3.1 THE PARIS EXPERIMENTS
Skeptics had claimed that Brown’s flying discs were propelled entirely
by ion wind pressure and would lose their propulsive force if tested in a
vacuum chamber where few air molecules would be present, hut in 1955
and 1956, they were proved wrong. Under the sponsorship of the French
government, Brown conducted a series of vacuum chamber experiments
at facilities made available by Société Nationale du Constructions
Aeronautiques du Sud-Ouest, a Paris-based aeronautical corporation.
There, he successfully flew a pair of miniature saucer airfoils in a high
vacuum of less than one billionth of an atmosphere. Not only did the
discs propel themselves more efficiently, hut they also sped faster, since,
without ion leakage, they could be energized with greater voltages.
The tests used a 200-watt power source to supply DC potentials rangi
ng from 70 to 220 kilovolts) Few details are known about these tests
because the results were considered a confidential matter. However, it
appears the discs measured about 4 to 5 inches in diameter and had a
central body made of solid aluminum.2’ By comparison, the 1.5- and 3-
foot-diameter discs that Brown had tested in his carousel demonstration
svere made of Plexiglas and lightweight sheet aluminum.