The Top-Secret Warplanes of Area 51

[Buttercup McToots]

LINK:
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/aviationspace/95e16f096bd8d010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html

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For a closer look at the exotic aircraft the Air Force might be cooking up at Area 51, launch the photo gallery.
On a trip to las vegas in 2004, observing from my east-facing hotel room in the pyramidal Luxor Hotel at daybreak, I watched a fleet of six unmarked 737s make commuter flights to nowhere. These aircraft depart every weekday morning from a tidy, anonymous terminal on the western side of McCarran International Airport. A long line of cars pours into a 1,600-spot parking lot as the jets pull away from the terminal, taxi to the runways, and head out into the desert sky. At the end of the day, the shuttle flights return and the lot empties. The passengers go home and tell their families nothing about what happened at work that day.

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Cut to April 4 this year. San Diego is hit by a rumbling shock that isn’t an earthquake. It is ruled out by the media as a sonic boom after military operators claim it is not one of their aircraft. San Diego Union-Tribune reporter Alex Roth does some digging and comes up with six puzzlingly similar incidents around the country since 2003.

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All these events are linked. They are the visible signs of an invisible, parallel world within the universe of aerospace and defense: the classified, or “black,” world of secret military programs. Those unmarked 737s were ferrying employees to the flight-test center near Groom Lake, Nevada, known to the public as Area 51. The gray airplane is Polecat, a next-generation stealth unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)—Cappuccio’s video was his sly way of unveiling the program. Those earthquakes? Quite possibly sonic booms from a long-suspected hypersonic attack vehicle, a sleek aircraft that has consumed the imaginations of black-project enthusiasts and military analysts, including me, for two decades. Though seemingly dormant in recent years, the program appears to be on the move again, and with a renewed vigor that has me feeling, somewhat unsettlingly, a bit like the aerospace industry’s own Ahab.

[Sherman A1]

1. Always love these high tech super airplanes

We will have to see what if anything comes of these. Cool stuff, wonder just how many tax dollars are at work????

[alfredo]

2. The first image had a Sci Fi feel about it.

The Martians are coming!!!!

[bananas]

3. Mars Attacks!

[alfredo]

4. They also remind me of those control line aircraft I used

to see as a kid.