Vaimānika Shāstra

"shastra on the topic of Vimanas"; or "science of aeronautics", sometimes also rendered Vimanika, Vymanika, Vyamanika) is a 20th-century text in Sanskrit.

It contains 3000 shlokas in 8 chapters which Shastry claimed was psychically delivered to him by the ancient Hindu sage Bharadvaja.

In the foreword to the 1973 publication that contained the full Sanskrit text with English translation, Josyer quotes a 1952 press release of his which was "published in all the leading dailies of India, and was taken up by Reuter and other World Press News Services":[6] Mr. G. R. Josyer, Director of the International Academy of Sanskrit Research in Mysore, in the course of an interview recently, showed some very ancient manuscripts which the Academy had collected.

A critical review pronounced Josyer's introduction to be "least scholarly by any standards" and said that "the people connected with publication – directly or indirectly – are solely to blame either for distorting or hiding the history of the manuscripts", perhaps in an attempt to "eulogise and glorify whatever they can find about our past, even without valid evidence".

The topics covered include, "definition of an airplane, a pilot, aerial routes, food, clothing, metals, metal production, mirrors and their uses in wars, varieties of machinery and yantras, planes like ‘mantrik’, ‘tantrik’, and ‘kritak’" and four planes called Shakuna, Sundara, Rukma, and Tripura are described in greater detail.

The extant text is claimed to be only a small (one-fortieth) part of a larger work Yantra Sarvaswa ("All about machines"[6]) composed by Maharishi Bharadwaj and other sages for the "benefit of all mankind".

B. Hare of the Internet Sacred Text Archive in 2005 compiled an online edition of Josyer's 1973 book, in the site's "UFOs" section.

A 1974 study by researchers at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, found that the heavier-than-air aircraft that the Vaimānika Śāstra described were aeronautically unfeasible.

The authors remarked that the discussion of the principles of flight in the text were largely perfunctory and incorrect, in some cases violating Newton's laws of motion.

This can be explained on the basis of the fact that Shri Ellappa who made the drawings was in a local engineering college and was thus familiar with names and details of some machinery.

"In those days, aeroplanes were huge in size, and could move left, right, as well as backwards, unlike modern planes which only fly forward," he added.

Ram Prasad Gandhiraman, a NASA scientist, launched an on-line petition demanding that the talk be cancelled as it represents pseudoscience.