Wake-up time.

I have left this blog dormant for a long time. The weather has made outdoor investigations impossible for the last couple of years. Currently we have gales and rain and even if the ghosts were dancing in my garden, I wouldn't go out there tonight. They don't get wet or feel cold. I do, and so does my expensive camera equipment.

Lab ghost remains elusive, and in this weather the creaks, rattles and bangs in that old building mean I'd have trouble finding a banshee. Any low voices will be drowned out by howls, whistles, creaking and banging doors and rattling windows and all of it is easily discounted as being down to the wind. I wouldn't be able to prove a thing against that level of background interference.

Things are starting to liven up in the news though. There's another UFO report, although it's one of those 'black triangle' ones. They always make me think of those stealth fighters which, oddly enough, appeared a few years after the first black triangle UFOs. If the military were testing a new secret plane, they would test it at night and they certainly wouldn't admit it was anything to do with them if someone spotted it. So I am very sceptical of black triangles.

The saucer ones are more interesting. I knew that the German air force was interested in that form of flying machine during the Second World War. I was aware they had drawn up plans but I didn't know they had actually built fifteen prototypes. Unfortunately the article doesn't say whether any of them flew. The moon base is part of the movie being advertised. That's fiction. The German attempts to build such a machine were real.

There's one big flaw in the design. If the outer rim rotates at high speed, I don't see how they could stop the inner part rotating in the opposite direction once it left the ground. Helicopters get around this by having a small rotor on the tail to keep the body steady, but these discs don't seem to have a tail. Another way would be to have two sets of blades rotating in opposite directions. Again, there doesn't seem to be room for this in the designs.

Is it even possible to make a circular flying craft? It seems it certainly is. At least at the model scale. I don't know how well those designs would scale up. It is, however, possible.

What's special about this shape of craft is its maneuverability. Like a helicopter, it doesn't have to travel in any particular direction. It can hover or even fly backwards. It can change direction at speed without having to bank or turn. It would be faster than a helicopter at all these things because it is, in effect, just the blade part. There is no heavy passenger cabin hanging below the propulsion unit, the whole thing is the propulsion unit. One thing stops them being spaceships - they can only work in an atmosphere. Rotating propellors get you nowhere in space.

If I was involved in a secret military project to get one of these things working (I'm not and never have been) then how can such a thing be kept secret? Simple denial won't work for long. They'd have to be test-flown and sooner or later, someone will see them. Once in a while there's likely to be a crash.

If, however, a couple of pilots were to dress up as aliens now and then, land in a field where they'd be seen, and start a rumour that the ships were from another planet, then the entire project remains secret as long as everyone who takes an interest is looking the other way.

It's still possible that these UFOs are coming from another world, of course, but there is also the possibility that those 1940's plans weren't discarded when they were captured. They might be from another world. Or they might be from this one.

Perhaps even a mixture of both.