Avrocar, the real flying saucer
The account
At the height of the Cold War, a Canadian aircraft maker built a flying saucer for the U.S. military.
What investigators found
The Avrocar is real and well documented, but it never got past being an unstable prototype that barely left the ground.
The story
In the 1950s, the aircraft maker Avro Canada, based in Malton near Toronto, secretly developed disc-shaped aircraft. The best known was the VZ-9 Avrocar, ordered by the U.S. Army and Air Force. It was a disc with a large turbine at its center, meant to take off vertically and fly as a fast attack vehicle. Two prototypes were built, and testing began in 1959.
In practice, the Avrocar could only hover a short distance above the ground and became unstable whenever it tried to climb. The program was canceled in 1961. To ufologists, the case shows that governments tried to copy the shape of flying saucers. To aviation historians, it is simply an experiment that failed, and one of the prototypes now sits in a museum in the United States.