‘Houston, we have a problem!’ – ok, guys, maybe this misquotation wasn’t used for the first time in 1970, maybe it was used, like centuries ago. Even before ‘’Apollo 13.’’
On display in the Gold Museum of Bogota (Museo del Oro, Colombia) you can find a very cute, petit air jets. They represent a scale model of what exists the belief that is the first airplane, found as an archaeological discovery in South America.
These dozen golden artifacts, dated around 1000 CE, and they were found in an area of Central America and in the coastal areas of South America.
Besides the fact that this is a very interesting revelation, and that it could be considered as the first model of an airplane, the other fascinating thing is the fact that it really flies!!! It’s working, though!
The ancient jets are about 2 to 3 inches (5 to 7.5 cm) each and they were recovered from royal tombs. It’s very difficult to say exactly from what period they dated, but, however, we can say approximately about 1500 years ago.
When people found this golden cutie, they thought they are some models of an animal from that age, to be zoomorphic. Like there were fish, flying fish or rats, and even birds.
These models were the most similar to flying fish because of their aerodynamic shape. Petit air jets have the vertical and horizontal “stabilizers”. These stabilizers aren’t the quiet size, shape, and function like in theory, but it served in the past. If not as transport, then as a fancy and very expensive toy for sure.
The horizontal stabilizers are close to the wings, which actually is bad aerodynamically.
Speaking about the vertical stabilizer, it doesn’t extend below the body, unlike the fishes.
However, if the zoomorphic explanation is supposed to hold, then why did the artist cut the head off almost three quarters from the body? And why is the nose practically rectangular and the cut titled forward, with eyes positioned at either side, when fish eyes are usually more near the center of bodyline and far forward on the head?
The tail is equally intriguing. No fish has only a single, upright and perpendicular
flange. But this tail fin has an exact shape of fins on modern airplanes.
Also, there are spirals on the wings and the nose. According to Amerindian iconography, these spirals represent ascending and descending.
Recently, the hieroglyphs, found in an exactly 3000-year-old temple at Abydos a few hundred miles from Cairo, confirmed this story.
The wow thing about whole the story is that in 1994 Germans, Peter Belting and Conrad Lubbers, created one of these objects in a larger form, they added a motor and the object was flying normally!
Maybe for our modern history, this doesn’t sound like much, but hey, it’s still impressive.
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What an impressive find, No one grasp their purpose exactly. Still comparing them to the modern airplanes structures, its harder to neglect the fact that they look like the scale copies of the ancient planes in a first look.
I think toys based on flying fish could be the most likely explaination. They did say they were found by a coastal area so it makes sense the ancient people living there would try and create toys made out of gold for royal kids or something. Also that stone carving found in Egypt in the otger photo was later proven to be regular hyroglyphs that were eroded by the weather so they aren’t carvings of helicopters subs or spacecraft.