According to the Vymankia Shastra, purportedly written by Maharishi Bharadwaja in the 4th Century BC, there are 32 secrets to piloting a vimana. These include:

"Maantrika: The invoking of mantras which will permit one to achieve certain spiritual and hypnotic powers so that he can construct airplanes which cannot be destroyed.
Taantrika: by acquiring some of the Tantric powers, one may endow his aircraft with those same powers.
Goodha: This secret permits the pilot to make his vimana invisible to his enemies. Adrishya accomplishes the same purpose by attracting 'the force of the ethereal flow in the sky'.
Paroksha: This helpful hint enables the pilot to paralyze other vimanas and put them out of action.
Aparoksha: One may employ this ability to project a beam of light in front of his craft to light his way.
Viroopa Karana: With this skill mastered, the pilot can produce 'the thirty-second kind of smoke', charge it with 'the light of the heat waves in the sky' and transform his craft into a 'very fierce and terrifying shape' guaranteed to cause 'utter fright to onlookers'. Roopaanara can cause the vimana to assume such shapes as those of the lion, tiger, rhinoceros, serpent - even a mountain- to confuse observers.
Suroopa: If one can attract the thirteen kinds of 'Karaka force', one can make the vimana appear to be 'a heavenly damsel bedecked with flowers and jewels'.
Pralaya: This deadly secret pushed electrical force through the 'five-limbed aerial tube' so that the pilot may 'destroy everything as in a cataclysm'. Vimukna sends a poison powder through the air to produce 'wholesale insensibility and coma'.
Taara: This ability, once mastered, provides the pilot with another means of avoiding contact with an enemy or hiding his purpose from observers: 'By mixing with ethereal force 10 parts of air force, 7 parts of water force, and 16 parts of solar glow, and projecting it by means of the star-faced mirror through the frontal tube of the vimana, the appearance of a star-spangled sky is created.'
Saarpa-Gamana: This secret enables the pilot to attract the forces of air, join them with solar ryas, and pass the mixture through the center of the craft so the vimana will 'have a zig-zagging motion like a serpent'.
Roopaakarshana permits the pilot to see inside an enemy's airplane, while Kriyaagrahana allows one to spy on 'all the activities going on down below on the ground'.
Jalada roopa instructs the pilot in the correct proportions of certain chemicals which will envelop the vimana and give it the appearance of a cloud."
     - Brad Steiger, Worlds Before Our Own

"Aavartaas or aerial whirlpools are innumerable in the above regions. Of them the whirlpools in the routes of the vimanas are five. In the Rekhapathha there occurs the whirlpool of winds. In Kakshya-pathha there occurs Kiranavarta or whirlpool from solar rays. In Shaktipathha there occurs Shytyaavarta or whirlpool of cold currents. And in Kendrapathha there occurs gharshanavartaor whirlpool by collision. Such whirlpools are destructive of vimanas, and have to be guarded against.
"The pilot should now these five sources of danger, and learn to steer clear of them to safety."
     - Vymankia Shastra

"In ancient India the writers of knowledge were careful to observer every form of change, every pattern of flow - rest- motion and to describe even the smallest of effects seen, the causes unseen. Often they spoke of matter that were beyond the five senses, yet in much detail. It seems their science was one of experience more than speculation."
     - John Walker, "The Vortex Arena" in Anti-Gravity and the Unified Field

"Since the siddhis [paranormal powers] are natural principles, it is possible that machines might be constructed that take advantage of them, and some vimanas and UFOs might operate on this basis. Thus, laghima-siddhi could be used to make the craft weightless, and mano-java could be used to move it through the ether. Other vehicles might make use of more familiar mechanical or electromagnetic propulsion methods, or they might employ a combination of siddhis and more familiar principles." -
     - Richard L. Thompson, Alien Identities - Ancient Insights into Modern UFO Phenomena

According to the "psychic crystallization theory", thought forms as independent energy entities "might be the result of mind blending with a psi substratum". 
"Samuel Lentine, a physicist at Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute, has investigated such 'thought forms', and claims they can be created by mixing psi energies in the same way you can create certain chemicals by mixing other chemicals. Lentine, blind since childhood, found during meditation that such humanly-created entities can actually exist by themselves for short periods, causing a whirl of energy about them."

As G. Patrick Flanagan "has speculated, it is an all-pervasive 'ether' that actually causes the force of gravity by the pressure it exerts, and forms electricity and magnetism by flowing in whirls and eddies."
"...The PK effect could be looked upon as mind not necessarily intermingling with the physical elements of an object but altering the etheric or organizing forces that supposedly shape the material world - the idea that thoughts are actual things imprinted in the clay of the universe." 
     - Michael H. Brown, PK

Plasma: a collective of elementary particles devoid of atoms which exist at normal temperatures in metals and so forth. Living organisms are an unusual reservoir and generator of plasma. Almost any plasma generates inhomogeneity, pinching itself together into dense, swirling filaments, separated by diffuse voids.

Hyperlinks

·Hermes Trismegistus
·Mani, the Ambassador of Light
·Mysteries of the Templars
·The Resurrection
·The Secret Knowledge