Shooting Down the Saqqara Bird

Ever heard of the Saqqara Bird? Discovered in 1898, it's an Egyptian artifact believed to be about 2,000 years old. Made of sycamore wood, the bird may have been a ceremonial object, a toy, or even some kind of weather vane, but a lack of historical references to the bird means that we may never know exactly what it was intended for. The bird is a fun historical footnote, a minor mystery whose true purpose may never be known, but it doesn't represent anything earth-shattering...or does it? Anything remotely unexplained in archaeology serves as a lightning rod for crackpot theories, and the Saqqara Bird is no exception. For many years alternative history enthusiasts have been making some pretty incredible claims about the Saqqara Bird.

The Saqqara Bird in all its glory.

One of the hallmarks of the alternative history crowd is the idea that ancient civilizations possessed incredibly advanced technologies that were somehow "lost" to later generations. Pseudohistorians like Erich von Daniken and David Hatcher Childress have become famous by spouting falderal about ancient astronauts, long-lost super technology, and futuristic civilizations that have somehow vanished without a trace. Likewise, ancient Egypt, which boasted numerous legitimate scientific and engineering accomplishments, has long stoked the imaginations of kooks as diverse as Sylvia Browne and Richard Hoagland. Therefore it should come as no surprise that the Saqqara bird, wth its ancient Egyptian origin and tantalizing airplane-like shape, has been the subject of many far-fetched theories.

Specifically, there's no small number of folks out there who'd have you believe that the Saqqara Bird is a functional glider, or perhaps even a prototype model for a full-scale airplane. Nearest I can tell, the first person to claim that the bird was a model/prototype aircraft was Dr. Dawoud Khalil Messiha back in 1969, but the claim may have been most famously made by Hunter Havelin Adams III in the notoriously specious essay African and African American Contributions to Science and Technology. ¹ On pages 52 and 53 of this essay, Adams claims

The ancient Egyptian model looks contemporary and bears a strong resemblances to the American Hercules transport aircraft...[Although the glider] could sail through the air for a considerable distance with only a slight hand thrust it definitely was not a toy. It was a model for a full-scale glider! ...[Another source claims that] Egyptians used their early planes for travel, expeditions, and recreation!

Wait...what? The Saqqara Bird looks like a Hercules C-130? A Hercules C-130 is 97 feet long, and has four 4,300 horsepower engines. The Saqqara Bird is about seven inches long and doesn't even have a horizontal stabilizer on its tail. It looks like a modern plane only in the sense that it has wings. I'm also curious to know who Mr. Adams' source can make bold assertions about how the ancient Egyptians used their airplanes when we have nothing in the way of evidence that they had airplanes to begin with.

The History Channel, as part of it's continuing plan to completely discredit itself, recently ran an episode of the show "Ancient Discoveries" which purported to prove that the Saqqara Bird was capable of flight. Have a look.



Wow - those guys put a model of the bird through a wind tunnel AND a computer simulation and they say it can fly! That's conclusive proof, right? Wrong. Watch the video again and pay attention - these guys aren't testing the Saqqara Bird, they're testing a balsa wood model fitted with a large horizontal tail surface. The real bird has no horizontal tail at all and is made from sycamore, which is something like three times as dense as balsa wood. The real conclusion here is that if the Saqqara Bird was made of different material and actually shaped like an airplane, it could fly. How much does that prove?

This is Big Fluffy Puss-Puss, and he can fly...
Or he could, if only he were shaped like this:

More to the point, a few years ago model airplane enthusiast Martin Gregorie tested the flight capabilities of a model of the Saqqara Bird and his results were far less less enthusiastic. Unlike our friends with the History Channel, Gregorie notes that the original bird's wings are of unequal length and are not level with the rest of the body and the vertical tail is actually set at an angle. ² Take a look at this picture and see for yourself. In order to get a more thorough picture of the bird's potential capabilities, Gregorie experimented with various slightly different configurations for the object's wing and tail structures. He fashioned two wings for his model, one that was curved like the original bird's (which he calls a "scale wing") and one which was flat. He also created two horizontal tail surfaces, a "scale tail" shaped like the wings of the original bird, and a "big tail" that was flat and, er, big. He also experimented with adding additional ballast to the model.

Gregorie's conclusion when launching the model without an added tail surface was as follows:

The model will not fly without a tail...The result is always a pitch up if the model is launched at its gliding speed and a pitch down if launched faster, followed by a tumbling motion. Adding ballast to the nose to move the balance point forward has no effect.

He found that the "scale wing" (which, as you'll recall, closely mimics the wing of the original bird) is somewhat less effective than the flat wing at sustaining a glide, noting that "the scale wing section is rather inefficient and the anhedral built into it makes the model laterally unstable." Directly refuting the earlier claim that "the model could soar through the air with only a slight hand thrust" Gregorie states that:

Even unballasted, the model's flying speed is fairly high. It does not soar and cannot be launched "with a slight jerk of the hand"...Attempts to do so merely result in the model flopping to the ground in a level attitude. It needs a full-arm launch at a fairly high speed to fly at all.

His final conclusion consists of three simple bullet points and reads thusly:

The performance of this model proves conclusively that the Saqqara Bird never flew. It is totally unstable without a tailplane. A cursory inspection of the photos shows that it never had one.

Even after a tailplane was fitted the glide performance was disappointing. The Saqqara Bird was certainly never a test piece for a low speed, cargo carrying aircraft.

The model makes an excellent weather vane. It points directly and steadily into the wind and does not veer from side to side.

I imagine the History Channel couldn't sell as many advertisements for a show talking about how the ancient Egyptians made awesome weather vanes as they could for a show claiming that they soared above the pyramids in fully functional gliders that we've no other archaeological evidence of. The fact of the matter is that the Saqqara Bird cannot fly. It also cannot be jury-rigged to fly without significant changes to the design of the wings and tail and the addition of a horizontal tail surface that nothing save wishful thinking impels us to believe it originally had.

Saying that the Saqqara Bird could possibly have been an ancient weather vane may not be nearly as exciting as claiming that it was the prototype for an Egyptian airplane, but it's almost certainly closer to the truth


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1.) The Adams essay is especially troubling because it was distributed to schoolchildren as part of a series of essays about African and African-American history. An extreme Afro-centrist, Adams was willing to throw legitimate African-American scientific contributions under the bus in favor of grandiose pseudohistorical nonsense. See this Skeptical Inquirer article to a full discussion of Adams' bizarre claims.

2.) Gregorie notes that the unequal length of the wings may be due to breakage and subsequent reassembly of the bird.

The Imaginary Asteroid

I'm going to go ahead and make the assumption that readers don't remember this post from last year. Basically, a pair of fellows made a claim based on their (and only their) interpretation of an ancient Sumerian disc that a heretofore unknown asteroid impact caused a huge landslide event at the Köfels site in the Austrian Alps that took place around 8,700 years ago. Well, the two fellows involved, Alan Bond and Mark Hempsell, have released a book about their findings that was reviewed in the new (vol. 14, no. 3) issue of Skeptic and their arguments appear to be pretty freakin' weak.

It's always troubling when someone's allegedly scientific conclusions are released not in a peer-reviewed journal but rather in a mass-market book. Readers may also recall that I found it odd that Bond and Hempsell's asteroid scenario required that the Köfels event take place about 3,500 years more recently than the conventional dating of the site indicates. This is because our two friends want to show that an Sumerian artifiact called the planisphere is actually a record of the event, but computer models of the ancient sky from around the accepted dating of the Köfels event don't synch up with the planisphere's depiction of the night sky, but you can get a close match from a computer model of the sky from June 29, 3123 B.C. Widely accepting dating methods be damned, according to Bond and Hempsell. If the planisphere looks kind of like the sky from 3123 B.C. and not like the sky from 6600 B.C., then by golly the Köfels landslide took place in 3123 B.C. and the geologists who've dated it otherwise are wrong.

That in and of itself should set off some warning bells, but Skeptic reviewers Jeff Medkeff and Martin Rundkvist have even more damning criticism of Bond and Hempsell's work. Briefly, Bond and Hempsell claim that the impact at Köfels threw a massive plume of debris backwards along the path of the impacting object, creating a huge plume of fire over much of the ancient mid-east that has since been incorporated into the mythology of the region. As Medkeff and Rundkvist note, all of this supposedly happened without leaving so much as a crater at the Köfels site. Bond and Hempsell's further claim that the impactor was broken up before it struck the Köfels site by glancing impacts against other nearby mountains is also unsupported by observations.

It looks very much like Bond and Hempsell simply came up with a "cool idea" about what the planisphere might represent and worked backwards to find some way to make it mean what they want it to mean. If that meant rejecting physics and geology to make the evidence fit their conclusions, then so be it.

Also, given that some of the early headlines about Bond and Hempsell's hypothesis read "Research Shows Asteroid Destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah"*, it may also be worth noting that some of the customer reviews on Amazon go a little something like this (Emphasis added):

I was first interested in the book to see if it confirmed any dates in the long, 13,000 year chronology of the Bible. (See bibletime dot com or Harold Camping's 13,000 year Bible Chronology.) This impact event does match. The impact date given in the book is just after Peleg's first year, (using the Bible Time version) at the time when the earth was "divided." This impact event provides a great explanation of that mysterious reference.

The always-hilarious website Conservapedia also has an excited entry on the "Köfels Impact" in which it claims that the non-existent impact provides literal evidence for the Biblical account of Sodom and Gomorrah. Since it also incorrectly cites Mark Hempsell as a geologist (He's actually an aerospace engineering lecturer and England's Bristol University), that whole article can probably be taken with a grain of salt. Still, it looks like the imaginary "Köfels impact" is likely to quickly find its way into the lexicon of Biblical literalists.

In any event, check out an online version of the Skeptic review here.

*Headline is from FoxNews.com, 4-1-2008.
Also, I know it's not considered an asteroid it it hits the Earth, but I liked the alliteration...