Building a UFO from scratch........or at least an "O"

[Dover]

Didn't know where to post this one, but too much fun to pass up:


You gotta have faith building a UFO in China

Countryside inventor: He lacks money, formal education and an understanding of the science of flight, but he has a lifelong dream

By Gady A. Epstein
The Baltimore Sun


DUANYUAN, China - Tucked away down an unpaved cart path, behind a high brick fence, is about the strangest thing anyone could expect to find in the middle of rural nowhere, short of a UFO - an "experimental base'' for building one.
Well, technically, it's not unidentified, and it's not flying, but what Du Wenda is building here in eastern China is indisputably an object.
Du, the son of a horse-cart driver, is founder and president of the Global UFO Scientific and Technological Research Institute of Xiao County of Anhui Province, which is an institute with a single proposition: to make a flying saucer for earthbound travel.
Lacking money, formal education and a full understanding of the science of flight, Du has an unlikely proposition. Certainly, the first test "flight,'' observed by fewer than 20 people just before dusk Oct. 22 at his experimental base, did not conjure up images of the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk. The UFO-looking saucer, with rotors powered by a used eight-cylinder engine, rose about four inches off the ground for five or six seconds, he said.
Du, 39, a former maintenance man, has spent $95,000 in 2 1/2 years, including his family's savings, investor contributions and proceeds from the sale of a cow, but he remains undaunted.
"We are still thinking about ways to find more funds for this because at a later stage, if we want to make this into a real product, we have to buy aviation engines and aviation materials,'' said Du.
"I don't believe you have to think that building a flying saucer is that hard. What I'm building will have similar capabilities as a UFO, but the speed will be much slower.''
In the late 1950s, China's countryside became the setting for Mao Tse-tung's disastrous Great Leap Forward, during which tens of millions of farmers were exhorted to answer Mao's call to help the country industrialize quickly by operating backyard blast furnaces to produce steel.
Today, some farmers are committing their livelihoods to the pursuit of seemingly impossible dreams, including in a few cases the building of a homemade flying machine, typically a helicopter or plane. It is a poignant quest to participate in a booming, industrializing society that still passes most of them by...cont'd

http://www.sltrib.com/nationworld/ci_2469618



Du Wenda's UFO chassis, which is powered by an eight-cylinder engine, was disassembled after its first test flight on Oct. 22, in which it briefly rose 4 inches off the ground for five or six seconds, Du said. (Gady Epstein/The Baltimore Sun)