Area 51

The Air Force’s classified test range at Groom Lake, Nev. has never lacked for evocative nicknames — it and its restricted airspace have been called Dreamland, Paradise Ranch, The Box and, most famously, Area 51. Now there’s a less romantic moniker to throw on the pile: “Homey Airport,” according to a few civilian aviation journals. “Homey Airport” now appears as the official name for a certain air base near a certain dry lake bed in Nevada, according to reports in the Web site of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, as well as the Daily Aviator blog andothers.

New editions of flight planning software and civilian aviators’ GPS gear lists the name and the official designation “KXTA” — which online wags have speculated stands for “extraterrestrial airport.” (The “k” designation indicates only that the field is in the U.S., according to the Federal Aviation Administration.) Capt. Jessica Martin, a spokeswoman for Nellis Air Force Base, which sits 85 miles south of Homey Airport and is responsible for the airspace and any ground facilities, said that “we already know about the designation, but it doesn’t have any effect on operations at the base.” Martin said she didn’t know the origin of the name “Homey Airport.” Featured inmovies, TV shows and video games, Area 51 is likely the most famous top-secret facility in the world and a favorite component of UFO and military conspiracy theories. The Department of Defense didn’t even acknowledge the base existed until 1994, when former base employees sued the government and claimed they’d been poisoned by hazardous materials used at the base for research into stealth technology.

View: Full Article | Source: Air Force Times

Those robo-dragonflies may not be the only creatures keeping an eye on you. For many years now intelligence agencies have been looking at drones disguised as birds. These days flapping-wing "ornithopters" are not easy to tell apart from birds -take a look at this video of a robo-peregrine and some seagulls and see how long it takes you to spot the impostor. But even back in the 1970"s you could build something that did a pretty good impression of a soaring bird seen from a distance. This was the CIA"s 1970 Project Aquiline, one of those top-secret program carried out at Area 51. That"s the only known model of it in the photo. The plane"s mission was to intercept signals from deepinside enemy territory, hence the need for the bird camouflage.

The project was headed by Lt Col John H. "Hank" Meierdierck, who tells the story in his online autobiography. The relationship with contractors McDonnell Douglas was the problem: The vehicle was a six foot long plane that had a small pusher prop and actually looked like an eagle or buzzard when it was in the air. It was designed to fly at very low levels along communications lines and intercept their messages. It also had a small television in the nose as an aid to navigation and to photograph targets of opportunity. There were several successful flights and some crashes [reason unknown] and some lousy landings. This small vehicle was launched from inclined rails and was recovered in a large net strung between two poles. Progresswas passable, but then came budget time. The contractor predicts the amount of money needed since I did not have the intimate knowledge of the development expenses. I had $11 million for the following year and I advised McDonnell of this fact and asked for the next years operating budget. They came back to me with a $110 million forecast. Ridiculous! I returned to HDQ and discussed it with the bosses and they suggested that I give them two weeks to adjust the amount and then to come to DC with the result and have Macdonald Douglas present their budget.

View: Full Article | Source: Wired

Something big is in the works at Nevada's legendary Area 51 military base. A massive new building is under construction at the top secret location. Aviation experts say there's a good chance that a new, highly classified aircraft might soon be zipping around the Nevada skies. What kind of aircraft? One possibility is a successor to the SR-71 spy plane, the SR-72. The SR-71 Blackbird is widely regarded as thegreatest airplane ever built.

It sliced through the sky at Mach 3 and still reigns, officially anyway, as the fastest plane in history. Groom Lake, also known as Area 51, was home for the Blackbird during its early days. The question is -- will Area 51 also be the location of choice for the development of a successor, and maybe more than one? A photo of a new building under construction at Area 51 has raised tantalizing possibilities for the civilian researchers who dabble in such topics. No one can say for certain what the buildingwill be used for, but aviation historian Peter Merlin says the one thing we can say is that it's one big hangar. "It probably measures 275 feet by 600 feet. It's no larger than hangars at other bases, but it certainly is the largest at Area 51," Peter Merlin said.

View: Full Article | Source: Las Vegas Now

Introduction: The "Silent Invasion" Scenario in a Nutshell : The 1980s and 1990s spawned once of the most satisfying mythologies of the 21st century. In essence, it goes like this: The U.S. government has known that UFOs are alien craft since the late 1940s [actually, not totally impossible]. Formal contact with the aliens was established in the 1950s. Shortly thereafter a deal was struck between the government and the extraterrestrials: the aliens would be allowed to abduct citizens for research and experiments in exchange for technological information. [Here the line of reasoning suffers a critical fracture: why would a starfaring (or dimension-hopping, depending on who you ask...) alien species need our government's permission to do anything? One would think it could do as it wished with impunity, much how we tag and research ants without bothering to "negotiate" with their representatives. While I don't necessarily preclude the idea of some form of official human-alien contact, the human-alien "deal" recounted in the Silent Invasion Myth strikes me as very questionable -- unless, of course, the ETs were simply staging the whole thing...

It was supposed to work like this: the aliens would furnish the government with a list of their human abductees, never going over "quota." But soon the horrible truth became apparent: the aliens were abducting more than their legal share of unwitting humans! And to top it off, they were performing grotesque biological experiments with cattle and leaving their handiwork in plain view! How insolent! Moreover, some of the abductees weren't coming back.One naturally wonders if the government knew exactly what kind of "research" the aliens were up to when it signed its Faustian pact. Apparently the aliens duped the humans into thinking they were nothing more than benign interstellar anthropologists, free of ulterior motives. The brass panic. Although armed with some ET-derived technology (possibly including crashed alien vehicles such as the one allegedly discovered at Roswell, New Mexico), they realize they're no match for the aliens (or, as they are now known, the "Grays"). Pandora's Box has been unleashed...