MoD confirms "black" military aviation projects exist, sort of
- 14 Jun 06, 03:33 PM
My colleagues, Meirion Jones and Liz McKean, have been digging through old MOD documents about UFOs - contrary to what you might think the military are still very interested in the concept of alien invaders from outer space and as late as 2000 produced a comprehensive document rubbishing the idea of UFOs. One of the reasons people keep seeing them (apart from magic mushrooms) is the rumoured existence of US military aviation projects, in particular the Aurora project. Anyway some poor soul in the MOD had to go through the report when it was declassified and physically insert little crosses in biro where all reference to US military projects is "redacted" You can read the full thing on the Ne or stay here and read the cut-n-paste summary below...
Report fuels spy plane theories
By Meirion Jones
大象传媒 Newsnight
The UK knows more than it is saying about top secret American aircraft projects, recently declassified documents reveal.
Deep inside a previously secret are a few pages which will reignite one of the biggest internet conspiracy questions - Is the US Air Force building secret spy planes which can cross the sky at 3,000mph?
The plane, which is often referred to as Aurora, is supposed to be a follow on from the U2 spy plane and the 2,000mph SR71 Blackbird, both of which were first developed and flown in secrecy as 'Black' projects.
The MoD report from 2000 says the USAF plans to produce "highly supersonic vehicles at Mach 4 to 6" and hypersonic unmanned craft which will fly in the upper atmosphere and in space. In 2003, the USAF revealed it had been working on a hypersonic unmanned craft - the Falcon - but denied building an Aurora-like Mach 4 to 6 aircraft.
The Aurora has 100,000 web pages devoted to it - a lot for an aircraft which may not exist.
According to Jane's Defence Review a third of USAF spending on research and development and procurement goes on classified projects. Some of that helps pay for the development of spy satellites and intelligence activities. But a sizable proportion goes on the development of secret manned and unmanned aircraft.
For more than 50 years some of the world's most exotic aircraft have been developed at Groom Lake in Nevada - otherwise knows as Area 51 - where the appearance of strange shapes in the sky - planes which officially did not exist - led to rumours that captured UFOs were being flown out of there by the US military.
The U2 first took to the sky at Groom Lake in 1955 and stayed secret for five years till the Russians shot one down over Svedlovsk and captured the pilot Gary Powers.
The Blackbird SR71 spy plane also secretly flew from Groom Lake in the early 1960s and the F117 Stealth Fighter and its prototypes flew from there for ten years before they were publicly revealed.
Huge projects have been hidden from public gaze. The USAF spent $20 billion in developing the B2 stealth bomber before revealing it.
Millions were spent upgrading Groom Lake ten years ago and all the surrounding high ground which overlooks the base has been fenced off to keep out curious onlookers but apart from a couple of stealth prototypes there is no sign of what the USAF has been working on there since.
The MoD report which was produced in 2000 and originally classified "Secret - UK eyes only" deals with UFOs - or UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) in MoD jargon - and concludes that there is no evidence for the existence of alien visitors.
But it includes a working paper on 'Black' projects which says "it is acknowledged that some UAP sightings can be attributed to covert aircraft programmes". The report lists three Western programmes.
The first is the SR71 Blackbird which it refers to by its little-used code name 'Senior Crown'. A 14-line description of Programme 2 and a ten-line description of Programme 3 are both withheld.
Even the names of the programmes have been redacted on the grounds of 'international relations'. There are pictures of stealth fighters and bombers, the Blackbird and the new American F22 fighter but two photographs have been withheld. Could one of these be a picture of Aurora?
Bill Sweetman of Jane's Defence Review has been analysing America's undercover defence projects for fifteen years. We showed him the report and he concludes the MoD "identified two separate US 'Black' programmes that might have operated from the UK. It could be something they have reason to know about".
The blanked out sections might well contain a reference to Aurora but that does not mean the plane definitely exists. Sweetman says the blanked out sections "could be speculation but then why would they need to withhold it?"
Elsewhere in the document in a section on exotic technologies is another intriguing line. The DIS say "The projected (USAF) priority plan is to produce unpiloted air-breathing aircraft with a Mach 8-12 capability and transatmospheric vehicles." but it then continues "as well as highly supersonic vehicles at Mach 4 to 6".
The MoD report will be seen by Aurora chasers as another clue to put with unexplained sightings and mystery sonic booms but the Pentagon still insists that Aurora is a figment of their imaginations.
WATCH THE REPORT ON NEWSNIGHT 14 JUNE AT 2230BST/2130GMT ON 大象传媒 TWO IN THE UK AND LIVE ON THE NEWSNIGHT WEBSITE.
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U2, SR71, B2, Aurora, mere trinkets, wasteful trinkets to be sure. The Soviet Union was to be crashed economically, not militarily, that's what Mutual Assured Destruction was all about, and that much was clear very early into the cold war. Of course, an economical pressure was applied by means of arms race, but that was a matter of choice, a lack of imagination perhaps, certainly a lack of concern, but not a necessity. The cold war could had been buried together with Stalin.
The significance of knowing the exact location of one or the other, a base, a facility - suspicious building site this one, sir, sure son, and keep an eye on it, that's what we have these birds for - it was exactly nil. Additionally, what is it that B2/ B117 ever did, that an F16 couldn't do? A serious answer please, no boyscout strategic considerations. Our new eternal enemy, it seems, can be even taken out by a mere F15, as we have seen recently. Stealth technology though may help us evade those sophisticated radar surveillance networks operated by the Taliban. But, we can just as well carpet bomb them instead, as our ally Dick Cheney demonstrated in the early days of war on terror, using nothing more sophisticated than a fleet of B52's, old skool, you understand.
Air-breathing aircraft? A nice thing, especially an engine containing no moving parts is a feet from an engineering point of view. However, the present design only works with a very fast moving shuttle brought to speed by a more conventional means first. But, what do we need such a device for? (It won't work as a space vehicle, never mind the details now) What could be done, for the same 20... 40 billion dollars a year, in terms of improving efficiency and safety of commercial air transport, for example? Mach 8 for 80 billion anyone? That's an awful lot of money locked inside the proverbial, and the real one too, military industrial complex, serving itself, and producing equally selfserving... well, trinkets, in the process. Yes, I know, it creates jobs, stimulates research, and the rest of it, but any multiple billion dollar enterprise would do the trick, wouldn't it? The society as a whole profits from the present situation only by a stretch of imagination, I'm afraid. Not convinced? This illuminates my point brilliantly:
Underlining these phallic toys are the great balls of plasma, "rarely encountered", "barely understood", "scientific rational" behind them being "incomplete or not fully understood", "a field [with as yet] "undetermined characteristics"; nevertheless, it offers "a reasonably justified EXPLANATION" (!) based on "[the] correlation of the overview of information reported", and here is my personal favorite piece of positivist metaphysics - "they [UFO's] appear to originate due to more then one set of weather and electrically-charged conditions" - can a native English speaker explain to me what exactly does that mean: electrically-charged conditions? How does one charge a condition, atmospheric or otherwise, electrically..? Additionally, MoD links these not fully understood phenomena of undetermined characteristics, with an equally dubious and seriously disputed research conducted by an unnamed Canadian scientist, wrongly identified, by the 大象传媒 Breakfast News, as Richard Dawkins. The Canadian neuroscientist in question is one Dr. Michael Persinger. No, this report was not meant to enlighten anyone, and I sort of understand that no scientist wished to be publicly associated with it. By the way, are there any scientists queuing up for research grants, now that an existence of a hitherto unknown natural phenomenon with possibly useful technology to be extracted from it is officially announced? Alternatively, has anyone at MoD ever heard of Hessdalen? (https://www.nidsci.org/pdf/hessdalen.pdf)
The MoD "study" can be best understood in terms of the timing of it's release - a weekend conveniently sandwiched between Gary McKinnon 大象传媒 World interview, and Gary McKinnon Extradition hearings, a mere synchronicity, an "acausal connecting principle" at work, no need for conspiracy. A sorry attempt to buy a little time at five to twelve.
William Burroughs summed it up nicely,
Destroy alien machinery of governmental control. Think well of and have respect for individual aliens.
PS
Mr Mason, please do an interview with one Dr. Jacques Vallee -
He can tell you all you want to know about cutting edge technologies, military and civilian, and - very important for a business correspondent - he's a venture capitalist, promoting, and investing in, these technologies for about 20 years now. And, of course, he can tell you more about UFO's than MoD would want you to know.
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I wish the goverment would stop denying everything.Especially the U.S. because if the public see something in the sky that they have never seen before and they think its an ''unidentified flying object'' they phone around and eventually the rumer will get to M.O.D but they already know its not a U.F.O but yet they still go along with the rumer and i for one am sick of it.The public need to know that its not a U.F.O because if they dont they could get worried that something strange is going on and think that the existance of U.F.Os is real.
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How can I contact Liz McKean to get permission to create a DVD of her piece about Austria's attempt to achieve a 2% landfill target?
Contacting staff of the 大象传媒 is next to impossible! What miracle do I need to achieve this goal?
And how long will it take?
Until doomsday?
Graham Cliff.
ps this has NOTHING to do with LP but you DID ask for my URL!
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