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The news is: The United States government kept the existence of a flying saucer secret for 60 years. And you would be reading that news on the front page of every paper in existence, rather than this blog, except for the fact that the saucer was made by the US Air Force.

declassified in 2012, tell the story of Project 1794, the $10 million development of a circular VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) fighter aircraft with lift and thrust from a single turborotor, top speed of between Mach 3 and Mach 4, and a ceiling of 100,000 feet. Then there would be the look on the Russian pilots' faces when they saw it.

All in all, an amazing concept. There was just one problem: It couldn't fly. The WS-606A, as the prototype was known, could do little more than hover.

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Check out this video from 1958:

In 1961, unable to remedy the system's myriad problems, certainly not as easily as purchasing one of the new Harrier jump jets, the Air Force got out of the saucer business—at least officially. You can see the prototype at the National Museum of the USAF in Dayton, Ohio.

"Lifting body" is term for an aircraft configuration in which the body itself produces lift. There's little or no conventional wing. NASA experimented with them from 1963 to 1975, testing the concept of flying a wingless vehicle back to Earth from space, then landing like a conventional plane.

First came the M2-F1, called the Flying Bathtub. It had a steel frame and a plywood shell, built for $30,000. It was towed to 12,000 feet by a regular plane, then released. Gutsy pilots like Chuck Yeager brought it back to Earth, proving the concept.

The next big step in lifting bodies came with the X-24A, built by Martin Aircraft Company for the Air Force, a 24-foot-long, 6,270-LB flying potato with three vertical fins at the rear for directional control.

The X-24A

Debuting in 1970, the X-24A reached 71,400 feet and 1,036 mph. The coolest thing about the it may be that its younger sibling, the X-24B, looks like the product of a later generation. If fact the X-24B was built around the fuselage of the X-24A, with the potato shape transformed into a "flying flatiron."

X-24B

The X-24B first flew in 1973. It hit 1,164 mph, reached 74,130 feet. Demonstrating that accurate unpowered reentry vehicle landings were operationally feasible, it paved the way for the Space Shuttle.

Lifting body experiments somehow stayed off the public radar until the M2-F2 footage appeared in the title sequence of The Six Million Dollar Man TV show in in 1974.

Want more tech, with a thriller thrown? Check out .

Say you were watching a sci-fi movie where, every time a space ship reached a certain speed, it generated a cone of white mist and disappeared into it? Would you think, Kinda cool, but the special effects guy maybe used one effect too many? Well, this happens in real life, to mere airplanes. Per the Prandtl-Glauert singularity, vapor cones appear around objects as they near the speed of sound. Read all about it , or check out the exhibits below and get the picture.

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Exhibit A: An F/A-18 gives good cone:

This F/A-18 demonstrates the Prandtl-Glauert singularity and/or an interdimensional portal:

Not a cloud, not Photoshop, but the Prandtl-Glauert singularity demonstrated by a B-2 (top speed of 628 mph, on the record) near the speed of sound (747 mph, but relative).

A pretty skirt:

Not the coolest cone, but a swell picture:

King Cone:

Actually, that was fake. A B-52 couldn't go the speed of sound (767 mph give or take) unless you dropped it from outer space. But in a Buff's dreams�

The one below, I swear, is an F-22 (you can see a bit of wing protruding from the lowest part of the vapor cloud:

Space Shuttle Atlantis goes conic:

The Blackbird gets in on the act:

This is pretty stupid, but it took me 1/2 hour to make it:

A rocket tries. Rockets go so fast, the vapor basically can't keep up.

Last, not a vapor cone, but a close and cool cousin: NASA added colored smoke to the plume to measure the effect of vortices on the air behind landing aircraft. Result: Vortices are awesome.

If I put the US Navy's development of this flying breakfast entree of an aircraft in a novel, my editor would strike it. Over the top, she would say. Beyond belief. And she'd be right. Yet another instance of truth trumping fiction. So here it is instead in a blog post�

In the early 1940s, the Navy needed fighter planes that could be deployed from ships to counter Japanese kamikaze attacks. Enter Charles Zimmerman, an aerodynamicist at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, who theorized that a disk-shaped fuselage could contribute to lift.

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He designed the experimental Vought V-173 Flying Pancake" with a pair of 80-horsepower Continental A-80 air-cooled engines driving massive 16.5-foot-diameter wooden propellers—so large that the aircraft needed to sit at a 22-degree-upward angle prior to take-off. The core idea was that the entire aircraft would contribute to lift.

It first flew in 1942, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, 13 minutes at 100 MPH.

Nearly 200 test flights later, it proved the viability of Zimmerman's design and earned him the Wright Brothers Medal.

Seeing is believing: A V-173 is now part of the Smithsonian collection at the in Suitland, Maryland. You may also want to visit the IHOP nearby.

And not just any bomb, an 8,000-LB Mark 6 (Fat Man, detonated over Nagasaki, was an earlier Mark 3 model).

Let's go to the newsreel�

You can still visit the bomb crater in Mars Bluff, SC. Details .

Incredibly Mars Bluff wasn't an isolated incident. In 1961, a B-52 crashed and accidentally dropped a pair of far-more-powerful Mark 39s onto Goldsboro, NC. The bombs' safety mechanisms meant to prevent accidental detonations worked in this case, albeit barely. [.]

If the CIA's decision to spend $20 million to turn cats into field operatives seems at all strange to you, know that it was the 1960s: The agency was also attempting to deploy psychics, drug dealers, Mafiosos, and . Operation Acoustic Kitty commenced when a veterinary surgeon placed a microphone in the ear canal of the first candidate, along with a radio transmitter at the base of the skull and a wire antenna concealed by the fur (see diagram, left).

The first operation entailed eavesdropping on two men outside the Soviet compound in Washington, D.C. The newly-minted feline operative was released across the street, and, while scampering toward the targets, was hit and killed by a taxi.

The Agency deemed the project complete failure and cancelled it, destroying most of the records. One item lost to posterity is the training, other than it was hard because the cats' hunger often took precedence over the mission. Also it's hard to train a cat.

to see one espionage author's speculation on the methods the Agency may have used.

For more information on Operation Acoustic Kitty, check out the book .

"This was largely a secret until that damned book [] was published."—Columbia official.

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The
eighteen-year-old who would become known in Columbia lore as Poughkeepsie Pete
enrolled at the university’s School of Engineering in 1990. From his first day
on campus, wherever he went, he marveled at the possibility that the hallowed
Manhattan Project tunnels might be beneath his feet. Little was known about the
complex beyond its role in the Allied victory. Nothing about the offices and
laboratories had been declassified. Entry was forbidden. The facility became
Poughkeepsie Pete’s Holy Grail.

He learned that in years past,
likeminded students had pried their way past boarded-up parts of Furnald Hall’s
basement, where the famous grocery store had been. Those who made it furthest
entered a dark, cement tunnel, empty but for a few wagon wheel-sized wooden
cable spools stamped U.S. ARMY. After a hundred feet, the tunnel dead-ended.
The students turned back, generally thrilled at getting as far as they had.

Trying a brand new tool, the
Worldwide Web, Pete found a site with a blueprint of the entire complex. Late
one night, he snuck past a Campus Security guard and into the crew team’s
indoor rowing tank facility, across the quad from Furnald Hall. He hammered
through what the same Web site had promised would be a thin plaster wall in the
basement.

At the back of a defunct boiler
room, using a technique also provided by the site, he picked the lock on what
appeared to be a closet door. It opened onto a short tunnel at the end of which
he discovered a full-sized laboratory, seemingly frozen in time from 1945. The
built-in tables and cabinets had been stripped of all equipment and
instruments, save a dusty cathode ray tube. The cathode ray tube later drew
dozens of awestruck classmates to his dorm room, where he held court with his
tale of his experience. For years thereafter, Columbia students dodged Campus
Security guards to visit “Al’s,� as the lab became known—Al was Albert
Einstein.

A second-year medical student from
California thought they were fools. Why didn’t they find it odd, he asked, that
the same Web site that mysteriously provided the blueprint also provided the
method to pick the lock? Or that of the hundreds of kinds of locks, the
formidable Manhattan Project complex was protected by perhaps the simplest, a
basic pin and tumbler? He suspected the laboratory was real, utilized as a
decoy by someone with extensive knowledge of the complex, their aim being to
divert students from the relatively mundane tunnel they’d breached so often in
the past. Although the medical student never had given much thought to the
Manhattan Project complex before, he found himself unable to stop wondering
what was going on there now.

Determined to find out, on Christmas
Eve, 1990, at 11:45 p.m., he accessed Furnald Hall’s basement by prying open
the shaft of an outmoded service elevator and rappelling down. He sprung the
old employee washroom door’s intricate lock with a quiet surgical drill.
Leaving the door ajar, he crept into the tunnel.

Furnald Hall at Columbia University

The tunnel ended after about a
hundred feet, at a grimy cinder block wall. He suspected the rusty ventilation
grate there, wadded with a half-century’s worth of dust, was really a door—the
dead end of a tunnel was an odd place for a ventilation grate. If so, the door
probably opened with an iris scanner concealed somewhere. Even if he knew
where, the odds were one in 100,000 at best that his eyeball would open it. If
he had brought a torch and five or six tubes of acetylene, or a grenade
launcher, the odds would have been a bit better. These
were still odds, he thought, that the people inside the complex could live
with.

He concealed himself into the core
of one of the giant cable spools. He planned to stay the entire weekend, during
which time he would not eat. He would drink a minimal amount of a citrus
beverage he’d made after reading about it in one of his books on desert survival.
The beverage was stored in the small rubber bladder he’d sewn onto his
backpack. He’d taken preventive measures so that his bodily waste would be
limited to urine, discharged into a tube and stored in the rubber bottle
secured to his thigh by spandex bicycling shorts. Just being balled up in the
cable spool for so many hours might have been torture, but he’d spent three
weekends rehearsing in his small clothes closet. Also he viewed
self-deprivation as something of a sport.ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý

His plan hinged on his theory that
the tunnel’s entry door was outfitted with at least one motion sensor. His
backpack contained forty-eight small lab rats. At precisely 12:00 a.m., four
minutes after his arrival, he sent the first of his rats scurrying out of the
cable spool, through the open tunnel door and into the Furnald basement, where
he’d placed a hunk of cheddar cheese. At exactly every hour on the hour
thereafter, he sent another rat on the same course. The first rat was meant to
simulate the motion his own departure. The subsequent rats were intended to
make whoever was in the Manhattan Project complex conclude that the motion
sensor had gone haywire, then come out to do something about it.

At 9:07 the next morning, the
ventilation grate swung outward and two men in business suits emerged from the
opposite side. The medical student revealed himself to them and owned up to
what he’d done. They invited him into the complex. Although not one for
emotional displays, he found himself pumping a fist.

While gloomy, the labyrinthine
facility dazzled him. Racing the Nazis to develop “the gadget,� Oppenheimer, Fermi, Einstein and company never got around to
decorating or even painting the concrete walls. The medical student would learn
that when the current occupants moved in, they had no more time or inclination.
But in the early �80s, on one of the chaotic August days that Columbia students
all arrived on campus, the custodial alley behind Furnald Hall received a
truckload of items confiscated by the DEA from a local drug kingpin—tables and
chairs and fixtures befitting the Palais de Versailles in jarring combination
with furnishings better suited to Las Vegas. Typical of the resulting scheme
was the conference room, with an elegant antique Persian carpet and a
contemporary black lacquer table inlaid with a shiny soaring hawk rendered in
shiny silver, gold and bronze.

At the head of the table on the
morning of December 25, 1990, sat the de facto CIA station chief, Drummond Clark, then in his mid-forties. When
brought into his stern glare, the medical student considered for the first time
that he might be killed.

“We’re undecided what to do with you
as yet,� Drummond said. “Some of my colleagues have suggested that, as a
penalty, you have to work here.�

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During my last book tour, I got to meet Playboy Magazine publisher Hugh Hefner—we were both staying at a hotel called the Valley Ho, a block away from the Bookstore in Scottsdale, Arizona. I learned that the Big Bunny, his customized DC-9 that was a standard bearer for the jet set as well as the mile-high club, is now being used by Mexican schoolchildren.

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Here's the skinny: In 1969, dreaming of a "bedroom in the sky," the Playboy publisher got a new McDonnell Douglas
DC-9-32 for $9 million. He obtained special permission from the FAA to paint the Big Bunny black. Needless to say, it was equipped with a disco, a movie theater, a sunken Roman tub, and a king-size elliptical water bed (with seat belts. "Coolest private jet ever," Hef says.

The jet served as a traveling version of the Playboy Mansion�"except better," according to the proprietor—until 1976, when Playboy hit hard times. Hefner was forced to sell the jet to Venezuela's Aeropostal, which in turn dealt it to AeroMexico.

Two of the four stewardesses, aka Jet Bunnies

Hefner and a regular Bunny

The plane's second, less exciting chapter

The Big Bunny was transformed into a passenger jet, serving until 2004,
when AeroMexico decided to scrap it before instead donating the fuselage to the city of Cadereyta, Queretaro for use as a classroom.

Their classroom's singular past is not lost on the schoolchildren, particularly the boys, who enjoy reading Playboy Magazine in order to better understand the history.

The Big Bunny in retirement, as a classroom in Mexico

I was once dating a young woman we'll call Jane, and I was
intimidated by her prior boyfriends, who included the likes of an
All-Big-Ten quarterback, one of the youngest Fortune 500 CEOs, and a
comparably successful financier who was fluent in several languages. The
financier and I happened to have gone to the same college and graduated
the same year, but we never met, probably because I only hung out with
mortals.

I suffered from the comparisons to this pantheon of great boyfriends
until Jane told me a story about the time the financier took her home to
Virginia for Thanksgiving.

Tragically, Alzheimer's had forced the financier's father into
retirement in his early sixties -- he'd been a big American company's
factory manager in several foreign countries. While the family lived
abroad and the son soaked up cultures and languages, becoming a worldly
sophisticate, the father was a xenophobe of the Archie Bunker school,
going out of his way to procure Budweiser and adamantly sticking to
speaking English. Accordingly, everyone around the table that
Thanksgiving day in Virginia was surprised when he began speaking
French.

Fluently.

Taking in the looks of mystification, he switched to German.

Evidently, xenophobic factory manager and Bud man had been cover.

I wondered: What do intelligence agencies do when operatives lose their ability to retain important secrets?

According to Fred Rustmann, who was a CIA operations officer for
twenty-five years, "Whenever anyone is going to be under anesthesia or
in any situation where he may babble, there's an agency minder to make
sure he doesn't divulge classified information."

It turns out that there are so few long-term cases of potential babbling, however, that no official policy exists.

"Usually with older operatives, keeping secrets is practically ingrained," says Peter Earnest, the executive director of the
whose thirty-six year CIA career included over twenty years in the
Clandestine Service. "You also have to take into account the relative
sensitivity of their secrets: Generally, when these men and women leave
the field, they spend years consulting for us or for outside firms.
During that time, the sources and methods that they are obliged to keep
forever secret change at an incredibly fast rate."

So once the former spies' minds begin to fail, decades have passed,
at which point they could sit down and dictate their memoirs to a North
Korean agent and cause little damage, if any.

Still, it's not unprecedented for an older or retired spy to have a
head chock-full of valuable intel. What if such a person did fall into
enemy hands?

Take the case of William Colby, who served as director of the CIA
from 1973 until 1976, then founded a law firm and remained actively
involved in intelligence matters. On April 27, 1996, Colby went canoeing
by himself near his home in Rock Point, Maryland. Later, the canoe was
found, but he wasn't.

A week passed without any sign of him. Had enemy operatives spirited
him to a secret interrogation facility? Were they extracting vital
national security secrets from the seventy-six year-old?

His body turned up in the water two days later. Although suspicion of
foul play ran rampant, an inquest established that he had suffered a
heart attack or stroke, fallen out of the canoe, then died from drowning
or hypothermia.

But what if there was merit to the suspicions?

Similarly, what if someone like the financier's father went for a
stroll in the park one day and didn't return? Alzheimer's sufferers
often depart for the corner store and are found halfway across the
country. The financier's dad was still young enough, still close enough
to his clandestine service days, that he might have rattled off the
names of numerous American operatives abroad, compromising their
operations and costing them their lives.

The hypothetical intrigued me enough that I wrote an entire novel, ""
(Doubleday), which I hope contains a sufficient portion of
reality -- the research brought me into contact with an array of other
intelligence community personnel ranging from a National Security Agency
temp to a director of the CIA, plus several spies so bright and dashing
and heroic that I would guess at least one of them dated Jane.

[Read the first few chapters of "Once a Spy" on the .]

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CIA HQs

in 1995, Gerard Sava, a friend of mine from high school, collected several cans of short-ends—leftover film, essentially—while working as a second assistant cameraman on Karate Kid IV. For some reason, I thought we should use the short ends to make a movie about a hit man interviewed by an aging Cupid who is seeking a replacement. The resulting short (about 7 minutes long), Cupidity, played in the Sundance Festival, won the Laura Napor Award, and got me out of cartooning and into writing, for better or worse. Stars Matt Servitto from The Sopranos.