“What impact will the ‘UFO How To’ series have on space tourism?”

What?

Space tourism.

Are you serious?

Actually, yes.

What the heck is the “UFO How To” series?

It’s a series of books – big individual volumes actually – that contain information gleaned from exhaustive research in various patent offices.

And it's called "UFO - How To" for a very good reason. The author says if you follow the instructions, you can build your own.

Specifically, the patents relate to the construction of craft that use a variety of unorthodox structural components, fuselage configurations, propulsion and control systems.

You might be surprised to learn (though you shouldn’t be) that many of the drawings that accompany the patent applications, depict craft that you would think come straight out of movies like “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

However, unlike Hollywood, we are not mixing fact and fiction here.

The patents, and there are dozens of them, have been filed in different countries over a period of almost a century.

It's also a fact that none of them uses the term "UFO." But one patent, filed in 1972, did use the term "Flying Saucer."

That's what eye witness pilot Kenneth Arnold who saw several strange craft while flying near Mt Rainer in Washington in 1947, said they looked like.

The description stuck for many years, but in the United States where the military was tasked with investigating these phenomena, they became known as Unidentified Flying Objects - or UFOs. (At the same time, the military also chose to dismiss many sightings as weather balloons, swamp gas, Venus, or fireflies).

“Flying Saucer” gradually gave way to “UFO” but not before a Brazilian inventor, Olympio Pinto, filed for a US patent for a "Flying Saucer....which may take the form of a toy, or an actual full-sized passenger and cargo carrying vehicle.”

His is but one of many patents for such things as electromagnetic generators, an “apparatus for generating a secondary gravitational force field,” an “interstellar transport vehicle engine” and a “dipolar force field propulsion system.”

As the so-called Cold War dragged on accompanied by the Space Race the term UFO found its way into broad acceptance. “Unidentified Flying Object” is now the official non-explanation for the thousands of eye-witness reports that have been recorded over many decades.

The general public has long wondered about UFOs, where they come from, what they are, why they are here; are they real? Do aliens pilot them or are they secret military craft built under some black budget program in an underground base like Area 51 in Nevada?

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