Or at least, that's what a new press release from UFO guru Luke Fortune claims. Fortune, an inventor, has put the plans and patents to allow you to build your own laser-fusion-powered UFO online for free. The prototype will cost $60,000 for you to build, but don't worry — soon, building your own UFO will be dirt cheap, and everybody on the planet will be flying them, according to Fortune's press release. And this will transform the world's economy:

The government approved public charity to develop UFO technology is underway.

Imagine a tomorrow where instead of your usual humdrum job, you, and the Average Joe, were flying about the planet at thousands of miles per hour without danger, hauling cargo or people. The Average Joe can build a flying craft for about the cost of a car. Instead of driving a taxi, Average Joe flies people all over the planet, all over the solar system. The cruise industries find great profits in tours around the moon and the outer giants. Resources need no longer be in short supply as mining the asteroid belt becomes a commonplace event. Shooting galleries can be opened in the Kuiper Belt. Oil prospecting on Jupiter's moons could likewise easily be achieved. The open use of these technologies will repair the global economy by opening the next great economic growth. Space tourism can become a reality in a much shorter time, as people who aren't millionaires realize they can build these devices and cash in on the space tourism trade. You can become wealthy by taking part in the next great economic expansion.

For you, for all of us, science fiction will become science fact.

Current, and retired, aerospace engineers, some involved with "black operations" have been consulted for this project. It is acknowledged by these engineers that a repository of over 50 years of research data was their source material database of knowledge in UFO research and development in their employ with their respective aerospace companies.

Technology exists that can repair and rebuild the economy on both the national (United States) and global scales. Exotic Propulsion Systems are methods of transport that far exceed the abilities of the currently used methods of travel and transport. For the last century, these methods have been available, but have been hidden beneath a mountain of paperwork and filing numbers.

George Noory called them "very interesting stuff. There is a ton of material."

Michael Knight of Earth Change Report said "They are fascinating... You might be surprised to learn that many of the drawings ... depict craft that you would think come straight out of movies like "Close Encounters of the Third Kind. However, unlike Hollywood, we are not mixing fact and fiction here."

6,500 pages of complete patents of these craft have been compiled by Luke Fortune and made available in book format at www.ufohowto.com. Come to the website and see the free E-book. Come to www.ufohowto.com and see explanatory videos. Come to the website and see the other free downloads available at the site, including interviews, patents and more.

Exotic Propulsion craft (formerly called "UFO's") are capable of speeds of thousands of miles per hour. Pilots and cargo are shielded from gravity and inertia. Right angle or sharper maneuvers are can be made without danger of damage to cargo or pilot by the exposure to G-forces. This is a patented fact that has been scientifically proven since the early 1970s. G-forces are simply not a factor with this shielding.

Since these craft are capable of circling the globe in under an hour, of hovering, and landing anywhere [whether air strips are present or not], the ability to transport needed supplies, people, and/or cargo instantly to anywhere upon the globe becomes a reality.

Fresh foods can be brought anywhere on the globe in mere minutes. Imagine eating a meal with lobster from Maine, caught fresh that morning, with Irish potatoes, not 120 minutes out of the earth from Ireland, with pineapple from Hawaii, picked not an hour before, and drinking coffee from Ethiopia, picked, roasted and delivered within two hours. This could be the reality of today, with technology that we've had for many yesterdays.

Starvation can be eliminated, as food and clean water can be transported anywhere.

The threat of overpopulation can be stopped, as the technology to create lunar bases and settlements in other locations of the solar system, technology already in our possession, can be manufactured. Transport and shipment of supplies between these settlements and the Earth will be possible because the speeds achieved are far in excess of rocket technologies.

So what are you waiting for? Why haven't you built your UFO yet? The world is waiting! [UFOHowTo via Australia.To World News]

On Monday, Virgin Galactic's Branson and designer Burt Rutan gave the public our first peek at the Virgin Mothership — White Knight Two, an aircraft with a 43-meter wingspan and four Pratt & Whitney PW308 turbofans. It's gorgeous, it's gigantic, and it's going to carry Rutan's not-yet-completed aircraft SpaceShipTwo and six passengers (per flight) if all goes well. In fact, it's the first built of two planned White Knight Twos: This one is called "VMS [Virgin Mothership] Eve," after both Branson's mother and the Biblical pioneer of humanity.

As this BBC news graphic shows, the plan is for White Knight Two "Eve" to carry SpaceShipTwo to an altitude of about 15,000 meters, where SpaceShipTwo will then disembark and fire its engines for the biggest stage of the journey. It has to go up to at least 100,000 meters to break the Kármán line, or the official boundary of space according to the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale. Virgin Galactic's flight plans have it at 110,000 meters.

Near the top of the curve — specifically, after SpaceShipTwo's engines shut off and as it coasts to the highest point in its trajectory — passengers will experience weightlessness for a sustained six minutes. This explains the price hike to $200,000; six straight minutes is a bit more than you'd get out of a $3,675 parabolic flight with the Zero Gravity Corporation. After that, as they say, it's all downhill.

On Virgin Galactic's website, passengers (read: people who can afford to make deposits over $20,000) are described as astronauts. But the thing is, they're not exactly; in my view, astronauts are chosen for the value of their skills and expertise, and they're either wild daredevils or bewildered victims. Virgin Galactic's customers will be the first visitors to space who are tourists — not astronauts. So it's fitting, now that Branson estimates a maiden voyage in 18 months, for us to take a nostalgic look back at the first ever astronauts to cross the Kármán line.

The first living Earth creatures in space were a couple of fruit flies, who coasted past that 100-km boundary in a V-2 rocket in 1947. If that doesn't count for you, Albert II the Rhesus monkey went up on June 14, 1949 — also in a V-2 rocket. It didn't work out very well for him, though, as his parachute failed and he perished on impact. In 1950, the United States launched mice into space with V-2s; in 1951, the Soviet Union raised the stakes and sent two dogs up in an R-1. Both survived.

Several more Soviet dogs and American mice made the journey past the boundary of space in the 1950s, but the next first explorer was Laika, a stray dog who went from sniffing dumpsters in Moscow to being a canine cosmonaut. Laika went farther than any of Virgin Galactic's tourists will go on SpaceShipTwo; on November 3, 1957, inside Sputnik 2, she completed a full orbit of the Earth. (Yup, that's right — the first Earthling to orbit the planet had two X chromosomes.) She probably didn't finish many more, however, because the spacecraft cabin's thermal control system malfunctioned and she died about five hours into the flight. Laika's story is tragic, but it gets worse: Soviet engineers did not design Sputnik 2 to be retrievable. Nobody expected her to get back to Earth alive.

Life was kinder to Ham the chimp, a primate from Cameroon who found his way to the US Air Force and eventually into a Mercury capsule on top of a Redstone rocket. His suborbital spaceflight took place on January 31, 1961, and he emerged from splashdown with only a bruised nose to show for it.

That April, Yuri Gagarin became the first human in known history to orbit the Earth. He had spent his adolescence building and flying small-scale unmanned aircraft, and entered military flight school in 1955. After five years in the Soviet Air Force and another year of rigorous training in the space program, he was selected for this historic honor.

In December 2009, according to Branson, he and his family will become the first in known history to enter space — having paid for it themselves. After them come William Shatner, Signourney Weaver, Stephen Hawking, and ... Paris Hilton. Yeah, space tourism is beginning. One must wonder where it will take us.

Images from The Huffington Post, BBC News, WIRED Magazine, Wikipedia.

Don't get me wrong, I know what you're trying to do. Everyone seems to like those superhero comics - Only a handful of titles in the March 2008 top 100 comics aren't superhero books, after all - and you're just like everyone else: You just want to be loved. But announcing two new superhero projects within days of each other only feels good right now. When the sales figures come in, you'll see: All that attention? They're just being polite. No-one really wants to read your superhero books.

Now, now. Don't cry. I'm saying this for your own good. Look at that top 100 list again for a second. Sure, it's superheroes up the wazoo, but only four of those superhero titles come from a company that doesn't have the words "Marvel" or "DC" in their name. The third most popular comic publisher of last month didn't get that not-as-impressive-as-you'd-want-it-to-be title with men in tights; Dark Horse got there by paying ridiculous amounts of money to Joss Whedon and George Lucas, respectively, for their Buffy, Serenity and Star Wars comics (The third most popular superhero publisher is Image, with a massive 3.86% of the market).

It's not as if other publishers haven't tried to break Marvel and DC's stranglehold on the superhero market in the past — Image did a very good job in the '90s - but those attempts tend to be successful only when there's some kind of name recognition, and that's something that Virgin is pretty much completely lacking (Well, outside of Jenna Jameson and Ed Burns, but that's not really what I mean). Yes, I know that everyone knows about Stan Lee, but there's something else that everyone knows about Stan... That he's not done anything worthwhile for decades. You only have to look at Stripperella and Who Wants To Be A Superhero to see that.

You're just throwing your money away, gentlemen. And, sure, Sir Richard - You're used to that by now (Hey, I've tasted Virgin Cola), but there's no need to rush into it so eagerly this time. Maybe there's some Hollywood money or something you can scare up by selling the rights and make some scratch back before everyone wises up. Or perhaps you can convince Stan that he's got Alzheimer's and imagined the whole thing. Just, please: Don't do anymore superhero comics. It's not a good idea, and you'll just hurt everyone involved.

Just say no.

Lee to create superheroes for Virgin [Variety]