Professor Harry Messel. . . chalk, equations, an open mind.
THE AUCKLAND STAR, SATURDAY, AUGUST 21, 1954—
Peculiar offspring
ASKED to assume for the purpose of discussion that saucers came from outer space, Professor Messel was on his hobby horse—cosmic rays. Out there, he said, nothing could protect one from the rays. Fruit flies had been rocketed up in cylinders to a height of 20 miles to see what cosmic rays would do. This insect was chosen because it breeds rapidly and mutations could be studied quickly, generation to generation.
Design for the future
WORKING with this in mind, Frost has produced a design for the future. In the centre of a 40ft diameter saucer is a small but immensely powerful jet engine, surmounted by a bubble cockpit. The engine has 35 burner tubes radiating to 180 exhaust pipes around the edge. The pilot has movable control over one lip of each exhaust to deflect jet blast and profit from Coanda effect.
In theory, this strange craft takes off vertically by deflecting the blast downwards, so removing air from above the machine and allowing it to rise. Once airborne, lip selection enables direction changes to be made and the automatically moving cockpit rotates so that it always faces forward.
Some Canadians think this saucer will fly one day. And they are not alone in this belief. It is reported that Britain, the United States and Russia are also working on saucer designs.
watching a weather balloon in New Mexico. It was 60,000 feet from heads! “And they are only 60,000 feet from the ground.” His findings were, then, that if saucers had beings in them they knew more about cosmic rays than man. They had probably found some protection and might even be using their power.
“If we look back 50 years,” he said, “the things once considered fantastic, impossible, unreal, are now taken for granted. The future must hold even greater advancement than we can imagine at present.”
Let us turn from a man of science to a man of engineering—an Englishman named John Frost, now living in Toronto, where he is chief designer for Avro Canada. While others ponder and wonder, John Frost has designed a flying saucer. Its principle is what is known as the “Coanda effect.” This was discovered by Henry Coanda, a Rumanian inventor, in 1937. Simply, it says that by curving one side of a nozzle one can deflect the jet blast through it to follow the curved side.
“The alternative is that they are still a real A-grade mystery. This alternative would get me a very low priority. I don’t believe that Martians are using saucers for earth reconnaissance trips. But the saucer mystery may not yet be satisfactorily solved. There is a five per cent remainder of saucer sightings unexplained. If these saucers are from this earth it is the best kept secret of all time and has completely fooled everybody!”