Possible Methods of UFO Propulsion Examined - Part XV
By Dr. Raymond A. Keller, author of the international awards-winning Venus Rising series of books:
Venus Rising: A Concise History of the Second Planet
Final Countdown: Rockets to Venus
Cosmic Ray's Excellent Venus Adventure
Lady Columba Venus Revelations
Dr. Igor I. Sikorsky (1889-1972), Russian-American aviation pioneer designer of helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft, who believed anti-gravity space vehicles would one day become a reality.
“Deep and Real Mystery”
Dr. Igor I. Sikorsky, one of the world’s most outstanding airplane and helicopter designers in the mid-1950s, took a somewhat more conservative attitude toward the anti-gravity research then being conducted in corporate and government circles. While he did believe that sometime before the year 1980, humankind would be flying around in vehicles beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, he wasn’t sure that the immense trans-spatial force of gravity, being so “real, tangible and formidable,” could easily be overcome without some physical carrier. Dr. Sikorsky pointed out to Ansel E. Talbert, the Military and Aviation Editor of the New York Herald Tribune, in an article in its 22 November 1955 European edition, that electricity and light, once equally mysterious, now have become “loyal, obedient servants of man, appearing or disappearing at his command and performing at his will a virtually countless variety of services.” However, as far as gravitation was concerned, Dr. Sikorsky noted that the more scientists attempted to visualize the unknown agent that transmits it, “the more we recognize we are facing a deep and real mystery.”
Dr. Sikorsky felt that the subject of gravity required intensive scientific research. Up through 1955, all known gravity research conducted in the United States had been financed out of the private funds of individuals and corporations. Leaders of the nation’s armed forces had bee briefed by scientists from many fields about the theoretical chances of conquering gravity, but their public comments were something akin to, “Call us when you get some hardware that works.”
“Who Ya Gonna Call?”
Dudley Clarke, president of Clarke Electronics Laboratories of Palm Springs, California, which was then one of the nation’s oldest and prestigious firms devoted to electronics research and experimentation, was actually just such a scientist already at the “hardware stage” of building an anti-gravity device at the time Dr. Sikorsky was expressing his skeptical comments. An article that appeared in the Teletech and Electronics Industry magazine, New York, New York, earlier in 1955, noted that Clarke’s company created quite a stir in the industry when one of its spokespersons announced that their scientists had succeeded in “developing pressure-sensitive resistors having unusual characteristics for parachute and other aviation use.” Clarke apprenticed years ago under Dr. Charles Steinmetz, the General Electric Company’s electrical and mathematical wizard of the 1920s. Based on what he learned from Steinmetz, Clarke was sure that, “The successful harnessing of gravitation will take place sooner than some ‘ivory tower’ scientists believe.”
Overcoming Doubters
Dudley Clarke pointed out that back in 1935, Sir Frank Whittle, the British jet pioneer, was informed by the United Kingdom’s Air Ministry that it could see “no practical value” for his jet aircraft engine. Clarke then told the Herald Tribune’s Aviation Editor that, “I have a particularly cherished letter. It was written about the same time by the commanding general at Wright Field (Dayton, Ohio) giving a similar analysis of a jet design proposed by me.”
Clearly, one of the main issues that Clarke and others faced with the whole issue of developing anti-gravity devices was overcoming all the doubters out there, especially those entrenched in high places. Clarke noted that, “The force of gravity is powerful enough to generate many thousand times more electricity than is now generated by Niagara Falls and every other water-power center in the world- if it can be harnessed. This impending event will make possible the manufacture of anti-gravity ‘power packages’ which can be bought for a few hundred dollars. These would provide all of the heat and power needed by one family for an indefinite period.”
Coral and Jim Lorenzen converted their Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, home into international headquarters of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) during the period 1952-1955. This photo was taken in 1955, one year before the Lorenzens moved to Tucson, Arizona, where they continued with APRO and their UFO research.
Ufologists Postulate Anti-Gravity Assist
Coral Lorenzen of Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, was one of the pioneer ufologists and the founder of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) in 1952. Lorenzen believed strongly in the reality of a crashed flying saucer at Aztec, New Mexico, that was retrieved and covered up by the government, as described in Hollywood reporter Frank Scully’s classic, Behind the Flying Saucers (New York, New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1950). On the veracity of Scully and his book, Lorenzen noted in her groundbreaking book, Flying Saucer Occupants (New York, New York: Signet Books, 1967), that, “Although generally rejected by most researchers in the early years, subsequent incidents (UFO crashes, landings and occupant reports) seem to indicate that Scully was either telling the truth or that he was a prophet.”
In 1950’s best-selling Behind the Flying Saucers, Hollywood columnist Frank Scully delves into the advanced propulsion system of an alien spaceship recovered from the 25 March 1948 crash site.
According to Frank Scully, an analysis of the crashed saucer at Aztec, New Mexico, revealed that its propulsion system was based on the harnessing of electromagnetic forces, much as Nikola Tesla predicted that future aircraft would surely incorporate into their designs. During World War II, it seems that both Allied and Axis scientists had already begun to make huge strides in this area. Of this, Scully surmised that any blank spaces left in the development phases of an electromagnetic propulsion system were going to be filled in by the back-engineering of crashed disks. In Chapter 2 of Behind the Flying Saucers, Scully quotes Silas M. Newton, the president of a Colorado oil company privy to classified information on the Aztec saucer debris, as declaring during a lecture at the University of Denver, Colorado, on 8 March 1950, that “They (the scientists) had come to the conclusion that everything existing owed its shape and being to magnetic lines of force. There are 1,257 such magnetic lines of force to the square centimeter. That is to say, about a half inch.”
Newton was further quoted as saying that, “Much of the magic, which has baffled both trained and untrained observers, is not magic at all. A good deal of what is claimed to have happened to ships in the air, such as disintegration, suspension for a period of time, immobilization of their instrument boards, and such, can be duplicated in the laboratory.” And of Captain Thomas F. Mantell of the Kentucky National Guard, who died on 7 January 1948 at the young age of 25 when his P-51 Mustang trainer plane crashed as a result of pursuing a UFO, Newton told the student body at the University of Denver that, “Mantell’s plane and every portion of his plane from the motor to the tips of the wings hung together by reason of magnetic frequency. This was true of even Mantell himself. Therefore, all that a flying saucer had to do to disintegrate Mantell’s plane was to demagnetize it.”
In discussing the technical aspects of a flying saucer such as the one described by Scully and Newton, Coral Lorenzen wrote in Flying Saucer Occupants that, “The proponents of the anti-gravity idea propose that some system is utilized by the UFOs which is able to nullify the gravitational field of the Earth and produce its own gravitational field which it carries with it- a field within a field, so to speak. This theory, however, appears to take care of only half the problem. We have no basis for the assumption that eliminating the weight of an object eliminates its inertia….”
“To say that we do not know how to accomplish a particular effect is not the same as saying that it cannot be done,” added the APRO director, adding that, “To say either that such a thing is ultimately impossible or that such a thing is ultimately possible requires that one drop the mantle of the scientist and don that of the fortune teller.
“Circumstantial evidence in the form of UFO reports, however, advocates slightly the assumption of the idea that we are dealing with possibilities,” she noted, specifically keeping in mind, “the most mystifying aspects of UFO reports from the standpoint of contemporary physical science…. The repetitive appearance of descriptions of right-angle turns and (less often) accounts of UFOs that disappear abruptly.”
The reader has seen multiple examples in this series on possible methods of UFO propulsion how anti-gravity assist can theoretically be provided through the application of nuclear power or sundry other agents, thus confirming Dr. Sikorsky and APRO Director Coral Lorenzen’s assertions of such a needed boost. And one can heartily concur with Lorenzen’s astute observation that, “Science, however grudgingly is constantly converting the impossible to the possible.”
*****
Stay tuned to this website for Part XVI of Possible Methods of UFO Propulsion Examined, where Dr. Raymond A. Keller looks at various cross-overs in electronics and anti-gravity research and experimentation taking place behind the scenes in the period 1956-1960.
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