“It’s been almost 20 years since the SR-71 was retired. If there was a replacement, they’ve been hiding it pretty well,” says Brad Leland, Lockkheed Martin's portfolio manager for air-breathing hypersonic technologies, quoted in Guy Norris' breakthrough story on the SR-72.
Very true. 20 years ago, I and a bunch of other smart and occasionally eccentric individuals, Guy included, spent a lot of time trying to track down that SR-71 replacement, and (if it existed) it was indeed hidden very well. Mind you, those responsible for hiding secret projects had a few advantages over us, including the services of unfriendly men carrying M-16s, the authority to turn large pieces of the Mojave into use-of-deadly-force-authorized no-go areas, and the resources to forge quite convincing documents that linked Area 51 to re-engineered spacecraft and dead aliens.
Indeed, if someone hasn't hidden quite a few aircraft programs very well, the taxpayer is owed a confession and a refund, because there are a few things in this murky story that are clear beyond a doubt.
[...]
One of those things was a high-speed vehicle.
Of all the evidence that came to light in the course of the media/amateur investigation of Area 51, two pieces stand out: the 1989 sighting of an unidentified aircraft over the North Sea, and the sonic booms that created a small sensation in the Los Angeles area in 1990.
[...]
The background to the "mystery booms" is worth recounting. Seismologists at CalTech had recently finished networking the sensors distributed around the area. Out of curiosity, they began using those readings to plot the tracks of Space Shuttle landings at Edwards; only after that did they check on the unexplained "skyquakes", finding similar tracks. Although the researchers eventually accepted the USAF's contention that the booms were caused by fighters operating off the coast, one of the nation's leading sonic boom experts, Domenic Maglieri, has rejected that explanation.
link.
The booms ought to be easy to check out. FOIA request for the flight times and logs of aircraft off the coast of California during the time frame Sweetman mentions. If there was an Aurora it was almost assuredly canceled. Remember, the time frame is when the cold war was winding down. Aerospace companies were being massively downsized. Giant projects were no longer in the appetite of the US: we picked between the SSC and ISS after all as an example. We massively delayed the F-22.
1 comment:
I don't think it got out of the testing phase and was cancelled. I saw one flying out of Key West from the Bahamas, very late at night, very high and fast and very obviously pulsed. I believe they moved testing over there to keep it from prying eyes in the southwest. I have also heard the mystery booms out there, but some of those could have been bolides. I've seen my share of very bright fireballs out there as well.
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