Imagine how the U.S. government would have reacted during the Cold War had they discovered the USSR was developing a flying saucer. The EKIP (“Ecology and Progress”; the project was also referred to as “Tarielka”) model aircraft looks nothing like a typical plane, and as you can glean from the narration on this clip from the 1980s or so, even well into the twentieth century western observers sounded a bit frightened by it. Though hampered by a lack of funding, Russian engineers are still hard at work on EKIP—you can see flight tests from the early 90s here (about 4-5 minutes in). Remember, EKIP is “the new generation of the transport means.”