Feel like your work is being suppressed? Feel free to post and vent here.

I couldn’t decide on a title for this post… So it could be: “Patterns that discourage exploration — intentionally or not” or “A Lesson from the ‘Build Your Own Flying Saucer’ Era” or “When Real Effects Are Packaged in Broken Designs” Storytime: Many years ago, for several decades from the 1950s through the 1970s there were advertisements in the back of both magazines and comic books. Many of the ads were sensationalistic money grabbers, like bicycle mounted BB machine guns, and gyrocopters. One of those ads was for a "build your own real flying saucer" instruction set. I spoke with someone who spent his hard-earned newspaper route money and bought the plans. The plans were for building a small UFO-disc shaped craft with gyroscopes mounted all around it. The premise was that the gyroscopes would lift the craft if the craft was rotated, because of forced precession. There were a lot of disappointed builders out there because this, of course, does not work… More hard-earned newspaper route money wasted… The writer obviously never actually built the craft. Or did he? Was this just a "big fail" or was this a "false flag" to make people believe it was not possible to create inertial propulsion? This was the era of discovery and of deception… Big Fail… or Something More… Um… Interesting? There are three possibilities: 1. Simple Scam The most obvious explanation: The author understood gyros only superficially, and never built the device, so he sold a compelling story instead of a working system. This definitely happened in those days— a lot. 2. Incomplete Understanding (The More Likely One) More charitable — and more dangerous explanation. The designer may have: Observed forced precession and felt strong reactive forces, then he misinterpreted internal forces as external lift. Many experimenters stop here and conclude: “Gyros don’t work and inertial propulsion is bunk.” 3. False Flag by Design (The Uncomfortable but Very Real Possibility) This is where history gets interesting.