From: skunk-works-digest-owner@mail.orst.edu To: skunk-works-digest@mail.orst.edu Subject: Skunk Works Digest V5 #25 Reply-To: skunk-works-digest@mail.orst.edu Errors-To: skunk-works-digest-owner@mail.orst.edu Precedence: bulk Skunk Works Digest Friday, 4 March 1994 Volume 05 : Number 025 In this issue: Re: Unsolved Mysteries Wed. Night Alert _Wired_ Magazine Article Screaming Yellow Drippers Re: Unsolved Mysteries Wed. Night Alert Unsolved Mysteries Blackbird Losses See the end of the digest for information on subscribing to the skunk-works or skunk-works-digest mailing lists and on how to retrieve back issues. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: larry@ichips.intel.com Date: Thu, 3 Mar 1994 10:35:27 -0800 Subject: Re: Unsolved Mysteries Wed. Night Alert So? The silence here puzzles me! What did people think? Larry ------------------------------ From: joeh@towel.wpd.sgi.com (Joe Heinrich) Date: Thu, 3 Mar 1994 10:59:58 -0800 Subject: _Wired_ Magazine Article : _Wired_ magazine recently had an article on Steve Douglass, Glenn Campbell, and Groom Lake. It's been disseminated on the Web (WWW) with minimal redistribution restrictions, but it's also 24K ASCII, so I hesitate to broadcast it too, unannounced. Perhaps whomever is keeping this list could send me their address, and I'll forward it to them, leaving it to their discretion...? Here's a sampling from the article: - ---------cut here--- WIRED 2.02 Stealth Watchers **************** Armed with Radio Shack scanners and PCs, Steve Douglass and a small group of private citizens are unmasking the US Defense Department's black-budget aircraft. Phil Patton reports from Dreamland. First Steve Douglass heard and saw familiar shapes - F-117s he had seen many times since they emerged from the black-budget world; Stealth fighters he had tracked and monitored when they were still secret. Then came one that was slower, with a different sound, a different shape. Douglass's radio scanner crackled, the numbers churned on its readout. He was at White Sands Missile Range, and the sky was filled with B-1Bs and F-15s. He raised his video camera - and the battery warning light flashed. He grabbed seven seconds of video before the machine snapped off. Douglass had gone that May weekend with his father-in-law, Elwood Johnston, packing his Radio Shack Pro-2006 and other scanners, to cover an exercise near Holleman Air Force Base in New Mexico. He received a tip that something interesting would happen. Now, in the living room of his ranch-style home in Amarillo, Texas, the country's top military monitor shows his tape. Beavis and Butt-head disappear from the screen, and from a powdery mix of colors emerges a dot, a dot growing larger, a dot becoming a winged bat, a ray-shaped airplane swooping overhead - then the image dissolves to gray grit. He flicks the machine off. "Seven seconds," he says. "You live for those moments. You listen all those hours for that kind of gold nugget." The "bat" is a still-secret TR3A Black Manta, captured on video for the first time by Douglass - the dean of a new culture of digital scanner buffs who monitor military channels to find secret planes. The image is published here (see page 83) for the first time (the 5,000 or so subscribers to Douglass's Intercepts newsletter got a sneak preview last fall). The Black Manta operates in tandem with the F-117A Stealth fighter, and although evidence suggests it was used in the Gulf War, the Air Force has yet to admit its existence. With the help of a frame grabber, Douglass printed an enhanced view of the bat plane after he returned from White Sands. Then, consulting with his wide network of experts in the industry, the aviation press, and the military, Douglass tweaked the details to create a speculative image of the airplane the government says does not exist. ... =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=WIRED Online Copyright Notice=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Copyright 1993,4 Ventures USA Ltd. All rights reserved. This article may be redistributed provided that the article and this notice remain intact. This article may not under any circumstances be resold or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission from Wired Ventures, Ltd. If you have any questions about these terms, or would like information about licensing materials from WIRED Online, please contact us via telephone (+1 (415) 904 0660) or email (info@wired.com). WIRED and WIRED Online are trademarks of Wired Ventures, Ltd. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= - --- - -- Joe Heinrich Flatland: joeh@wpd.sgi.com Rotary dial: 415.390.3437 Bureau of Land Management ID#:B8L uucp:!meIIplease SnailMail:MS/535, 2011 N. Shoreline Blvd., Mt. View, CA 94043 ------------------------------ From: rschnapp@metaflow.com (Russ Schnapp) Date: Thu, 3 Mar 94 09:42:02 PST Subject: Screaming Yellow Drippers Pardon the title -- I couldn't help myself. Anyway, I found a use for the Picture-In-Picture feature on our new tv: Keeping an eye on Unsolved Mysteries while watching Home Improvement. (Well, if you *have* to watch tv, you may as well watch funny dreck as silly dreck.) I saw the "golden dripper" tape. Unless that sucker was clearly observed maneuvering, it sure looked like a Bolide Mark I from the Meteor Corporation (Asteroid Belt, Sol System). The tape just showed it moving parallel to the horizon, and leaving bits of incandescent material in its wake. A classic bolide. I didn't see *anything* on the segment that looked particularly convincing. The "manta" could have been almost anything. Not even the enhanced frame was clear enough to identify the kind of aircraft. (The air force said it might have been a Navy A-6, and the Navy said they didn't know what it was.) There was a photomultiplier image of an aircraft that had something run a ring around it. That something could easily have been an optical effect. It didn't strike me as being something that was actually in the sky. The least convincing footage was of a light that was hovering over a mountain range. It could have been a distant aircraft with its landing lights on (e.g., a "Janet" flight), a helicopter, or even Sirius or Venus. Perhaps I'm overly skeptical. I guess I'll just have to wait until the government sees fit to take the next black aircraft out of the bag, or an extraterrestrial decides to put on an airshow while I'm watching. Maybe a radar tracking report coupled with an optical observation might do the trick... ...Skeptical Russ ------------------------------ From: TOM PETRISKO <0004343121@mcimail.com> Date: Thu, 3 Mar 94 16:14 EST Subject: Re: Unsolved Mysteries Wed. Night Alert It looked like some kind of plane for seven seconds. I would hope that Steve Douglas carries more batteries with him from now on. I liked the fast little green jet more, as it zipped around in the night sky. That jet looked real fast ! Tom ------------------------------ From: Bernie Rosen Date: Thu, 03 Mar 94 14:33:46 PST Subject: Unsolved Mysteries In response to Larry's query on the silence over last night's show - - - I enjoyed the show; it was entertaining and I can see why the mysterious lights remain unsolved. Too bad that there were only seven or eight seconds of home-video. The only worse time to run out of battery would be at a wedding or baby-delivery. My overall impression, though, is that there IS at least one new craft out there in Air Force or Skunk-land. Bernie - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - brosen@ames.arc.nasa.gov NASA Ames AIS Office 233-7 (415) 604-6558 Moffett Field, CA 94035 ------------------------------ From: rb3@aol.com Date: Fri, 04 Mar 94 00:52:34 EST Subject: Blackbird Losses Last night I had the pleasure to watch the Wings episode covering the Blackbird. Though there it includes much wonderful footage, the part especially that caught my attention last night referred to the loss of "at least eleven Balckbirds, some with their crews." I'm sure if I dug through my books here, I'd find some of these instances, but 11 seemed high to me. Does anyone have any comments about these losses, such as dates and causes? In any case is there the consideration that hostile action brought any of these airframes down, or is it simply unstarts, fatigue, pilot error, and the like? Thanks for your comments, Ran ------------------------------ End of Skunk Works Digest V5 #25 ******************************** To subscribe to skunk-works-digest, send the command: subscribe skunk-works-digest in the body of a message to "majordomo@mail.orst.edu". If you want to subscribe something other than the account the mail is coming from, such as a local redistribution list, then append that address to the "subscribe" command; for example, to subscribe "local-skunk-works": subscribe skunk-works-digest local-skunk-works@your.domain.net To unsubscribe, send mail to the same address, with the command: unsubscribe skunk-works-digest in the body. 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