Mark McCandlish and the Alien Reproduction Vehicle

Mark McCandlish and the Alien Reproduction Vehicle

Witness	Mark McCandlish (1953–2021), aerospace conceptual illustrator
Claim	A friend saw three operational "Alien Reproduction Vehicles" (ARVs), nicknamed "Flux Liners", in a hangar during an air show
Date and place of sighting	Saturday 12 November 1988, Norton Air Force Base, San Bernardino, California (later retellings: Air Force Plant 42, Palmdale)
Primary source	The friend, Brad Sorensen (also spelled Sorenson); McCandlish's account is second-hand
Craft described	Bell-shaped discs about 24, 60 and 120–130 feet across, hovering with no visible support
Public presentation	Disclosure Project briefing document (testimony dated December 2000); National Press Club event, 9 May 2001
Status	Unverified; no documents, photographs or first-hand public testimony from the friend
Date	9 May 2001
Topics	Crashes & retrievals (topic), Secrecy & cover-up (topic), Propulsion & physics (topic)
People	Mark McCandlish, Brad Sorensen, Thomas Townsend Brown
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 145
Year	2001 in UFO history
Timeline	2001 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	15

Mark McCandlish (1953–2021) was an American aerospace illustrator. He said a friend had seen secret, man-made flying saucers called "Alien Reproduction Vehicles" (ARVs) in a hangar during a 1988 Air Force air show.^[1][7] From his friend's descriptions, McCandlish produced a detailed cutaway drawing of the craft, which has been widely reproduced. He presented the story in Steven Greer's Disclosure Project, in its 2001 briefing document and at its May 2001 press conference in Washington.^[2][4][7] He went on refining the design for twenty years, tying it to Thomas Townsend Brown's "electrogravitic" ideas. The account remains second-hand and unverified, and the physics it relies on has not held up in tests.^[1][5][13]

McCandlish's background

In his Disclosure Project testimony, dated December 2000, McCandlish described himself as a conceptual artist whose clients were mostly defence contractors. He said he had worked for General Dynamics, Lockheed, Northrop, McDonnell Douglas, Boeing, Rockwell International, Honeywell and Allied Signal.^[7] His briefing-document heading reads "US Air Force".^[7]

• Westover sighting. He recalled that in 1967, at Westover Air Force Base, he watched a silent light through a telescope for about ten minutes as it hovered over the nuclear-weapons storage area. It then vanished "like it had been fired out of a gun".^[7]
• Earlier stories. He also said that while working at the effects company IntroVision he heard from John Eppolito about a man who had seen a saucer in a hangar and been seized and debriefed. He also heard of an experimenter, Mark Stambough, whose high-voltage capacitor he said floated at about a million volts and was confiscated by men claiming government authority.^[7]

The story

McCandlish's 2000 testimony gives the fullest early version of the story.^[7]

• The friend. An old school acquaintance, Brad Sorensen, had become a wealthy designer in the Glendale–Pasadena area, with clients paying for patents that he licensed back to them.
• The missed air show. The two planned to attend an air show at Norton Air Force Base, on the eastern edge of San Bernardino, to see an SR-71 fly-by. At the last minute Popular Science gave McCandlish a weekend deadline, and he stayed home.
• The client. Sorensen went with a client, described as a tall, thin, white-haired man with an Italian-sounding surname who had been Secretary or Under Secretary of Defense. McCandlish speculated that he was Frank Carlucci.^[7]
• The Big Hangar. As the Thunderbirds' display was about to start, the client led Sorensen to "The Big Hangar" at the far end of the field. There, according to the testimony, he passed Sorensen off as his aide at a closed exhibit for cleared local politicians and military officials. He warned him to say nothing.^[7]
• Black aircraft. Inside, Sorensen reportedly saw the losing prototype from the B-2 bomber competition and a "Lockheed Pulsar" nicknamed Aurora.^[7]
• The saucers. Behind a big black curtain, when the lights came on, were three flying saucers "floating off the floor" with no cables or landing gear. A videotape showed the smallest hopping three times over a dry lakebed and then shooting straight up out of sight in silence.^[7]
• The date and the light-speed claim. Sorensen gave the date as Saturday 12 November 1988. He said a three-star general at the exhibit claimed the craft could reach light speed or better.^[7]

McCandlish's later retellings, summarised in an AltSci account of his final technical presentation, changed some details. The friend sounded "unusually drained" and reluctant to talk by phone, and described the craft only later in person. What first sounded like a hangar at Norton became a trip by dignitaries to Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, associated with Lockheed and its Skunk Works. Each craft was screened by "blinds" so visitors saw them one at a time under escort.^[1][8] Plant 42 is one of the publicly reported locations of Lockheed's Skunk Works.^[3]

The craft as described

As relayed in the 2000 testimony, the three craft were identical in shape but different in size:^[7]

• Shape and size. They were flat-bottomed and bell-shaped, with sides sloping about 35 degrees and a dome on top. The smallest was about 24 feet across at the base, the next 60 feet and the largest 120–130 feet.
• Interior. With skirt panels removed, the smallest showed radial oxygen tanks about 16–18 inches across and 6 feet long. It had a spherical crew compartment and a cast ring of 15–20 layers of copper coils.
• The capacitor disc. A thick base disc of greenish-blue clear plastic or glass was divided into 48 pie-slice sections. Each held 8 half-inch copper plates in alternating polarity.
• The central column. A central column carried four back-to-back ejection seats and a large flywheel, and held mercury vapour in a vacuum chamber.
• Vision and controls. There were no windows; the crew used camera-based 3-D vision like an Apache helicopter's sighting system. The ship was linked by fibre optics.
• Self-levelling. A ball-and-bowl device was said to level the craft automatically as it rocked "like a large ship at anchor".^[7]

The testimony says the exhibit included a cut-away illustration. Sorensen also reportedly saw a small robotic arm for collecting samples, suggesting the craft could fly in space.^[7]

The drawing and McCandlish's theory

From these descriptions McCandlish drew a detailed cutaway that has been widely reproduced. In 2000 he described the craft as a giant Tesla coil fed from two 24-volt marine batteries. In his account, the voltage was distributed by a rotating spark gap to the 48 capacitor sections, so that varying the charge around the rim steered the craft.^[7]

• Zero-point energy. He linked the design to zero-point energy and to the writers Moray B. King and John Moray. He argued that the craft drew on the energy of the vacuum, becoming "mass-canceled" so that "the faster it goes, the lighter it gets".^[7]
• Prior art. He pointed to a patent filed in 1960 and granted in 1967 by a "James King Jr." (named in the document as J. Frank King), an assistant of Townsend Brown and Agnew Bahnson. He said its flat-bottomed, sloping-sided design matched the ARV.^[7]
• Other witnesses. He cited two further informants. Kent Sellen, a former Edwards AFB crew chief, said he had seen such a craft at Edwards North Base in 1973. An unnamed Plant 42 worker described a black lens-shaped saucer being landed under curtains in summer 1992.^[7]

In his last detailed presentation, at the Alt Propulsion Conference less than five months before his death, he refined the model.^[1]

• The hull engine. The segmented capacitor array in the lower hull was charged "in excess of 1,250,000 volts", producing "a reduction in mass". He compared its steering to a helicopter's swash-plate.
• The switch and generator. The central column worked as a high-voltage switch using mercury vapour, and the spinning internal disc acted as a homopolar generator.
• Dangers. He stressed the dangers, describing arc-overs that could kill pilots and an anecdote of a craft destroyed when its flywheel ran away.
• The names. He said "ARV" was a phrase used by people associated with the craft, but he never learned whether it literally meant reproduced alien technology. "Flux Liner" was a "roundabout way" of saying the propulsion relied on high voltages.
• Era. He called the design "1960s technology".
• Later claims. He also described a personal 2012 sighting of a disc with colour-changing hexagonal panels, and said he believed the "Tic Tac" objects were man-made.^[1][8]

The Disclosure Project

McCandlish's testimony appeared in the Disclosure Project Briefing Document. Greer's introduction there presents it as proof that the United States had operational antigravity craft developed partly from extraterrestrial vehicles.^[7] The document runs to 492 pages; Greer also prepared a 95-page executive summary.^[6]

• The press conference. On Wednesday 9 May 2001 Greer presented about twenty witnesses, 21 by one count, at the National Press Club in Washington. He called on Congress to hold hearings on UFO secrecy and to ban space-based weapons.^[2][4][10]
• Video. Greer's channel has posted a video of the event.^[9]
• Reception. ABC News quoted the space consultant James Oberg as saying that not every witness necessarily shared Greer's theory of a worldwide "real X-file cabal". The media covered the event with what one historian calls "frolicsome derision", and Congress held no hearings.^[2][6]
• Kean's reaction. Journalist Leslie Kean, who had worked with Greer, said some speakers made "outrageous, grandiose claims", and she distanced herself from the project.^[6]

The ARV story has since been repeated in later books on alleged secret space programmes. The copy of one such book on the Internet Archive could not be read beyond its catalogue page.^[11]

Townsend Brown and the Biefeld–Brown effect

McCandlish rested his explanation on the work of Thomas Townsend Brown, born in 1905.^[5]

• The effect. Brown claimed that a high-voltage capacitor produces a force toward its positive plate. The effect came to be called the "Biefeld–Brown effect" or "electrogravitics". Denison University says it has no record of the experiments Brown claimed to have done with professor Paul Biefeld.^[5][14]
• NICAP. In 1956 Brown helped found the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP). He was forced out as director in 1957 amid allegations that he was using its funds for anti-gravity research. The earlier version of this article said he sat on NICAP's first board of governors.^[5]
• Bahnson. In 1958 he consulted for Agnew Bahnson's anti-gravity venture in Winston-Salem.^[5]
• Ionic wind. Scientists attribute the observed force to ionic wind, the momentum of charged air particles, rather than to any gravity effect. NASA tests at high voltage in a proper vacuum found no force.^[5]
• The Talley test. A 2003 Wired investigation of hobbyist "lifters" found that the only written report on a vacuum test documented a failure. In it R. L. Talley, testing a Biefeld–Brown-style capacitor for the Air Force in 1990, found no thrust. The earlier version of this article dated this Air Force study to 1988.^[13]

A CUFOS-hosted October 1971 issue of NICAP's UFO Investigator cited in the earlier version returned "not found" when checked.^[12]

Assessment

• Second-hand sources. The account is second-hand. Sorensen has not publicly confirmed it in detail, and the other informants McCandlish cited are known only through him.^[1][7]
• A shifting story. The location, the presentation of the craft and some technical details changed between the 2000 testimony and his later talks.^[1][7]
• Gaps in the engineering. Even the sympathetic AltSci analysis notes these gaps:
  • the energy source is never properly specified;
  • the "mass reduction" is asserted through a voltage threshold rather than derived from any model;
  • the purpose of the craft is inferred;
  • he supplied no schematics that could be built and tested. It calls this "the canyon between engineering narrative and engineering demonstration".^[1]
• The physics. The Biefeld–Brown effect on which the design depends has been explained as ionic wind and has not produced thrust in a vacuum.^[5][13]

McCandlish's drawing nonetheless remains one of the best-known images in claims about reverse-engineered craft. AltSci's references list a Find a Grave memorial giving his dates as 1953–2021.^[1] He died at his home in Redding, California, on 13 April 2021. The Shasta County coroner ruled the death a suicide, though some friends in UFO circles disputed the finding.^[15]

People and topics

• Mark McCandlish — Aerospace illustrator who drew the alleged "Alien Reproduction Vehicle".
• Disclosure Project — Steven Greer's campaign for UFO disclosure, best known for its May 2001 press conference.
• Brad Sorensen — Friend of Mark McCandlish who said he saw secret discs at Norton AFB.
• Norton Air Force Base — A California air base linked to claims of secret aircraft displays.
• Electrogravitics — The claimed link between electricity and gravity promoted by Thomas Townsend Brown.
• Thomas Townsend Brown — Physicist and inventor who promoted "electrogravitics" and proposed Project Winterhaven.
• NICAP — The leading U.S. civilian UFO group of the 1950s and 1960s.
• U.S. Air Force — The U.S. military service that ran the official UFO projects from 1947 to 1969.

On the Timeline

• Westwood on MJ-12 disinformation (2001) (5 May 2001) — A consultant tells Vallée the MJ-12 documents are disinformation.
• Mach effect experiments (June 2001) — Researchers publish an experiment on changing the mass of test samples.

See every 2001 event on the UAP Timeline →

Further reading

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “Skunk Works”, “Thomas Townsend Brown”, “en.wikipedia.org”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.