Net-stock fraudster Moller offers flying saucer on eBay Famous flying-car inventor Paul Moller, who was fined in 2003 by the US authorities for selling "fraudulent unregistered stock" on the internet, is now selling his personal flying saucer prototype on eBay. Our advice: buyer beware. According to Moller, the online auction is an opportunity to acquire "a piece of aviation …
In it Moller was touting the virtues of personal flying saucers again and there was the same 20-year-old grainy film of a 10 second flight. Strangely enough not a mention was made of SEC's ruling nor of the fuel problems.
Alien because I also have a grainy hand held film of a flying saucer that no one believes.
I have seen this before. I think it was in a 1950's or early 60's popular mechanics mag. According to the test pilot it was highly unstable (and very loud). Maybe he has solved that little problem. Then there was also a "flying pogo stick" which was basically a jet engine mounted vertically with foot pegs a gyro and a handlebar. Now we are talking real fun. As far as I know they still have the classic thrust duration problem. (can't carry enough fuel to make it useful). Along with the feared "failure=death" safety issue.
But good luck to him anyhow....
The auctions only question and answer is all that really needs to be said:
Q: In your information, it does not say if the unit still works - does it? Oct-06-08
A: We do not recommend flying the M200X in its current configuration. The fans are currently fitted with aluminum blades with a known failure mode that would put the operator at risk. We have switched over to composite fan blades and would only recommend flights be undertaken in the M200X if this was done as well. Unfortunately we believe this would also reduce the historic value of the aircraft. Performance estimates for the M200X are available but it should be considered non-operational at this time.
This con artist is going to make 20K from this piece of junk and he can't even provide said piece of junk in working order.... in fact to make things worse he even tells you its going to fail! Some poor sap is going to have this delivered to his door jump in it and be extremely disappointed!!
I've known Moller for some time and he's not a fraudster, more like an over-optimistic engineer. But, unlike most, he has consistently put his money where is mouth is. He's built and sold business worth hundreds of millions of dollars (SuperTrapp and RotaPower) and poured that money into the singular pursuit of a flying car. He's done that for over thirty years, with mixed success.
I don't think I know of anyone else who has sunk so much time and energy into trying to achieve something and never quite made it. And, yet, he still manages to carry on. The stock thing was an unfortunate occurrence, but I don't believe it was malicious, just naive. He's over 70 now, so who knows whether he'll be able to complete his vision.
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