The Dreamer of Muscoy

My childhood was not exactly normal (which may explain a few things about how I turned out). In fact, I can with great assurance say that I did things during my childhood that very, very few other children ever did.

I grew up in the community of Muscoy California, an unincorporated section of San Bernardino County, about 50 miles east of Los Angeles and in that community there was a barber, but not your average barber. Douglas Q. McMasters was one of a kind. He seemed rather bohemian: he had a beard and smoked a pipe and he played guitar. Doug swore that he could astral project and taught by older brother Jack how to do it (I'll go into this in detail at a later time, I promise). Doug was also a hypnotist and a damn good one. But the thing Doug liked to do most was solve problems.

You give Doug a problem and he would come up with a solution for it. He designed a phone that could only make local calls, an emergency big rig braking system that could stop a runaway truck on an icy road in a perfect straight line. He invented packing foam that he sold to a national moving company (I remember we used to play football with a cut-open ball that had a raw egg inside incased in Doug's foam). He designed a jump suit that you could wear to survive jumping out of a plane without a parachute. The more he thought about airplane crashes the more Doug thought the airplane was poorly designed, so he came up with his own design for an aircraft, one that could not be crashed.

Doug’s initial prototype was a square cardboard box set in the center of a hula hoop. He wrapped the whole thing in plastic wrap creating a saucer shape and then spent the afternoon up on his roof throwing the thing at the ground. No matter how hard he threw it, he could not crash it into the ground; it would swoop back and forth falling gently like a leaf.

Next Doug built a toy model of his flying saucer using an engine from a gas-propelled Stuka that my brother and I had. It flew like a bat out of hell!

Doug talked people in the neighborhood into putting money into his “saucer” craft and formed a corporation. My family was poor and we could not put up any money, so for a stake in the company my Dad offered to build the saucer. My Dad would take me at night to a barn where the saucer was being built and while he and Doug went over blueprints and modifications, I would climb up into the cockpit, grab a hold of the joystick and let my fantasies run wild. The cockpit sat directly on top of the airplane engine, the prop aimed down at the ground. The body of the craft was made of aluminum tubing and the skin was made of parachute silk, painted silver.


Once construction of the “craft” was completed, Doug kept the saucer at his home, sometimes in his back yard and sometimes in a lot next door. He had to chain the thing to the ground, not only for security, but because the thing had a tendency to take off during the Santa Ana winds. The first time this happened the saucer was in Doug’s backyard and by morning was in his front yard, having flown over the house during the night. That's me by the way standing to the left of the saucer; my brother Larry is manning the cockpit.

I remember the day that NASA came out to Doug’s house to see the saucer fly. It had a few bugs in it still and got no more than a foot or two off the ground. That was the only time I saw the craft fly at all. There is a lot more to this story, but I think I will save it for a later date. I'll leave you with a page from Doug's patent.