Aimee Michel:
'The Truth about Flying Saucers'
Criterion Books, New York 1956
p.208-224
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  Chapter Two

  Lieutenant Plantier's theory



The story of Lieutenant Plantier's intellectual adventure is
very strange.

  A few years ago this young officer, one of the most brilliant
brains in the new French Air Force, was being bored to death in
one of those minor posts where military discipline at first
invariably irks the very men who were attracted to it.
Lieutenant Plantier was crazy about everything connected with
aviation and devoured all the lore of his own branch of the
service, notably jet-propulsion.

  Sooner or later, he thought, men would make machines capable
of escaping the gravitational pull of the earth and propelling
themselves through planetary space. That was what he must work
for.

  He soon discovered the tricky nature of the problem, with its
troublesome mass-energy relationship.

  We can't think up anything better than jet-propulsion, he
mused. We may be able to send rockets to the moon, but they will
be appallingly heavy, expensive and risky. Only the State can
put up the money even to send a camera round the earth and back
again. It's a pitiable result and horribly dear. We must find
something else.


  Beyond the Jet Principle

It is at this point that we realize the young officer's
intellectual integrity. In the 'Forces Aeriennes Francaises'
(September 1953, page 219) he tells us how his speculations
began, and one can only congratulate him on his courage and good
sense. Conscious that he lacked the material resources to carry
out practical research (which ruled out experiment) but also
that the absence of experiment might launch him on the sterile
slopes of science fiction, he confined himself to formulating a
small number of well-selected assumptions, assumptions which are
no doubt incapable of proof for the moment, but do not conflict
with any known facts. From these assumptions he sets out to
deduce a series of mathematically interdependent consequences
which soon led him to the conception of the ideal interplanetary
device, the goal to which all astronautical research should be
directed.

  This attitude of mind on his part, even if yielding no
immediate result, was perfectly logical. Sooner or later it will
be possible to verify his basic assumptions. When that day
comes, there will be only two alternatives. They may prove to be
unsound, in which case his work will have been wasted. That will
be no news to him; he has accepted the risk. Or his assumption
will be confirmed by practical experiment and, thanks to the
quiet perseverance of an officer eating his heart out in the
colonies, the principle of the model interplanetary device will
be ready to leave the drawing board of the French Armee de l'Air
and point the way to sensational development.


  To be or not to be ?

What are these famous assumptions ? I will try to set them out
succinctly.

  There exists, distributed in space, a source of energy in a
form still unknown, which hitherto has been revealed solely to
the instruments of physicists in the form of cosmic rays, the
'top' of which can be heard in the Wilson Room of the Palais de
la Decouverte.

  ''The existence of cosmic radistion,'' writes Lieutenant
Plantier ('Forces Aeriennes Francaises', September 1952, page
222), ''lends weight to my theory. These particles incorporate
concentrations of energy amounting to about 100,000 times the
energy to bring about the complete and unattainable
'sublimation' of a nucleus of uranium.... They imply a fabulous
source. Gigantic cyclotrons would be needed to obtain particles
charged with such energy. Yet nothing has been discovered in
space which can explain these mysterious concentrations of
power.''

  Such is Lieutenant Plantier's first supposition: that a still
unknown source of energy is distributed in space in practically
unlimited quantities.

  2. There exists a means of liberating this energy by
transforming it into an energy of a different kind, and of a
lower order, like the blow of the hammer upon the anvil, for
example, which transforms kinetic energy into calorific energy.

  In the device which will thus transform this cosmic energy,
says Plantier, there will be a difference of local potential
brought about by liberation or absorption. To make this clearer,
he compares his hypothetical machine to the photometric
propeller, which begins to revolve simply because one side of
its blades is painted black, and black absorbs light, while the
other, painted white, does not. This means that there is a
''difference of potential'' between one side and the other,
which suffices to set the propeller in motion as soon as it is
exposed to light.

  3. Plantier's third proposition: the liberation of this cosmic
energy makes it possible to create, at the scene of that
liberation, a local field of force which can be varied and
directed at will. This local field of force is like the magnetic
field which exists in a solenoid, or between the two poles of a
magnet, or the earth itself.


Such are the assumptions which enable Lieutenant Plantier to
envisage the model inter-planetary machine. Obviously, these
suppositions are nothing more than suppositions. The deductions
to he made from them depend on their validity. To be or not to
be ?

  In reality il is only the first which presents a problem. It
is practically certain that if the famous cosmic energy really
reveals itself some day, man will liberate it and create the
motor postulated by the field of force of the third assumption.
We must not forget that, once nuclear energy had been
discovered, it was not long before the first atom bomb was
exploded.


  Lieutenant Plantier's model machine

After making these assumptions Plantier next considered the
possibility of envisaging the applications of the future cosmic
energy in the realm of aero-astronautics. To his surprise, he
found not only that it was possible to envisage something, but
also that it would be envisaged as something fairly definite;
not definite enough to satisfy a technician, but sufficiently so
to give imagination its head.

  ''It can be presumed,'' he writes ('Forces Aeriennes
Francaises', September 1953, pages 223 ff.) ''that the device
utilizes a method of liberation analogous to that which in
nature creates the primaries of cosmic radiation. The cosmic
corpuscles thus generated would radiate in the form of a
'corpusculo-undulatory' fluid through the machine, in the
direction in which it is being propelled, at a speed
approximating to that of light. There would thus be a kind of
continuous cosmic jet, pulsating right through the machine.
Released by the machine, it would follow it on its journey,
propel it, and hold it up when it stopped, very much like the
jets of water on which ping-pong balls are poised in shooting
galleries at fairs.''

  Plantier is careful to point out that by reason of his third
assumption this ''cosmic jet'' would not be a cluster of
artificial cosmic rays, but a field of force. Arguing from
analogy with other fields of force which are known -
electromagnetic fields, for example - he then defines the
essential characteristics of his machine. The result is quite
startling:

  1. To achieve its full efficiency, the machine must be in the
form of a disc which is perfectly symmetrical in relation to its
axis. (He has not elaborated this point in his short summary of
his theory, but I think that a reader with a little knowledge of
mechanics will easily understand what he means.)

  2. The machine could travel at the most terrifying speeds
without producing a sound, and break through the sound-barrier,
without producing the transonic bang. In point of fact, the
field of force centred on the machine would act also on the
surrounding air. It would drag the adjacent molecules of air
along with it at a speed varying with their proximity to the
machine, the result being that, whatever the real velocity of
the machine, ils velocity in relation to the nearest molecules
will always be far less than the speed of sound. These
molecules, for their part, will always travel slower than the
machine, but faster than the molecules of the following layer,
and so on, as the distance from the machine increases. Finally,
no _relative_ super-sonic speed cam be noted, even if the
machine attains a speed of 30,000 kilometres an hour.

  This argument seems perfectly logical. What causes the
strident noise typical of supersonic aircraft and the bang as
they break through the sound barrier is their continuous impact
against the motionless air. But Plantier reasons that the air is
carried along the machine, so that there is never any impact,
but only a gliding movement of the successive layers, which
becomes slower and slower.

  3. For the same reason the machine could move through the
atmosphere at enormous speeds without experiencing any marked
increase of temperature. The heat produced by friction, instead
of being concentrated on the body of the machine, would be
dissipated in the huge volume of air carried along by the field
of force.

  4. The passengers would rernain unaffected by the most
tremendous acceleration of the machine. They would not even
notice it because they would be caught by the field of force
themselves. Every atom of their bodies, being subjected to
exactly the same thrust, would therefore be unaware of any
movement whatever, and they could go on playing chess while the
machine shot off like a cannon ball or something even faster -
or turned at go or even 180 degrees. The pieces on the board
would be carried along by the field of force just like the
machine and everything and everyone within it.

  Lieutenant Plantier had reached this point in his reasoning
when a crazy notion entered his head, a notion which I am sure
has also enured the reader's - his impossible contrivance, a
brain child born of the boredom of an outlandish military
station, already existed ! He had seen it. It was the flying
saucer.

  ''I then undertook,'' he writes ('Forces Aeriennes
Francaises', page 223), ''a close study of the most trustworthy
reports, and to my ever-growing astonishment the alleged
freakishness derided by the critics of flying saucers was the
normal consequence of the system of propulsion with which I had
endowed them. For example, my assumptions explained the silence,
the resistance to heat, the change of shape and habitability....
Nay more. I was able to anticipate that certain characteristics,
such as the excentric patch and 'cumulus agite', would be
confirmed by observation.''

  I have demonstrated that his theory accounts perfectly for the
silence and the resistance to heat. What about the other two ?


  Change of shape

Let us try to imagine Lieutenant Plantier's machine in flight.
How will it behave ? To hover in the sky, it will have to direct
the field of force vertically, giving it an intensity equal to
the gravitational pull of the earth, but in an opposite
direction, tbat is to say, upwards. Seen from below, the machine
will look the classic saucer, circular to spectators exactly
below it, elliptical to others.

  Now let us suppose that the machine wants to take off
horizontally at full speed. First of all it will oscillate for
the fraction of a second, and then it will tilt at a very marked
angle in order to set the field of force in the direction
desired. At the same time the power of the field of force will
increase enormously to ensure both maintenance of altitude and
horizontal acceleration.