Subrata Roy, a professor at the University of Florida, is building a flying saucer that will slide around on a cushion of plasma. All jokes about little green men and tinfoil hats aside, his concept seems feasible. Roy plans to cover his flying disk with electrodes that will zap the surrounding air, ionizing it to create magnetically charged plasma that will repel the air around it. By varying the juice that flows to electrodes across the disk’s surfaces, and thus the amount of repulsive plasma, he’ll be able to steer.

The professor’s first flying disk will measure about six inches across. In the future he plans to build larger and larger disks, eventually allowing you to don a bubble helmet, hop in and scare the bejesus out of simple farm folk.

Roy’s plasma-surfing disk is nothing new. American physicist Thomas Townsend Brown created a flying disk in the 1920s based on the same principle, which later became known as the Biefeld-Brown effect. More disks were supposedly created in the ’50s and ’60s by various arms of the U.S. Military. Most believe they were never mass produced due to the tremendous amount of electricity (and thus energy) required to keep them aloft. Modern ultra capacitors may harbor enough energy to make the disk fly without trailing miles of cable, but it remains to be seen.

Link to Scientific American article.

Wikipedia entry on Anti-Gravity.