SUBJECT: NEW SECRET SPY PLANE IN ACTION FILE: UFO3108
Date: 05-15-93 (14:30)
From: LUIS REYES
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Does the U.S. Air Force - or perhaps one of America's intelligence agencies
have a new secret spy plane in action? A growing body of evidence suggests
that the answer is yes. A startling disclosure came recently when
Chris Gibson, a British oil engineer and highly trained aircraft-spotter,
produced a sketch that captured the shape and size of an unusual aircraft
he saw during daylight hours in August 1989, flying over his drilling rig
in the North Sea. The expert eye witness's drawing is the keystone that,
with other evidence, provides an understanding of a secret hypersonic
reconnaisance aircraft that is widely rumored to exist, but routinely
denied by U.S. officials. It's nickname Aurora.
Gibson - a former member of the disbanded Royal Observer corps, a group of
volunteer aircraft spotters was able to estimate the strange airplane's
length and width by comparing it with the known dimensions of the
K-135 refueling tanker and two F-111 bombers flying alongside.
But it wasn't until last year, when he came across a magazine illustration
of a hypersonic (faster than Mach 5) aircraft design, that Gibson suddenly
made sense of the sharp triangular silhouette he saw.
Gibson's North Sea sighting completes a puzzle that has obsessed military
aircraft analysts for several years. Consider the following pieces of
evidence hinting at the existence of something unacknowledged that flies
high and fast.
In February 1990, the Air Force retired its SR-71 spy planes.
The official reason was saving $200 - $300 million a year it costs to
operate the fleet of Blackbirds. Reporters were told that the SR-71's
role had been take over by advanced spy satellites.
The Air Force actually discouraged congressional attempts to reverse
this termination of its most glamorous aircraft mission. Never in its
history has the Air Force walked away from a manned mission without a fight.
The pace of activity at the Air Force's top-secret Groom Lake test site
in the Nevada desert has increased dramatically in recent years, suggesting
the presence there of one or more secret aircraft programs. by comparing
recent photos of the base with ones taken in the 1970's, it's apparent that
several large new buildings were added during the 1980's. Always visible
in the recent pictures are a number of chartered Boeing 737 airliners that
ferry workers in from other defense industry towns such as Palmdale,
Burbank, or Edwards in Southern California, or from Nellis Air Force Base
in Nevada.
Since mid-1991, enexplained sonic booms have periodically rattled
Southern California. Officials at the United States Geological Survey,
the agency that monitors earthquake activity, no doubt irked the military
with their public statements that a very fast, high-flying aircraft was
causing the "airquakes" registering on their array of seismographs.
The Federation of American Scientists, a private Washington, D.C. based
policy group, issued a report late last year on the likelihood that
unacknowledged military aircraft might exist. The cautious review of
unclassified literature on the subject concluded that several new types of
aircraft may indeed be covertly flying around.
In a 1985 Pentagon budget document requesting production funds for 1987,
a censor's slip let the line item "Aurora" appear, grouped with the
SR-71 and U-2 programs. Even if Aurora actually was the prjects name
at the time, it almost certainly would have been changed after being thus
compromised; "Senior Citizen" is one new label that has been reported.
rated by the Pentagon as an "unacknowledged special-access program," the
plane's existence and real name secret, and therefore deniable.
Gibson's sighting now makes it possible to reconstruct the Aurora program
history. the spy plane was operational, or nearly so, by August 1989, just
before the Air Force parked its SR-71's for the last time. Aurora would
have made its first flight by 1986 at the latest, following the development
effort that was launched in 1981. This analysis elicited denials by high
officials involved in defense and intelligence matters.
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