From: skunk-works-digest-owner@mail.orst.edu To: skunk-works-digest@mail.orst.edu Subject: Skunk Works Digest V5 #203 Reply-To: skunk-works-digest@mail.orst.edu Errors-To: skunk-works-digest-owner@mail.orst.edu Precedence: bulk Skunk Works Digest Friday, 10 February 1995 Volume 05 : Number 203 In this issue: Triangular Craft - Belgian Sightings 1/2 Aurora - The Evidence 1/6 Aurora - The Evidence 3/6 Aurora - The Evidence 4/6 Aurora - The Evidence 5/6 Aurora - The Evidence 6/6 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: James Easton Date: Fri, 10 Feb 95 20:52 BST Subject: Triangular Craft - Belgian Sightings 1/2 Regarding... >From: "J. Pharabod" >Date: Thu, 09 Feb 95 15:11:33 MET >Subject: Re: Triangular Craft >In answer to James Easton (Wed, 8 Feb 95 19:24 BST): [From a recent U.K. TV documentary] >>" Their radars locked on to the object, the diamond shape (on radar - >>the video was being shown at this point), which suddenly drops 1300 >>metres in one second. As it dropped below 200 metres it vanished from >>all radar screens." >Not one second, but 3 or 4 seconds. Hi Jean-Pierre, I would have do disagree with this on the evidence I have. I retained a copy of the above mentioned documentary and the movement is almost instantaneous. Further supporting evidence follows. >Now the Air Force has an explanation: ground clutter. I know of only >4 radars involved (2 on ground, 2 airborne), not 5. There were not >hundreds of eye witnesses (this night), only a few gendarmes. Now it >is said that what they saw could be stars through unusual atmospheric >refraction phenomena. Ground clutter simply isn't credible, nor is "unusual atmospheric refraction phenomena". Again, further supporting evidence follows. >As far as I know, the craft has not yet been identified. Maybe illegal >flight of a private jet ? Unquestionably not. >>Both of the above reports are consistent with the initial report which I >>mentioned and all three unquestionably rule out a _conventional_ LTA. >No, since maybe the F-16 radars did not detect any real object. Being conscious of staying on topic, it is important to remember that the question being asked here is whether these incidents, and the additional consistent reports which exist from other countries, are evidence of a "black" project, the existence of which is largely unknown. In view of your welcome comments, I would bring to your attention a summary of a significant report which addresses many of the points you have raised and, dare I say, supports my contention that we are not dealing with a _conventional_ craft, LTA, private jet or otherwise. The report in question follows: AN UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECT ON THE RADAR OF AN F-16 From "Paris Match", (described as a "slick French weekly, something like a classy cross between Time and People Magazine. It is very widely read and something of a journalistic institution".) by Marie-Theresa De Brosses The Belgium Defense Minister authorized us to publish this report. On June 22nd...after going through a meticulous security screening, I find myself in the headquarters of the Belgium Air Force near Brussels. In a small room, Colonel DeBrouwer, Chief of Operations of the Belgium Air Force, started a video tape recorder. On the screen appeared the film that was brought back in the "black box" of the F-16 that was launched to chase the UFO...The Belgium military had been on alert since November 1989, when numerous reports by the Gendarmerie (National police force) began pouring in daily telling of observations of UFOs above Belgium territory. It had started on the crazy night of November 29, 1989, during which 30 groups of witnesses, among them three police patrols, scattered over 800 square kilometers of territory between Liege and the German/Netherlands border, reported UFOs. All of the witnesses observed for hours a strange triangular object nearly silent, maneuvering at low speed and very low altitude, without creating the least amount of turbulence. As do the world's Air Forces, the Belgian military have at their disposal supersonic interceptor airplanes ready 24 hours a day to take off with five minutes notice. In this case we are talking about two F-16 single pilot fighters, armed with missiles...On the night of March 30th, one of the callers reporting a UFO was a Captain of the national police at Pinson, and Headquarters decided to make a serious effort to verify the reports. In addition to the visual sightings, two radar installations also saw the UFO. One radar is at Glons, southeast of Brussels, which is part of the NATO defense group, and one at Semmerzake, west of the Capitol, which controls the military and civilian traffic of the entire Belgian territory. The range of the two radars is 300 KM, which is more than enough to cover the area where the reports took place. In this region the land is fairly flat, rolling country without any prominent hills. The radar has a perfect view of all flying objects with an altitude above 200 meters over the ground. Nevertheless, Headquarters determined to do some very precise studies during the next 55 minutes to eliminate the possibility of prosaic explanations for the radar images. Excellent atmospheric conditions prevailed, and there was no possibility of false echoes due to temperature inversions. All military and civilian airplanes are equipped with a device called a transponder which permits their immediate identification on the radar screen in the form of a coded signal. The radar echo received on that night was like that of an airplane that was moving at very low speed, about 50 KPH, and frequently changing direction and altitude. But it did not send any identifying transponder signal. Naturally, the Belgian Air Force can't permit an unidentified object to fly over its territory. So at 0005 hours the order was given to the F-16s to take off and to find the intruder. The lead pilot concentrated on his radar screen, which at night is his best organ of vision. The F-16 is equipped with very sophisticated equipment, including chase radar, which is not fixed directly ahead of the airplane, but makes a wide search in an arc of 90 degrees left and right of the nose. Slightly behind the lead fighter, the wingman in the second F-16 followed the movements of the first jet, concentrating on maintaining contact with the center of coordination of the search. Suddenly the two fighters spotted the intruder on their radar screens...the pilots ordered the onboard computers to pursue the target. As soon as lock-on was achieved, the target appeared on the screen as a diamond shape, telling the pilots that from that moment on the F-16s will remain tracking the object automatically. On the screen is indicated the object's position, distance and speed. The object was very close to the fighters. On this portion of the video tape that Col. DeBrouwer has, in such an exceptional manner, allowed us to see, we can hear the radio exchange of the two pilots. The emotions of the pilots are clearly perceptible. "Look," the Colonel tells me stopping the VCR, and showing me the diamond shape on the screen, "At this stage in the chase in our military jargon it means a successful interception." Then I said, in layman's terms, what does a "successful interception" mean? He answered, "Our fighter planes are armed with automatically self-directed missiles. Once they are launched, internal computers in the missiles intelligently guide the missiles to the target by themselves. Of course, in this case of the UFO there was no question of doing that. We only wanted to identify the intruder." Continued... ------------------------------ From: James Easton Date: Fri, 10 Feb 95 20:59 BST Subject: Aurora - The Evidence 1/6 I seem to have amassed a considerable collection of text files pertaining to the "Aurora" and in view of recent discussions concerning it's potential existence I have summarised the essence of the respective arguments. This was specifically for those who may not have seen the full evidence presented on both sides. The relevant text has been divided into manageable sized files and follows. Cheers, James. - ------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: TEXJE@VAXB.HW.AC.UK Internet: JAMES.EASTON@STAIRWAY.CO.UK - ------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------ From: James Easton Date: Fri, 10 Feb 95 21:01 BST Subject: Aurora - The Evidence 3/6 The following appeared in the February 28, 1992 issue of Janes Defense Weekly on Pg 333: "Mystery contact may be Aurora" by: Bill Sweetman Mounting evidence suggests that the US Government has secretly developed and deployed a hypersonic reconnaissance aircraft, probably as a replacement for the SR-71. A Royal Air Force air traffic controller tracked a target leaving the NATO RAF base at Machrihanish, Scotland at an estimated speed of Mach 3 last November, according to 'The Scotsman' newspaper last week. Another witness heard an extremely loud jet noise near the base around the same time, it said. In the USA, highly supersonic aircraft believed to be operating from Nevada have been detected and tracked by seismological sensors installed by the US Geological Service (USGS). The booms were first recorded in June last year. Machrihanish in one of the most remote bases in Europe, located near the tip of the Kintyre peninsula in Western Scotland. Recent base modernization and a rumored association with the F-117 Stealth Fighter lend credence to the new reports. Meanwhile, the California booms are the first substantial corroborated evidence of unidentified supersonic aircraft operating over the USA. On at least four occasions, sonic booms have registered on some of the 220 sensors across Southern California, from the Los Angeles basin to the eastern edge of the Mojave desert, according to Jim Mori, a USGS seismologist at the California Institute of Technology. The incidents were recorded in June, October, November, and late January. The seismologists estimate that the targets were flying at speeds between Mach 3 and Mach 4. So far all the tracks have been headed north and east over the Los Angeles basin, pointing directly to southern Nevada, 500 km away. Most secret US Air Force activities, including the large flight test base at Groom Lake, are within the Nellis range in Nevada. Since the range is only 8 min from Los Angeles at such speeds, the targets were presumably decelerating as they crossed the coast. The USGS first noticed that its seismographs could detect sonic booms when they registered space shuttle landings at Edwards AFB, California. Mori says the wave-forms detected in the latest incidents are characteristic of a smaller vehicle than the 37 m long shuttle orbiter. Neither the shuttle nor the single SR-71B which NASA maintains in flight status were operating on the days the booms were detected. Reports that USAF is developing hypersonic aircraft in undisclosed 'black' programmes date back to the mid-1980s. In early 1988, the New York Times reported that a Mach 6 stealthy reconnaissance aircraft called Aurora was being developed to replace the SR-71, which was retired in early 1990. More recently witnesses in Nevada and California have reported hearing extremely loud or 'pulsing' noises caused by unidentified aircraft. 12/13/92 Mystery Plane;Why Is America's Super-Spy Aircraft Still a Secret? By Bill Sweetman IN FEBRUARY 1990, the Air Force retired its sleek, matte-black Lockheed SR-71 spyplanes. Officially, they were being grounded to save the $300 million a year that they cost to operate. Some reporters were told - off the record - that the SR-71 had been replaced by spy satellites. It was hard to believe that the pilot-dominated Air Force had walked away from a glamorous, relatively low-cost, peace-keeping manned-aircraft mission in favor of orbiting robots. It was hard to believe because it wasn't true. The SR-71 was, in fact, replaced by a new spyplane so fast and high-flying that no extant or practical surface-to-air missile (SAM) could touch it. Observers call it Aurora, because that name was inadvertently published in the 1985 Pentagon budget request. That may have been the right name then; it is almost certainly not so now, but Aurora's real name is secret, as is the fact that it exists. Aurora will present President-elect Clinton with a test of his commitment to open government and of his willingness to confront the secretive, well dug-in and conservative intelligence community. While secrecy still has its functions in the post-Cold War world, this is less apparently so in the case of an aircraft that is immune from direct attack. The rigid secrecy of the Aurora project raises questions about the intelligence community's accountability to the military as well as to Congress. It also suggests that U.S. taxpayers are not getting the most from their investment in expensive technology with obvious applications to other military and civilian development projects. The Pentagon has maintained secrecy by ruthlessly limiting the number of people aware of the program, and "compartmentalizing" information within it. The security program has worked so well that many people who consider themselves "in the loop" will deny that the plane exists. Aurora was almost certainly created by the elite, tight-lipped engineers of the Lockheed Skunk Works, who built the U-2, the SR-71 and the F-117 Stealth fighter. But even the Skunks couldn't make it invisible. In August 1989, Aurora was seen refueling from a KC-135 tanker over the North Sea, and was sketched by Chris Gibson, an oil drilling engineer who is also one of Britain's best aircraft spotters. Gibson's sketch, which forms the basis of a drawing that I first published in the Dec. 12 issue of Jane's Defence Weekly, is simple, but shows a size and shape that, according to experts on hypersonic aircraft design, correspond exactly with the way such an aircraft would look. Seen from above or below, Aurora is a paper dart. It measures between 80 and 90 feet from nose to tail, a bit shorter than a Boeing 737. As for the rest of the shape, hypersonic experts agree that such aircraft "almost design themselves," as one puts it. The wings disappear and the shape becomes a blended body with engines underneath. The most likely fuel is a sub-zero liquefied gas, which protects the crew, equipment and structure from the heat generated by air friction. The 80-ton Aurora's size suggests that it uses liquid methane. The engines will basically be ramjets - aerodynamic ducts with no moving parts. These do not work efficiently until the plane is moving at well above twice the speed of sound. Rather than using jet engines (which are heavy) or rockets (which use too much fuel) to reach such speeds, the evidence suggests that Aurora uses a radical "combined-cycle" engine that blends features of the rocket, the jet and the ramjet into a single unit. Aurora could take off from a normal Air Force runway and fly more than 5,000 miles without refueling, at a speed that could be between five and almost eight times the speed of sound - 3,315 mph to 5,300 mph. Cruising height would be well above 100,000 feet and could be as high as 130,000 feet. None of this will have been easy. Kelly Johnson, chief designer of the SR-71, had a standing bet with his engineers: He would pay a quarter to anyone who could find anything on the SR-71 that was easy to design. Johnson never paid. Aurora will have been as hard. The main challenge is that the body, engines, controls and internal systems of a hypersonic aircraft are so closely linked that it is impossible to design and test them in isolation. If Aurora was operational in 1989, it probably flew in 1985 or 1986 from the Air Force's flight-test base at Groom Lake in Nevada. (Groom Lake has been operating since 1955, and is now nearly as big as Edwards AFB, but its existence is officially secret.) Development would have started in 1981. One incentive would have been the appearance of a new Soviet SAM, the PMU-300 or SA-10, possibly the first such missile to pose a serious threat to the SR-71. Aurora complements the U.S. constellation of spy satellites. Satellites are ideal for checking fixed targets (such as military test sites or manufacturing plants) at regular intervals. Changing a satellite's orbit, either to bring it over a specific point at short notice or to make it less predictable, eats into its fuel supply, and when the supply is gone the satellite is junk. Aurora, by contrast, can be sent over any point on the world, any time surveillance is required. Continued... ------------------------------ From: James Easton Date: Fri, 10 Feb 95 21:01 BST Subject: Aurora - The Evidence 4/6 Aurora has other advantages. Most spacecraft carry excellent cameras, rather than radar, but they cannot see through clouds and their acuity suffers at night. An airplane can carry a high-resolution radar more easily. In a crisis, it is hard to increase satellite coverage quickly, because space launches take so long to prepare. A wing of aircraft simply goes to war footing. More satellites would reduce the need for manned aircraft, but it costs several hundred million dollars to build and launch a satellite. Satellites must be replaced every five years or so, while aircraft can last at least 30 years. The price is high either way. Developing Aurora will have cost close to $10 billion. Including production, the total program costs will have nudged $20 billion. Since the Pentagon does not need many Auroras - a fleet of 20 would be ample - the unit cost would approach $1 billion. It is quite possible that all the aircraft on order have already been delivered. Aurora's costs are part of the military's black budget, a maze of generic titles and unidentifiable codenames that, in the 1993 budget request, amounted to $16 billion for research, development and production. Most secret programs are overseen by congressional committees. Aurora, however, seems to belong to a select group of programs that are revealed only to the chairman and senior minority member of each relevant committee. The secrecy raises questions about the intelligence community's accountability to the military as well as to Congress. Spy satellites - and, quite possibly, Aurora - are operated by the Pentagon's National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). The NRO reports not to the Pentagon brass but to the CIA. This structure was blamed in part for the fact that field commanders in the Persian Gulf felt that they never received the full benefit of the NRO's awesome capabilities. Culturally, the CIA prefers to operate covertly. This is understandable in the case of human spies, but less so in the case of a satellite or aircraft that is immune from direct attack. Ultimate security for the collection system can impede the flow of badly needed imagery to the field. The rigid compartmentalization of the program may also prevent the U.S. taxpayers from getting the most from their investment. It seems likely that some Aurora technologies, like the engine, are critical to the National Aerospace Plane (NASP) project, aimed at developing a winged spacecraft. If so, however, technology is passed from one program to the other in carefully sanitized packets: a far cry from full cooperation. For example, the designers of the Navy's A-12 Avenger II stealth bomber, scrapped in early 1991, could have avoided some very expensive mistakes had they had better access to other stealth projects, such as the B-2. The same could be true of NASP and Aurora. Aurora has been protected by cover stories that verge on disinformation. Air Force Secretary Donald B. Rice pooh-poohed Aurora reports in October. "We have no aircraft program that flies at six times the speed of sound or anything up close to that," Rice told reporters. Given that Aurora does exist, the question is how Rice's denial was hedged. Perhaps Aurora flies at a speed reasonably far removed from Mach 6 (either Mach 5 or Mach 7); or it may nominally belong to the NRO rather than the Air Force. The Air Force has also blown smoke over the mysterious sonic booms that have rumbled through Southern California since mid-1991. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) team based at California Institute of Technology first concluded that the booms were caused by aircraft heading towards Nevada at Mach 3 and higher. The Air Force professed puzzlement at first but, this summer, asked the Massachussetts Institute of Technology to analyze one of the events. The MIT team concluded that it was caused by a Navy fighter over the Pacific, and the Air Force has since cited this analysis in response to press queries about the booms. But the Air Force answer is far from complete. Booms have been detected more than 80 miles inland, but the Air Force - in a standard release - says that the boom from a fighter is usually heard no more than 25 miles off its track. And how come the booms are only being noticed now, 36 years after the Air Force and Navy first got supersonic fighters? "There are a lot of little inconsistencies," says Jim Mori of the USGS. "If it was just fighters, why didn't they come out and say that the first time it happened?" Dutch scientists are analyzing a similar boom that rolled across northern Holland in the early hours of Aug. 19, causing a flurry of complaints and some structural damage. With full cooperation from the Dutch Ministry of Defense, they have ruled out fighters, meteors and space debris and concluded that an undisclosed large supersonic aircraft - Aurora - was the culprit. When citizens and allies are shaken out of bed by a $1 billion super-plane that doesn't exist, what the public doesn't know really does hurt them. Bill Sweetman, a Minneapolis-St. Paul-based writer, is the author of more than 20 books on aerospace technology and policy issues. [END] ------------------------------ From: James Easton Date: Fri, 10 Feb 95 21:02 BST Subject: Aurora - The Evidence 5/6 From Aerospace Daily, Wednesday January 13, 1993 Aviation Week Group, McGraw-Hill Inc. Aerospace Daily Special report Air Force abondoned SR-71 follow-on in mid-1980s The Air Force gave up on a 1980s attempt to develop a follow-on to the SR-71 Mach 3-plus reconnaissance aircraft because the technology was out of reach and unaffordable, according to active and retired service, Pentagon and industry sources familiar with the program. The aircraft, originally envisioned as succeeding the SR-71 in the 1990 timeframe, was being developed at least in part by Lockheed's Advanced Development Co. or "Skunk Works" unit in Burbank, Calif., but was canceled about 1986, sources said. "There was a program, but we couldn't make it work," an industry source reported. An Air Force official added that "we would have been remiss in our responsibilities if we didn't try." Sources said they were willing to discuss the top-secret, special-access- required program in a limited fashion because of an increasing number of media reports that the AF is operating a hypersonic SR-71 follow-on. They believe, as one source said, that the stories should be "debunked". The aircraft, of which only drawings and small models were made, was to have been capable of sustained speeds of about Mach 4-5 with an intercontinental range. It would have been a large aircraft, about the size of the B-1B bomber, with a long, tapered fuselage. Sources said the AF and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency were pursuing the technology against the wishes of the Central Intelligence Agency, which wanted the funding diverted to develop and procure more sophisticated spy satellites using technologies such as imaging radar. But the AF countered that an aircraft could be more responsive than a satellite if imagery was needed of a location faster than a satellite could be positioned over it. This argument "still holds", a Pentagon source said. Sources were reluctant to discuss the specific technologies that would have been applied to the aircraft, except to say that they were similar to those now being wrestled with on the National Aerospace Plane. "Let me put it this way," an ex-Pentagon official said. "Many of the same people working on NASP (also) tried to make this thing work. If they had succeeded years ago, why would they be having so much trouble now? A senior AF official ridiculed the suggestion - made in some press reports - that NASP is a huge cover for the hypersonic plane. Though unwilling to discuss technical details, sources did say that slush hydrogen or methane was the intended fuel for the aircraft, but that the materials technology didn't exist to keep slush supercooled for the length of a mission in fuel tanks only a few inches from skin temperatures of thousands of degrees. Propulsion technology also had not advanced far enough tp provide the desired increase in capability over the SR-71, sources said. "The analogy of lighting a match in a wind tunnel is valid," observed one source. "It's not an easy thing to do, and it hasn't been done yet." The project "did not, in the final analysis, cost all that much money," an industry source once connected with the program said. "But there was no way to cost it out and see where we would end up. We did not have a blank check, and there were competing programs deemed by the most senior Air Force leadership to have (higher) priority. One of these higher priorities was the B-2 bomber. Ironically, one of the "hiding places" for funding for the then-secret B-2 was "Aurora," a program name which accidently made its way into a 1985 Pentagon budget document. The "Aurora" line item in the P-1, or procurement, budget book was slated to increase to $2.7 billion in 1986 and was listed as an aircraft. This accidental reference is what spawned a near-cottage industry in speculation about a secret hypersonic plane. The speculation increased when the Air Force decided to retire the SR-71 without an obvious successor in public view. Coupled with the AF's clandestine development, production and operation of the F-117 stealth attack plane, many industry observers refused to believe the service's denial that it had an "Aurora" or other top-secret reconnaissance aircraft. Air Force Secretary Donald B. Rice has of late aggressively denied persistent reports of an "Aurora." Sources said Rice has been challenged by members of Congress who also refuse to believe his denial of the program's existence, insisting that they are being kept in the dark about a program for which they are supplying funds. An exasperated Rice told reporters last fall that the persistent rumors are creating "certain beliefs and expectations in some quarters that are just unfounded" (DAILY, Nov. 2). Rice said the reports have "gotten way out of hand," and he added "categorically" that "the system described in those articles does not exist. We have no aircraft that flies at six times the speed of sound or anything up close to that." He said such a program would be impossible to conceal because it would involve too many people and cost too much money. During the years of speculation about the then-secret F-117, Air Force officials and spokesmen never categorically denied the program's existence, but instead chose the ambiguous, "I have nothing for you on that," or a flat "no comment." Rice fired off a terse letter to The Washington Post in December complaining about two "Aurora" stories that accused the AF of spreading "disinformation". He insisted that the service has no such program "either known as 'Aurora' or by any other name. And if such a program existed elsewhere, I'd know about it - and I don't." He added that he has "never hedged a denial" about it, and the AF "has never created ... cover stories to protect any program or vehicle like 'Aurora.' I can't be more unambiguous than that." Rice echoed the remarks in a rare interview with CNN the next day. The AF has investigated various reports of phenomenon that suggested an "Aurora"-type aircraft, because, as one service official said, "it wasn't one of ours and we wanted to know if it was someone else's." The service had MIT's Lincoln Laboratories do an independent analysis of data recorded in Southern California by a U.S. Geological Survey seismologist. The data allegedly showed that some aircraft was routinely causing triple-sonic booms. But Lincoln Labs found that "the data matched documented flight tests of Navy aircraft along the California coast," according to an AF document. "Aurora" was reported to have made a covert night landing at Lockheed's Helendale, Calif., facility on July 12, 1992, but the AF said this would be as "amazing" feat, since the field is "short, narrow ... only 4,000 feet long and 400 feet wide ... and could not possibly accomodate a billion dollar, one-of-a-kind hypersonic aircraft nearly the length of a Boeing 747." A "long, slender, aerodynamic shape with rounded chines" seen being loaded into a C-5 at the Skunk Works - and reported as "Aurora" - was actually an F-117 radar cross section pole model, the AF asserted. After checking out a reported near-miss between a commercial airliner and an unusual supersonic aircraft last year, the AF couldn't find a military plane that would have been in the area, and "based on our investigation, we can unequivocally state that no military aircraft was involved in this incident." The AF also said that some "sightings" of the mystery plane "will probably remain unchallenged simply because there is not enough information available to even hazard a guess." In this category the service places reports of a wedge-shaped plane over the North Sea in October 1989 and "puffs" of smoke resembling "doughnuts on a rope."" Continued... ------------------------------ From: James Easton Date: Fri, 10 Feb 95 21:02 BST Subject: Aurora - The Evidence 6/6 While the hypersonic "Aurora" is not a reality, sources and independent evidence suggest that the AF may indeed operate secret aircraft unfamiliar to the general public. The Skunk Works, for example, routinely accounts for more work in Lockheed's annual report than can be accounted for by overt, or "white" programs. But these would not, as Rice said, "come close to" the performance attributed to "Aurora". The Pentagon revealed the existence of one of these aircraft in a synopsis of a classified Inspector General audit released last year. The IG is required to summarize audits that it isn't permitted to publish. The audit, labeled simply "Report No. 92-110 - Top Secret," was ordered "to determine if the Program was responsive to contingency requirements and to evaluate the overall management of the peacetime program." The synopsis described "the Program" as needing "improvements ... in procedures for transitioning from peacetime (to wartime) operations and for approving peacetime reconnaissance flights." In addition, it said that "the Air Force budget for one aircraft type was overstated by $14.4 million for the six-year period ending in FY 1997." Pressed repeatedly to explain this secret aircraft, since it would, at first glance, suggest an "Aurora," a Pentagon official would only advise the questioner to "think lower-tech." Plane Mystery Gains Speed, Hits 5,500 Miles an Hour By John Mintz Washington Post Staff Writer [Deletion] Jane's said it believes the spy plane has been flying tests since about 1985 and has been operational since 1989. Air Force officials have denied such reports for years, with more pointedness than the "I-have-nothing-for-you-on-that" nondenial denials used in reply to queries about other classified subjects. "The Air Force has no such program, period," said Capt. Monica Aloisio, an Air Force spokeswoman. Yesterday she also denied a suggestion in Jane's that the Air Force would lie to cover up the secret plane. "Air Force public affairs doesn't knowingly participate in any disinformation programs," she said. But Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio), a member of the Armed Services Committee who led congressional opposition to retiring the SR-71, said this week that the Pentagon's trickiness in denying secret programs over the years gives people pause. So with each flurry of reports like the one in Jane's, he calls the CIA and senior Defense Department officials "to make sure I wasn't being hung out to dry." "They answer me from all quarters there is no such program," Glenn said. "Everybody in CIA swears up and down there's no such program. I think they're telling me the truth." He said he used to wonder about those denials, because the Air Force's 1990 retirement of the SR-71 did not make sense. Air Force officials said satellites are more cost-effective for reconnaissance, but Glenn said planes such as the SR-71 are far superior. Spy planes, he said, are more maneuverable and can get to a target more quickly than satellites. Further, an adversary can often calculate when a satellite is making its once-every-few-hours sweeps and hide secrets on the ground. "The only way doing away with the '71 made sense," Glenn said in an interview this week, "was if you had a (spy plane) follow-on," which the Air Force has always denied. Glenn said he was also intrigued by the suggestion in the Jane's article that the supposed new plane is so secret that Defense Secretary Richard B. Cheney has designated it a "waived program," meaning only the chairmen and the ranking minority members of the House and Senate military committees would have been told of its existence. If true, Glenn is being kept in the dark by his own committee chairman, Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.). Glenn said he called Nunn's staff this week and was told Nunn has not misled him on the subject. Glenn said that under the Senate's "rules of engagement," a direct question to a colleague must be answered straight. There are other indications suggesting there is no new spy plane. In the 1991 Persian Gulf War, for instance, field commanders were distressed at what they believed was inadequate photo reconnaissance by U.S. satellites and the some subsonic spy aircraft. The Pentagon considered reactivating the SR-71, but rejected it, government officials said. "If they'd had this (new spy plane) operational," said William E. Burrows, author of a 1987 book entitled "Deep Black: Space Espionage & National Security" about space-based military projects, "they would have used it" in the Gulf. Ernest Blazar, who is writing a book on the SR-71, said industry sources told him the Pentagon planned a second-generation Blackbird that died in 1990 when the SR-71 was withdrawn from service. John Pike, director of a space policy project for the Federation of American Scientists, a nonprofit research group that favors disarmament and opposes government secrecy, contends as do other nongovernment experts that secret airplanes may exist but may have multiple missions operating as, say, spy planes and spacelaunch vehicles. Speculation about a possible successor to the SR-71 heated up in 1984, when an entry in the defense budget mentioned a $2 billion, two-year "Aurora" project. Pentagon officials said it was not a spy plane, but journalists became suspicious when, a year later, "the Aurora line item vanished as mysteriously as it had first appeared," said a report by the Federation of American Scientists. Jane's still uses that name for the supposed project, but Blazar said if a new spy plane exists, it would be code-named "Senior Citizen." A number of Wall Street defense industry analysts have said for years they think Lockheed - which built the SR-71 - and other companies are involved in the spy plane business because Pentagon money going to the firms does not square with the aircraft work the companies acknowledge. A Lockheed spokesman referred questions about the matter to the Pentagon. Proponents of the spy plane theory also cite earth rumblings in southern California that some U.S. Geological Survey scientists have speculated are sonic booms caused by unknown aircraft. There have been eight such booms in the last 18 months, all on Thursdays between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. In a 94-page report pub- lished in August, the federation said "a certain measure of agnosticism continues to be appropriate" in discussing mystery aircraft. The report noted that in recent years, as the number of sightings of supposed secret Pentagon aircraft increased dramatically in the western United States, sightings of unidentified flying objects also rose there. Both groups of eyewitnesses typically cite bright lights in the sky or strange noises, the report said. "The number of reports (of mystery aircraft) and their consistency suggest that there may be some basis for these sightings other than hallucinogenic drugs," the report said. But it warned: "There is no exit from this wilderness of mirrors." From "International Herald Tribune", January 21, 1993: U.S. SUPERPLANE: ANOTHER UFO TALE ? by Malcolm W. Browne, New York Times Service NEW YORK - Rumors and reported sightings of a secret American superplane have been spreading lately almost as abundantly as yarns about unidentified flying objects. But despite the acknowledged yearning of many American aviation experts and buffs for an ultra-fast spy plane, it appears that development of even the engine needed for such a plane is moving faster in Russia than in the United States. Advancing the case for wishful thinking, John E. Pike, an aviation expert, has written: "Belief in the existence of marvelously capable and highly secret aircraft resonates with some of the deeper anxieties of contemporary American society. Aviation has long been one of the distinguishing attributes of American greatness, but the declining fortunes of the American aerospace industry have created growing uncertainties about the future." [Deletion] Some experts say they believe the purported sightings of a hypersonic reconnaissance plane are credible in light of some mysterious Defense Departement budget items in the 1980s referring to a project called "Aurora". Donald B. Rice, secretary of the air force, said last month that reports of such an aircraft were "fantasy." [Deletion] Meanwhile, Russia and its French aerospace partners have announced the successful test firing of a "scramjet" engine - an engine that operates at speeds starting at five times that of sound, and capable of boosting an airplane toward orbit outside the atmosphere. The French-Russian test, as reported by Aviation Week & Space Technology, was carried out Nov. 17 in Kazakhstan. [END] ------------------------------ End of Skunk Works Digest V5 #203 ********************************* To subscribe to skunk-works-digest, send the command: subscribe skunk-works-digest in the body of a message to "majordomo@mail.orst.edu". 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