by Kathdys » Tue Dec 09, 2014 8:15 am
Sure! I mean, throwing rocks is like, the first and best technology ever, now if only there was a way to be the rock...
Admittedly, the birds make it look much more majestic and less fatal. So, I guess maybe jumping through the branches of trees, or swimming in the ocean would be more inspiring than rock-throwing.
Also, I'm pretty sure the 'world was flat' thing was greatly exaggerated, since a lot of ancient civilizations were good enough at observation and mathematics to do some amazing things with astronomy, making all kinds of predictions and deductions, including that the world was round.
I mean, they didn't have much to go on, but the people in Athens, in particular, had thousands of years to build up their knowledge just by yammering on in their forums working on fragmentary evidence, and they were idolized by most Western intellectuals at least well into the industrial period.
Aristotelian logic might be a little presumptuous, and spontaneous generation an utter myth (along with all his sexist and racist stuff), but 'the world is flat' just doesn't satisfy anyone who thinks for a living. I mean, they'd go to amazing lengths to contrive that the Earth was the center of the solar system despite this being way more complicated and hard to justify, but trying to explain the Earth flat, even though anyone who lives in a port town can clearly see a ship's sails sink below the horizon as it sails away, and anyone looking at the night sky can see the stars slowly rotate around the Earth's surface, takes a bonus level of crazy. I wouldn't be surprised if people who had no free time to sit and stare at things believed it, though.
Regarding the Aerocar, there were only two ever built, it's very well-documented and both are accounted for, so it seems unlikely that one ever crashed anywhere, for the wreck to be recovered. And it couldn't get more than a few feet off the ground, so it would be pretty impossible as a source of credible UFO sightings. That and it didn't exist until the 1950s, several years after the Roswell incident. It does explain where some military insiders with incomplete information could have gotten incredibly stupid ideas, though--like just its estimated performance statistics. 300 MPH, 10,000 foot ceiling, for a metal disc with a single fan in it and no control surfaces? Ngaaaaa. Nice try at the anti-gravity technology, I'm sure that confused a lot of hopeful technologists.
If it wasn't the first craft of a similar design, there might have been others in the US... though I doubt they'd perform better. They might have made some nice wreckage somewhere. Some people think Nazis built the first flying saucers, but people blame Nazis for everything. To be fair, there aren't many crazy ideas they didn't attempt, it's just that there aren't that many they completed successfully.
Wikipedia tells me that what crashed at Roswell was, in fact, a balloon; it was just a military balloon with radar-catching material, not an ordinary weather balloon. They showed some debris which was things like rubber, wood, foil, paper, and glue which no one would ever build a spaceship out of, or even a high-performance aircraft (after the second world war, anyway. In the 20s, canvas and wood were still cool). Better than a brick rocketship, I guess.
I'm not sure what the motive would be to cover-up some kind of stupid failed saucer design with another cover-up that had its own cover-up that had its own-cover-up unless they were just really, really, really embarrassed about it. It's almost plausible, because a flying saucer that failed more badly than the Aerocar would be that embarrassing. But no, I don't think they're that good at cover-ups. It's just funny to think about (except for the test pilot.)