Back in his quarters, Gibson consulted the aircraft recognition manual that he considered the best in the world: the Flykendingsbog, published by the Danish civilian spotter group, the Luftmelderkorpset. But no plane in the book looked anything like what he had seen.
Gibson then made a drawing of the triangular craft and sent it to several aviation journalists, including the highly respected Bill Sweetman, who much later presented the sighting, in Jane’s, the aviation publication, in December 1992, as one of the linchpins of a pro-Aurora argument. The plane, Sweetman concluded, could fly at Mach 8, reaching anywhere on Earth within three hours. It had first taken to the skies, he believed, in 1985, at Groom Lake, and likely flew in and out of Machrihanish, the Scottish special forces base that had also hosted the SR-71.
In 1990, after a ceremonial flyover above the Lockheed Skunk Works, which the ailing genius Kelly Johnson viewed from his car, the SR-71 was retired, lending strength to the Aurora stories. The Air Force or CIA wouldn’t have retired the Blackbird, the reasoning went, if they didn’t have something else ready to replace it. Why had the Air Force not fought harder to keep the SR-71?
Complex politics swirled about the SR-71. While the Blackbird lacked powerful patrons within the Pentagon, its legend attracted many in Congress, which several times had restored the Blackbird to the budget after the Air Force had removed it. Aurora seemed the logical next project for the Skunk Works, a plane that flew higher and faster than any then known, kept under wraps as long as possible.
Aurora, the story soon came to include, was powered by methane, a technology involving cryogenics, which the Skunk Works had explored as early as 1957. At that time, it had nearly built the hydrogen-powered CL-400 or Suntan, but Skunk Works boss Kelly Johnson killed the project at the last minute when he realized the prohibitive cost of setting up an infrastructure for handling liquid hydrogen at bases around the world and refueling in flight.
Liquid methane might work better. It might power an Aurora that girdled the globe, a recon plane, but one that might also be able to drop a wicked heavy projectile on a hardened command post with an uppity dictator inside it. Johnson had advocated such a system years ago, using the SR-71. Dropped while flying at such speeds, a heavy hardened-steel projectile is like an A-bomb — each thousand miles of velocity is worth a pound of TNT.
In 1991 a series of “skyquakes,” as the local media liked to call them, long rumbling sounds, rolled over Los Angeles. To seismologist Jim Mori, these suggested the sonic booms of a craft returning from an altitude of, say, 100,000 feet, or even from space, descending over L.A. to land in Dreamland.
Sightings around the same time in Palmdale and the Antelope Valley proliferated. Many of the reports depicted a long triangular craft, with wings swept back about 70 degrees. Others suggested an XB-70-like craft, or a “mother ship” carrying a smaller “daughter” craft on its back.
A TV writer named Glenn Emery reported a sighting in May 1992 near Atlanta, hardly black-plane country. In August 1992 more reports surfaced of delta shapes. The sound described in several reports, including one near Mojave, California, was a “low-pitched rumble.” That month, a viewer near Helendale, California, location of Lockheed’s radar cross-section (RCS) test facility, described a craft crossing the road at an altitude of less than two hundred feet. It may have landed at Helendale, the reports said, because the Groom and Nellis areas were covered with severe thunderstorms.
There were reports of shrouded shapes being loaded onto cargo planes at the Skunk Works in Burbank and of airliners in near misses with strange craft. Airline pilots reported several near misses with triangular craft.[2]
In August 1992, John Pike and the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) published their Mystery Aircraft report, which took at best an agnostic view. The study pointed out the epistemological problems: There were too many sightings, too much information, too many possible planes — and yet not enough evidence. And despite the budget document listings, the FAS report pointed out, no money had ever actually been appropriated for the Aurora item before it was removed.
As usual, the signal-to-noise ratio was invoked. Based on the report, The New York Times came out with a story in January 1993 that denied Aurora’s existence. But Aurora flew on. At least on aviation and popular science magazine covers, it flew with all the fidelity skilled airbrush and gouache could convey. The paintings and models made the near mythical craft seem as real as any Piper Cub at the local landing strip — or, rather, more real. Amphibian, feline, raylike shapes, delicately modeled, seen against orange sunsets and blue depths of sky — if they did not exist they should have.
In 1993 the Testor company released a model John Andrews had designed. It adopted the theory that Aurora was a “mother ship” with a smaller vehicle on its back. The mother ship bore the name “SR-75 Penetrator,” and on its back rode the “XR-7 Thunderdart.” The Thunderdart was supposed to fly at Mach 7 and boasted the pulse detonation wave engines that emitted the already famed doughnut-on-a-rope contrail.
The model made the idea of Aurora inescapable. Such craft should exist whether it did or not. It was hard not to believe in a craft that someone had so carefully and thoroughly imagined, designed parts of, and written instructions for that that read like this: “Podded Engines. Assembly. 1. Cement centerbody vane, 71 G, to centerbody wall and vane, 72 G. Now cement the vane/wall unit into the center spike, 73 G. Now cement the centerbody flow ring, 74 G, to the centerbody.”
Jim Goodall, aviation journalist and black-plane expert, was convinced. Goodall believed that about $15 billion had been spent on the thing, that it was there to sniff out Third World nukes, a joint project of the United States and the former Soviet Union.
Even Bob Lazar claimed to have seen what he thought was Aurora, inside Dreamland.
Speculation over Aurora brought all sorts of proposed hypersonic craft designs out of the closet as stealthies rushed to find corroboration for a real plane. These were dream wings, paper airplanes. Aircraft companies and engineers are constantly dreaming up possible airplanes. Sometimes they are simply fantasies, aeronautical engineers’ wet dreams, and sometimes they are teasers, like concept vehicles shown at car shows, intended to whet the public’s appetite and that of the generals in the Pentagon.
By the fall of 1993, Bill Sweetman had written a book on Aurora, consisting mostly of citations of these earlier hypersonic aircraft proposals, going back to the early supersonic X planes. There were dozens of them, pictured with slick contractor illustrations of lifting bodies and wave-riders (triangular aircraft that surf on the shock wave produced when they push beyond the speed of sound), many of them intended to be launched from the back of another aircraft. Also included was Lockheed’s hypersonic glide vehicle, which was designed to reach Mach 18.
One version of the Aurora story held that work began in 1983 to create a successor to the SR-71. It was called Q, Aerotech News reported, from “quantum leap” in technology, but it had become too expensive and was canceled. To Jim Goodall, cost was no problem. The airplane would cost, say, a billion dollars a year. What airplane didn’t cost that much? he argued. The number was easy. And it was easy to hide that much.
Black-budget watcher Paul McGinnis, known as Trader, at first believed that Aurora was a program code-named Senior Citizen. But he tracked that one down and concluded it was a stealthy transport — a short-takeoff-and-landing craft for sneaking troops behind enemy lines. Later, the program he finally decided was the real Aurora was one he knew only by the budget-line code number 0603223F.
2
Reports of near midair collisions with mysterious aircraft were often picked up by monitors of airlines’ radio traffic. The following is typicaclass="underline" “Last night [March 3, 1996] in the early evening, Flight 573 of America West Airlines was making a routine flight from Dallas to Phoenix when it came very close to colliding with a very, very large triangle-shaped craft over New Mexico at approximately thirty thousand feet. The craft, according to my source, was
Another overheard tower transmission at Las Vegas’s McCarran Airport:
McCarran Tower/Departure: “United 278 please confirm your heading.”
United Flight 278: “Well, I wanted to confirm that. Seems like your heading’s gonna take us pretty close to Dreamland.”
McCarran Tower/Departure (Aggressive, bordering on hostile): “United 278, I have no information on a location called Dreamland!!”