A friend mentioned this when talking about some of the aircraft in the game “X-Com: UFO Defense” and I did a little research. I haven’t found much, just allegations of a super-secret spy plane that can go much faster then the speed of sound and apparently replaced the SR-71 blackbird.
Is there any more to this then just hearsay and conjecture from UFO sites? It sounds quite interesting if such a thing did exist, I would imagine it would be kept secret for a while, but there seems to be very scant(if any evidence in it’s favor that I’ve seen).
If you believe Ben Rich, who helped build the Blackbird and ran Lockheed’s Skunk Works while they were designing the F-117 Stealth Fighter, there was no successor plane built for the Blackbird after it was retired in 1990. The government chose to rely on satellites and the U-2 for its recon needs. If you read Rich’s book “Skunk Works” you’ll see that he was quite bitter about the retirement of the Blackbird. If there is a ultra-secret hypersonic airplane out there now it either wasn’t built by the Skunk Works or Rich was engaging in active disinformation in his book.
As for the Aurora, he also talks about that in the book. Apparently it was a code word used for something while the Stealth Fighter was still a black project that leaked out of secret congressional hearing. People made the leap that since it was connected to Skunk Works and they built the Blackbird, it must be a follow-on hypersonic aircraft.
There’s lots of hearsay and conjecture (which as Lionel Hutz will tell you, are kinds of evidence), but very little non-UFO or conspiracy type reports on it.
This article from Popular Science is about the closest you’ll find to legit articles about it. Again, lots of interesting stories, but nothing even close to concrete eveidence.
Undoubtedly, the USAF has some amazing stuff under wraps. The SR-71 was designed in the 1950’s using slide-rule technology, so it’s not too big of a stretch to think they’ve improved on that design in the last 50 years. The big question is whether the substantial investment in material, propulsion, and fuel R&D would be worth it, when satellites can do most of the work of a spy palen and then some. Of course, a satellite’s orbit can be calculated and avoided, so a plane will always be useful.
Guess we’ll have to wait another 10 or 15 years to see.
I wouldn’t be suprised if there was one, since it would seem strange for the military not to be working on any advanced weapons projects at all(end of the cold war or not).