The impression of riding in an interplanetary space craft
I’ve instructed OTC to prepare a release that we have been detained by ‘moon women’ if we are not back in the prescribed seven days
A few elements lingered from Oklahoma’s semicentennial celebration. Fifty years later, a time capsule containing a 1957 Plymouth Belvedere was excavated near the Tulsa County Courthouse. Clarence Love had placed a case of Schlitz in the car’s trunk, later joking, “I hope my beer's all right, I promised a lot of people I'd give ‘em a can.” The local musician was never reunited with his stash, dying nine years before the ceremony. A contest had been held before the burial. Whoever came closest to guessing the city’s population after half a century would win the car – and, presumably, the beer inside.
One-hundred and six miles away in Oklahoma’s capital, the semicentennial was marked by a massive state fair. The celebration promised a look at its past and a glimpse into its atomic future. The 190-foot-tall “Arrows to Atoms” statue would be removed from the site the following decade, over fears that its deterioration could injury passersby. The end of the seven-month-long fair was marked by a college football game 20 miles away in Norman. Notre Dame beat Oklahoma 7-0, ending the school’s 47-game win streak.
While a pioneer town built for the fair was soon disassembled, committee head Jimmy Burge began work on an amusement park centered around similar themes. Frontier City opened the following year, with a ribbon cutting that swapped the scissors for a vintage six shooter. Within months, Burge struck a deal with Otis T. Carr, an inventor who promised to use the park as a launch pad for his flying saucer, the OTC [Otis T Carr] X-1.
It was an ambitious goal by any measure, delivering three key components to Frontier City. First, Carr would provide a 45-foot replica of the craft, which Burge and company could convert into a ride. Then the inventor promised to deliver a six-foot working prototype by the following April, capable of hovering 500 feet off the ground. In December, Carr and extraterrestrial contactee Wayne Sulo Aho would pilot a working version of the 45-foot craft round trip to the moon.
“I landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day and there was a lot of of hot lead flying around,” Aho told The Tucson Daily Citizen. “I don’t feel as uneasy about this space trip as I did about having hot lead flying around my head.” He added, “I’ve instructed OTC to prepare a release that we have been detained by ‘moon women’ if we are not back in the prescribed seven days.” He also told the paper that early testing had gone according to plan.
Carr, for his part, explained to all who would listen that his work was based on Nikola Tesla’s uncompleted research around free energy. He had even gone so far as convincing investors to aid in the construction of a “Free Energy Research Institute” in Baltimore that would realize the technology’s full potential in the form of free energy devices, anti-gravity machines and flying saucers.
In January, the USPTO granted Carr a patent for an “Amusement Device.” The proposal highlights plans for a park ride, rather than a working spaceship. “This invention relates generally to improvements in amusement devices,” it reads, “and more particularly, to an improved amusement device of the type wherein the passengers will receive the impression of riding in an interplanetary space craft.” Believers noted that the “amusement” angle was simply a ploy to get his spaceship through a skeptical government office, while the patent hid the true secrets to his technology.
Carr called out sick for the April launch and soon disappeared altogether. None of the visitors to the Otis T Carr Enterprises factory, which he’d opened in Oklahoma City soon after the deal was struck, ever saw either version of the ship, working or not. The hundreds of people who showed up at Frontier City on December 7th saw neither the ship nor Carr, having to settle for the amusement mockup he’d delivered to the park earlier. The entire project reportedly cost investors $50,000.
“I was trying to develop it on a shoestring, when I needed several shoe laces,” he said later. By the following year, he’d moved on to Southern California, convincing investors in San Bernardino County to back his research.
“The Apple Valley Victorville Hesperia triangle entered the Space Age when it was reported last week that Otis T. Carr & Associates had leased the Osbrink Building on Bear Valley Road for the building and testing of space craft machines that ultimately Carr & Associates hope to put into manned flight,” one contemporary report noted. “The plant will be used by Mr. Carr to further his developments in Space research, which will include fabrication and assembly of space exhibitions rides, such as were developed by him and his associates in Frontier City, [an] exhibition park in the Oklahoma City area.”
The paper went on to describe his plans for a 21-foot craft capable of transporting four people. That same year, Carr and associates went on trial in Oklahoma, charged with “selling securities without registering the same.” He was found guilty in early 1961 and fined $5,000 – roughly one-tenth the cost of that specific scheme. Unable to pay the fee, he was sentenced to 14 years in prison. He ultimately served six months after he was discovered in another state selling more investors on his unrealized technologies.
Carr would reemerge sporadically over the following decades, after relocating to Pittsburgh. In the mid-60s, he offered a paper comment on a recent spate of UFO sightings, noting that his own successful experiments proved the objects were likely made by humans. “I don’t say the craft are from somewhere else,” he explained. “I have proved in laboratory experiments that you can levitate a solid body electrically.”
By the end of the decade, he began publishing advertisements for his “Carr Model AX-1 Interdimensional Perpetual Free Power Machine” in newspapers. “The cruel dictatorship that rules this planet with an iron fist is afraid to challenge me, one poor, lone, weak individual,” he wrote in 1970. “In their mad quest to maintain their murderous dynasty wherein they will gladly trade a gallon of blood for a barrel of oil they still, with all their powers, are afraid of Free Energy and Free Power.”
Sources:
Frontier City Continues in Old West Tradition https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/1998/05/17/frontier-city-continues-in-old-west-tradition/62281200007/
Uneasy Over Trip to Moon? Not Flying Saucer Man Aho https://www.newspapers.com/clip/100692115/otis-t-carr-and-wayne-aho-plan-trip-to/
Amusement device https://patents.google.com/patent/US2912244A/en
Flying saucer trains skeptic https://www.newspapers.com/clip/100692172/otis-t-carr-and-the-flying-saucer/
Trial is slated for Otis Carr https://www.newspapers.com/clip/100692553/otis-t-carr-flying-saucer-inventor/
The Life and Legend of Otis T. Carr https://thesaucersthattimeforgot.blogspot.com/2020/11/the-life-and-legend-of-otis-t-carr-part.html