Makng the Statue of Liberty Vanish

Actually, John Carty is correct in how the illusion was performed. The
helicopters were actually there, though the pilots were in on the trick. One
of the purposes of the helicopters was to shine lights in the eyes of the
live audience to make sure that they were blinded. The basic illusion can be
found in Poundstone.

The stage consisted of seating for the live audience, two towers with an
arch between them, and a curtain that could be lowered from the arch. The
entire stage could be rotated. The audience was seated so that they could
not move around and see what was going on behind the towers. The helicopters
circling overhead helped disorient the live audience so they could not feel
the stage turn. When the curtain was dropped, the statue had 'vanished.'
What had really happened was that the stage was turned so that now the
audience was just looking out to sea. The noise from the helicopters also
helped to obscure any noise that the rotating stage might have made. One of
the two towers had been repositioned to obscure the statue from the
audience. Since the TV cameras faced the same direction as the audience, the
TV audience would be limited to the same view that the live audience had.
While the curtain was in place and the stage was rotating, assistants turned
off the lights ringing the statue and turned on a second set of lights so
that the audience would think that they were looking at the same lights that
surrounded the statue. The lights on the ground and the spotlights from the
helicopters served to blind the audience by destroying their night vision.

The radar was only a video animation shown for the TV audience and it was
not well executed. It just looks cheesy -- not even a real radar screen. The
illusion would have been better without it. I have noticed this about
Copperfield -- his grand illusions are very impressive and show a talent for
showmanship, but he almost invariably degrades the whole thing by throwing
in some cheap trick like this. Witness the awful penetration of the Great
Wall of China illusion, for example, where somebody (probably Copperfield
himself) keeps pushing against the cloth on the far side of the wall. It
just looks dumb and adds nothing to the illusion. The Escape from Alcatraz
had some of the same stuff.

I really did not want to talk about how the illusion was performed. Most
magic really consists of, well, pretty dumb stuff. Knowing how the trick is
done really detracts from the show and often leaves people with the feeling
that they have been had by a cheap shot, which is not fair to the magician
or the other performers.