This weekend I was in Western North Carolina, enjoying the lumpier part of the state, taking in the natural beauty and, it seems, some of the unnatural beauty, as you can see above. That’s a vehicle I saw while in Asheville, driving around noisily, and it made me realize that this is part of a largely unsung tradition in America: the UFO car.
I’m not exactly sure why, and I don’t really have evidence to back it up quite as thoroughly as I’d like, but I feel like there have always been a couple UFO/flying saucer-shaped cars rolling around the country, popping up on local news stories maybe once a year, at least if my fuzzy memories from childhood can be considered viable historical documentation.
I think there was even one in the town I grew up in as a kid, Greensboro, NC, and I think it was based on a Volkswagen Beetle pan, like so many backyard kit-cars of that era? I feel like the UFO car is part of American folk art, as valid as chainsaw sculptures and muffler men.
This particular UFO car seems to be built on, based on the fact that it has three wheels under there and the distinctive sound of the engine, a Cushman Truckster or something similar to that. The method of construction is clever and a good way to re-body something like a Cushman with more ease than fabricating a metal body.
Maybe more ease, but I’m not implying any less skill is required for a textile/soft type of body like this: it’s clear that care has been taken in putting this together, and there must be some rigid hoops in that thing holding the shape around the middle. And the use of tentacled and alien-shaped inflatables works well, and the resulting aliens remind me a bit of the famous Kang and Kodos of the Simpsons:
Let’s look at some other examples of the UFO car genre; there’s some relatively well-known ones currently, including this on built on a 1968 VW Beetle:
This one is interesting in how much of the existing Beetle body it retains; the whole stock Beetle greenhouse is retained, and the (aluminum?) body looks to be built right onto the original structure. I wish I could see how the doors work, though.
Here’s a good full-body-replacement example, from Brooklyn – the Wisconsin one, not the one with better corned beef sandwiches – built sometime in the 1980s on a 1976 Chevy Camaro:
I think at the moment the currently operating flagship of the UFO car fleet has to be this one built from a 1991 Geo Metro by Steve Anderson:
This UFO car got some attention when it was pulled over by a cop while driving from Indiana to Roswell, New Mexico:
While not strictly saucer-shaped, I have had the pleasure of driving a handmade spacecraft-shaped car, Baron Margo’s incredible rocket car, also built on a (heavily modified) VW Beetle chassis:
Oh hey, this is all sort of appropriate for today, May 4! Live long and prosper in the Force, as they say!
Somebody in Eau Claire, WI semi-regularly drives a Mike Vetter ETV (Extra-Terrestrial Vehicle) and the thing looks absolutely bizarre. I’d attach a pic but can’t do those in comments here.
Everybody seems to want more space in their car.
This is all so out of this world…
Happy May the 4th! (be with you)
There’s apparently a UFO car driving around Fort Wayne, I’ve seen a video and pictures, but haven’t seen it in person.
That’s usually how UFO stories go.
That’s my hometown! I’ll have to look out for it next time I visit my parents there.
Somewhat related – Merrymobile ice cream vending vehicles were a summertime thing in Louisville and Memphis during the 1960s. (OSHA and NHTSA would not approve, these days.) https://www.facebook.com/p/MerryMobile-100057076765772/
I like my UFO cars to have function that matches their looks. The theme lends itself quite well to aerodynamic drag reduction.
Examples that work include but are not limited to the Schlorwagen(aka “Pillbug”) and the MG EX181. Both look like UFOs, and both are slippery little bastards. Then there’s the Alfa Romeo Disco Volante Coupe, whose name disco volante translates literally from Italian to English as flying saucer.
Hats off to anyone with a vision who then builds it. Artistic vehicle enthusiasts might be interested in the Baltimore Kinetic Sculpture Race (https://kineticbaltimore.com/KSR/2026/Preliminary.asp), hosted by the American Visionary Art Museum (itself a national treasure, not least because it is home of the Fart Post). Sculptures are human propelled; in addition to an on-road course through the city, they must traverse a water section in the harbor and mud pit/hill climb. Alas, 2026’s race just occurred but the field for 2027 is wide open.
Is that the museum where the men’s room is named after John Waters?
No, the John Waters bathroom is at the Baltimore Museum of Art. However, the American vision art Museum does have a very large statue of Divine
No, the John Waters bathroom is the Baltimore Museum of Art The Visionary Art Museum does have a large statue of Divine
You only *think* you haven’t seen any aliens cruising around lately.
Turns out they’re tired of getting shot at by the gov’t, or mobbed by sex-crazed hippies. Even police boxes are too noticeable. So they’ve traded in the Tardis and flying saucers for white CUVs (Camouflage Underspace Vehicles).
Now they can slip through the cracks in space-time and park undetected at the Costco. Olive oil is in high demand on Dalari Prime.
And no more rice-picker-accident wise cracks. With everyone shopping in hoodies and sweat pants, most aliens can blend right in.
That’s a much smarter strategy than using the spaceship-looking vehicles, which advertise that you’re. only here on earth To Serve Man.
Years ago we booked a B & B in the small town of Eureka Springs, Arkansas. It was just a late summer get-away. We were sitting on the swing of the front porch of our rental right off of the main street on a Saturday afternoon when a parade approached out of the blue.
A small marching band, followed the dress-in-drag cheerleaders and some random floats throwing out hard candy (pelting us actually). The highlight for me was near the end when an van drove by. It was (poorly) painted NASA white and decked out in shuttle fins and tail. The tail was an easy 5 feet high and the thing took up most of the street. Very ambitious and random.
This is a tourist town, so the locals apparently do the parade EVERY weekend. I asked what the occasion was and they said “it’s Saturday!”. They clearly don’t take themselves too seriously up there. I think there’s an old Hippie commune nearby. Still it was fun and explains the piles of old hard candy on the porch. The van made a good space shuttle.
Not as good as a Reliant Robin, I’d wager.
Cleveland’s delightful Rocket Ship Car is a ride you can go on https://www.rocketshipcar.com
There is also the most beautiful one: the Alfa Romeo Disco Volante. The original, not the 8C based sequel.
The coupe had a 0.25 drag coefficient. Coupled with its small frontal area, it was an efficient little bastard. 140 mph on 156 horsepower.
If this car were converted to electric, it would probably only need ~110 Wh/mile to hold 70 mph on flat ground. Inexpensive, simple, aerodynamic sports cars made to look beautiful are really the way to do EVs: you’ll keep them light for a desired range by keeping the size of the battery down, they’ll be cheaper to produce, and they’ll add a lot of performance value for the money. But the auto industry would rather force us to have ugly, aggro-looking SUVs/CUVs instead and make us pay supercar prices if we want something fun…
I do wonder how much weight would be added to something like this, a super-aerodynamic small sports coupe but with electric drivetrain, once you comply with safety regulations. How much weight is added by having a passenger cell, impact-absobing front end, airbags, a rollover-supportive roof, and side impact door beams? And how much more motor and battery does that then require in order for it to have an acceptable acceleration (not just flat surface cruise)?
Or, maybe your thinking is not about creating a more mainstream vehicle, and my question is not relevant.
Miata-like weight is possible, or even less if you build a smaller car.
A fully-assembled battery pack using cells ~270 Wh/kg will end up being around 200 Wh/kg when ready to drop into the car. You shouldn’t need more than 35 kWh to get a real-world 200+ mile highway range with a sufficiently aerodynamic design, say a CdA value matching or beating the VW XL1. A 35 kg electric motor these days can make 250 horsepower. The entire EV drive system ready to use, including battery, motor, wiring, cooling, and controller shouldn’t weigh more than 500 lbs, comparable to an entire ICE system.
A 2,500 lb streamliner sports car EV is very possible with today’s tech, using the Miata ND as a baseline for what is possible within the scope of meeting NHTSA crash safety regulations. All you have to give up is all of the modern stupid styling cues such as oversized wheels, oversized grilles, aggressive creases everywhere, plastic cladding, that not only work against aerodynamics, but IMO make the cars abdominally ugly. We need to go back to clean, curvaceous, sexy designs that harken back to the Alfa Romeo Disco Volante and TZ, Shelby Daytona Coupe, Ferrari 250GTO, Jaguar D-Type, ect. of a bygone era, shapes that with subtle changes could lend themselves well to drag reduction.
If the car isn’t made to be extremely aerodynamic, it won’t work because the battery weight will go up.
Then there’s this one in Brooklyn Brooklyn
I haven’t seen it in a while but I haven’t been down the side streets over there in a bit, I was worried it had been impounded or something, but some recentish facebook posts make me think it’s still out there
Apparently it’s a Blazer underneath
Novelty itself feels like it’s dying. Everything feels more homogenous than ever and it’s really unsettling.
Too many people are in survival mode, whether in actuality or they just feel that way. They lack the creative inclination, time, money, and ability. The last one is especially disappointing because the access to cheap parts, electronics, 3D printing, and tutorials has never been better, but I think the saddest thing is that decades of passive, unimaginative entertainment and the decline of reading (and among those who read, many just read essentially the same thing over and over) have severely limited imagination and the idea of creative DIY. For the people with the money, they’d rather buy stuff they think impresses people. As entertainment/pacification gets more fragmented and “individually curated to better serve us” by data gathering and algorithms, common points of reference and shared experience disappears, separating everyone from a sense of community and belonging, leaving only The Corporations. That’s to say nothing of the declining quality of said entertainment in all areas from art to complexity that encourages thought and maybe even reconsideration of beliefs. Thought hurts peoples’ heads because they’re so unaccustomed to it, conflict has them run crying because they’ve never been made to handle any, and identities were never formed thanks to the latter two, so they adopt ready-made ideologies with a full set of beliefs and thoughts, like franchise fast food. Since those thoughts aren’t even their own and they can’t defend them argumentatively, but disagreement threatens their very identity, they’ll do whatever they feel they need to do to defend them from perceived threat and justify it all.
I built a yellow/hot pink/turquoise ACME rocket bike. Everywhere I ride it, people love it. It cost me a couple hundred bucks to make and most of that was decent tires and several iterations of trying to get the suicide shifters to work properly and having to buy larger quantities of odd hardware than I needed. People actually seriously ask if it’s real, something I don’t think I would have been asked (or at least not as often) were this the ’90s or earlier. The rocket body is corrugated HDPE drain pipe, the fins from a coroplast sign, the nose cone a chainlink fence capital and cheap desk lamp shade (fence capital is removable for the headlight underneath, an old Mazda3 projection unit running a 12V 27W LED), the exhaust a stainless cocktail tumbler with a 12V trailer light inside. There are two opening doors in the body secured by leather straps. It does not look real to anyone with the slightest idea of how a rocket works or what using one would mean. Anyway, back to the shared culture point, a lot of people younger than their 30s don’t seem to get the ACME reference, though they still like it. As for impressing people, no 5-figure bike gets a second glance, but I’ve gotten phone numbers from attractive women nearly half my age, so on the flip side, it’s at least easier to stand out in this depressing environment.
That sounds amazing! Got some pics?
I don’t know how to post pics here. Some of the build pics used to show up on a Google image search, but the website that hosted the pics from the bike build contest I built it for might have shut them down as I think I built it in 2017. I’m kind of surprised to not be able to find pics posted by someone else as I’ve been stopped to get photos dozens of times.
Custom bikes are so cheap to make and easy to store in comparison to cars and I think people could get a lot out of making them. If I was more of a people person, I’d love to organize a custom bike show somewhere around here, but it would probably just be my bikes, some random tall bike, and a flat black cruiser that would show, anyway.
Funny thing is, though I didn’t expect it to be much more than a novelty, the rocket bike is pretty comfortable to ride despite having a bit too small of a frame* and, combined with being the safest bike I’ve ever ridden, it’s probably the bike I ride the most.
*The bike was my mother’s old bike and nobody wanted it, so when the contest came up, I decided to make a real bike from a sketch I drew up to mock guys who were too macho to ride an antique “girl’s bike” by adding a phallic rocket top tube to a mixte.
For hosting images, imgur works well and is relatively easy to use. There are others.
Please share pictures of this bike. It sounds fun.
I regularly wear a bright yellow hat festooned with magnetically attached “things” which I change out out daily. It always gets attention and smiles. Great to bring a little color to folks. Then I found a wildly patterened colorful jacket at a thrift store. They make for an attention grabbing attire (on the hune for pants to clash). Fun to bring some smiles, yucks, or grimmaces to people if to only interrupt for a minute their gloom. The one adornment on my hat that seems to have permanence is a small Pink Rainbow Care Bear. A recent addition is a Cat in the Hat, and for automotive relevance, I have a selection of tiny (less then an inch long) hand-cut tin cars made in Madagascar which includes a vaguely 2CV, old-school caddy convertible, and a Jeep.
Thank you; the world needs more everyday whimsy.
There’s a cure for that: Burning Man. Tickets still available.
In the world of cosplay there’s still plenty of folks expressing inexpensive originality.
I would like to see one crashed in Roswell with a sign “Just a weather balloon, move along”.
Ironically enough, I saw one dead on the side of the road two weeks ago!
Must have been a Ford…Probe? Ha ha
https://www.theautopian.com/1996-ford-probe-cold-start/