The American Stealth Program and the UFO Phenomena.

Factual Questions
1

I was watching Discovery the other night and saw a very interesting show on the American Stealth program past, present, and where it will be in the future. I could not get over the huge similarity between the stealth fighters, bombers, and reconnaissance aircraft have with what is popularly considered the normal icon of Alien Space Craft or UFO’s.

Not wanting to sound too wacked here, but I have seen many a broadcast on discovery, the learning channel etc…etc… to know that there is a general norm to what people think UFO’s look like. Usually not the regular flying saucer shapes people report but more of a diamond, very angular shape. Triangular sometimes rounded sides with very geometric aerodynamic shapes, is what most people think of when they think of a UFO. Or when there is a mass sighting and people say what they saw…

Some of the new aircraft being tested by the USAF look curiously like what we come to expect a UFO would look like. Small, fast, triangular/geometric/aerodynamic. No propulsion discharge vents or even wings for that matter.

I don’t want people to assume that there are UFO’s out there, or that aliens are visiting our planet. No, no, I am looking for someone to postulate on how and why do the stealth machines the USAF are testing now look like what most people commonly see as a UFO?

I wonder what they are doing out there in the desert? Could they (the gov’t) have a craft they are modeling by? A propulsion system maybe? 0-gravity maybe?

2

Philosphr, you just hit the nail on the head!

The military won’t address this, but they HAD to test these radar-evasive aircraft…like in the desert? This theory probably DOES explain many UFO sightings especially those where nothing was seen on radar screens of local airports, for example.

Also, there was a story in the news about a decade ago about a UFO all ablaze and then crashing somwhere in some small, remote town in some desolate spot in PA. While the locals tried to track it down, it’s very suspicious how the military just happened to beat them to the scene! Hmm…what does this say to you? Now why should the military just happen to know the back roads, and the exact location, better than the locals?

Makes ya wonder…

  • Jinx
3

When was the stealth airplane revealed to the public? the mid 80’s? and when was the start of production? mid 60’s? 20 years to debut?

so if we keep that trend… they’re still 20 years ahead… and i bet that the military has some WEIRD tech in testing.

4

Like this one?

5

Here’s a link with history of the B-2. Supposedly it started in 1978. Not sure how accurate the data is, but it seems implausible that this project was started in the '60s.

6

My own experience with UFOlogists is that they have a tendency to call ANYTHING over the desert a UFO. I went to White Sides Mountain outside of Rachel, NV during Christmas 1994 which was the last mountain where you could get a good view of ‘Area 51’ prior to the USAF annexing it on Jan.1, 1995 (I read about it in Popular Science at the time).

As you might guess, there were loads of people around (who also probably read the same article about their ‘last chance’ to see the base). So here are a bunch of men and women sitting in the middle of the Nevada desert with telescopes, freezing their asses off. What do we see, a light move across the sky, stop and hover, then change direction. Immediately, people say UFO. I say, Helicopter, Harrier jet, or some new modified version of either. It came from the Nellis AFB, seems more likely to me to be a stealth plane if not just a run of the mill normal plane or helicopter.

7

Jimmy Carter made the first public acknowledgment of the stealth research programs in 1980, during a televised debate with Ronald Reagan. If I remember rightly, he said that Reagan was wrong to harp on expensive weapons programs the Carter administration was not pursuing, as enormous resources were already going into more sophisticated technology, and had been for many years.

It may be that Carter’s disclosure was inadvertent.

In any event, it is clear that stealth research–whether involving the B2 Bomber or in another form-- had been going on for a long time at that point–well before 1978.

Back around 1982 a friend of mine whose husband worked as an engineer for McDonnell-Douglas observed that he now had to be considerably less reticent about just what the heck it was he did for a living. As was proper, he still wouldn’t divulge any specifics about his work, but since the sixties she hadn’t known what sort of products he was working on at all. This is, of course, a friend-of-a-friend story, the stuff of what urban legends are made. Nevertheless, it was the kind of remark one heard a lot at the time if one was living in St. Louis.

It has often been suggested that stealth prototypes, as well as experimental craft generally, account for some UFO sightings. I recall there was even a My Three Sons episode with this premise (Ernie was contacted by a government representative who told him to shut up about the “flying saucer” he had seen; it was an experimental government craft). It seems likelier that the reverse would be the case; it seems more realistic that the government would get people to believe that experimental aircraft they had seen were “just” flying saucers.

Some years ago I caught the end of an interview on the National Public Radio show All Things Considered who claimed that the whole mythology of gray aliens was largely a government fabrication, a disinformation program designed to cover up aircraft research and to discredit people who caught sight of experimental craft as they were tested. I have never been able to determine who the author was or what his book was called; I tried posting a thread about that here, but came up with nothing.

A final note: there was another episode of My Three Sons where Fred MacMurray was pressed into service as a spy for a day; I believe he was supposed to give foreign agents the impression that he was willing to sell them secrets. To get to a meeting with them on the east coast, he is flown in a super-secret government plane which can cross the country in a couple of hours. During a conversation with the foreign spies he makes a slip, and says he was in California “a couple of hours ago”.

In the 90s the government acknowledged that it had such a plane, had been using it since the 1950s, and was now retiring it.

8

Philisophically speaking we can say that they exist without having a hard concrete example to point to. But why keep it secret? Is it because the gov’t doesn’t want to divuldge that fact that they got some secret propulsion system from a crashed alien ship. Or because they do not want people to know how they spy on other nations with undetectable aircraft that are virtually invisible?

I can see keeping national security secrets behind the curtain. But hasn’t the idea of aliens been sent waaaay of into left field? If the idea of small grey aliens with large ovaliod heads and big beaty black eyes is not an alien icon then I don’t knwo what is. Furthermore if that is a government construct to get people to believe in something that doesn’t exist, then they have done a beautiful job.

But why?

And why have thousands or millions of people tuning into Discovery Channel to watch something that looks suspiciously like a UFO and then call it a government spy plane? Is the gov’t still trying to cover up sightings, or just informing anyone who watches the shows that our new planes look like UFO’s so stop calling us with all your fool hearted claims of aliens?

9

(hijack)

From LA to NY in a couple of hours? Ummm … sounds a lot like an SST to me. How did this super-secret plane differ from, say, the Concorde?

(/hijack)

*BTW … just thought of this after I wrote the reply. Where I’m from, “a couple” does not specifically refer to “two” of something. To me, “a couple” = “several”. For instance, if I look and see that I have 8 dollars in my wallet, I’ll say I have a “couple of dollars”.

To make a long story short, I thought you were saying that this secret plane could go coast-to-coast in about 3 hours – which the Concorde can do (IIRC about the Concorde maxng out at Mach 2 or a little better). If you meant specifcally TWO hours … then that’s a different matter.*

10

A lot of military testing has spawned OFO reports. Just read Philip Klass’ books on UFOs. He describes a few cases of military operations that were incredibly erroneously reported as UFOs (“noiseless” craft, or “hovering” craft, where there were only ordinary noisy, non-hovering military planes performing exercises.) And this was long before “Stealth” technology. Similarly, several Russian UFO reports coincide with testing of Soviet aircraft (I think I read about this in something by James Oberg).

It certainly wouldn’t surpruise me to find that Stealth planes were mistaken for UFOs. Read the book Skunk Works about the program – they did a lot of testing over the desert, prime UFO spotting region.

11

You are thinking of the SR-71 Blackbird.

http://www.marchfield.org/sr71a.htm
http://www.cowan70.freeserve.co.uk/secret_aircraft/lockheed_sr-71.htm

Apparently the record-setting LA to DC flight took only 64 mins. N.B. that several of the SR-71s were later unretired.

12

FYI-

The F117A Stealth “Fighter” - First flight June 18, 1981. The Have-Blue prototypes flew in 1977-78 (if memory serves). Aircraft publicly announced in 1988.

B2 - Also announced 1988, however the first flight wasn’t until 1989.

I think you are right though. The F117A flew for many years before it was announced. And it definetly doesn’t look like any conventional aircraft. It could have (and almost certainly was) been mistaken for an alien UFO. As for the 40s-70s, there were many experimental and exotic aircraft flown out of Edwards and (presumebly) Groom Lake. It is not that much of a stretch to believe that many UFO sightings were these aircraft.

What does the Dept of Defense have up its sleeve now for “secret” aircraft? Who knows. But I bet there is something and people have already seen it but just don’t know what it is.

13

Well, ever since the A-12 Oxcart radar-absorbing material (RAM) has been incorporated into many American aircraft designs. Even U-2s were retrofitted with radar-absorbing paint jobs.

At the end of WWII, the Americans got their hands on an example of the Horten flying wing. Northrop was already playing around with a flying wing design, but the Hortens also sported a a rudimentary radar-absorbing material based on charcoal. The flying wing also has a small radar profile to begin with, and there were a few Northrop B-35s and B-49s flying around. Note their resemblence to the B-2.

So by the late 1940s there were already aircraft designs that might not show up well on commercial radars. There were also materials that could be applied to prototype aircraft to intentionally keep them off commercial radar screens. The flying wing design has been flying since just about the time Kenneth Arnold announced his UFO sighting, which happened to be a flying wing, not a flying saucer (he described them as “disk-shaped,” perhaps for lack of a better term). What do I mean by “just about the time”?

According to this site, the first flight of the second B-35 was on June 26, 1947, probably out of Edwards AFB, California.

According to the site I linked above, Mr. Arnold made his sighting on June 24, 1947 near Mount Rainier, Washington. He claimed to have seen nine silver aircraft.

What does that mean? Heck if I know. But it’s something worth considering.

14

Sofa King check out the link you gave for the B-49. If you look in the lower left corner of the photo there is a curious formation/landing pattern cut into the desert. What is that? a cross with a circle in it? Have you ever seen a landing zone like that? I certainly haven’t…

15

Looks like it might be one of the Nasca lines (which is oddly appropriate considering the subject of this thread).

16

Say, here’s a thought: Why don’t I include a link that actually has some pictures of the damn things! :smack:

17

My guess is that it isn’t anything as bizzare as that. There are compasses carved into the ground around Edwards, and I believe this is probably just one of those.

I don’t know how many there are, but I found a photo online of one right at Edwards AFB at this link http://www.sr-71.org/photogallery/f-22/f-22-01.htm

I’m trying to get more info on them to confirm/deny my hypothisis.

18

Not quite. The whole “flying saucer” thing stems form a bit of a misunderstanding. What Arnold said was that the craft he saw “flew like a saucer would if you skimmed it across the water”. (Look at this transcript of an interview with him). He specifically said they were NOT saucer-shaped; in fact he described them as “half-moon shaped, oval in front and convex in the
rear… somewhat bat-like”.

However, all the newspapers at the time misquoted him and the disk-shaped “flying saucer” was born.

19

From Sofa King: “…the Hortens also sported a a rudimentary radar-absorbing material based on charcoal.”

I have seen the original Horten jet powered flying wing at Silver Hill (Paul Garber Restoration Facility --a great tour) and am not aware of any charcoal substances on it. I am also unaware of any radar absorbing propreties of charcoal.

I don’ mean to be taking SK or anyone else to task on this, but if you all happen to have a cite on either the Horten aircraft using charcoal or charcoal as a radar absorbing material, I would be much enlightened.

20

I suppose one could could SAY they existed without proof. I could SAY alot of things existed and prove it philosophically. Even agreeing that we could SAY they existed does not mean that the goverment knows about them, deals with them, or steals thier technology. Or that they probe people’s bungholes on a regular basis.
Too much television is watched I think, when It comes to peoples ideas of what kind of conspiracies the goverment is capable of. (the media is capable of alot, but of course UFO pundits believe the media is controled by the guv’ment :rolleyes: ) To me it seems vastly more likely that magic and ESP and such exists than our goverment keeping secrets so well hidden for 50 years. Why would they care that people know we can fly over other countries undetected and spy on them. That happens now, and other countries KNOW it is going on. It is no secret.

Personally with the bent this question takes, and some of the assumptions Philosphr is making, I think this belongs in GD.