![]() Some sightings, says Shail, were of "weather balloons, Zeppelins, cloud formations and experimental aircraft being developed by the US Air Force as part of the Cold War". Some of these reports were clearly hoaxes: it wasn't hard to fake a saucer photograph if you had a hubcap, frisbee or pizza to hand. Soon there were hundreds of other reported sightings – including one of crashed flying-saucer debris in Roswell, New Mexico. The story spread around the globe considerably faster than 1,200 mph. The editor of the East Oregonian newspaper sent this utterly unverifiable story to the Associated Press news service, and on 26 June, Hearst International put out a press release that contained the fateful term "flying saucers". In June 1947, a commercial pilot, Kenneth Arnold, claimed to have seen nine "flying discs" zipping across Washington state in the US at 1,200 mph. But if you flick through copies of Startling Stories, Super Science Stories and other pulp magazines of the period, you'll see that in the first half of the 20th Century, aliens preferred their transport to resemble submarines and airships. Science-fiction artists had drawn circular spacecraft long before that: an early Flash Gordon strip from 1934 features a spinning "squadron of deadly space-gyros". And yet it didn't take off, so to speak, until the 1950s, when the world went flying-saucer crazy. The flying saucer is a design classic – the archetypal Unidentified Flying Object. "By the end of the 1950s," says Andrew Shail, senior lecturer in film at Newcastle University, "that particular shape had become a shorthand for 'spacecraft piloted by beings from another world', available to everyone working in the visual arts." Sure enough, flying saucers have signified mysterious visitors from Mars and beyond in countless films, TV series, novels, comics, and even hit records, from Mulder's I Want To Believe poster in The X-Files TV series to the popular children's picture book, Aliens Love Underpants. Don't Look Up: The stories that reflect our oldest fear ![]() Flash Gordon: An erotic sci-fi extravaganza Maybe, just maybe, Nope will be a proper flying-saucer movie – a celebration of one of the most recognisable and spine-tingling shapes in the history of popular culture. Judging by the twists and turns in Peele's previous films, Get Out and Us, it's impossible to say whether its real or fake, whether it's from the Earth or from outer space, but that glimpse of sparkling silver is tantalising. Note: Dates based on Pacific time zone at the time of Ingenuity's flight.It's only there for a moment i n the trailer for Jordan Peele's new horror film, Nope, but it's definitely there: a flying saucer. MiMi Aung, Mars Helicopter Project Manager Taking Flight: How Girls Can Grow Up to be Engineers News Briefing: Preview First Mars Helicopter Flights Mars Helicopter Live Q&A: One Step Closer to First Flight Month of Ingenuity - Helicopter Flight Preview News Briefing: Mars Helicopter Pre-FlightĬhannels that carried the broadcast include:Įxperts Discuss NASA's Mars Helicopter - Talk for Students Samantha Hatch, human resources specialist Nagin Cox, engineering operations deputy team chief With its tech demo complete, Ingenuity transitions to a new operations demonstration phase to explore how future rovers and aerial explorers can work together. After that, the helicopter successfully performed additional experimental flights of incrementally farther distance and greater altitude. ![]() It was a major milestone: the very first powered, controlled flight in the extremely thin atmosphere of Mars, and, in fact, the first such flight in any world beyond Earth. For the first flight on April 19, 2021, Ingenuity took off, climbed to about 10 feet (3 meters) above the ground, hovered in the air briefly, completed a turn, and then landed. The helicopter completed its technology demonstration after three successful flights. Once the rover reached a suitable "airfield" location, it released Ingenuity to the surface so it could perform a series of test flights over a 30-Martian-day experimental window. It hitched a ride to Mars on the Perseverance rover. The Mars Helicopter, Ingenuity, is a technology demonstration to test powered, controlled flight on another world for the first time. ![]()
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