Mark McCandlish

Mark McCandlish (1953–2021) was an American aerospace and conceptual illustrator best known for his technical artwork for major U.S. defense and aerospace contractors and for his later involvement in UFO and “black project” disclosure circles. Over a career spanning more than three decades, he produced detailed renderings of advanced aircraft and experimental systems, gaining a reputation for combining artistic skill with engineering accuracy.

Within ufology he is most closely associated with the so-called Alien Reproduction Vehicle (ARV) or “Fluxliner”, a disc-shaped craft he claimed was a man-made, reverse-engineered vehicle using exotic electrogravitic propulsion. His detailed cutaway diagrams of the ARV and public testimony at events such as the 2001 Disclosure Project press conference at the National Press Club made him a prominent, and controversial, figure in alternative propulsion discussions.

McCandlish grew up in a U.S. Air Force family and was exposed to aviation from an early age; his father served roughly twenty-five years in the Air Force.

As a student at East Longmeadow High School (class of 1971), he was already known as a gifted artist, creating yearbook covers, school artwork and backdrops for theatrical productions.

After graduating high school he studied at Springfield Technical Community College, the Community College of the Air Force, and later attended electronics school at Lowry Air Force Base in Denver, training as a weapons-control systems mechanic. He subsequently served in the U.S. Air Force with the 318th Fighter Interceptor Squadron at McChord AFB in Washington state.

Leaving the service, McCandlish pursued art and design, eventually specializing in aviation and aerospace illustration. Over the next thirty years he became an internationally recognized technical artist, providing conceptual and cutaway artwork for a range of American defense and aerospace corporations.

His work often depicted advanced aircraft, stealth concepts, and speculative future systems, and was used in trade publications, promotional materials and technical briefings.

According to McCandlish, his interest in UFOs began in childhood after a 1966 sighting at Westover Air Force Base in Massachusetts, where he reported observing a disk-like object hovering over a line of nuclear-armed B-52 bombers before it departed at high speed.

This experience, combined with later reports from colleagues, led him to study unidentified aerial phenomena and possible exotic propulsion technologies.

McCandlish gained wider public attention in the UFO disclosure community when he appeared as a witness for Steven Greer’s Disclosure Project, speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on 9 May 2001. There he stated that U.S. gravity-propulsion research began in the 1950s and that at least one class of man-made antigravity craft already existed, referencing what he called the Alien Reproduction Vehicle.

In the 2010s he continued to lecture at conferences and in online forums, including a 2020 session of the Alternative Propulsion Engineering Conference (APEC) devoted to UFO reverse-engineering and the ARV.

He also appeared in the documentary Zero Point: The Story of Mark McCandlish and the Flux Liner, which focused on his ARV claims and the speculative physics he believed could underpin such craft.

Mark McCandlish died on 13 April 2021 in the Redding, California area at the age of 68, as confirmed by local obituary notices.

Reports discussing his death note that the Shasta County coroner listed the cause as a self-inflicted gunshot wound and ruled it a suicide; some commentators within the UFO community have speculated about foul play, but such claims have not been substantiated by publicly available official evidence.

McCandlish’s ARV narrative centers on an alleged incident in November 1988 at an air show and classified exhibit associated with Norton Air Force Base in California. According to his account, an associate (often referred to under the pseudonym Brad Sorensen) attended a VIP-only hangar display where three disc-shaped craft were shown—said to be 24, ~60, and ~120–130 feet in diameter—and where a U.S. Air Force general described them as operational vehicles capable of extreme performance, including rapid climbs to around 80,000 feet and velocities at or above the speed of light.

McCandlish stated he did not witness the demonstration personally. Instead, he relied on detailed verbal descriptions and sketches provided by his associate, which he then translated into a series of technical illustrations and finally a copyrighted cutaway blueprint of what he named the Alien Reproduction Vehicle or “Fluxliner.”

Over time, variations of the story placed the demonstration either at Norton AFB or at a Lockheed Martin Skunk Works facility in Palmdale, allegedly reached via a short flight from Norton.

In McCandlish’s view, the craft were human-built advanced aerospace vehicles, not extraterrestrial originals, and were part of a long-running black program drawing on earlier gravity-propulsion research.

From the late 1980s onward, McCandlish devoted much of his private research to reverse-engineering the ARV design from the original witness description, refining his drawings and hypothesized internal systems over several decades.

The best-known version of his ARV/Fluxliner blueprint shows:

A roughly 24-foot diameter disc with a thick lower “skirt” and domed upper crew section.

A spherical four-person crew compartment at the top, equipped with ejection seats mounted around a central column, accessed via a hatch and supposedly using external TV cameras and a synthetic-vision system instead of windows.

A large flywheel/unipolar generator beneath the crew cabin, serving as both a stabilizing mass and electrical generator.

An annular primary Tesla coil encircling the vehicle at its “waist,” with a tall secondary coil wound around the central column to step up voltage to extremely high levels.

A central column containing counter-rotating, partially evacuated quartz or glass cylinders filled with mercury vapor, forming a high-energy plasma vortex when energized in a strong electromagnetic field.

At the base, a 24-foot-diameter capacitor array divided into 48 “pizza slice” segments, each segment comprising multiple stacked plates arranged in alternating polarity (negative/positive) to exploit what he interpreted as the Biefeld–Brown electrogravitic effect.

In McCandlish’s proposed operating concept, high-voltage power from the Tesla coils would charge selected segments of the capacitor array. Because the net force in the Biefeld–Brown effect is in the direction of the positive electrode, selectively energizing different segments would, in principle, allow vector control—lift by energizing all segments, and lateral or directional motion by energizing only those in a particular azimuth.

He further speculated that the mercury-vapor vortex in the central column, interacting with intense electromagnetic fields, might tap zero-point energy and reduce the effective inertial mass of the craft. In this model, the ARV would move inside a “space-time bubble” where relativistic constraints are altered, making near- or super-luminal travel theoretically possible.

These ideas were elaborated in secondary technical write-ups on “space-warp propulsion” and in conference talks where McCandlish described the ARV’s components, materials and control systems in detail, answering questions about everything from the construction of the quartz cylinders to the color changes of the surrounding ionization field at different power levels.

McCandlish’s ARV work reached a wider audience through several channels:

Disclosure Project (2001): His testimony at the National Press Club introduced the ARV concept to a mainstream press audience and later to online viewers via recordings and documentation circulated by the Disclosure Project.

Documentaries and media: The documentary Zero Point: The Story of Mark McCandlish and the Flux Liner focused on his claims, illustrations and speculative physics. Numerous podcasts, conference videos and YouTube channels have since dissected and debated his ARV diagrams.

Alternative propulsion community: Groups such as the Alternative Propulsion Engineering Conference (APEC) hosted multi-hour sessions where McCandlish walked through the ARV design step by step and fielded technical questions, framing the craft as a case study in electrogravitic and inertial-propulsion engineering.

His detailed drawings have inspired 3D models, DIY engineering analyses, and derivative designs produced by enthusiasts attempting to test or simulate aspects of the ARV concept.

McCandlish’s ARV narrative remains unverified in the open scientific and historical record. No independent documentary evidence has surfaced publicly to confirm the existence of the craft as he described it, nor have his proposed propulsion mechanisms been demonstrated under controlled experimental conditions according to mainstream standards.

Within the UFO and alternative-propulsion communities, his work is viewed by some as a key piece of alleged evidence for a long-running, secret U.S. antigravity program, while others regard it as speculative or uncorroborated hearsay built on a single primary witness.

In conventional aerospace and physics circles, the ARV concept and its claimed faster-than-light performance are generally treated as fringe or incompatible with established theory.

Nevertheless, McCandlish’s attempt to “decipher” the ARV—translating a second-hand witness account into an internally consistent engineering blueprint—has had a lasting impact on discussions of UFO reverse-engineering, zero-point energy, and electrogravitic propulsion, and continues to be cited and debated in both enthusiast and critical analyses of alleged advanced aerospace black projects.