Government report on secret flying saucer program made available

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The truth isn’t out there … it’s been stored in a warehouse for 56 years. The National Declassification Center in College Park, Md., opened one of more than 100 cardboard boxes from the Air Force recently and came across a 114-page document from 1956 sure to interest the tin-foil-hat crowd: a document describing a secret program by the Air Force to build a flying saucer. "These records have been classified probably since their creation during the '50s," Neil Carmichael, director of the declassification review division at NDC, told Popular Mechanics, which first posted news of the complete document. "It’s like somebody went into somebody’s office, emptied out a filing cabinet, stuck it in a box, sealed it, and sent it off to the federal records center. It was deemed permanently valuable at some point in its life and that’s why we have it today."  The newly released documents, not yet posted on the website of the National Declassification Center, offer details on a Cold War-era plan to build a round, vertical takeoff and landing aircraft that can only be described as a flying saucer. The disk-shaped craft -- which comes complete with an ejector seat and was powered by a “ram jet” -- was designed to reach a top speed of Mach 4 and reach a ceiling of more than 100,000 feet, according to the lengthy document, which is titled “Project 1794, Final Development Summary Report” and dated 1956. It reveals that the Air Force had contracted the construction of the craft to a Canadian company, Avro Aircraft Limited in Ontario...more