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Are UFOs In Actuality the Military's Ultimate Sky Spies?
This article originally appeared in Popular Communications
Magazine August 2004. (C) 2004 Steve Douglass. Reproduction here with
friendly permission by the author.
Ifthe winds were kind and the technical problems were ironed-out, by the
time you read this you may have already heard about the strange "flying
V-shaped" UFO that has been seen by citizens over far west Texas and
southeastern New Mexico.
Although the event hasn't happened as of this writing, it is likely
this huge flying object will be seen at sunset and is flying so high it
probably glows bright for maybe more than an hour after dusk and will
undoubtedly prompt uninformed citizens to call local authorities and
report a unidentified flying object in the area.
In reality the UFO is a prototype of a new lighter-than-air sky spy
and might give utility monitors in the area a rare opportunity to
intercept some unique communications.
Scheduled for late June and lasting throughout the summer and fall a
V-shaped airship bigger than a baseball diamond is due to rise from the
West Texas desert to an altitude of 100,000 feet (30.5 kilometers),
navigate by remote control, linger above the clouds and drift back to
earth.
This joint JP Aerospace/U.S. Air Force project to build a new kind
of reconnaissance and battlefield communications platform that some day
might lead to even bigger lighter-than-air, gas filled floating
platforms that gossamer spaceships could use as high-altitude way
stations.
"The full-size station in our grand vision is 2 miles across," says
John Powell, the company's founder. "But that's down the road a bit. We
take baby steps." You can learn more about this project by pointing
your browser to: https://www.jpaerospace.com/
Known as the "Ascender" the unique shaped aerostat is slated to be
(as of press-time) launched from the Pecos County/West Texas Spaceport
at Fort Stockton, TX, but the liftoff is dependent on the weather and
has been delayed several times. According to Powell, "We actually had
the first flight window in February, but we sat there and stared at
30-knot West Texas winds for two weeks, so we're going back in June,"
If tests are successful, the Ascender could lead to a much larger military airship being developed as a separate project.
In 2001, the Missile Defense Agency awarded Lockheed Martin a $40
million contract to work on the High Altitude Airship, a 500-foot-long
(152-meter-long) blimp, 25 times larger than the Goodyear blimp and
much more capable than the Ascender and could loiter at altitudes above
65,000 feet for as long as a year.
One reason airships are becoming more and more attractive to the
Pentagon is the cost. The roughly $500,000 cost of building the
175-foot-long (53-meter-long) Ascender airship is far less than the
price tag for any piloted airplane or robotic drone.
But the Pentagon's primary motivation is strategic rather than
financial. The altitudes best suited for the helium-filled Ascender are
virgin territory for the military. It could take a payload higher than
any spy plane, above the weather and well beyond the reach of virtually
any attack from the ground or the air.
Although the Ascender is considered to be a prototype of a future
system there are some who speculate the NRO has been flying top-secret
airships for years which have been responsible for may "slow moving"
UFO sightings.
A few years ago an American Air West 727 was flying in an air
corridor just north of the restricted military airspace known as Area
51, when lightning from a nearby thunderstorm illuminated a huge
motionless cigar-shaped object hovering silently over the Nevada
Desert. The pilot startled by the sudden appearance of the eerie craft
radioed air traffic controllers to report the encounter as a UFO
sighting.
Controllers on the ground responded that it was probably a
classified aircraft operating out of the restricted Nellis Range. The
pilot described the craft as looking something like an elongated big
black blimp, invisible except when illuminated by lightning flashes.
What the commercial pilot saw was most likely one of the best kept
black world secrets, the stealth airship, a flying Big Brother,
prowling the upper reaches of the atmosphere capable of collecting
enormous amounts of intelligence for its spy masters on the ground.
These rumored "stealth-ships" are capable of eavesdropping on
military, government and civilian radio communications, photographing
the world below in amazing detail, and even listen with sensitive
electronic ears for the telltale sounds of war.
Possibly equipped with state of the art imaging devices, ground
scanning radars and sonic detection equipment, unmanned sky spies could
go completely unnoticed until something goes wrong.
They are only spotted when, as fate would have it, a kink in the jet
stream forces these goliaths down into civil airspace where they can
become a hazard to commercial aircraft traffic and visible to us
groundlings below. On many occasions unidentified "airships" have been
spotted by airline pilots and civilians who report them as UFOs.
Could it be that the famous Belgian, Mexico City and Hudson Valley
UFO sightings of a huge, slow moving aircraft, accompanied by large
formations of military helicopters, are in reality stealth-ships
accidentally brought down to low altitude by freakish winds?
Although eye-witness reports by qualified observers point to the
possible existence of stealth air ships, new documentation almost goes
as far as proving it.
Lockheed-Martin (the same company that designed the SR-71 Blackbird
and F-117 stealth fighter) recently secured patents on advanced airship
designs with the U.S. Patent Office.
The concept for a high altitude reconnaissance airship is not new
and has its roots in the U.S. Navy's HI-SPOT program of the late 1970s.
HI-SPOT (High Surveillance Platform for Over-the Horizon Targeting)
addressed the Navy's stated needs for a lighter-than air reconnaissance
platform.
Visualized missions for the airship included air and sea
surveillance, communications interception as well as a communications
relaying platform.
An airship was also seen as the ideal heavy-lift platform for a Navy Bi-Static (OTH-B) radar receiver.
By its very nature, a low frequency OTH-B reception, system requires
a very long antenna to work. A large airship would be ideal for lifting
up to high altitude such a massive antenna. The Navy foresaw HI-SPOT's
OTH-B radar capabilities as very useful for detecting
submarine-launched cruise missiles.
An OTH-B radar designed to track low-altitude aircraft and stealthy
cruise missiles would also have bonus applications in an anti-drug role
making it easier to intercept drug running aircraft flying low over the
open ocean.
In 1981,the NADC (Naval Air Development Center) selected the
Lockheed Missiles and Space Company to develop HI-SPOT. According to
information Lockheed released to the press in that same year, the
Lockheed HI-SPOT design would be that of an unmanned blimp-like airship
500 feet long.
Shortly after the press release the HI-SPOT program was classified
as top secret with no announcements ever coming from the Pentagon that
the system was cancelled or fielded, however multiple sightings of
slow-moving rigid airships reported by many observers in Nevada and
California began surfacing in the mid to late 1980s.
In 1990, a major sighting of a slow-moving black airship occurred in
California's Antelope Valley not very far from one of Lockheed's secret
radar cross section testing ranges. The airship was described as being
500 to 600 feet long, blotting out the night sky while moving slower
than four miles per-hour. Artist depictions of a huge pumpkin seed
shaped airship were published in Aviation Week Magazine (AWST 10-1-90)
and other aviation technology publications.
Such a huge airship would need to be based in huge hangars. Just
such a large hangar has been photographed at the secret Area 51 base in
Nevada.
Recently this author also spotted very large hangars capable of
housing airships on the Fort Bliss Range in southern New Mexico. These
hangars may account for the 1995 sighting of a large black airship by
an airline crew flying near Las Cruces, New Mexico. Las Cruces sits on
the west side of the Ft. Bliss Range.
A high altitude floating reconnaissance platform has many technical
advantages over conventional satellite and aircraft platforms. An
unmanned airship can stay over an area of military interest for days or
even months at a time.
A stealthy airship could loiter undetected while gathering all types
of reconnaissance data. Long term, real-time photographic data could be
relayed direct or via satellite to a command center providing an ever
changing and always accurate tactical picture of the battlefield.
Due to a natural atmospheric phenomenon known as sonic ducting, the
sounds of battle and in particular the loud booms caused by missile
launches and nuclear explosions can be detected by sensitive
microphones lifted aloft by an airship up into the proper sound ducting
atmospheric layer.
Conventional jets are too loud and their engine noise would overload
any audio system, but an airship is virtually silent and becomes the
ideal listening platform. These airships could also be fitted with
radiation sampling systems capable of detecting the telltale signs of
nuclear testing or a Chernobyl-type nuclear accident.
Airborne electronic eavesdropping gear could intercept civilian,
military, commercial and government radio communications which can only
be done for short periods by ELINT platforms such as the U.S. Air
Force's RC-135 Cobra Ball aircraft.
Generally only communications that take place above 30 MHz have a
chance of radiating into space without being reflected back down by the
electrically charged ionosphere. An ELINT airship has an advantage over
reconnaissance satellite systems in that it can intercept low powered,
low frequency radio communications that satellites are blocked by the
ionosphere from receiving.
Many important military communications take place on the VLF and ELF
frequency bands including those concerning the command and control of
deep diving nuclear submarines.
Any unmanned long-duration reconnaissance airship would have to be
self-sufficient. Electricity for the reconnaissance, maneuvering
systems and communications systems could be continually provided by
solar cells (charging batteries by day) mounted outside the airship's
gas filled envelope.
Advanced radar absorbing composites and special shaping could make a
reconnaissance airship very hard to spot on radar and at the altitude
they hover (above 100,000 feet) these stealthships (camouflaged to
match the sky) would be very hard to detected visually.
Recon-Airships could also be protected from detection by hiding in
magnetically charged layers of the ionosphere that naturally deflect
probing radar beams.
These ships are not designed to float aimlessly at the high
altitude. While most of the deployment into a target area could be
accomplished by taking advantage of high-altitude winds an airship
could stay on station by employing efficient and silent electronic
motors spinning propellers at very-low speed. Operated autonomously
from the ground, stealthships may be the ultimate spy platform.
It may take days, weeks or months to position an airship but once in
place an airship could loiter for an extended time while collecting
very valuable strategic and tactical information.
If the winds are unkind, dozens of airships could be placed into a
high atmospheric fast lane, cruising on the trade-winds in an endless
chain, relaying a constant stream of gleaned information back to an
intelligence agency's command center.
As for monitoring Ascender, keep a close ear to civilian and
military aviation channels. No doubt monitors in a few hundred miles of
the launch area will be able to hear air traffic control advisories as
well as pilot-to-pilot chatter concerning the aerostat.
Since a major part of the experiment is to see if Ascender can serve
as a military communications relay station, it might do good to give a
listen to narrow and wide-band military SATCOM frequencies in the 240
MHz to 370 MHz range. If Ascender works as advertised it might be
possible for you to hear military ground stations and units from well
beyond your listening horizon. Who knows, the military might also
experiment with relaying HF communications. Whatever you intercept,
make sure you pass on your logs to this author!
So why try and reinvent the wheel? Why would the Air Force fund a study for a recon system that may already be in use?
For one thing, they may not know about the secret NRO projects. They
may be out of the loop when it comes to matters of intelligence (no pun
intended) or the white-world Ascender project could be a cover for the
black-world counterpart project. Let's theorize that maybe the black
airship project is entering a new phase where daylight operations may
become the norm. Couldn't any new sightings be explained away as
Ascender?
In any event it will be interesting to see what UTE and MILCOM monitors intercept as the project matures.
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