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This is a New Zealand Defence Force public release of RNZAF file AIR 39/3/3, "Flying Saucers," which covers 1952 to 1955 and was declassified in September 2010 under the Official Information Act. It collects sighting reports from the public and military personnel, press clippings, and a table of 1952 sightings. It also holds Carter Observatory opinions attributing some reports to meteors. A large part covers the inquiry into lights seen from National Airways Corporation Flight 108 on 31 October 1955, which the RNZAF could not fully explain as Venus.
“Christchurch”32 pages
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# Has Russia got atomic saucers? Special to the Auckland Star From K. FRANK FELDMAN LONDON. (Airmail).The contemporary flying saucer mystery is now seven years old. Explanations that the disks are of extra-terrestrial origin have been debunked frequently enough, but the studied silence on the part of successive U.S. Air Force commissions which were entrusted with the investigation of these phenomena was portentous. Apart from hypothetical interstellar craft, there is now strong evidence that the Soviets are building flying saucers. Jet-disk plants were established in an irregular chain south of Kasalinsk, near the shore of Lake Aral. These littoral plants have been working at full pressure. In 1947 a number of German specialists were selected to join three teams in this region. The German technicians and aircraft designers did not know it but there were 174 of them working on the secret disk project: This division prevented the Germans from knowing what was going on. They knew only part of the story. Each team dealt with a different aerodynamic problem. ## First success WITH the passing of time the pattern fell into shape. Six test prototypes failed before the first success could be reported to Moscow. The Soviet engineers assembled the various parts of the disk planes themselves. They permitted no alien to watch this process. By 1951 the Russians discarded all pretence and allowed their German colleagues to watch a take-off. The ascent was very quick. The disks did not taxi for a start. They rose vertically at high velocity and were lost to the eye within ten seconds. Twelve lenticular jets powered the saucer. ## Professor Einstein . . . what is Kapitza really after? The code-name for the experimental saucer is COW 7. It is not quite clear whether the disk consists of two independently functioning parts; but, judging by the quartzitic cockpit which is bedded in a rail that feathers on ball-bearings, the outer disk of the superstructure rotates on its own axis. The disk plane gains altitude at a speed of 630 m.p.h. in vertical flight and then burns up space at 1000 m.p.h. in horizontal flight. ## Berserk craft A FLANGE rotates around the core of the disk. The saucer can either be deployed as a guided missile or can be used as a manned fighter. It holds up to four flyers. Chief of the entire project is believed to be the relatively young Soviet Air Marshal Constantin Verschinin. It is known that occasionally a saucer gets out of control and zips off. Some defect in the "brain" of the machine causes this lapse and the saucer goes ripping through the sky at a tremendous speed, having thrown off its invisible shackles. Such berserk projectiles are believed to have traversed Scandinavia. If Russia's flying saucers are designed to carry atomic weapons they would fall within the jurisdiction of Lt General Pjotr Kapitza, 59 year-old former pupil of Lord Rutherford. Kapitza recently created a firstclass sensation when he gave a three-minute interview on Magadan Radio. "I am glad," he said, "to have switched to practical work after so many years research." Russia's Foreign Ministry must have known, indeed must have inspired, this broadcast. ## Fled to England 1st by choice. He fed from the blood-spattered scene in Leningrad shortly after the Revolution, and joined Rutherford in England staying in Britain until 1934 when he accepted the Invitation of a scientific congress and went to Russia. There is a witty anecdote about this. Baldwin telegraphed to Stalin requesting that Kapitza be permitted to leave the U.S.S.R. "Send us Rutherford." Stalin is alleged to have cabled back, "and you can have Kapitza." Professor Einstein thinks highly of Kapitza's scientific acumen. "I wonder," the relativity man once said, "I wonder what Kapitza is really after." Stalin refused to grant him an exit permit and for a whole year Kapitza staged a one-man sit-down strike in a Moscow hotel room. Finally his resistance broke. The world may never know, although he definitely has had a hand in the disk project. In the three minute broadcast Kapitza said that he hoped the "nuclear teams" in his charge would never be used. ## Guided missiles ## EXPERTS of the United States Atomic Energy 26/214 States Atomic Energy Commission, including its chairman Lewis L. Strauss, believe that Kapitza may have been speaking of guided missiles with atomic charges. At any rate, Kapitza now resides in the back of beyond. Magadan is the headquarters of a region that he
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