Mark McCandlish

Mark McCandlish (1953–2021) was an American aerospace conceptual artist and illustrator who worked for major defense contractors and became prominent in UFO research circles for producing detailed technical drawings of an alleged alien reproduction vehicle (ARV) — a disc-shaped craft believed to have been reverse-engineered from recovered non-human technology. His drawings were based on an account given by his friend Brad Sorensen, who claimed to have seen three such craft at a classified exhibit near Norton Air Force Base on November 12, 1988. McCandlish testified at the Disclosure Project 2001 National Press Club press conference and died in April 2021 in what was ruled a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Biography

Career

McCandlish worked for decades as a conceptual artist and technical illustrator for the aerospace and defense industries. Steven Greer has separately stated the existence of man-made ARVs and stated that the earliest Lockheed Skunk Works craft of this type were called "flux liners" because they drew energy from the quantum vacuum flux field. His clients included General Dynamics, Lockheed, Northrop, McDonnell Douglas, Boeing, Rockwell International, Honeywell, and Allied Signal Corporation, as well as publications such as Aviation Week and Space Technology and Popular Science.

Personal UAP sighting

In February or March 1967, while near Westover Air Force Base, McCandlish took his telescope outside and observed a silent, unlit aerial object hovering directly over the base's nuclear weapons storage facility near the alert hangars for approximately ten minutes; it then drifted slowly before accelerating out of sight in one to two seconds.

Early exposure to electrogravitics

While working at International Vision, McCandlish learned from a colleague named John Alito about an incident in which a person had inadvertently walked near a military hangar and seen a flying saucer inside, then been detained and debriefed. Through the same professional circles, McCandlish heard about a researcher named Mark Stall who had replicated the Biefeld–Brown effect by embedding two quarter-inch-thick copper plates, approximately one foot in diameter, in a clear plastic resin to form a plate capacitor. When charged to approximately one million volts, the device levitated, always moving in the direction of the positively charged plate — consistent with principles described in a patent filed by Thomas Townsend Brown in the late 1950s. According to McCandlish, Stall's experiment at the University of Tucson was confiscated by men claiming government authority under the International Security Act, who removed all equipment and instructed witnesses to remain silent.

Disclosure and public activities

ARV research

Main article:

Alien reproduction vehicle

McCandlish reconnected with Brad Sorensen, a former classmate from Art Center College of Design, who had built a lucrative industrial design practice in the Glendale–Pasadena area; Sorensen structured his contracts so that clients funded patents filed in his name, from which he collected exclusive licensing royalties, making him a millionaire before the age of 30.

In the fall of 1988, McCandlish and Sorensen planned to attend an air show at Norton Air Force Base. McCandlish withdrew at the last minute to complete a Popular Science commission due the following Monday. Sorensen attended and claimed to have witnessed three disc-shaped craft at a classified exhibit. The week after the air show, Sorensen described the craft in detail, and McCandlish used these accounts to produce his ARV cutaway blueprint, completed in March 1989. In a separate interview, Greer stated the Norton Air Force Base exhibit took place, stating that he possessed witnesses, transcripts, and fully illustrated schematics of the ARVs displayed there. The Sorensen account, the ARV's technical design, additional witnesses, and McCandlish's technical analysis are documented in the alien reproduction vehicle article.

2001 Disclosure Project testimony

In May 2001, McCandlish appeared at the Disclosure Project National Press Club press conference in Washington, D.C., organized by Dr. Steven Greer. He presented his ARV cutaway blueprint and the 1967 photographs by Captain Harvey Williams.

Following his testimony, McCandlish reported receiving anonymous phone calls warning him to stop his research and losing his defense industry clients one by one. He also reported IRS seizure of funds and vehicles. McCandlish later acknowledged regret over having publicly named Sorensen under pressure from Greer's organization.

In 2015, McCandlish delivered a lecture at the Secret Space Program conference titled "The Feasibility of Interstellar Travel," arguing that back-engineered off-world technology had been leveraged to establish a privately controlled secret space program and "break-away civilization."

McCandlish stated that scalar-energy researcher Tom Bearden had told him the reason NASA's budget had been repeatedly cut was that classified ARV-type technology — capable of reaching any point in the solar system in hours — rendered conventional rocketry obsolete for military and intelligence purposes. McCandlish concluded that if the technology existed and was deployed, then speculation about manned facilities on the far side of the Moon or on Mars was almost certainly correct.

Sellen and Plant 42 sightings

McCandlish gathered additional independent accounts that matched Sorensen's description. At a 1992 Edwards Air Force Base air show, he met Kent Sellen, a former crew chief who had worked on test pilot William B. Scott's aircraft at Edwards in the early 1970s. In 1973, Sellen had been sent on a routine errand to North Base at Edwards — the classified aircraft facility — where he drove across the dry lake bed directly to the hangars, expecting security to intercept him. Instead, he arrived unchallenged at a hangar with its doors cracked open and saw a disc-shaped craft hovering off the floor inside — flat on the bottom, sloping sides, a dome on top, with synthetic vision cameras in plastic domes around the circumference. Within seconds, security personnel appeared with weapons drawn; Sellen was hooded, detained, and debriefed for 18 hours. During the debriefing, Sellen was told details about the ARV's construction that Sorensen had not observed — including that the crew compartment hemispheres were manufactured from poltrusion composite material wrapped around a ball-shaped mandrel, forming armor-strength spheres, and that the upper hemisphere was reportedly designed to separate via explosive bolts as an emergency ejection shield at high altitude.

Sellen also described to McCandlish a 1992 incident at Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, California. On a smoggy summer evening, after indoor smoking bans forced him outside during a late shift at the B-2 bomber production facility, Sellen noticed sheriff's deputies blocking all streets surrounding the plant — a standard protocol for classified aircraft movements, which McCandlish independently confirmed after receiving a ticket during the same procedure while doing work for Rockwell eighteen months later. The mercury vapor lamps around the Lockheed Skunk Works facility were extinguished and the massive hangar doors stood open; a circular formation of vehicles with elevated baskets held up a concealing black curtain. Above the formation, at approximately 500 feet, Sellen saw a large black lens-shaped craft hovering silently against the orange-glowing smog. A man emerged with a blue-green flashlight, signaled three times; three blue-green lights under the craft flashed in response; the vehicle descended into the cluster, the arms extended curtains over it, and the entire assembly was wheeled inside the hangar. One week later, Sellen witnessed the reverse procedure: the craft rose silently, exchanged light signals, then covered the full length of the Plant 42 runway and disappeared in under two seconds without any sonic boom.

Patent research

McCandlish identified a patent filed initially in 1960 and secured in 1967 by James King Jr., an associate of Thomas Townsend Brown, whose design closely matched the ARV: the same flat-bottomed, sloping-sided profile with coils around the circumference and radially oriented capacitor plates, differing from the ARV only in having a cylinder rather than a dome for the central compartment. McCandlish traced the lineage further: Brown had worked at a laboratory near Princeton, New Jersey, with physicist Agnew Bahnson, and their assistant was King himself. Film footage originally shot by Bahnson's daughter under the title "Daddy's Laboratory" documented the Brown–Bahnson–King experiments, showing small discs levitating and emitting sparks. 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 demonstrating that the ARV technology was both patented and deployed by the late 1960s. McCandlish further connected the ARV's fiber-optic control system — necessary because mass cancellation would cause superconducting electrons to disrupt conventional electrical telemetry — to the 1947 Roswell debris accounts, which described thin fibers with light passing through them that investigators at the time could not explain.

2014 documentary and James Allen's death

The 2014 documentary Zero Point: The Story of Mark McCandlish and the Flux Liner, directed by filmmaker James Allen, documented McCandlish's ARV research. Allen died in 2014, approximately one month before the film's release. McCandlish stated that pathology results showed radioisotopes including uranium, thorium, beryllium, and cadmium in Allen's system — elements he said would not be found naturally occurring — suggesting deliberate poisoning.

Death

On April 13, 2021, McCandlish was found dead at his home from what authorities ruled a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Earlier that day he had spoken to his friend Rick Price and told him he would call later, and to his girlfriend, telling her he would see her at her animal shelter.

According to researcher Robert D. Morningstar, McCandlish had been in contact with Senator Marco Rubio and was scheduled to testify before elements of the United States Senate on UAP in June 2021, approximately two months after his death. Many in the UFO research community disputed the suicide ruling. Weeks before her own June 2022 death, the anti-gravity researcher Amy Eskridge wrote in a text message that McCandlish "sure as fuck did not blow his own head off with a shotgun", arguing that his fatal mistake had been telling no one he was under threat, whereas Bob Lazar had survived by telling everyone. When contacted about McCandlish's death, Brad Sorensen told UAP Gerb: "Mark McCandlish was a stupid, dramatic, selfish fool who died because he could not keep his mouth shut. Learn from this."

McCandlish had himself recorded: "There are many times I lay awake at night with my 9mm under my pillow, loaded, and I wonder why they haven't killed me."

References

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