Shadowcraft: UFOs, Spy Planes, or Something Else?
by Jim Oberg
Source: Special to SPACE.com
http://www.space.com/sciencefiction/phenomena/shadowcraft_mystery_000317.html
March 17, 2000
The decade-long struggle to understand the mystery of
the super-secret "Aurora" hypersonic aircraft and its role in the UFO
phenomenon’s rash of "triangle sightings" has entered a new phase.
Veteran UFO litigator Peter Gersten (of CAUS -- Citizens
Against UFO Secrecy) argues that military secret-keepers did not make
a "good faith" effort to provide him with information about large
triangle-shaped craft seen repeatedly within the United States and
elsewhere.
The Department of Defense (DOD) has maintained it could
find no information confirming the existence of such craft, military
or otherwise.
However, the U.S. District Court in Phoenix, Arizona,
recently denied DOD motions to dismiss Gersten’s lawsuit, instead
demanding that the DOD produce additional affidavits about the way it
handled the request.
This sets the stage for a rare opportunity to submit
oral arguments regarding UFO sightings possibly caused by secret
military aircraft like the notorious "Aurora".
Hunting the shadowcraft
The quest for Aurora has consumed the passions and
skills of a diverse army of investigators for more than a decade. One
of the more knowledgeable is Dr. Scott Miller, associate professor of
aerospace engineering at Wichita State
University in Kansas.
Miller has recently been touring the country lecturing
on "shadowcraft" -- his term for the elusive mystery vehicles reported
all around the world.
His travels are sponsored by the American Institute of
Aeronautics and Astronautics, the world’s largest professional society
of aerospace engineers, as part of the annual "Distinguished Lecturer"
series of about a dozen speakers who visit local chapters.
"A lot of the audience is a bit skeptical," he admits.
"Yet they’re also intrigued, and they’d like to think these things
really exist."
The professional engineers he talks to also express
gratitude that a fellow professional is examining the well-known
rumors from a strict engineering point of view.
Has Miller gotten any useful feedback from his
audiences? "Nothing really super juicy yet," he notes.
Black programs and Belgian triangles
At St. Louis, the home of the Boeing military aircraft
and missiles plant (formerly McDonnell Douglas), he recalls that one
attendee told him that some of his other friends in a local military
’black program’ couldn’t attend the
talk because of security concerns.
"That was kind of disturbing," Miller recalls. "And kind
of interesting!"
Some fellow experts he has talked with are very
interested in photographs of the "Belgian triangle" seen repeatedly
over Belgium a decade ago.
"They tell me it resembles a vehicle that Teledyne-Ryan
had been working on," he says, "and they were way ahead of Lockheed on
’stealth’ technology."
Such a subsonic reconnaissance vehicle might be the
long-rumored spotter companion for B-2 missions over Russia.
Miller described the need for an aircraft to help hunt
down rail-mobile Russian missiles, and such a mission would be more
than enough rationale to keep its existence classified.
Follow the fuel
He himself is intrigued by recent Indiana UFO reports
and the "pretty wild" rumors of stealth blimps with fake starfields
displayed on their undersides.
"At this point," he admitted, "I’m paying attention."
One of the most interesting tidbits Miller has learned
involves the mid-air refueling aircraft that any secret military
vehicle would need.
"The SR-71 needed a special hydrocarbon fuel," he says.
"And there were several modified KC-135 tankers stationed near
Wichita. The fuel has a two-week shelf life and must be safely
disposed of if stocks are not used quickly."
"I was told the KC-135’s are still in service, and they
are still making that fuel."
According to Miller, there aren’t any more SR-71s
flying, and they were mostly served by tankers out of Beale AFB in
California, not Kansas. So why the Wichita refueling fleet?
The Los Angeles object
Another heavyweight aviation historian who has examined
"Aurora" stories is Tom Heppenheimer, famed for his ferociously
precise engineering assessments of aerospace issues.
One case Heppenheimer examined centered around reports
of unusual supersonic shock waves over Los Angeles in 1991-92.
Many analysts speculated that these phenomena were
caused by a Mach 4 aircraft headed north at about 30,000 feet, but
Heppenheimer was skeptical that any aircraft would fly at that speed
so low.
He calculated that the dynamic pressures on such a
vehicle would reach 4,500 pounds per square foot, ten times the
tolerance proposed for known hypersonic designs.
Furthermore, the Federal Aviation Administration
controls this airspace to an altitude of 60,000 feet and all aircraft,
military as well as civilian, are required to have active radar
transponders while in it.
The mystery plane did not appear on radar.
From sonic booms to odd jet trails
Perhaps a less conventional object, flying at a lower
speed but designed to evade radar, caused the disturbance?
"The computer analysis which came up with the
performance figures has never been calibrated in real flight
experiments," Heppenheimer points out.
Moreover, analysis of the same acoustic data at MIT’s
Lincoln Laboratory suggested that the booms could have come from
conventional fighters doing about Mach 1.1.
Heppenheimer is more intrigued by sightings -- and
photographs -- of strange contrails which follow a "donuts on a rope"
pattern, like sausage links. He interprets these as evidence for
subsonic flight testing of pulsed detonation
engines, possibly the next step in efficient and reliable aircraft
propulsion.
But Miller has his own less highly classified
explanation for such effects.
"Aerodynamics expert Steve Crow studied this effect in
the early 1970s," Miller tells SPACE.com, "and so these are called
’Crow Instabilities’. Studies show that on some occasions, wake vortex
interactions from normal jets such as a 747 build donuts out of
trailing vortices."
The increasingly clandestine sky
None of these expert assessments has had any influence
on what people continue to perceive in the sky.
They see and report large objects, sometimes bizarrely
lighted and sometimes dark against the stars or clouds above. Often
these phenomena are entirely silent, but witnesses sometimes report
pulsating, throbbing engine noises.
And such reports are appearing in far higher numbers
than in the past.
Arguably, many of these sightings are misinterpretations
of both manmade and natural phenomena, and there is a long, dismaying
history of such cases.
Various groups on Earth (from reconnaissance teams, to
test and training groups, to smugglers and even spies) have not been
at all displeased when accidental witnesses misinterpret their aerial
activities.
But the remaining uncertainties remain wide enough to
fly entire fleets of unknown objects right through them, all over the
Earth, and even possibly off it.
Aside from waiting for hindsight decades in the
future -- or for the success of lawsuits such as Gersten’s -- the only
hope to resolve these fascinating mysteries is to collect and
rigorously assess reports.
And even, when opportunities arise, go deliberately
hunting for these shadowcraft.