The Plumber Who Mailed UFO Plans to His Family

A package sat on Natalia's kitchen table in Boston for weeks. It was from her father, a retired plumber in Kazakhstan. When she learned he had died, she finally opened it. Inside were 119 pages of Russian text, physics equations, and detailed schematics. Her husband Jean, a former Air Force nuclear weapons guard who had done contract work for the CIA, read over her shoulder. "What does it say?" he kept asking. "I told him it's a UFO," Natalia said. "I was petrified and mesmerized at the same time."

The papers described a flat disc ten feet across and ten feet thick, with a dome at the center. The hull was solid silicon weighing more than 3,000 tons. Inside were 678,000 small superconducting coils. Run enough current through them, and the whole disc would push against gravity. The pilot wouldn't use a wheel or buttons. "You fly it with your mind," the documents explained. The craft would "collapse the space between itself and the object" — moving, as Jean put it, "at the speed of thought." One page carried a warning in capital letters: "This is technology from the twenty-second century."

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