Friday, March 28, 2014

UPDATED: Mystery aircraft photographed over Texas - by Steve Douglass

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Sitting on a secret is a hard thing to do - and not only for me but the Pentagon as well.

But now the secret is out and the speculation is running rampant on the Internet, so it's time to tell the story behind Aviation Week & Space Technology's Bill Sweetman's story:



As aircraft bums are want to do in their spare time, on March 10th I found myself at Amarillo International Airport with my grandson and three other "Interceptors" enjoying a a nice spring-like afternoon photographing military jets doing practice approaches and sipping ice tea at our hangout the Old English Field House restaurant located at Rick Husband International Airport on the far east side of Amarillo.

It had been a fun day. I had taken my grandson to the nearby Texas Air & Space Museum and we had toured their newest acquisition a beautiful DC-3 and then had lunch in full view of two beautiful black Beal AFB T-38s  (call sign Roper) that had stopped for lunch and fuel.

Amarillo is a great place for airplane spotters because it's centrally located (everyone stops here to eat and get av-gas) and it's expansive runways are used by the military  for practicing "touch and gos" and on a daily basis we have everything from Air Force Trainers to B-1Bs in the pattern.




It's safe to say over 50 percent of Amarillo's traffic is military.

So there we were - chatting having just watched as the two Beal T-38s executed an excellent tandem take-off, when  my cell phone rang.

I recognized the voice immediately whom (because of his government job) I will refer to as "Tom."

"What's up Tom?" I answer.

"Hey - Steve are you still out at the airport?" he asks.

"Yes - I was just about to head home." I replied.

"Look out to the southwest - there are three planes flying in formation - you can see their contrails."

I told the rest of the gang and we headed to the front of Old English to (as we say in Texas) take a gander.

They weren't hard to spot. The sky was severe-clear and the three contrails stood out like white chalked exclamation points across a deep blue sky.

The three aircraft were approaching from the southwest and they weren't in a hurry. They seemed to be heading right for the airport.

We readied the lenses on our cameras and hoped to get a clear shot of them coming overhead.

Since we are all aircraft spotters - we knew they most likely weren't commercial aircraft and had to be military, hoping maybe they were something cool like an F-22 or F-15s that we often see flying over the Amarillo VOR but have yet been able to coax down for some gas and grub.

Both Dean Muskett and myself were shooting with similar lenses - a 70 to 300mm zoom, I with my Nikon and he with his Canon.

There were four witnesses to this formation (five if you count my grandson) myself, Ken Hanson, Dean Muskett and "Tom."

Steve Douglass  Dean Muskett   Ken Hanson 


We (Dean and I) watched through our cameras as they approached and then turned parallel to the airport, staying south of us and turning due east.

At their closest approach (guesstimating twenty miles) we began taking photos.

Although it was easy to see the contrails, it was not so easy to see the aircraft leaving them; their coloring and shading pretty much matching the sky.

But one of the three then did something either unusual or on purpose that made it's planform visible for a brief few seconds. It maneuvered in and out of the lead aircraft's contrail, kind of playfully.

Dean Muskett

Both Dean and I snapped away shooting multiple frames.

In another ten minutes the flight could still be seen but receded to a contrail and a dot on the eastern horizon.

Dean and I reviewed our photos on our cameras to try and identify the aircraft type.

"That's a B-2" Dean said excited. "It's a flight of three B-2s."

I looked at mine, zoomed in, but I wasn't so sure. Something about it looked odd. The shape wasn't quite right but on my tiny LCD frame in bright daylight I couldn't really see it well.

I rushed home and imported the photos into my computer. I then looked at the frames where the aircraft was flying in and out of the lead contrail and zoomed in using Photoshop.

My grandson (who was leaning over my shoulder watching me work) jumped when I shouted. "The trailing edge is wrong!" I must have said it three times.

He looked at me odd. "What?"

"This one here - isn't a B-2. See that edge on the backside?"


I grabbed a model of a B-2 that I have on my desk - "If it was a B-2 it would be jagged like this." I explained.

I smiled. "I think we have discovered a new black aircraft!"

I then called Dean and reported to him what I think I had found and asked him to send me his frames.

Typically British he said, "I don't think mine are very good. My lens isn't as sharp as yours. I can't tell what it is."

"Send them anyway." I replied.

Once downloaded, I examined his frames - they weren't as sharp but they did reveal something mine hadn't. At one point the aircraft had banked and the trailing edge was quite clear. It wasn't straight but had a slight curve, the aircraft was almost boomerang shaped.

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Convinced we had captured a new black aircraft, I began looking closer at the other 20-odd frames and doing some enhancing - bringing out the planform, applying filters and discarding the color. At the same time I knew I had another source I needed to check.

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I own a Uniden BCT15x scanning receiver dedicated to receiving and recording communications in the military-aviation UHF band (225 to 399 MHz) which when connected to a PC records everything and saves them as a time-stamped file. It was a simple thing to go into those recordings and search them for any communications possibly related to the sighting.

I found two. One with a three-ship-formation of aircraft checking in with Albuquerque Center on 251.100 MHz and another with the same aircraft checking in with Fort Worth Center on 316.100 MHz.

Call sign: "SIENNA"

LINKS:

SIENNA FLIGHT CHECK IN ON ZAB

SIENNA FLIGHT CHECK IN ON ZFW

So I began to think about what we had, which was three unidentified aircraft (with the same call sign) flying in a non-standard formation with three mile separation.

This indicated to me they were fairly big, hence the need for spacing due to wake turbulence.

The flight checked in with two ATC Centers - Albuquerque and Fort Worth and came from the Southwest. The unknown aircraft were flying between 36 and 37,000 feet and avoided flying over the Amarillo VOR staying south of it, heading almost due east.

my monitoring post 

Now with that data, I decided to check another site FLIGHTRADAR24.COM which provides almost realtime tracking of commercial and civil aircraft using MODE-A, C and S transponders.

It's basically like having your own air traffic control radar scope. I use it a lot when monitoring and tracking aircraft flying in the Amarillo vicinity. It's a great site for those interested in aviation.

FLIGHTRADAR24.COM has a very cool feature which is a playback mode. One can type in the time parameters and basically roll the tracking back and see what was flying in the sky at any given time.


I know what you are thinking - it's highly doubtful the mystery planes were squawking Mode S, but that's not what I was hoping for.

What I hoped to see is if any commercial or civil aircraft were in the vicinity (or more importantly) being routed away from the mystery flight as it flew east.

Watching the playback it became very obvious that was exactly what happened. During the time in question, there was a fifty mile-wide gap of airspace, a clear corridor in the area that the mystery 3 ship formation had flown though.

Once I had finished with the photos I contacted editors and former editors at Aviation Week & Space Technology Magazine and showed them what we had. I posted the enhanced and the raw images in a Dropbox folder so the could do their own analysis.

This wasn't a single image of a blurry UFO thrown together in Photoshop. We had over two dozen good frames (including EXIF DATA) taken by two photographers, and (for the sake of argument) that would be something pretty hard to fake, but not impossible.
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So not content with having just photographic evidence, I needed verification knowing if I published the photos would undoubtedly cause a sensation.

So there was also one thing I had to do - which was find out if there were any B-2s flying in the area at the time. I had to be sure that what we had captured wasn't just B-2s photographed at a weird angle. I contacted the Public Affairs Office at Whiteman AFB (where B-2s are based) but they never replied back.

Weeks later this reply was passed on to me by Aviation Week Editor Bill Sweetman, concerning his query to Whiteman about any B-2 traffic over Texas on that date.


From: GREENE, JENNIFER D GS-07 USAF AFGSC 509 BW/PA 
Sent: Tuesday, March 25, 2014 2:00 PM
To: Sweetman, Bill
Cc: COOPER, JOHN M 1st Lt USAF AFGSC 509 BW/PA; GREENE, JENNIFER D GS-07 USAF AFGSC 509 BW/PA

Subject: Aircraft sighting

Sir,

I have spoken with our schedulers and the aircraft you saw was not a B-2 on the date and time in question.
Thank you!

Very Respectfully,

Jennifer Greene
Director of Community Relations
509th Bomb Wing Public Affairs
509 Spirit Blvd. Suite 112
Whiteman AFB, MO 65



So there it was - the confirmation I sought. The aircraft in question were not Whiteman's B-2s.

Then what were they?

We know they were manned, we know they were big and we know they were and unlike anything that anyone has yet to admit are currently in our military inventory.

We know they flew - in broad daylight- over at least three states and maybe more. I heard them checking in over New Mexico, Texas and watched as they flew toward Oklahoma.

Where they went from there is anybody's guess.

So where did they come from? Where are they based?

Since they came from the southwest it's logical to conclude they could have come from Holloman, AFB, Cannon AFB, or maybe even Edwards AFB.

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They also may have flown from Nellis or Area 51 - possibly for some work or testing over the White Sands Missle Range or Melrose Bombing Range or any number of ranges located in the south western US. Maybe TTR? These are all questions that remain open.

But I did have one additional piece of information that I had collected a few weeks earlier that now that I look back at it, might have been related.

On February 21, I posted this radio intercept to my Facebook group of aviation photographers:


"It's frustrating when you monitor something very interesting in your vehicle - but the scanner at home didn't catch it or record it. At approximately 2:39 PM, as I was driving down to pick my grandkids up from school (down in Canyon,Texas ) I heard this conversation on 321.100 MHz on the scanner in my vehicle. 
BTW - pardon the language. I'm quoting.

"That's what I'd call an oh-ficial UFO. Unusual-Fucking Object. What's it's designation?"
"Can't say over the radio."
"Weirdest fucking airplane I've ever seen."
"Hey - who's the boomer?"
"Mike Sinclair. Why?"
"I thought I recognized that ugly mug. Is he on the frequency?"
{pause}
"Should be- if he ain't we are in big trouble."
"Hey Mike - what do you think of this fucking thing - ain't it the fugliest thing yet?"
"How'd you rate that? Who's in the back seat?"
"I'd rather not say ... SIGNAL Begins to fade ..... UNINTELLIGIBLE."
"No, we will be your tanker all week ..." 

While this was going on - I witnessed two aircraft flying to the west in approximately the same position our mystery aircraft would come from a few weeks later.

Could this have been our mystery aircraft on their way west?

Other questions remain.

Some may ask why they would fly it in broad daylight over Texas? Why wouldn't they use encrypted radio frequencies?

I've always been of the opinion, if they don't want you to see something, you won't.

But let me digress a bit in search of a better answer.

Look at the history of black aircraft and in particular the F-117.

During initial tests it flew only at night, but a number of crashes, one  caused by pilot fatigue necessitated the move to daytime test flights. The USAF knew that soon it would be spotted and the cat would be out of the proverbial bag.

But they also knew a aircraft that can't be seen on radar could make a hell of a dent on the USSR's military budget as they struggled to find ways to counter stealth.

Billions of rubles were spent and (as history has proven) the Soviet Union went bankrupt.

It's only recently that other countries have cracked the code for stealth and are building their own stealthy aircraft.

But consider this - there's could also be another reason.

A weapons system isn't a threat to an enemy unless they know it exists.

Ask yourself an important question - what's going on in the world right now?

Who (has of late) has decided to roll back the clock to the good old days of the Cold War and MAD?

Question: How do you make your adversary take a moment of pause and rethink his military doctrine based on Cold War technology?

Answer: You give him a glimpse, a hint that we haven't just been sitting on our hands all these years after the fall of the Soviet Union.

The point I'm trying to make - is - to make your adversary lose sleep at night wondering what super weapons the USA has in their arsenal that are far advanced than their own.

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You don't trot the show pony out for all the world to see - you don't tip your entire hand because that smacks of propaganda.

Remember when world laughed at Iran's supposed stealth fighter?

But like the shark in Jaws, it was scarier when you couldn't see it - when you just caught a glimpse of a fin slicing through the water.

I rather like the thought of current leaders of Al-Qaeda tossing and turning at night, listening for the sound of stealth helicopters approaching, helicopters they now know exist. 

The best weapon IS the one you never have to use. 

-Steve Douglass 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR LINK


UPDATE: Since the news has broke I've been contacted by reporters from many media outlets asking me the same question over and over again, "What do you think it was?"

Here's my educated guess:

Since the discovery of low observable (stealth) technology was quantified, it has been implemented across the board.

First there were stealth bombers, followed by stealth fighters and spy-planes, drones, stealth ships and because of the bin Laden raid we now know stealth helicopters exist.

But if you look at the list of stealth applications, there's one military mission that stealth has supposedly never been applied to; a covert way to quickly airlift a large number of troops and equipment into a battle zone or unfriendly country without the enemy ever being the wiser.

The answer to the question "What's missing from this picture?" is a stealth transport.

-Steve Douglass 

UPDATE: 4-1-14

"I sincerely apologize for the delay in responding to you. We received Bill Sweetman's query last week, but we never saw this one come through our organizational box; otherwise we would have responded right away. In short, we spoke with our scheduling office, and the aircraft you saw was not a B-2 on the date and time in question. 

To better ensure that we receive any future queries in a timely manner, I would recommend calling 509th BW/Public Affairs at 660-687-6126/5727, and we will strive to get you an answer promptly. Thanks. 

V/R, 

John M. Cooper
1st Lt, United States Air Force
Chief, Public Affairs, 509th Bomb Wing
Whiteman AFB, MO
660-687-6126


PS: What's very telling to me (other than the confirmation there were no B-2s flying that day) is that the aircraft wouldn't have been notice if they were flying separately.

Contrails crossing the Panhandle skies are as common as cows here - but three flying together is not. I've seen posts that I heard the aircraft on my radio and then ran out and saw them - which was not the truth - I only discovered the communications when I got home and went digging through my time-stamped recordings after I realized they weren't B-2s.

Some people are also citing the lack of encryption and say it's rare that the military talks on an open frequency so they must be faked to support the photos.

They couldn't be more wrong - plus they HAVE to talk to ATC centers - which is done in the clear.

I also hear them a lot - chatting on back channels conversing freely. I imagined them thinking "How many times do we have to fly over Amarillo before Douglass notices?"


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51 comments:

  1. Sounds like "they" wanted you to see it. I expect an official reveal soon.

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  2. Could these be the LRS-B demo aircraft. The competition is supposed to start this year.
    You may be right about a statement to the rest of the world about US military superiority. Mystery cloud in NM and now this?

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  3. Aurora, maybe? Northrop already teased it in one of their PR videos. Most supposed photos and eyewitness accounts seem to agree that it's a perfectly triangular shape though.

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    Replies
    1. Interestingly enough it looks exactly like the 2 crab that flew directly over my head boomerang shape To a t It gets me pissed when someone says triangle What I saw was clearly to boomerang not resembling a triangle in any way If they were close enough that I could see the to knobs in the front then I would be sure the you and i saw the exact same thing only my siding was very low and in Texas Although I don't know aircraft like you do I do know that what I saw was in no one Official inventory although I do believe what I saw was military and not extraterrestrial

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  4. Hi Steve, thanks fornthe article, very interesting.

    The parto of the email that you have covered is in clear text. If I do copy&paste on notepad I see the cc and the rest of signature.

    Bye

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  5. I like your articles as they are based around the facts, rather than inventing crazy conspiracy theories. I feel as though we will find out what these craft are in the coming months.

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  6. If it operates similarly to the B2 with long, round trip missions which put them over targets under the cover of night, a daytime return would be necessary right? Side question, for large drones, the remote pilot would still need to coordinate with local air traffic control over the US, correct?

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  7. Dear Sir,
    I think you're going to have a good number of visits from Italy in the next few hours!
    "Corriere della Sera", the most important newspaper in Italy, has just spread the news of the three mysterious planes!
    http://www.corriere.it/esteri/14_marzo_29/quei-voli-misteriosi-cieli-texas-fbee0fe0-b6cf-11e3-ac02-19a792716bb3.shtml

    Have a nice day and keep the good work

    Tom

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  8. Great writeup -- thanks!

    Could you post the date/time on FlightRadar24.com to watch the gap in regular traffic? I tried to find it myself, but I think at 84x, I might have missed it, and at significantly slower speeds, this'll take forever to find. :)

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  9. Maybe just a standard B2 but with some sort of slat deployment to change the W configuration when not required.

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  10. You know, it makes sense if they were manned transports as opposed to UAVs, it seems like the tanker boomer confirmed at least two men inside

    -Transports without a weapons system would take a short time to develop, especially if they were built using stealth concepts from already existing designs
    -Mid to late 2000s proved a need for a stealth transport
    -Don't transports typically fly in a similar loose trailing formation? If they aren't transports, there's not really a reason for them to be flying in a group
    -If they are manned that would point to a transport or adaptable ISR aircraft, as almost all new strike aircraft are optionally manned or pure UCAVs. Troops probably wouldn't trust a UAV transport, either

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  11. Thanks for your investigative work on this. I found it very interesting. Keep up the great work!

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  12. I lived next to Whiteman AFB for 5 yrs. Our home was just on the skirts of thier flight path. I have seen the B2 hundreds of times and at various altitudes. That is not a B2. Countors ate wrong. Different aircraft for sure

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  13. My guess would be that it is a replacement for the F-117 and A6 Intruder rolled into one, with a longer range and a bigger payload than the F-117.

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  14. I live in Oklahoma and remember (middle of March) a plane or several flying over for what seemed like a very long time, possibly for 45 minutes. And wondered what it was that would take this long to fly over and at a considerable height. Like listening to a commercial jet fly over, but that normally only takes a couple of minutes. I live close to the Air Force Base and this plane/planes did not attempt to land there or had taken off from there. They just flew over, for the longest amount of time I have ever witnessed a plane/planes being in the air above. I heard the same phenomenon last week, but at night, and it too took a very long time for whatever it was to just fly over.

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  15. Steve's great work prompted me to write my own article about this, you guys might find it interesting.

    http://theobjectreport.blogspot.com/2014/03/a-closer-look-at-mystery-aircraft-over.html

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  16. Boeing Phantom Ray

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  17. Last night (evening of 3/29/2014) I and some other amateur astronomers were up on Colorado National Monument and saw a very strange aircraft flying by our location heading toward the west. I had 10x70 astronomy binoculars set up on the tripod and another observer had hand-held binoculars. We examined it as it flew past. It was dark; but the fuselage was somewhat visible.

    I had the impression that what I was seeing was an airliner-sized delta-winged Concorde-like aircraft, but flying at the speed and altitude of a private plane. It was so low and slow we thought it was going to curve back around down the valley and land at the Grand Junction airport; but it instead continued on over the border into Utah.

    There was a single red light in front and above it. If this red light was on the fuselage, then the plane would have been flying with an extreme angle-of-attack, perhaps 30 degrees. (Do delta-winged planes do this when flying as slowly as possible?) If the red light were an escort plane, it was flying in ridiculously close formation and (according to one of the other observers) not legally lit. Relative to the wing lights on the plane, the single red light appeared to be about where a refueling tanker would be if one had been there. It's also conceivable that the red light was on some goose-neck structure extending in front of the plane and upward, like a refueling intake nozzle; but it was too dark to see what the connection was between the red light and the rest of the plane.

    Another observer commented on the loud engines and said it was probably military.

    The next morning (i.e., this morning) I saw your reports on the news and immediately wondered if we saw the same kind of thing.

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  18. A stealth transport, excepting for spec ops, would be a colassal waste of taxpayer dollars. Just ask Paulus and the sixth army at Staligrad. Can't supply a modern mech army by air. Fly in a couple hundred troops? A MBT with an hours worth of gas? Big deal. Not gonna work. Ever.

    You think Putin or any Russian general is worried about that? hell no.

    Of course some big brain in the AF probably thought it a wonderful idea and the Military-industrial-congressional-complex gladly threw $50 billion at it because dealing in defrauding the taxpayer is their life's work.

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  19. dror marom, defense reporter, IsraelMarch 30, 2014 at 9:45 PM

    Great job!
    keep tracking..

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  20. Steve, where you've tried to redact some of the text (particularly the email from the 509th PR), you've just changed the colour of the text and background, but it's still there and can be copy/pasted.
    Hence it's easy to see that the address on the email ends:
    Whiteman AFB, MO 65

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  21. I love the work you're doing here. I must say though that my skeptical geiger counter is ticking like crazy. I think the photos are too inconclusive to rule out a B2, no matter what the Director of Community Relations of the 509th Bomb Wing says in an email. No one takes at face value anything coming from a PR director, they will always tell you what they want you to hear. Also, who's this mysterious "Tom" and why did he tip you off to the approaching formation? It's a pretty odd coincidence that he thought to call you at that precise moment. Surely Tom knows what these planes were. Even more surely, you definitely asked him. So what did he tell you? When will you share his response?

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  22. If this is a new plane, and I see no reason to doubt it is, I hope it's designation is "Sharktooth" because that's what I think of when I look at the photos

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  23. Those look like the new B2-e

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  24. One thing - the plane in the picture doesn't look "fugly" - it looks kind of graceful and aerodynamic, at least from the angles we can see. So it makes one wonder if the guy heard on the radio is referring to the plane in the photo.

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  25. Great work as always Steve! I was wondering...Smashwords says the coupon code of TR38X is invalid or expired :( Any new code?

    thank
    EnigmaD

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  26. Tanker?

    How can the AF build these out of the public eye, but the F-35 is a public clusteracquisition? Should it be a black program?

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  27. STEVE
    NICE WORK, where is dropbox links? SHARE PLEASE!
    http://losverdaderoshombresdenegro.blogspot.com/2014/03/avion-tr-3b-persigue-chemtrail.html

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  28. Not phantom Ray. I've seen that plane in testing first hand here at Edwards. Also not x47, that has a distinct look as well. And both too small. Could be larger version of either.

    Rumblings of a new bomber are all over out here. The "South base" control rooms for much of the b2 flight test were closed and then oddly now reopening with only gov workers, no contractors.

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  29. Steve,

    First, I do not believe in UFO's when it comes to little green men. That being said, this black triangular aircraft-- I came across something one night flying low and slow in the Fort Lauderdale area.

    I lived off the airport, and as you described, it was odd that the usual inbound flight traffic was nowhere to be found that night. The planes were NOT using the alternate runway, they just were not in the area.

    The craft flew right over where I was standing while on my phone-- black, triangular shaped... almost no noise. There were white rectangles in the center of all three sides that looked almost like flaps.

    Since I was standing near a well lighted area (a pool deck), the sky was flooded with light pollution, which made it easier to see as it passed by. If the lights were out, it would have gone by without much notice at all.

    I honestly was wondering if what I saw was what you saw as well.

    (and no, it was NOT white circles... they were definitely white triangles).

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  30. Ok I know you think this is a new plane, but while your clearest pic is obviously a new plane, another (much less clear) pic I've seen on a news story (after processing in Photoshop to bring out edge detail), does in fact appear to be a B-2 bomber. Now maybe BOTH planes are in use, and some pics in fact show the new one, and some show the old one, but the one I've seen on the news is undeniably the B-2 stealth bomber.

    Here's my material on in.
    http://www.mediafire.com/download/5qzjpgbin7n2fn1/Stealth_Plane_Siting.zip
    I think it's pretty obvious after viewing this that it is a B-2 bomber that is being shown on this news site.
    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2607840/Is-THIS-SR-72-spy-plane-Mystery-aircraft-spotted-flying-Kansas-just-weeks-seen-Texas.html

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  31. About the frequencies used by secret aircraft: I worked an FAA facility in the previous century that handled SR-71s. They did not use a frequency commonly used by other aircraft, but their frequency could be received by the radio scanners Douglass uses, in the UHF band.

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  32. Great post! The Uniden BCT15x is a great equipment.

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  33. I can assure you, Cannon AFB would not have anything like this stored away. Our biggest aircraft hanger handles a C-130, and not much else, but those hangers are few and far between. I worked in one of them. They have only been operational for a few months. January 2014 I believe? The next biggest hanger holds just 4 F-16's. Plus, there isn't much room on the tarmac for anything big. With all the aircraft stationed at the base, we are almost out of room now, which is why they are building more taxiways and parking ramps, but they are nowhere near completion.

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  34. Love your monitoring post, your passion for this stuff is Loud.


    Bret

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  35. That looks like an A-12 Avenger II. Except that that program was canceled and none built , they say.

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  36. To date we still have not seen tangible, convincing evidence of UFOs.

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  37. I’ve been absent for a while, but now I remember why I used to love this website. Thank you, I’ll try and check back more frequently. How frequently you update your web site? Flight simulators in india, Heliports in India and Helipads in Bangalore

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  38. Hey Steve, great site. Stumbled onto it looking for X37B info. The thing that really amazes me is that they are manned. Being somewhat of an enthusiast it looked like all the stealth/black projects were trending in the unmanned direction. But here you have 3 billion dollar black projects in daylight and theyre obviously piloted. Since everyones throwing out theories I'll throw out my own. I dont think they are troop transports like you said (sorry). The stealth black hawks already fill that role for covertly dropping troops. These things just look too high-tech to be transports. I'm thinking they are what you said at the end of the article. An ace in the hole. Stealth, hypersonic, recon/attack aircraft.

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  39. Hi! I was searching the net looking for an answer to what my son and I saw last night around 8:40 pm. We live near a military base that tests new aircraft, but they're usually known aircraft, I think. I only saw this because of how low it was and because the red and green lights startled me. Driving south on route 5, from my left, I saw the lights and snapped my gaze up to them. It was a triangle-shaped plane flying fairly low, east to west over route 5 at night. My son and I put down our car windows and heard nothing. I live in a flight path and hear fighter jets, and other military craft fly over our house daily. They rattle windows, but this thing did not. It seemed to fly slower than I expected, too. But it had a pseudo concave backside with an overall triangle body. We thought stealth but my husband said the stealth capabilities are for radar not for sound. Any thoughts?

    Dee

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  40. I was on a commercial flight a couple days ago and headed to SLC. Something caught my eye out the window and a bit below our plane. It was an aircraft, all black, in the shape of a bow (upside down U) with more severe angles downward than a boomerang shape. It was much too high to be a parachute and much too close to our commercial flight path. I have been searching the Internet for what it may have been. It was in the middle of the day, tons of visibility.

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  41. Dean Muskett is my hero i really love his job, what he made!

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  42. You forgot one. Edwards AFB also has B2s. I worked there for 10 years and watched them fly out often. I believe that they only have 2, however

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  43. Add also the X-47B UCAS. It might have ben closer than you thought, but smaller

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  44. These three just NOW confirmed to have deployed out of Kirtland AFB and were LRS.

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  45. Kirtland AFB was the source. Just new leak confirmed these were LRS.

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  46. from direction there heading and altitude my guess grand forks north dakota AFB also look at badge and whats on the torch and size and length of hangers

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  47. Great to re-read this and rewatch the YouTube video again. Now after the Pentagon has announced that the B21 Raider is to be produced soon, I would not be too surprised if these A/C were them... Or Pre-Production types much like the Have Blue was to the F117.
    Only time will tell. Keep digging. I've kept my head looking upwards since I was a kid during the 70s here in upstate NY. B52s and KC135s getting Alerted was often. I was able to see an inflight refuel overhead just by looking up during the summer of 83. As another plane geek I relish seeing all sorts of aircraft. WB-47s out of Kandahar was interesting. Keeping my head up almost made me miss a good one; RQ-170 just touching down at KAF.
    Alright, here's to the next new one.

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  48. Steve, do you think this could have been the newly unveiled B-21Raider?

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