Hiller Aviation Museum

Photo from the official website.

I've only been to the Hiller Aviation Museum a couple of times in my younger years, but it was certainly a memorable experience. The Hiller Aviation Museum in one of the newer institutions and has only been around for 24 years, having opened in June of 1998. The museum has the namesake of Stanley Hiller Jr, who was an aviation pioneer in his own right, especially in the field of vertical takeoff and landing vehicles like helicopters and vectored thrust vehicles. The museum found it's origin because of the repository of Hiller aircraft and prototypes that were left by the Hiller Aviation company to Redwood City, that had been left in a warehouse, but is now thankfully open to the public at large. 

Unlike most aviation museums, the Hiller aviation museum has primary focus on advances in civilian aviation, and in showing off it's impressive, one of a kind repository of Hiller built aircraft such as the first ramjet, NOTAR and gunship helicopters, Coleopters, and Rotorcycles. 

Some of the other more interesting aircraft they have on display are:

a Rutan Defiant - not exactly rare, but any Rutan design is just cool to look at.  

Boeing Condor - A super rare spy drone from the late 80's that is utterly massive.

Scaled Composites LLC Space Ship One - just about anyone would know that one. 

Grumman HU-16-RD Albatross - this one having a very unique story you can read about. 

A replica of the Manfred von Richtofen's Fokker Dr.1 Triplane

A replica of the Curtiss Pusher - the very same model that was the first to land on a ship at the Tanforan Air Exhibition. 

By far the most interesting to me though, was the fact the museum was (for a short while) the home of a portion of the late Boeing 2707, the American project that was to surpass the Concorde. The project is no longer there, but had a portion of the cockpit and first class, along with a mural depicting how big the full aircraft would have been. It's no longer at the Hiller location, as it has been moved to the Seattle Museum of Flight and is currently undergoing restoration. 

A pic from the Boeing 2707 Wikipedia page of what it looked like at Hiller.