Long read coming, but here goes ....
I'm sorry to say but the claims on TV, about the Americans and Russians having lots of experimental craft with very odd shapes, are just bunkum.
The basic rule of thumb is that any aircraft needs maximum lift for minimum drag (just like an F1 car needs maximum down-force for minimum drag). That rule of thumb has been understood ever since
Sir George Cayley stated the principles for flight in 1799. I do sometimes guffaw when I watch some of the b.s. on TV which involve claims about "odd shaped aircraft" - even the Germans (or especially the Germans) stuck to those principles.
Let's take the German
Horten Ho 229 "flying wing" as a good example. The reason they developed this was because Göring wanted a plane that could "carry 1,000 kilograms of bombs a distance of 1,000 kilometres with a speed of 1,000 kilometres per hour". Because the Junkers Jumo jet engine was already in use (in the Messerschmitt Me 262), Reimar and Walter Horten decided that, in order to meet Göring's spec, a flying wing with a jet engine was the only way to do so. Note that a flying wing was not a new concept, they chose it because it has lower drag and, with a jet engine, high lift. There are claims that it was also an early "stealth" aircraft, but in reconstructions undertaken in 2008, the only reason why it had a somewhat reduced radar signature was due to the use of wood in part of the wing (thus by extension, I might claim that the de Havilland Mosquito was built of wood as a stealth fighter bomber). I did see one TV program where it was also stated that the Russians fitted a much higher powered jet engine to a captured Ho 229 and were astounded that it flew at Mach 2 (guffaw at 200 decibels).
Now let's move on to the
Avro Canada VZ-9 Avrocar - so-called "secret flying saucer". Before looking at its engine, we need to look at the
Power Jets W.2 jet engine which was Frank Whittle's early design based on his 1930 patent. Unlike all 4-stroke or 2-stroke reciprocating internal combustion engines (which rely on either compressing an air-fuel mixture and then igniting it, or compressing air and then squirting fuel into it) a jet engine is an internal combustion engine that can continuously burn compressed air and fuel in a combustion chamber, because the air is instead continually pre-compressed by a turbine (aka fan).
In Whittle's design, there were several "reverse flow" combustion chambers outside the turbine, see the cutaway of the similar RR Welland below
(inlet on the right, blue is cold air, orange is combustion and also "exhaust" or thrust areas).
Note that Whittle used this design due to his concern about materials available at the time, and also to keep the engine short. Hans von Ohain drastically altered this design in 1937 by making it all axial, as in the Junkers Jumo see below
The 1941 de Havilland Goblin removed the reverse-flow but kept multiple combustion chambers, keeping it short see below
- jet DH_Goblin.jpg (25.69 KiB) Viewed 96956 times
Now we come to
John Carver "Jack" Frost, who worked at de Havilland in 1942 on jets using the Goblin engine, then joined Avro Canada in 1947, and then in 1952 he started their "Special Projects Group". He designed a new type of engine layout with the combustion chambers outside the outer rim of the centrifugal compressor, but pointing outwards like the spokes on a wheel. The turbine drove the compressor using gearing, rather than a shaft.
The resulting engine was arranged in the form of a large disk, which he referred to as a "pancake engine". The jet thrust exited from around the entire rim of the engine, and this presented problems trying to adapt the design to a typical aircraft.
Meanwhile, some strategists in the USA were concerned about a possible nuclear "first strike" by the Russians in Europe, and they wanted aircraft that could take off without runways - VTOL. Frost came up with a craft that used the
Coandă effect
and said that, by using his engine, if ducted around a suitable shaped craft, lift would be obtained - see below.
Frost believed/hoped that, somehow, his engine could produce stable lift and then somehow also give some forward thrust (a bit like a helicopter does). The reason why nobody was using a conventional jet engine to do this, was because the Hawker Siddeley Harrier did not obtain first VTOL flight until 1967. Note also that, around the time the Harrier jump-jet made its first public flight, an original Avrocar was put in a museum in the USA (so no truth to "hidden secret flying saucers")
If you watch
this youtube video of the Avrocar, you'll see how rubbish it was. Basically no better than (in fact, useless in comparison to) Sir Christopher Cockerell's SR.N1 Hovercraft as seen in this
this youtube video. The SR.N1 made its first crossing of the English Channel in 1959. It's strange that nobody refers to this as a "flying saucer".
There were a few propeller driven aircraft in the 30s and 40s that used circular-shaped wings for some weird reason, but they never got anywhere mainly because they broke the rule of "max lift for min drag". See
Arup S2,
Sack AS 6,
Vought V-173 flying pancake (now in a museum in the USA),
Vought XF5U
To conclude, there never was, never will be, any man-made or alien-made saucer-shaped craft that flies high through the skies, because a saucer shape provides no inherent use for flight - except as a Frisbee. [How about a boomerang with jet engines - Noooo don't even think about it]. Furthermore, should anti-gravity exist, rather than put it into a saucer, why not just build it into a house ?
If you want total codswallop, these 3 websites are a laugh
https://www.manmade-ufos.com/usaf-flying-saucer
http://themillenniumreport.com/2016/03/ ... -for-real/
http://www.laesieworks.com/ifo/lib/USDiscWing.html