Thursday, March 09, 2006

George Méliès

For the better part of the last three decades I’ve been fascinated with top-secret airplanes, especially the super fast, near space flying, SR-71 Blackbird. In high school I wore that shirt with the spy plane printed on it nearly every day. I had little dye cast toys. I had all manner of books and magazines with pictures and stories of the design and history of the most famous spy plane ever built. There was a poster on every wall of my bedroom. I even built the Revel plastic model.

When the Stealth Fighter and Stealth Bomber were finally unveiled I became even more fascinated with Black Project Aircraft. The Internet soon supplanted books and magazines for feeding my curiosity about America’s most secret technologies. A lot of hobbyists traded stories about Tacit Blue and began to discuss other more current projects. Unfortunately the community soon became a quagmire of wacky conspiracy theories and outlandish claims of UFO technology. UFO doesn’t mean saucer men from Neptune, it means Unidentified Flying Object but to the average person, it makes no difference. Unfortunately there are so many wacko’s who insist that Area 51 is full of dead aliens so the military further clouded the issue. Fox showed specials featuring hoax Alien Autopsy films. Knowing what we know now about Fox News it’s obvious how that was a straw man meant to offer the government an easy avenue for skepticism. At the time, it worked. I lost interest in secret spy planes when they became synonymous with Martians.

For the last decade, there have been rumors and uncredited reports of the existence of new secret black project aircraft. A flying triangular shape sometimes called ‘The Black Manta’ or ‘Aurora’ sometimes gets a whisper in the more credible aircraft related publications but rarely make it into mainstream reporting. Some of the latest rumors about secret aircraft have been about a ‘Two-Stage To Orbit’ aircraft called ‘Brilliant Buzzard’. This plane is thought to fly in two stages, a launch vehicle or ‘mother ship’ that does the heavy lifting then separates from a capsule, which completes the journey up to orbital altitudes. Some believe that the Aurora and Brilliant Buzzard are mother ship and orbiter, together known as ‘Blackstar’. It makes some sense in that the Aurora is thought to be a smaller craft yet it needs a tremendously long runway to land. That suggests it would carry an amazing amount of kinetic energy upon touchdown; kinetic energy from velocity due to falling from high orbit. The airstrip at Area 51, already one of the longest in the world was extended to five miles when the rumors of the Aurora first surfaced. It’s not known conclusively that these programs exist however there has been evidence, witnesses and the occasional photographic slip from NASA of unknown aircraft.

Although the Aviation Week article above is speculation I believe there’s an advanced military aircraft capable of reaching orbital altitude. It would make sense. Burt Rutan can make a civilian two stage aircraft capable of reaching the edge of space for less then $30 million. By now, the Air Force with classified secret technologies and an unlimited budget must be capable of Le Voyage Dans La Lune.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home

Download Web Counters

Thanks for stopping by.



Email me - dean.rules@yahoo.com