The Saqqara Bird: Did Ancient Egypt Know How to Fly?

In 1898, archaeologists excavating a tomb in Saqqara, Egypt pulled out a small wooden bird about five and a half inches long. For decades it sat in a museum drawer as a ceremonial object or a child's toy. Then someone looked at it again and noticed the wings didn't look like a bird's wings, the tail didn't look like a bird's tail, and from certain angles the whole thing looked like a glider.In the very first episode of Strange Air, Seda and Vartan introduce the show and dig into the Saqqara Bird. One of us takes the mainstream case: what Egyptologists say it is, why we tend to project modern technology onto ancient objects, and why a civilization that documented everything left behind no other trace of flight. The other goes down the rabbit hole: the aerodynamic tests, the tail that may be missing, the strange coincidence of the discovery landing just a few years before the Wright brothers, and what the ancient world might have understood that we no longer have records of.At the end, we each deliver a verdict on our 1-to-5 mystery scale, and we don't agree.Got a strange case, disappearance, UFO encounter, or archaeological mystery nobody talks about? Send it our way and it might end up on the show. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.