Round Flying Things

 were already people who were working on much simpler concepts of dish shaped vehicles. However, most of these early flying saucers of the post Wright brothers era were based on conventional aviation, with most of these vehicle’s innovation simply being airframe designs.

Some of these flying saucer drawings from the early nineteen hundreds became very famous, even though they were fake, such as the one from early science fiction series by Albert Robida known as La Guerre Infernale. Robida’s work features many conceptual drawings of the potential for technology in the future, including the concept for a dome flying machine in 1908 in La Guerre Infernale.

In his own day, Leonardo Da Vinci had already sketched the outlines of circular vehicles: war wagons, movable fortresses, and other artifacts which had been endowed with the power of flight.
Before the Twentieth century there were very few UFO encounters, with a minor number of UFO sightings go back to the ancient Egyptians and romans. The oldest being the documented description of a UFO encounter is said to be in the form cave paintings. Though they were uncommon throughout the earlier part of human history, they were still noted as being seen, usually accompanied by a religious explanation. Sightings of UFOs were seen by people throughout different parts of the ancient world, yet now it's some sort of secret, that gets hidden from society, at the highest levels of government.

The most obscured and hidden histories to man is the history of aviation. Just a quick view of all the secret aircraft, that have been declassified, will show just how hidden and obscure the history of aviation really is, with different designs of aircraft, space craft, and other flying machine being regularly prototyped and flown, only to be remain hidden from the general public and therefore history, due to the secrecy of the aerospace industry. With the first heavier aircraft taking flight in 1903, even the Wright brothers with their earlier primitive design of aircraft, were keen to keep their new invention a secret, out of fear of competition. It wasn't until word got out that Glen Curtis started prototyping his own version of the airplane with his own produced, more powerful engine, which started the Wright brother competition.

In the era before man flight, many designs for heavier than air vehicles were drawn. Historical people going back as far as Leonardo da Vinci have been known to make sketches of their primitive ideas for manually powered helicopters and winged flying contraptions, back in fourteen eighty-eight. Later on, some would even go so far as to prototype other risky flying contraptions, which were based off these same principles. Even though they were only drawings, they showed the initial theory for a technology still to come. Emanuel Swedenborg made his own drawings of flying craft as well in the early eighteenth century, however his designs were much different. His drawing for a flying machine, showed a device with an oblong oval shape, something similar to descriptions of a flying saucer.

Flying saucers would be drawn by others as well afterwards, including in early science fiction cartoons, such as the ones by Albert Robida in La Guerre Infernale, who was a French illustrator who was pretty much a member back in the 1890’s. Albert Robida wrote many well-respected early science fiction pieces. While his career started off just by making caricatures, with small story lines, in 1908 La Guerre Infernale ("The Infernal War"), was released, which was an action-adventure series. La Guerre Infernale was originally started as a weekly for kids, with pictures of a science fiction base story line, and then later turned into a novel.

The following prototypical aircraft to come after that fateful day in 1903, would lead to some to some of the strangest designs of vehicles, with many of these airframes looking quite exotic compared to the aircraft that we are familiar with these days. Many of these experimental aircraft did have saucer like appearance, whether it was a flying wing viewed from a lateral angel to vehicles with airframes similar to what the Avrocar company producing with arial vehicles that were actually disc shaped. Even the US patent office has sub-class of patent dedicated to disk shape craft (Class 244, Aeronautics; Subclass 21.2 Airplane, circular.) Even multiple light-than-aircraft that have been built would resemble something similar looking to something that most would call a UFO.

It wasn't until World War two and after that UFO sightings had become a growing occurrence. That's not to say that they aren't seen before World War Two, just at a much more finite rate than we encounter them today. These pre-World War sightings still baffle me, and others in our field. However, the majority of UFO sightings happened post World War Two, so much so, it needs to be considered that the majority of these recently seen UFOs are from a much more recent source. Because of this, as well as recent government involvement, we can be almost positive that not only are these UFOs are from multiple sources, with a large amount being tied to a recent historical event.