moon… or what they are thinking of the strange creature now landed on mars… maybe one of them is putting words together similar to: ‘no one would have believed…’ and ‘slowly but surely they came.’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqvwxvCOSH4

This Channel 4 documentary from 2005 takes a pretty standard historically analytical approach to exploring this alleged phenomenon. Nick Cook, the presenter, probably lends too much credence to certain claims in his script in order to preserve maximum dramatic effect, but this is not reflected in what he has published in written format. All in all it is one of the best descriptions of how UFO "beliefs" have evolved since the 1940s and whatever plausible reasons might lie behind this development, despite often the lack of hard data - a development which itself receives plausible explanation in this programme.

After the discussion elsewhere on the Conspiracy Roadtrip on creationism, the next is on UFOs next Monday. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01ndm9r

The presenter, Andrew Maxwell and one of his associates, Darren Perks, managed to get themselves arrested after trying to sneak into Area 51 in Nevada.

17 April 1897, an "airship" is reputed to have crashed at Aurora, Texas.

http://www.ufocasebook.com/Aurora.html

the "pilot" is supposed to be buried in the local cemetery;



The Aurora sighting was part of what later investigators call "a ufo flap", a series of sightings of airships across the United States which took place in 1896/97.
( the alternative, a hoax to drum up business for Aurora which was dying on its feet )

14 May 1973, Skylab blasts off from Cape Canaveral. On the 20th September, this sighting takes place;

Combining both aliens and history, and yes people really do believe in this stuff

The Ancient Aliens debunking site;

http://ancientaliensdebunked.com/

one of the best known historical sightings;



and the more rational explanation;

http://ancientaliensdebunked.com/nuremburg-ufo-battle-debunked/

Why the MOD closed Britain's X-Files;

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22991014

My guess is that this is a dirigible,

Video no longer available.

Carl Jung's view on UFOs

Jung : UFOs

The Washington Post's headline after UFOs were reported over Washington DC in July 1952;

They're here;

Video no longer available

Deleted

UFOs in the modern sense began a little earlier than suggested above - as "foo fighters" they were reported fairly frequently from mid-1944, and were sometimes thought to be Axis "secret weapons".

The WOW! signal of 1977;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal

One of the more amusing (with hindsight) consequences of the "flying saucer" observations was a serious attempt to build one. Known as "Project Y", it seems to have been driven in part by the belief that if flying saucers existed, they had to be a Soviet secret weapon, and therefore it made sense to try to replicate the achievement.

Project Y ran in Canada with US funding from the late 1950s onwards, and was conceived as a supersonic fighter, with most of the "saucer" being a form of turbojet engine, and multiple exhausts along the rim. As this soon turned out to be rather too exotic, and did not progress beyond a mock-up, Project Y2 featured six or eight more conventional jet engines in a saucer-shaped body, with suggestions that one mode of attack could be ramming enemy aircraft with the reinforced edge of the disc. This remained a paper design. When details of all these exotics, and the amount of money spent on them, leaked out into the press it was highly embarrassing to the Canadian government.

But the program is credited with a inspiring the... hovercraft. The one actual vehicle built, the VZ-9 Avrocar, was just about able to hover in ground effect, and this inspired the inventor of the hovercraft to produce something more efficient.

This one only made as far as taxiing and runway hops, the Vought XF5U, nicknamed the Flying Pancake, cancelled in 1947 after budget overspends;

There were a few flying wing designs in the 40s and 50s which could easily have been mistaken for flying saucers.

Northrop YB-49;

I suspect the Northrop YB-49 would have been quite good "stealth-wise" against even modern radar, as indeed was the Vulcan bomber.

Back in the 50s/60s, the CIA noticed a correlation between the number of UFO reports and their (secret) U2 flights:

Last night's episode of Fargo went totally X-Files. The incident involving a Minnesota state trooper which lay behind it;


Val Johnson UFO

Trike - a spoiler! I've not seen recording yet - mark you most of Fargo is about unidentified  something or other......I make it 58 bodies so far.......not to mention several fingers on the butcher's floor. Oh dear, I suppose it will be all over soon.

Oooops!!!!!, Sorry, hope I haven't given too much away, P.

Yes, last night was the penultimate episode, I've really enjoyed this series.

Body count 70 plus - couldn't keep up. Loved the hairdresser whisking away the butcher with - "Come ARN -it's only a flying saucer!" Also loving it; brilliant production.

8 January 1981: the Trans-en Provence UFO case;

French UFO

The Truth is out There

Obama UFOs

Hurricane pilot BC Lumsden's encounter with two "foo fighters" in December 1942:

"No-one knows who the first RAF air crew to see a UFO in WWII was, but one of the earliest recorded RAF encounters comes from B.C. Lumsden who observed two classic foo-fighters while flying a Hurricane fighter over France in December 1942.
Lumsden had left England at seven p.m., for a mission over the French coast. An hour later, while cruising at 7,000 feet over the mouth of the River Somme, he discovered that he had company. Two steadily climbing orange-coloured lights, with one slightly above the other. Lumsden at first thought the lights may be tracer flak, but discarded the idea when he saw how slowly the objects were moving. He did a full turn and saw the lights astern and to port but now they were larger and brighter. At 7,000 feet they stopped climbing and stayed level with his Hurricane. The frightened pilot executed another full turn, only to discover that the objects had stayed with him. Lumsden nose-dived to 4,000 feet with the lights following his every manoeuvre. Finally they descended to about 1,000 feet below him until he leveled out, at which point they climbed again and resumed pursuit. The two lights seemed to maintain an even distance from each other and varied only slightly in relative height from time to time. One always remained a little lower than the other. At last, as Lumsden's speed reached 260 miles per hour, he was gradually able to outdistance the UFOs. ‘I found it hard to make other members of the squadron believe me when I told my story,’ Lumsden said, ‘but the following night one of the squadron flight commanders in the same area had a similar experience with a green light.’ "

Do frisbees count as flying saucers?  I suppose they are a bit too flat though they seemed to proliferate when "Xena, Warrior Princess" was on TV.  Haven't watched "Fargo" yet - it's on my list (mind you, "Breaking Bad" has been on my list for about 3 years - people say if one can get past the atrocious idea of a teacher supplying drugs to pupils [BB that is not "Fargo"] it's very good).

About the " Foo fighters"


An interesting documentary series " World War Weird" episode 2 had an interesting explanation on this phenomena experienced by night pilots during WW2.

Are you in a location where you can watch this series :


https://uktvplay.uktv.co.uk/shows/world-war-weird/watch-online/?video=5284171937001




Dirk

Dirk, that's where I heard Lumsden's UFO story and the U-28 Sea Serpent.

..............................................................................................................................

The West Freugh Incident, April 1957:

West Freugh Incident

Newly released footage of UFO incident over the Pacific;

Independent Newspaper

Triceratops wrote:

8 January 1981: the Trans-en Provence UFO case;

French UFO

A French documentary from 1965 entitled Les Soucoupes Volantes:
 


Presented by psychologist Aimé Michel, it looks (among other things) at the 1954 UFO sightings in France which lined up on an axis from Bayonne to Vichy in a sort of aerial ley-line. It also touches on the history of flying saucers, including the 1566 ‘celestial phenomenon’ witnessed over Basle which is mentioned in the 1651 Nuremberg ‘aerial battle’ link upthread.

The French connection with flying saucers and extra-terrestrial beings is a long one. The quest for extra-terrestrial life features in Jules Verne’s 1865 novel De la Terre à la Lune (From the Earth to the Moon) and its 1870 sequel Autour de la Lune (Around the Moon). These books envisaged 3 adventurers being fired from a huge gun towards the Moon in the search of said extra-terrestrial life and after deciding that there is none on the barren surface are unwilling and unable to land there but get catapulted back to Earth by the Moon’s gravity. Thus Verne anticipated NASA’s Apollo 8 mission of December 1968 by over 100 years. In the novel, the gun is even built and located in Florida.

And even before Verne there was Cyrano de Bergerac whose Histoire comique contenant les Estats & Empires de la Lune (1657) and Les Nouvelles œuvres contenant l'Histoire comique des Estats et Empires du Soleil (1662) also envisage space travel and contact with extra-terrestrial beings. Intriguingly de Bergerac associates space flight with North America as well but perhaps only by default. In Empires de la Lune the narrator builds various devices in an attempt to escape Earth’s gravity but his first flight doesn’t send him into space but from Paris to Canada. There he builds another machine which crash lands and he injures himself. Some interfering soldiers then drag his machine to the centre of Quebec 'au milieu de la place de Kebec' where they hoped to turn it into a giant firework with which to celebrate St John’s Eve 'pour faire le feu de la S. Jean … prist cette machine pour un Dragon de feu'. Just as he reaches the square himself the soldiers are about to set light to it and so he desperately tries to grab the match from the soldier’s hand while throwing himself into the machine in a bid to free it from all the wood etc which the soldiers had attached to it. But it's too late and he and the machine are sent flying up through the clouds. The next paragraph reads:
 
'Car dés que la flame eut devoré un rang des fusées, qu’on avoit disposées fix à fix, par le moyen d’une amorce qui bordoit chaque demy douzaine, un autre etage s’embrassoit, puis un autre; en sorte que la salpestre prenant feu esloignoit le peril en le croissant.'

(As the flame burned a rank of rockets which had been lined up one-by-one by means of a fishing line wrapped round every half-dozen, one set exploded, then another; in such a way that the saltpetre burned while ejecting the danger as it went.)

The above is believed to be the earliest description of rocket-powered human flight. With the help of this technology he then makes it to the Moon where he does indeed meet intelligent beings before returning to Earth.

Kaikoura Lights

The Kaikoura Lights were a phenomenon seen in the sky over Kaikoura north of Christchurch in 1978, which were seen by pilots in the sky and people on the ground. There was endless speculation at the time and afterwards. This article here though also mentions some traditions in Maori re lights seen, and in their rock art.

Caro, those flying saucers are all quite explainable to me...flying saucers seek for places with high earth magnetism...

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/magnetic-map-shows-earth-youve-never-seen-it-180962612/




And some concentric weels turning around each other and with variable points of gravity...

And some robots with intelligence, a bit copied along the human physiognomy...

And most in the Fifties because that intelligence was warned by the first atomic explosions...

And most in the US because there there is a higher magnetic field...

And if you don't believe in that scenario, you haven't to believe in the new Russian conspiracy theories launced in Russia, first the questioning and then even on semi official channels the guessing if it wouldn't have be an itsy pitchy true...
Conspiracy of some US officials having launced the Corona virus to damage China and indirectly Russia...

KInd regards from Paul.

MM, I know the youtube is about a magnetic stirrer as we used in labo. 

But what if we let for instance a soft iron plate of one square meter inserted in a globe, turn at 1000 revolutions a minute, this soft iron plate with 1000 cupper wire windings around the plate and perpendicular on a strong earth magnetic field of 60,000 nano tesla...
How many ampère will we have in the cupper wire and what electrical power can we expect...

Kind regards from Paul.

MM,

and this... 

https://patents.google.com/patent/WO1989007857A1/en

Abstract:
"As an alternative to traditional aggregates for generating force, electricity or heat driven by conventional forms of energy, a motor is driven by permanent magnets by means of magnetic electron torques in conjunction with the field forces resulting from magnetic polarization. Two or more identical or different magnetic fields generate a co-ordinate composite driving force by mutual excitation due to movement and/or difference in level. After consumption of the power expended by magnetization, generally defined as ageing, by power output, the permanent magnets (1, 2) can be regenerated by remagnetization."


Kind regards, Paul.

Blimey, Paul, you do ask some questions. I'm not sure I can answer that.

MM, take it as a compliment that you are deemed to have the knowledge to answer such questions.

Paul,

  if you google :

"The Belgian Wave"

you may find some answers about flying saucers and their movements and speed


Dirk

Dirk,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_UFO_wave

"My" flying saucers are much much faster and have nearly 10 mach speed ...

Kind regards.

Paul.

Meles meles wrote:

Blimey, Paul, you do ask some questions. I'm not sure I can answer that.

 
MM, some 40 years ago I let it calculate by a female student with  a "stage" (traineeship?) in our service. She came if I remember it well with an electric power of more than 2 kilowatt...and we reckoned with "oersted" now the symbol seems to be Oe but in the time it was a kind of an "H". I have it still in my book of physica from 60 years ago), seemingly the unit of magnetic intensity... I thought it was the magnetic density?...

Kind regards from Paul.

PaulRyckier wrote:

Dirk,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_UFO_wave

"My" flying saucers are much much faster and have nearly 10 mach speed ...

Kind regards.

Paul.

Dirk,

and this from the BBC today...
intelligent life outside our earth...
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-51223704

Kind regards,

Paul.

Other question to MM in relation with "my" flying saucers...

Suppose two wheels:
one wheel with a diameter of 1 meter and connected to a second wheel underneath the other one. The two are connected with each other by a gear that oblige the two to turn in opposite direction at the same speed and with a motor on that gear.

I suppose a powersource of an electrical motor which let the two wheels turn in opposite direction at 6,000 turns a minute.
On one wheel there is on the side a weight connected of 1 KG and on the other on the side a weight of 1/2 KG.

If I calculate right then the wheel with 1 kg at 6,000 turns a minute will have a "power vector?" of:
6,000 tours a minute, that's 60 tours a sec or roughly the kilo will move at 600 meter a second or 2,100 km an hour?

That will then be 600 kgm/sec?
https://www.convertunits.com/from/kg-m/s/to/watt
That will then be roughly a
"power vector," of 6 kilowatt?

And for the second wheel with the 1/2 kilo it will then be 3 kilowatt?

That means that if one add the two opposite power vectors of the two wheels together, one has a power vector in a "certain" direction in the space of 3 kilowatt?

Kind regards from Paul.

Even if it does have a 3 kilowatt power vector and the direction is "up" is this sufficient to counteract an unavoidable downward acceleration of 9.79379 metres per second squared? I would like to see your calculations for how this might be achieved (I have always envied Superman).

I don't understand, are you trying to calculate the apparent 'lift' of a gyroscope when it is rotated about an axis at an angle to the axis of spin? If so then if the disks are spinning in opposite directions the effects will tend to cancel each other out I should think, because the angular momentums (what you are calling the power vector, I think) are in opposing directions.



.... and then taking it a bit further:



But I don't really understand where the weights are: are you saying that one disk weighs 1kg and the other 0.5kg? Otherwise if it's spinning at 6000rpm and the weights are unbalanced on the same disc it'll just shake itself to pieces, no?

nordmann wrote:

Even if it does have a 3 kilowatt power vector and the direction is "up" is this sufficient to counteract an unavoidable downward acceleration of 9.79379 metres per second squared? I would like to see your calculations for how this might be achieved (I have always envied Superman).

 
nordmann,

"the direction is "up"
I am not that far yet ...

But 3 kilowatt is not nothing...if I can reduce the weight of my motor in the middle and can start with a motor of a higher tours capacity? I have chosen the 6,000 tours as that was, I thought, a nowadays possibility
https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/SHINEGLE-high-torque-6000rpm-brushless-electric_60732103608.html?spm=a2700.7724857.normalList.54.597b6a4eCfNoFB

What if I start with 100,000 tours a minute...I will have some 50 kilowatt...
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8507676

Of course the "couple"? (force couple? or pure moment)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Couple_(mechanics)
will not be enough to move the 1kg and 1/2 kg turning in a circle on a distance of 1 meter to zero distance from each other, I suppose...

Kind regards, Paul.