He Might Be an Alien

Gifford Florida

That thing in Dennis Schaller’s back yard off 45th Street looks like: A. A scaled-down version of Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon from “Star Wars.” B. An Airstream trailer on steroids. C. A DeLorean sports car from the early ’80s on some really serious steroids. D. Absolutely nothing else at all.

“Most people think it’s a spaceship,” Schaller said of his silver creation that measures 56 feet long, 20 feet wide and 17 feet tall. “It was originally designed to be a hovercraft. Now it looks like it’s going to end up as a houseboat. I won’t live long enough to get enough money to make it a hovercraft — not unless I went back to work full time; and then I wouldn’t have the time to work on it.”

Given Schaller’s background, the spaceship guess isn’t so far-fetched. Schaller started building rockets when he was a kid. He made a solid-fuel jet engine in high school shop class and, at age 15, took first place in the engineering division of the 1960 Georgia State Science Fair for a rocket he’d built. He was a rocket engine mechanic in the Air Force before becoming an electrical engineer with North American Aviation, where he worked on several Apollo missions, including the Apollo 11 craft that landed on the moon, and the early Space Shuttle program. He’s lived in Gifford since 1989. That’s about the time he started working on his hovercraft/houseboat.

“It’s been a 20-year project,” the 65-year-old Schaller said. “So far.” At the center of the craft is a travel trailer Schaller found in the woods in Fellsmere and bought for $100. “I put a deck around the trailer, then a roof on the deck,” he said, “and then, well, it just kind of took off. Unfortunately, my dreams are bigger than my life is long and my pockets are deep.”

The vessel, for lack of a better word, is a mixture of the practical and the fanciful. The front door, for example, opens hydraulically like the alien spacecraft from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” “Not being a rich man, I’ve had to build a lot of it out of junk,” he said, noting the lifeboat is made from a former acid dipping vat from the Piper Aircraft plant in Vero Beach and an old satellite dish. Schaller said he’d like to float the boat in Lake Okeechobee. “I’ve got two more years to go if I keep working steady every day,” Schaller said. “Of course, I’ve been saying ‘two more years’ for about 10 years now.”

http://www.tcpalm.com/news/2009/aug/30/20-year-old-dream-taking-shape-in-back-yard/