On December 2,1954, Canada's Trade Minister C.D. Howe sought to dampen speculation about the existence of an Avro flying saucer program with a statement that the Canadian government had backed studies into disc-shaped aircraft in 1952-53, but had since dropped the idea.
This, as it turned out, was true — up to a point. In fact, the Avro design, now called Project Y2, had been purchased outright by the U.S. Air Force and re-code-named "Project Silverbug."
Under pressure from the U.S. press to reveal the nature of this program — which, though classified, had again leaked — the USAF issued a bland statement in 1955 that it had a "research and development contract with the Avro Company of Canada to explore a new aircraft design concept." But that was all.
USAF documents on Silverbug declassified as recently as the mid 1990s show just how radical the Silverbug/Y2 concept was. "The Project Y2 design proposal incorporates a number of advanced improvements brought about by the utilization of several radical ideas in fundamental areas." Among these was a "very large radial-flow gas-turbine engine, which, when covered, will form a flying wing with a circular planform, similar in appearance to a very large discus."
The entire air vehicle, in other words, was a giant flattened jet engine, the hot gases that propelled it forward exiting from slots around its rim. By directing the exhaust, Silverbug would have been capable of almost instantaneous high-speed turns in any direction; maneuvers that would have included 180-degree reversals, the craft flipping this way and that like a tumbling coin, and all with minimum discomfort to the pilot, because the g-forces would have been alleviated by the adjustable thrust.
Much like the craft that had vexed the U.S. Air Force intelligence community following the first rash of U.S. flying saucer sightings in 1947.
The only other place prior to this discovery I had ever heard mention of a radial-flow gas turbine, an RFGT, was in Germany during the war.
After the ignominy of the Avrocar program, the Avro SPG disbanded and most of its exceptional brain talent was snapped up by U.S. aerospace companies or government-run research establishments. The most notable exception was John Frost, the maverick genius and inspiration behind the saucer projects, who soon after the Avro company was dissolved in April 1962 emigrated to Auckland, New Zealand. After the exhilaration and excitement of designing highly classified, highly unconventional air vehicles for the Canadian and U.S. air forces, Frost settled for the relative obscurity of an engineering job with Air New Zealand. He rarely, if ever, spoke about his work on the Avrocar and never mentioned the existence of the supersonic saucer projects that had gone on all the while behind it. He died of a heart attack in October 1979 at the age of 63.
Soon after I got back from Washington I rang Frost's son, Tony. I had tracked him down to Auckland, New Zealand, via a small band of researchers, all with strong aerospace credentials, who had done a fantastic job in piecing together the Avro story — the real story; one in which high-performance flying saucers had been shown to be real; far from the stuff of legend, as they had been in Germany.
"Dad was very secretive about his work," Tony Frost told me. "Everything I ever learned about what he had been doing in Canada I had to pick up from people he'd worked with. The Special Projects Group was, for a time, just about the most secret group of its kind in Canada or the U.S., but why its activities should remain shrouded in secrecy for so long is still a mystery to me."
In the brief silence that followed, my mind worked hard to fill in the gaps. Had the lumbering Avrocar been an intentional blind all along, something to draw the flak from the SPG's real, but hidden goaclass="underline" the creation of a supersonic, vertical takeoff and landing interceptor?
With Avro shut down, had work on the supersonic saucers contin ued in the utmost secrecy in the U.S.? Was there something about the very shape and form of the saucer, indeed, that was inherently super-classified?
While the Avro program didn't entirely explain how saucer-shaped craft had been "within the present U.S. knowledge" in 1947, it came very close.
First off, Avro showed that man-made flying saucers were real; they'd existed.
Secondly, if you substituted the radial-flow gas turbine, the RFGT, for something even more exotic — a T.T. Brown — type propulsion system, for example — the specification was a pretty neat match.
In the conventional world of aerospace, testing a new kind of airframe with a known engine was standard operating procedure. Was this what the Avro program had really been about? Were the Americans using the Canadians to perfect the aerodynamics of the saucer before the arrival of an all-new propulsion source — something that Trimble and Co. had hinted at in their statements of 1956?
Or was the truth altogether more prosaic? Had the supersonic Avro disc program merely been hushed up all these years in an attempt to avoid embarrassment by those who had thrown money at it and seen it fail?
These were questions without answers, so I asked Tony Frost instead how he thought his father had come by his radical ideas.
He told me, almost in passing, that a file recently uncovered in Canada's National Archives had shown that his father had made a journey to West Germany in 1953. There, at a Canadian government installation in the company of British and Canadian intelligence officials, Frost met with a German aviation engineer who claimed to have worked on a vehicle similar to the disc-shaped aircraft on the drawing boards at Avro. The German said that the project had been under way at a site near Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1944—45, and that the saucer had not only been built, but flight-tested. He told Frost that both the plans and the craft itself had been destroyed in the closing weeks of the war.
How the information was used by Frost was never made clear. Like the Avro supersonic disc program, he never spoke about it — to his family or anyone.
I felt the historical data pulling me back. If the Canadians and the British had been colluding on German-derived saucer technology, it was dangerously close to the scenario that Vesco had espoused all along.
But Tony Frost had spent years trying to piece together the secret history of his father's life and he was still no closer to the truth.
I had exhausted the safe, cozy world of archives and Internet trails. It was like Cross had said; they'd succeeded only in taking me everywhere and nowhere. If a decade of training had taught me anything, I knew my only real chance of verifying Trimble's outburst back in 1956 was to search for leads in the real world.
I didn't know it yet, but I was about to get a helping hand from a scientist on the inside loop, a man I came in time to regard as a genius, who for reasons of his own had already embarked on exactly the same journey as I had.
Chapter 7
I had expected the drive to Austin, the state capital, to provide me with a rich set of impressions of the frontier that divided the Eastern Seaboard from the wilderness that started here and extended to the Pacific. But for two hours I sat on the freeway, my views of Texas obscured by bumperto-bumper traffic, peeling trailer homes and secondhand car lots. And so I thought of the man I was about to visit instead.
Dr. Harold E. Puthoff, "Hal" to those who knew him better than I, was the director of the Institute of Advanced Studies at Austin. Puthoff had lived his whole life on a frontier; one that straddled known science, the world explained and understood, and a place that most people, scientists included, said didn't exist.