Shadowcraft: UFOs, Spy Planes, or Something Else

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

UFO flying over President Barack Obama’s

ASTONISHING video of a UFO flying over President Barack Obama’s historic inauguration has appeared on the internet.

The video shows a dark object flying past the Washington Monument as nearly two million people gathered to witness America’s first black president be sworn into office.


The clip shows CNN anchors Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper discussing President Obama’s historic speech, before cutting to a shot of the scene of Washington DC's Capitol.



Sworn in ... President Obama

US CNN anchor Blitzer says: “To the rest of the world especially to the Muslim world, he has a double message.”


The shot then cuts to the mall and small dark object is seen whizzing past the Washington Monument, the world’s tallest obelisk at 555ft tall.


Sensation

The footage also shows the dispersing crowds at the Capitol after President Obama had made his historic speech


The video, titled ‘Filmed by CNN News – UFO at Inauguration of President Barack Hussein Obama’ was last night causing a sensation on YouTube.


It started a huge discussion with some bloggers suggesting it could be a bird or a UFO.


One wrote: “Personally, I think the little green men rocked up to join the rest of the world in wishing Obama well.”

IS OBAMA A ALIEN?l

US, Chinese researchers engineer invisible cloak: study

In a breakthrough that could signal a new era for human technology, US and Chinese researchers announced Thursday they are a step closer to creating an invisibility shield.
In a development made possible by advances in complex mathematical algorithms, engineers at Duke University, North Carolina were able to create what they call "metamaterials."

These materials can "guide electromagnetic waves around an object, only to have them emerge on the other side as if they had passed through an empty volume of space," according to the team, whose work was published in the January 16 edition of the journal Science.

The cloaking phenomenon is similar to mirages seen at a distance on a hot day, according to senior researcher David R. Smith.

"You see what looks like water hovering over the road, but it is in reality a reflection from the sky," Smith said.

"In that example, the mirage you see is cloaking the road below. In effect, we are creating an engineered mirage with this latest cloak design."

The team, who were backed by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation of China among others, worked off their 2006 prototype that proved the project's feasibility.

But Smith said their latest cloak is far superior to the original design, Smith said.

"The new device can cloak a much wider spectrum of waves -- nearly limitless -- and will scale far more easily to infrared and visible light," he said.

"The approach we used should help us expand and improve our abilities to cloak different types of waves."

The breakthrough has the potential of advancing numerous technologies that already exist, and ideas that have yet to be devised.

"By eliminating the effects of obstructions, cloaking devices could improve wireless communications, or acoustic cloaks could serve as protective shields, preventing the penetration of vibrations, sound or seismic waves," said the team.

The cloak, measuring 20 inches (50.8 centimeters) by four inches (10 centimeters) and less than an inch (2.5 centimeter) high, is constructed with 10,000 fiberglass pieces arranged in parallel rows, 6,000 of which are unique.

The unique algorithms that can affect electromagnetic waves determined the shape and placement of each piece, the team indicated

cold war aliens

Elmer Barnes once explained the meaning of historical revisionism. Revisionism, he said, "implies an honest search for historical truth and the discrediting of misleading myths that may be a barrier to peace and goodwill among nations. . . . Revisionism has been most frequently and effectively applied to correcting the historical record relative to wars because truth is always the first war casualty."

The interventionist spirit in American foreign policy, especially during the last 60 years, has led the United States into numerous misguided and disastrous adventures around the world. (See FFF's new book, The Failure of America's Foreign Wars.) Among the myths that still need revision are many pertaining to aspects of the Cold War.

For example, beginning in the 1930s, leftists in America accused their opponents of being paranoid about communism and the danger that there was "a communist under every bed." The recently declassified Vonona documents, however, clearly show that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were Soviet spies (Julius's Soviet code name was "liberal"); and that Alger Hiss really was a Soviet agent, as were Harry Dexter White, undersecretary of the treasury and one of the architects of the Bretton Woods agreement, and Laughlin Currie, leading Keynesian economist and state department official. Indeed, it appears that in the 1930s and 1940s there were more than 200 Soviet agents in the Washington bureaucracies, many of them in high positions.

One of the other myths during the Cold War was that the Korean War was started by South Korea in June 1950 or, if it was initiated by North Korea, it was without the approval or support of Stalin or Mao Zedong. A leading proponent of this view was the American journalist I.F. Stone. It now turns out that Stone was on the Soviet payroll.

Now that the Cold War is over and the Soviet Union no longer exists, Russian and Western historians have begun to get a look into many of the secret archives of the USSR. This has enabled the beginning of Russian historical revisionism, a revisionism that is putting to rest all of the lies of the Soviet state, from Lenin to Gorbachev. For example, the Soviet government always denied that the 1939 Non-Aggression Pact between Stalin and Hitler contained a "secret protocol" dividing up Eastern Europe. Not only has this finally been admitted, but the Soviet originals of these documents have been on display in Moscow.

The most valuable work in this area has been the "Cold War International History Project" sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. Since 1992, they have published translations and summaries of a vast number of released documents from the Soviet archives in their semiannual Bulletin, which is available free upon request. And a number of Soviet and Western scholars have been publishing histories of various periods and events during the Cold War on the basis of these new archival materials. Useful studies based on documents and previously unpublished memoirs from Communist China have also begun to appear. All of this is helping to put better perspective in many of the major events of the last half century.

One of these recent works is Alien Wars: The Soviet Union's Aggressions against the World, 1919 to 1989 by Gen. Oleg Sarin and Col. Lev Dvoretsky. It is not as detailed as many of the more specialized studies or as thorough or well structured as a definitive history of the period will eventually have to be. But it offers many useful insights about Soviet foreign policy and Soviet actions before and during the Cold War.

The authors have an interesting chapter on the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939, and the extent to which the Republican side was soon taken over by Stalin's agents. They also detail the amount of Soviet military intervention in the war and how Stalin saw Spain as a proving ground for new military technologies, just as Hitler and Mussolini did in their support for the fascist side in the conflict.

In their discussion of the origin of the Second World War, the authors (like some other Russian historians in recent years) argue that Stalin not only wanted to help start a war between Hitler and Britain and France but was also planning to attack Nazi Germany (probably in 1942) as the crucial stage leading to the communizing of Europe; but Hitler beat Stalin to the punch by invading the Soviet Union first in June 1941.

They also detail the origins of the Korean War. Their discussion, along with Soviet documents now available through the Woodrow Wilson International Center, clearly demonstrate that while the first proposals for a war to unify all of Korea under communist rule came from North Korea's dictator, Kim Il Sung, he had the full financial and military support of the Soviet Union. Stalin personally gave the official go-ahead. He sent Soviet military advisors to help plan the strategy of attack and conquest. After the war had begun and the tide had turned against the North Koreans, Soviet military pilots went into action against the U.S. Air Force from bases in Siberia and Manchuria in planes disguised with North Korean and Chinese Communist markings.

Another standard myth about the Korean War is that the Chinese Communists decided to intervene only when U.S. and UN troops began approaching the Manchurian-Korean border along the Yalu River in October 1950. However, this is contradicted by recent works, especially China's Road to the Korean War by Chen Jian (1994). After Mao also gave the go-ahead to Kim Il Sung to start the war, Mao and the Chinese communist military began preparations in July 1950 for participation in the Korean War, as Mao's next step in taking the leadership in Asia (with Stalin's approval) for the communization of the Far East.

Sarin and Dvoretsky also explain the extent of Soviet military and financial intervention in the Vietnam wars, starting in 1946 through the fall of Saigon in 1975. Soviet advisors and military personal not only assisted the Vietnamese communists; they also flew aerial combat missions. They also flew combat missions for the Egyptians in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. The authors detail Soviet interventionism in Somalia and Ethiopia and how the Soviet government changed whom it supported as strategic opportunities shifted. They also describe Soviet motives and purposes for placing nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962, events behind Soviet military intervention in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, and the disastrous war in Afghanistan.

Soviet military adventurism after 1945 cost the lives of tens of thousands of ordinary Russians, who were sent to advise or fight in foreign lands in the name of winning the world for communism.

Revisionist histories about Soviet foreign adventurism are not valuable merely as a means for the Russians to face the facts and realities of their own past. They also assist in better understanding the events surrounding America's own interventionist policies during this period. The lessons of history, Sarin and Dvoretsky hope at the end of their book, can be "useful in helping prevent unfortunate consequences in the future."