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It seems that three countries were cooperating on the project to build a flying saucer. These countries were
If the public would have ever know the truth at the time, they would have been astounded. The facts seem to indicate that the plane was being constructed in Canada by a British engineer named John Frost along with other engineers such as Ray Gibson of AVRO. The project was supposed to build a saucer aircraft with the best performance possible but it changed during experimentation into a sleek plane. AVRO was a British company that had a subsidiary in Canada. One of the things that was to make this plane revolutionary were small jet nozzles which were designed to give the aircraft increased thrust making the plane fly faster. The goal was Mach 5 or fives times the speed of sound. This seemed impossible in the early fifties. The plane would takeoff by standing on it tail. It is hard to see in the picture but notice the flat area on the tail.
AVRO had injected over five million dollars into a secret project including 2 million from the U.S..Today this would have been chump change, but in the early 1950s this was serious money. On December 3, 1954, The Leader Post, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, ran a front page headline declaring "Saucer project cost too large". The Canadian defence department had cancelled the project stating it was impractical at the time. Some of the engineers thought that the plane could have eventually attained at least some of its goals and were remorseful at the cancellation.
Were these engineers just disappointed at the cancellation of a project that they had invested years of their lives in or did the project actually show some promise? Some people have said that the AVRO plane has some similarities to our stealth aircraft. Of course the SR-71 Blackbird, a plane that even today holds many of the world's speed records did come out in the sixties but how many know that the A12 was a plane that looked almost exactly like the SR-71, was a little faster and first constructed in 1962 and had it's engine tested as early as 1958?
Was the A12 built from lessons learned in building the AVRO plane? We may never know the answer. The A-12's speed is classified but a speed over Mach 3 is admitted to, very close to the 2500 mph of the AVRO project.
THE CANADIAN CONNECTION:
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Under the direction of Dr. Walter Dornberger, the man in charge of operations at Peenemünde, and Dr. Wernher von Braun's boss, a secret saucer program was started at the BMW/Heinkel factory in Dresden in 1943. This design team was headed by Dr. Richard Miethe, who worked for the BMW rocket division in Berlin. These discs had been originally built in Germany in the fall of 1943, with the first flight occurring during the spring of 1944.
After the close of WWII, many German aeronautical engineers were sent to White Sands Missile Range under "Operation Paperclip". The remaining group of scientists, were captured by the Russians. The Soviets reached the German plant in Breslau before the Americans, and quickly dismantled many factories, rebuilding them in Russia. It's clear now that the Soviet Union had it's own saucer program (derived from captured German scientist) which explains many of the over-flights in the United States. Dr. Richard Miethe was sent to Fort Bliss, and later worked at Wright Patterson AFB. Eventually, Dr. Miethe went to work for John C. Frost of the Avro Aircraft Company (a subsidiary of Hawker Siddeley) in Malton Ontario Canada. Mr. Frost was a gifted aircraft designer from England, who headed up Avro's "special projects group" in 1952. Avro was currently working on at least 16 different "Flying Saucer" proposals, including project "Y" and project "Y2" (aka "Project Silverbug"). Project Silverbug was a design for a supersonic VTOL flying disc.
By 1953, John Frost and his team had completed most of the "paper studies" on these highly unusual aircraft. The only problem facing Mr. Frost, was the overwhelming costs involved in the development of these designs. It quickly became clear that only one country was capable of providing the necessary "financial backing" to "foot the bill" for Avro's flying saucer programs. USAF Lt. General Donald L. Putt had been briefed on the incredible performance specifications of these aircraft, and visited the Avro Canada plant on September 16, 1953.
Project Silver Bug
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Not wanting this incredible technology to be acquired by any other nation, the U.S.A.F. officially took over and financed Avro's saucer program in late 1954. This allowed the Air Force to "farm out" its own saucer program on foreign soil, while at the same time keeping the project strategically close to the United States. By 1955, Dr. Miethe had completed construction of the disc shaped aircraft he had originally built in Germany in 1944. These were the exact aircraft reported as "flying Saucers" in the U.S. during 1947. The first test flight of this USAF/Avro disc occurred in Malton in 1955, with additional test flights taking place at Edwards AFB.
