Word: wingless
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...ones reported, sighted near Mt. Rainier in 1947, were round and shiny, and they flew in daylight with no unusual maneuvers. The saucer-conscious public duly reported many more like them. Then the fashion changed when two airline pilots told about seeing, near Montgomery, Ala. one night, an enormous, wingless, cigar-shaped craft with glowing portholes...
...twin jets initially in its small, almost wingless body, looks more like a guided missile than an aircraft. As a "flying laboratory" for the Air Force, it is designed to top 1,800 m.p.h. and climb as high as 200,000 ft. For the X-3 and Planemaker Douglas, it looked as if the ceiling was just about unlimited...
Baumann, now 32, is not a scientific geneticist, and he does not quite know how he developed his wingless breed. It was part luck and part persistence, he thinks. At first only a few of the chicks he hatched in his small incubator turned out wingless. Year by year, the proportion rose. Today, 95% of his chicks are wingless...
...major difficulty at first was infertile eggs. As every barnyard observer knows, mating roosters need their wings for balance. Baumann's early wingless roosters were so unstable that often only some 10% of the eggs would hatch at all. Baumann sometimes used artificial insemination. Eventually nature solved the fertility problem. Some of the wingless roosters gradually learned a new technique of wingless balancing...
Baumann, who lives in Des Moines, is optimistic about the commercial value of his wingless fowl. "Wings on a chicken," he declares, "are obsolete. The airplane characteristics of the usual chicken are a nuisance." His wingless chickens do not have to be confined by high wire fences, because their ceiling is about two feet. They are nice and quiet too, and the roosters don't fight much. They "dress -out" beautifully, says Baumann, "with white meat where the wings are on other birds. These chickens are the nearest thing to a schmoo of anything alive...