The 15 February 1998 issue of The Augusta Chronicle featured an article by Randall Floyd titled “Flight may have begun before Wrights:”
The story began when the model was discovered in 1898 in a tomb near pyramid of Sakkara. The model was then categorized as that of a bird and placed in the Egyptian museum in its designated section, with all the other bird models. In 1969, while sorting through a box of old exhibits in the basement of the Cairo museum, Egyptologist Khalil Messiha found what appeared to be a 2,200-year-old model airplane, complete with wings, landing gear and an aerodynamically designed body. The object had been found in a 2,000-year-old tomb near Saqqara in 1898. The archaeologist was stunned. What would a perfectly scaled model of an airplane be doing in a tomb of such antiquity?
Egypt’s Ministry of Culture agreed. A committee set up to investigate the matter concluded that the 7-inch-long model, built of light sycamore wood and weighing only 1.11 ounces, seemed to incorporate principles of aircraft design that had taken modern engineers decades of experimentation to discover and perfect. Moreover, they found, the glider worked. More than two millennia after its construction, it still sailed easily through the air at only the slightest flick of the hand.
The typical models of the ancient Egyptian birds have legs but this one did not. Other bird models had painted feathers but not this one. Messiah’s brother, a flight engineer, reproduced it in balsa wood and launched it and it flew. Dr. Messiha was then sure it was a model of an airplane not a bird. The hieroglyphs on the model airplane say “the Gift of Amon”. Amon in ancient Egypt was known to be the god of wind and air and this was another proof that the model was more than a model bird. In addition to the phrase on the assumed model, the phrase “I want to fly” was found in three papyrus scripts. In his conclusion: “Apparently the ancients possessed long-forgotten technologies,” he said.
Another part of the world:
Incas and other pre-Columbian people left behind some extremely puzzling trinkets. Some of the strangest are probably the so-called Ancient Aeroplanes, which are small, golden figures that closely resemble modern jet planes.
The statues were soon found to have features that look very much like fighter planes’ wings, stabilizing tails, and even landing gears. They were aerodynamic enough that when ancient astronaut believers (allegedly) made model planes with their proportions and fitted them with propellers and (again, allegedly) jet engines, they flew perfectly. All of this has led to speculation that the Incas may have been in contact with (likely extraterrestrial) people who were able to build advanced jet planes, and who perhaps even possessed the technology themselves.
My friends and followers what say you?