Flux Liner

This article is about the craft demonstrated at Norton Air Force Base in 1988. For the general class of human-built craft, see

Human-made exotic craft

.

The Flux Liner is the best-documented alleged alien reproduction vehicle (ARV): a reverse-engineered aircraft said to have been developed by the United States military under black-program funding by replicating the electrogravitic propulsion principles derived from recovered non-human craft. The primary witness to ARV technology is aerospace illustrator Mark McCandlish, who in 1988 obtained a detailed technical account from colleague Brad Sorensen, who claimed to have attended a classified section of the Norton Air Force Base air show that year and personally observed three operational ARVs at close range, including one displayed in cutaway to reveal its internal structure. McCandlish produced detailed technical drawings of the ARV based on Sorensen's description, and submitted testimony to the Disclosure Project and to the US Congress.

Flux Liner etymology

Steven Greer, who uses the term "ARV" for post-1940s reverse-engineered craft of non-human design, distinguishes the "Flux Liner" designation as specifically referring to the early Lockheed Skunkworks man-made UFO program: "The early Lockheed Skunk Works man-made UFO were called flux liners because they were pulling energy from this quantum vacuum flux field." Greer frames the development of ARV technology as the natural payoff of 80 years and trillions of dollars in classified reverse-engineering investment: "After 80 years of that and trillions of dollars, you're going to have some payoffs. And these payoffs are in the form of advanced technologies and ARVs, Alien Reproduction Vehicles that are the man-made ones." Greer distinguishes ARVs from genuinely non-human craft (which he calls "EVs" — extraterrestrial vehicles), describing ARVs as "simulating, not totally, but simulating the energy propulsion capabilities of what we've reverse engineered and studied since the forties."

Greer has stated that the United States mastered gravity control in October 1954 and "then began to make man-made UFOs," asserting that current ARVs have reached such sophistication that even retrieval-team personnel find them "virtually indistinguishable until you get very close to them" from genuine extraterrestrial craft.

Norton Air Force Base demonstration (1988)

Main article:

Norton Air Force Base ARV demonstration (November 1988)

McCandlish's colleague Brad Sorensen attended a classified section of the November 1988 Norton Air Force Base air show and observed three operational ARVs — two hovering silently and one displayed in cutaway. The exhibit area was separated from the rest of the hangar by a large black curtain; when attendees were led behind it, the lights were turned on to reveal three disc-shaped craft hovering above the floor. A video monitor running in the hangar showed the smallest ARV sitting in the desert over what appeared to be a dry lake bed near Area 51, making three quick hopping motions, then accelerating straight up and out of sight in seconds — completely silent, with no sonic boom. Sorensen described the craft to McCandlish in detail; McCandlish produced a technical illustration published in a 1992 issue of Military & Aerospace Electronics.

Described design

Cross-section diagram of the alleged Alien Reproduction Vehicle ("Flux Liner") from p. 406 of William Cooper's Behold a Pale Horse (1991), based on Mark McCandlish's testimony.

Dimensions and external form

Three ARVs were displayed at the Norton exhibit, identical in shape and proportion but in three different sizes. The smallest was approximately 24 feet in diameter at its widest point at the base of the flange; the second was 60 feet in diameter; and the largest was approximately 120 to 130 feet in diameter. All three were flat on the bottom with sides sloping at approximately 35 degrees from vertical, a dome — the upper half of a sphere-shaped crew compartment — on top, and a ledge around the midsection. Panels on the sloping skirt section had been removed on the cutaway vehicle, exposing radially oriented oxygen tanks — described as approximately sixteen to eighteen inches in diameter and six feet long, arranged like the spokes of a wheel — confirming the vehicle was designed for both atmospheric flight and space operations. A robotic sample-collection arm could extend from the side of the vehicle. All three craft hovered silently with no cables, landing gear, exhaust, or sound.

Crew compartment

The dome visible on top was the upper half of a large sphere-shaped crew compartment situated at the center of the vehicle. Inside the compartment, a central column ran through the middle, with four ejection seats mounted back-to-back on the upper half of the column — the crew faced outward in four directions. A large flywheel-type mechanism occupied the center of the column. A second set of oxygen tanks was located inside the crew compartment sphere itself, separate from the radial tanks in the skirt section. The vehicle had no windows; instead, a synthetic vision system used pairs of cameras mounted in plastic domes around the circumference — including one on top — slaved to the pilot's head orientation through a helmet-mounted display, providing a stereoscopic three-dimensional view of the exterior at approximately 30 frames per second. McCandlish attributed the absence of windows to the extreme voltages involved — estimated between 500,000 and one million volts — which would make conventional glazing impractical.

Capacitor array and coil system

The midsection ledge was a large casting — greenish-blue clear plastic or possibly glass — approximately eighteen inches wide at the top and eight to nine inches thick, containing fifteen to twenty stacked layers of copper coils in a toroidal (doughnut-shaped) configuration. The bottom disc of the vehicle, approximately eleven to twelve inches thick, was a single massive casting — on the 24-foot model, weighing an estimated four to five tons — containing 48 radially oriented sections, each holding eight half-inch-thick copper plates separated by approximately three-quarters of an inch of dielectric insulating material. The plates alternated negative-positive four times through each stack, ensuring that the positive plates were always above the negative ones — consistent with the Biefeld–Brown effect, in which a charged capacitor produces a net force toward the positive plate. The outer edges of both the capacitor disc and the coil ring were milled at the same 35-degree angle as the vehicle's sloping sides.

McCandlish recognized the overall architecture as a massive Tesla coil: the large-diameter toroidal coil with its heavy copper windings served as the primary, while a secondary coil of finer wire wound around the central column stepped up the voltage dramatically. According to Sorensen, the initial power source was two large 24-volt marine-style deep-charge batteries; their current was converted to alternating current, fed through the primary windings, stepped up through the secondary coil to extremely high voltage, and then selectively distributed to any of the 48 capacitor sections.

Attitude control

The division of the capacitor array into 48 independently addressable sections provided full attitude control: by varying the voltage distribution across different sections, the craft could roll, pitch, yaw, bank, ascend vertically, or accelerate in any direction. Additionally, the vehicle incorporated a passive self-leveling mechanism: a mercury-filled bowl at the center acted as a gravity-sensing pendulum — when the craft began to tilt, the mercury shifted, triggering automatic correction by powering up the capacitor sections on the low side.

Vacuum chamber and mercury vapor

The central column contained a vacuum chamber within the secondary coils and crew compartment structure. The chamber held mercury vapor in a partial vacuum. McCandlish theorized that firing high voltage through ionized mercury vapor in a partial vacuum was the mechanism by which the system drove the local zero-point energy field out of equilibrium — the process described by physicist Moray B. King as the key to tapping zero-point energy — causing the craft to become partially mass-cancelled and allowing even small capacitor voltages to produce dramatic acceleration.

Fiber-optic control system

All internal sensor networks, computers, and control systems were linked fiber optically rather than by conventional electrical wiring. McCandlish explained that when the vehicle's mass-cancellation field was active, the electrons flowing through the system also became mass-cancelled, effectively creating a perfect superconductor — which dramatically increased efficiency but also meant that conventional copper-wire telemetry would become uncontrollable. Fiber optics, transmitting light rather than electrons, remained immune to this effect. McCandlish cited a NASA Tech Briefs article describing a fiber-optically linked sensor and computer network developed by scientists at Caltech under contract with JPL as an independent parallel to the ARV's design.

Propulsion theory: mass cancellation and zero-point energy

McCandlish's propulsion model held that the ARV's electromagnetic system interfered with the absorption of zero-point energy by the electrons in the craft's atomic structure, causing those electrons to slow down and reducing the gyroscopic effect that constitutes inertia and mass — even though the atomic structure itself remained intact. This model addressed Einstein's objection that accelerating to light speed would require infinite energy: if the energy that would otherwise increase the vehicle's mass during acceleration was instead converted into additional thrust by the same system preventing it from interacting with the atomic structure, then the faster the vehicle traveled, the easier further acceleration became — effectively inverting the relativistic mass barrier. McCandlish connected this mechanism to the Casimir effect as experimental evidence for zero-point energy, noting that the ARV's stacked capacitor plates — spaced only millimeters apart — replicated on a macroscopic engineering scale the same force that causes closely spaced steel plates to slam together in Casimir's original experiment.

Congressional testimony

McCandlish submitted a written declaration and technical diagrams to the Disclosure Project's 2001 National Press Club press conference, making him one of the most technically specific witnesses to reverse-engineered craft in the public record. He subsequently provided testimony in briefings related to UAP disclosure efforts in Congress, arguing that the technology demonstrated in the ARVs represented energy and propulsion breakthroughs with applications extending far beyond military aviation — specifically, the elimination of dependence on fossil fuels.

Reported performance capabilities

At the 1988 Norton Air Force Base classified air show, a three-star general present at the demonstration reportedly described the ARVs as capable of "light speed or better." This claim is consistent with the electrogravitic propulsion mechanism McCandlish described: if the toroidal capacitor array effectively cancels the craft's gravitational interaction with the local spacetime metric, then the energy requirements for acceleration toward relativistic velocity would be dramatically reduced compared to conventional thrust-based systems. The craft's silent hovering without any exhaust, downwash, or sound during the demonstration was cited by Sorensen as confirmatory of a non-conventional propulsion mechanism.

Corroborating sightings

Mark McCandlish gathered independent accounts matching the Norton exhibit description. In 1973, former crew chief Kent Sellen drove unchallenged to the classified North Base facility at Edwards Air Force Base and saw a disc-shaped craft hovering inside a hangar — flat on the bottom, sloping sides, a dome on top, with synthetic vision camera domes around the circumference. Sellen was detained for 18 hours and told construction details about the ARV's crew compartment that Sorensen had not observed, including that the upper and lower hemispheres were manufactured from poltrusion composite material and that the upper dome could separate via explosive bolts as an emergency ejection shield. In 1992, Sellen witnessed what appeared to be an ARV being recovered into a Lockheed Skunk Works hangar at Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, California, and one week later watched the same or a similar craft depart the facility, covering the full length of the Plant 42 runway and disappearing in under two seconds without any sonic boom. McCandlish's description of both Sellen incidents is documented in his biography.

Patent lineage

McCandlish identified a 1967 patent filed by James King Jr. — an associate of Thomas Townsend Brown who had worked alongside Brown and physicist Agnew Bahnson at Bahnson's laboratory near Princeton, New Jersey — whose design closely matched the ARV: the same flat-bottomed, sloping-sided profile with coils around the circumference and radially oriented capacitor plates, differing only in having a cylinder rather than a dome for the central compartment. Film footage originally shot by Bahnson's daughter documented the Brown-Bahnson-King experiments showing small discs levitating. McCandlish regarded the convergence of the King patent, the Norton exhibit, and a 1967 military photograph taken between Area 51 and Provo, Utah — showing a craft with the same configuration — as evidence that ARV technology was both patented and deployed by the late 1960s. Full details of the patent research are documented in McCandlish's biography.

See also

• Human-made exotic craft
• Alien reproduction vehicle
• Norton Air Force Base ARV demonstration (November 1988)
• Mark McCandlish
• Brad Sorensen
• Staged alien abduction

References