Comment Paul Moller - total crackpot (Score 1, Troll) 135
July 1967
If you have the urge to make like a Martian, you may get your wish. This is the goal of Paul S. Moller, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California, who wants to develop low-cost ($4,000 and up) flying saucers for personal transportation. After installing new engines in his first machine [PS, July '66], Moller recently made a series of successful test flights a few feet off the ground. With a second, eight-foot-diameter, single-engine craft, demonstrated a few weeks ago, he hopes to acheive real flying-saucer altitudes.
March 1987 (advertisement)
For the past three decades, Moller International has been studying VTOL aircraft from every angle, in an effort to engineer the first VTOL aircraft that is safe to operate, inexpensive to manufacture, and economical to maintain. This advanced technology has finally been developed and will soon be available, in the form of the two-passenger Merlin 200.
Last August one of the longest-anticipated feats of flight since the moon landing took place in a grassy field in Davis, California. As a small crowd looked on, a red Batmobile-like vehicle shuddered, lurched, and rose a few feet into the air, its eight 50hp rotary engines screaming like hornets. After a few minutes, the craft settled into the ground.
The event might not have seemed like much—it could hardly even be called a flight—but it represented a milestone that inventor Paul Moller, a 67-year-old Canadian, had been promising journalists and investors for more than a decade.
Yeah, a little bit more than a decade, all right. What a crackpot.