ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

38 The Hunt for Zero Point
U-2 spyplane (which first flew in 1955, but is still in service), a singleengined
aircraft intended for ultra-long endurance missions (and hardly,
therefore, a maneuvering type like the discs reported to Twining), had a
maximum unrefueled range in excess of 3,000 miles—3,500, perhaps, on
a good day.
And, needless to say, no one had ever owned up to building a flying
saucer.
To construct the "aircraft" that Twining had in mind, he told General
Schulgen: "Any developments in this country along the lines indicated
would be extremely expensive, time-consuming and at the considerable
expense of other projects and therefore, if directed, should be set up
independently of existing projects."
Placing such a project outside the mainstream of aerospace science
brought to mind the effort that had resulted in the development of
the first atomic bomb. In 1956, George Trimble had also cited the
Manhattan Project as the inspiration for his proposed antigravity
program. Brown, too, had offered a highly unusual development model
for Winterhaven, his Mach 3 antigravity program, one that only peripherally
involved the U.S. aerospace industry.
I tried to keep my mind on the facts. The essential point of Twining's
memo was that the development of an aircraft exhibiting the characteristics
of the saucers that people were seeing in 1947 was "within the
present U.S. knowledge," but that the craft themselves were nothing to
do with the USAAF. Then whose were they?
Twining himself offered two possibilities. First, that they were of
"domestic origin—the product of some high security project not known
to AC/AS-2 (air force technical intelligence) or this Command." And
second, "that some foreign nation has a form of propulsion, possibly
nuclear, which is outside of our domestic knowledge."
The first part I actually found a little scary. Twining was entertaining
the possibility that these craft had been developed and fielded by another
branch of the U.S. armed forces—the Navy, perhaps—without the
knowledge of the USAAF.
The second explanation was, at least, a little more conventional. The
discs, Twining offered, were the result of another country's secret
development effort.
I had been sucked into a story that seemed to have had its origins in
1956. Reluctantly, I now had to concede that if I was to do this thing any
justice at all, I needed to cast the net back even further.