ROSEWELL: Another Point Of View.

ROSEWELL: Another Point Of View. German V-1 and V-2 launches from desert bases after WWII.
Two key people were on hand to recover the debris from the Roswell saucer crash site: the base intelligence officer and a member of the Counter Intelligence Corps. They directed the recovery of the debris, which consumed a good part of the following day, and loaded the pieces into two vehicles. The debris was taken to Roswell AAF for disposition.
At about the same time, 100 miles away, Grady Barnett found what he believed to be a crashed saucer. Nearby were four small dead bodies. They had frail limbs and large heads with big, slanted eyes. According to Barnett, their bodies were encased in tight, one-piece, grey suits with no visible fasteners.
Again, the military was quick to arrive. All witnesses were ushered away and ordered not to speak of the event. On June 8, 1947, six days after the first event (all the debris may have been from the same vehicle), a press release approved by Lt. W. Haut, announced that saucer debris had been recovered by the 509th Bomb Group.
The debris from both finds was loaded aboard a B-29 and flown to Carswell AFB in Fort Worth, Texas where it was announced that it was nothing more than the remains of a standard weather balloon.
We are supposed to believe it took military intelligence officers an entire week to determine that the debris was from a weather balloon, an object any alert E-1 could have identified in about 30 seconds. Since most officers do not scrub about pastures recovering debris from fallen objects, it must be assumed some enlisted men were on hand for the task. Dozens, if not all, could have identified the object as a weather balloon if it was, indeed, a weather balloon.
But if not a weather balloon, what was it?
Let's eliminate the two least likely possibilities: weather balloon and alien space craft, and concentrate on discovering what the 509th might have carried away from the pastures in 1947.
To find an answer, we must return to the period near the end of World War Two and Nazi Germany. German engineers and technicians had produced the only operational jet bomber, the Arado 234, during the war. Additionally, Willie Messerschmitt had designed, tested and produced both the Me 262 twin-jet fighter bomber and the Me 163 rocket plane. Each of the latter planes was hundreds of miles per hour faster than anything the Allies had at the time.
The Me 262 was powered by two very advanced Jumo axial flow jet engines. The Me 163 was powered by a rocket motor using hypergolic fuels.
But most bizarre was the disclosure that the BMW plant in Prague had built a prototype advanced jet powered saucer shaped aircraft with a diameter of 140 feet. Completed in 1944, this radical aircraft was flying by February, 1945 and was destroyed with its blueprints when it became apparent it would soon fall into the hands of the Allies. British and U.S. intelligence reports confirm the existence of this real "Flying saucer."
Cessation of hostilities between the waring countries and the knowledge that Germany might have won the war by pure technical skill had not the Allies overwhelmed it with an endless supply of expendable hardware and manpower, was the impetus that prompted U.S., British, French and Russian scientists, politicians and military leaders to develop weapons equal to or better than those that had nearly destroyed half the civilized world.

Before the war was even declared at an end, U.S. intelligence agencies were scouring the countryside trying to locate as many German scientists and engineers and their hardware as they could before the Russians or British found them.
By mid 1947, Arthur Rudolph, director of the Dora-Nordhausen rocket projects, and hundreds of former Nazis and members of the SS were safely settled in dusty desert towns in southern Texas where they began reassembling a few V-2 rockets from hundreds of crates transported from Germany.
Rudolph would go on to create the Saturn V booster that would put an American astronaut on the moon.
Conveniently forgotten were the 80 million souls for whose deaths Rudolph had to share responsibility.
The American public, by and large, was unaware that these former Nazis were here or that their weapons would soon be launched from American soil, because the German teams had been literally smuggled into the country illegally and in secrecy by the military!
White Sands Missile Test Center was just down the road a piece. Los Alamos was not far away. Roswell AAF was north, across the state border.
When pieces of strange, unidentifiable objects began raining from the desert skies, it is no wonder that uninformed officers at Roswell's 509th thought they had discovered something "not made on this planet."
But when knowledgeable people heard of the incident through the media reports and frantic telephone calls, they would have clamped a lid on the find. The exotic materials found at both sites may have been pieces of a German-now-American V-2 tactical ballistic rocket gone astray!
The pieces, after all, went to Carswell AAF in Texas, probably close to where they had been fired if the reports are correct. There would have been no need to send the debris to Wright Patterson Air Force Base for identification.
Compromise of the classified projects and disclosure that Former Nazi officers were responsible would have created a political disaster, hence, the weather balloon story was released to pacify the American public.
America and Russia, who had kidnapped and confiscated the lion's share of German engineers and hardware, lost no time developing advanced aircraft and missiles of their own. Many of the early marks were bolt-for-bolt replicas of German operational aircraft.
The North American F-86 Sabre, so famous during the Korean War, was developed directly from German technology, the prototype flying on October 1, 1947.
Two weeks later, on October 14, 1947, Captain Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in the Bell X-1. A series of stunning and incredible flights followed with the X-planes leading the way toward the edge of space.
By 1958 the first North American X-15 was rolled out and by June, 1960, an X-15, powered by a Viking Rocket XLR-99 engine producing 57,000 pounds of thrust, reached an altitude of 59.6 miles_the very threshold of space itself_at a speed of 4,000 miles per hour. In 1964, the X-15 Number 2, designated A-2, established an absolute speed record of 4,520 miles per hour.
The next series of tests were to be conducted with exoatmosphere orbital planes but the project was cancelled before the planes could be developed.
Exoatmosphere planes were not a new concept. At least not to the German engineers. During the Second World War, German engineer Eugene S_nger had proposed and drawn up the plans for a massive sub-orbital "Skip Bomber" that, if produced, would have entered the edge of space, re-entered on a flat trajectory, and skipped across oceans of air and water until it fell to earth over North America. It would have carried a nuclear warhead.
America's "Skip" planes should have led the way to reusable aircraft that could have taken off from the ground (rather than being carried aloft under the wing of a B-52), flown into space and returned to the same airfield to refuel and take more passengers into space.
Scott Crossfield, who helped develop the X-15 and was its chief pilot for a number of flights, recently stated that if the exoatmosphere tests had proceeded, America would have been in space with a reusable aircraft years ago.
But the Space Shuttle program was developed (by the same German scientists) and the orbital planes were all but forgotten along with the daring pilots who paved the way for a new generation of astronauts who would take man's first tentative steps on another planet of the solar system.
Rocket scientists Werner von Braun and Willy Ley both worked on America's space program at Huntsville's Redstone Arsenal. Their efforts put Americans on the moon.
It is interesting to note that the period during the development, testing and evaluation of the X-planes, from 1947 to 1959, was also the period when most UFO sightings were reported.
Unidentified Flying Object reports dropped dramatically from a high of 1,501 in 1952 to only 167 during the last six months of 1959. Of the 173 official reports filed in the first six months of 1960, only three were classified as "Unidentified."
During the entire Blue Book reporting period from 1947 to 1960, the number of unidentified sightings averaged only about 2%, or 130 out of a total of 6,523 reported sightings. A number of the unidentified sightings were classified as "Lights In The Sky."
Lights in the sky can include such phenomena as ball lightning, swamp gas, earthquake lights, meteors, plasma, stars, planets, aircraft lights, jet or rocket exhaust, sun-dogs and a host of other odd known or unknown effects.
"Nuts and Bolts" sightings include aircraft, rockets or other tangible man-made artifacts, or unidentified or unknown aerial cars.
"Sightings" are generally defined as observations of unknown craft at a distance greater than 500 feet where the craft does not touch the ground, does not affect the environment and does not alarm nearby animals.
"Encounters" fall into three categories:
The First Kind: UFO is seen within 500 feet but does not touch the ground or affect the environment or nearby animals.
The Second Kind: UFO is seen within 500 feet and touches the ground, affecting the environment by flattening or scorching vegetation and/or alarming nearby animals.
The Third Kind: Occupants are seen within 500 feet outside the craft. Virtually all are seen at night and usually only one or two witnesses are present. The occupants do not attempt to communicate, but retreat to their craft which quickly flies away.
Two additional classifications are recognized but recorded separately from "Encounter" type reports. They are: "Favored Intermediary" or "Contactee"; and "Abductions."
Of all the reports filed, "Lights In The Sky" seem to be the most perplexing and difficult to explain. Many lights, or glowing orbs, perform complex maneuvers and sometimes respond to other lights or telepathic commands, or to the movements of human observers.
They apparently defy the known laws of the universe, traversing the atmosphere with ease and flashing into hypedrive in the twinkling of an eye, or by making rapid right-angle turns, stopping suddenly from rapid flight and hovering silently for long periods before they sail away.
In 1974, Ground Saucer Watch, comprised of 500 engineers, physicists and astronomers, began using computer enhancement to determine if UFO photos were real or fakes. Scanned onto a computer screen, the images are reduced to 245,000 pixels and the computer is programmed to assign each pixel a brightness rating. Using color contouring, 3-D enhancement, and a number of other sophisticated tests, GSW engineers were able to prove conclusively that 90% of previously accepted UFO photographs were hoaxes.
Two of the most famous UFO photographs were taken by Paul Trent on May 11, 1950 at about 7:45 in the evening. Mrs. Trent was in the yard feeding her rabbits when she looked up and saw a large metal disc sailing silently across the sky. She called to her husband who got his camera from the car and snapped two shots of the disc before it accelerated and disappeared toward the west.
Fearing he might have photographed a secret U.S. aircraft, Mr. Trent told only a few friends about the incident. A reporter from the local newspaper heard of the sighting and eventually got the negatives. Within a week the photographs were printed on the cover of Life Magazine.
In 1969, after rigorous scrutiny, skeptical scientists working on the Condon Report accepted that the object in the photos could not be explained by any known natural or supernatural phenomena. They concluded, "...the photographs confirms precisely what the witnesses said they saw."
GSW examined the photos and endorsed the Condon findings in 1974 when its experts concluded that the object in the two photographs was a real "nuts and bolts" solid object, between 60 and 90 feet in diameter with a flat, evenly lighted underside and had been at least one-half mile away from the observers.
In 1947, Kenneth Arnold made his historic UFO sighting while flying his private plane near the Cascade Range in Washington State. Nearby, in the inaccessible canyons and mountains of the Yakima Indian reservation, over 200 anomalous lights have been reported in the past 20 years. Reports include stories of discs, fires, glowing canyons, sounds from underground, encounters and other odd phenomena.
Most reports are of bright lights moving low in the sky, swelling and pulsing with color. Some appear to be aware of humans, some cause automobile engines to quit, others affect nearby animals.
Glowing orbs of lights performing apparently intelligent maneuvers have been photographed and observed with various scientific instruments in England, the United States and Norway, enabling investigators to make educated guesses as to speed, size and light intensity. Their physical and chemical properties remain a mystery.
Photographs of the objects reveal nothing more than lights rather than objects with features of flying saucers. Taken as lights alone, these phenomena pose a genuine challenge to science. Nothing presently known fits the description of the lights. They last longer than any known transient luminous phenomena. They glide silently, often for long distances, proving that they are not associated with specific locations.
Some have been photographed against a background of mountains, proving they are not celestial bodies, mirages, or refraction effects. They are larger and brighter than any other known atmospheric light. Some have been reported since at least 1771, meaning cars, trains and aircraft lights must be ruled out as causes.
They exist in the physical world, but evidence shows they may respond to lasers, light, radio waves and telepathic messages!
Challenged to explain sightings of mysterious lights in the hills around Piedmont, Missouri, physics professor Harley Rutledge of Southeast Missouri State College, set up Project Identification in 1973 to gather data. 178 anomalous objects were recorded on 157 separate occasions.
40 scientists used a wide range of equipment, telescopes, sophisticated cameras, spectrum analyzer as well as a galvanometer to measure changes in the earth's gravitational field.
Simultaneous observations from widely separated locations allowed measurements of speed, course, and position of the objects. Sightings of aircraft, meteorites, headlights, refracted lights, etc., were eliminated from the investigation.
The most startling discovery was that, on at least 32 recorded occasions, the movement of the lights synchronized with actions of the observers. They appeared to respond to a light being switched on and off, to verbal or radio messages, and even to telepathic communication! These claims, made by a member of the lay public, would have been dismissed as the ravings of a lunatic; coming from a professor of physics, they merit serious consideration.
In 1944, while flying over Germany, USAAF pilot Bill Leet reported a luminous sphere suddenly appeared beside his B-17 "like a light switch being turned on." It paced the plane for almost 45 minutes, then vanished.
The gunners wanted to shoot at it but Leet ordered them not to, stating that if the light wanted to harm them, it could have done so any time.
This was just one of many sightings of the now-famous "Foo Fighters" reported by pilots flying over Europe in the winter of 1944-45. The discs and globes were about five feet in diameter, generally seen at night, and sometimes changed color from orange to red to white and back to orange. They were never seen on radar.
After the war, German and Japanese pilots admitted they had been perplexed by the same phenomena. They have never been satisfactorily explained.
Could it be that these glowing orbs, combining a physical existence with an ability to interact with the human psyche, hold the key to the UFO enigma?
Secret weapons have always been guarded by the military and certain U.S. intelligence agencies for obvious reasons. It is simply not in the military's interest to have thousands of public eyes prying into top secret projects, nor is it, indeed, in the public's interest to do so.
The most bizarre of all aircraft, the alien-looking A-117 Stealth Fighter, the "Shabah" (Spirit), of Desert Storm fame, was kept secret right up until the time it was deployed to Saudi Arabia and it had been flying around the country for years! Had the public known of its existence, had foreign countries known of its existence, an effective countermeasure for detecting and destroying it might have been developed before it could have been used. So we must accept that there are some projects better left secret.
In 1947, a few days prior to the Roswell incident, a V-2 rocket had been fired from White Sands Missile Test Center. At about the same time, the U.S. Army released one of its first polyethylene weather balloons, a material uncommon in the late 1940's and which may have explained reports of a material "incredibly tough" and unlike any seen on this planet.
Additionally, either of those vehicles might have carried monkeys aloft as part of the test, which could explain the four small dead creatures discovered at the second site.
But even if secret rockets and weather balloons go astray (and the early V-2s were famous for it) the military and intelligence agencies, encouraging interest in the UFO phenomena, can discredit observers as cranks and, thus, effectively maintain the integrity of secret weapons tests.
It is the UFO conspiracy conspiracy! Areas of high UFO activity in America have always been near test sites for secret weapons and aircraft.
Additionally, several aspects of UFO activity might be attributable to the CIA or some group within the CIA since waves of UFO sightings often occur after times of crises within the government. Several UFO sightings followed the Soviet's successful launching of Sputnik in November 1957 when America's own space efforts were failing dismally on the screens of every American television set!
A UFO conspiracy, apparently now directed by a group ensconced in the lower stories of the Pentagon, and backed up by the military, effectively masks secret weapons from prying eyes. Disinformation diverts the scientific community from serious study of UFO phenomena. Obvious hoaxes, staged a few years apart, is enough to keep the media and scientists off balance. Behind the smokescreen, new secret technology and radical aircraft designs can be developed, tested and evaluated without serious interference from people who have no need to know what's going on.
It doesn't matter if someone is trying to hide a secret weapon, planning a corporate take-over or concealing their involvement in an assassination, these two strategies apply: (1) If you want to keep your secrets, you always create a diversion to keep people looking in the wrong direction, and (2) If the evidence you find leads to only one conclusion, the conclusion will be wrong every time because the evidence has been planted.
"Nuts and Bolts" flying around the skies of every country on the planet is one thing; "Lights in the Sky" are something else. It seems entirely plausible that an experimental saucer-shaped aircraft might have overflown the Trent house in Oregon in 1950, a period of great activity in aircraft development in America. It is less plausible that lights responding to human telepathic communication in Piedmont, Missouri are creations of the U.S. military or manipulations of the CIA.
They have been seen for centuries on every continent and by nearly every race of people, many of whom never even heard of the CIA or ever read a UFO report. Unlocking the secrets of the lights may give us some of the answers to the continuing enigma of UFO's.

The UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico.

THE SUMMER OF '47
The UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico. Development of U-2, SR-71 spy planes and VCASS for RPVs.
During the summer of 1947, a few weeks after a private pilot reported seeing a flight of unusual aircraft skimming along the mountain tops in the Pacific Northwest, Mac Brazel, a sheep rancher living near Corona, New Mexico stomped into the sheriff's office to complain that something large had fallen from the sky and was cluttering up one of his meadows. After hearing a description of the object, the sheriff suggested Mac report the incident to the authorities at Roswell Army Air Field.
Roswell AAF was, in 1947, home to the 509th Bomb Group. The 509th flew B-29s that carried Atomic Bombs. In the same general area and comprising a triangle were Los Alamos, New Mexico where the first atomic bomb was tested, and White Sands Missile Test Center. Authorities at Roswell were curious enough to send a detail out to Mac's place to have a look at the object, fearing, perhaps, that one of the B-29s had lost a part in flight. (Nothing was ever reported missing in subsequent press releases).
After they arrived at the meadow, they went ballistic, cordoned off the area, gathered up every scrap of the object and carried it back to Roswell AAF. A few hours later, someone issued a press release stating emphatically that Roswell had in its possession an alien spacecraft_a flying saucer! The next press release downgraded the metallic-like flying saucer to a rubber and wood weather balloon.
This encounter has been dubbed the "Roswell Incident" and, even after 45 years, has refused to go away, despite the government's attempts to deny that anything unusual happened.
Later reports, real or imagined, indicate that the "weather balloon" was placed aboard a railway flat car and transported to Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio for examination.
Two questions arise: (1) If it was a weather balloon, why did someone feel it required examination by the Air Force at one of the most secret bases in the world? and (2) who had a weather balloon so large it had to be transported by rail car with an armed guard rather than in a small cardboard box in a modest sized airplane?
If it was a weather balloon it would have been launched from one of the bases mentioned and the Air Force had no business examining it. A call to Los Alamos or White Sands would have produced the owner and they should have claimed it, extracted the data and tossed the ruined balloon into the trash.
It is interesting to note that the person who issued the second press release claiming the object was a weather balloon had never seen the object and issued the claim only on direct orders from higher authority. He insists, to this day, that because of the furor created over the recovery of the object, he is convinced it was not a weather balloon or any kind of aircraft known on this planet.
In 1947 the press, the Air Force, and scientists spent a lot of time trying to convince the American public that no aircraft could enter our airspace without being detected by radar, especially around Roswell, Los Alamos and White Sands.
But what most people didn't know then and still don't know today, is that in 1947 America had an aircraft that was, for all practical purposes, invisible to radar! It had not been designed as a stealth aircraft because no one even understood the concept in 1947, but this airplane, the brainchild of Northrup Aviation, the YB-49 Flying Wing, reflected such a small radar image that ground operators literally could not detect it. Indeed, its profile was so slight while airborne that it could not be seen visually until it was over the airfield!
So the claim that an aircraft could not penetrate American airspace undetected in 1947 was a lie and the government knew it was a lie.
I believe if the Army had produced several large pieces of a crashed B-29 (they were not known for not crashing, after all), and had let a few hundred journalists take pictures and print them in every newspaper in America, the incident would have died right there.
But they didn't. They told us they had found a flying saucer which mysteriously turned into a weather balloon and word leaked out that it had been sent to the Foreign Technologies Center at Wright Pat for examination.
The Foreign Technologies Center at WPAFB claims they take foreign aircraft apart to see how they were manufactured, how they work and what danger, if any, they pose to America. I believe that. Still, since Russian pilots now fly their latest fighter planes and bombers at airshows on American soil and in every country sponsoring an international airshow, and since anyone with enough money_governments and private citizens alike_can purchase one of these "foreign" aircraft, and since we trade and sell aircraft like cattle to countries who have even claimed to be our enemies, what could be so secret about any foreign aircraft that the Foreign Technologies Center is still so secure one literally cannot get past the entry foyer without getting shot?
Just how foreign is their foreign technology? Is it across the border in another country, across the ocean on another continent, or is it across the cosmos on another planet? How does the Air Force define it?
45 years ago the technology for stealth aircraft did not exist and neither did the machines for analyzing material which could not be identified_materials which might have fallen from or might have been a part of an alien spacecraft. 45 years ago no one could identify exotic materials such as carbon fiber composites that are lighter than but stronger than steel, do not reflect radar images and can enter Earth's atmosphere from space without falling apart.
But someone devised such a machine and that raises another question: Why would anyone have need of a machine to analyze exotic, unheard of materials unless they were required to examine something they could not otherwise identify with machines already in production?
As early as 20 years ago no one could have identified carbon fiber composites. Now the Air Force scientists at Wright Pat claim they could, given time, identify anything and eventually discover what function it performed!
The question is: Why would they need to do that unless they had found something somewhere that prompted the development of the technology?
Did it take 25 years or more to unlock the secrets of the Roswell "weather balloon"? Were carbon fiber composites just on chance discovered to have the exact properties required to construct a lightweight, strong, invisible aircraft capable of flying into and out of Earth's atmosphere a few years after the Roswell saucer was delivered to WPAFB?
Let's jump to the near present. Kelly Johnson and a team of amazing co-workers developed the Lockheed U-2 spy plane to carry out recon missions over unfriendly countries during the cold war era. It was basically a high altitude powered glider, thought to fly so high that it was out of range of enemy missiles until CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers was brought down over Russia, not by a direct hit, but by the sonic explosion of the fired missile.
The U-2 was a large, slow, conventionally powered (jet engine), conventionally built (aluminum, titanium, rubber, plastic) aircraft that could be easily spotted and tracked on radar. It flew at high altitudes for great distances taking pictures inside foreign countries, but it did not represent a great leap forward as far as aircraft technology was concerned. The great leap forward would be left to the next airplane, the SR-71 "Blackbird."
Statistics of the SR-71 are still classified even though the plane has been decommissioned. It was built of exotic composites, parts of the skin fitted so loosely that the plane actually leaked fuel before takeoff. Once in the air and after the skin of the aircraft heated up from friction, the plane sealed itself. The pilot would find a waiting plane, refuel, and make a dash for its mission somewhere in the neighborhood of 2000 miles per hour ahead of its two great ram engines.
Although a lot of unfriendly people tried to shoot them down, they flew so fast that no known missiles could catch them. They served America well and were recently retired from service. Visit Boeing's Air Museum in Seattle and you will see one prominently displayed but you will be unable to find out just what it was really capable of doing.
Anyone who has been around airplanes for more than a few months knows that the government, and particularly CIA, does not retire their best aircraft unless and until a suitable replacement has been developed, tested, flown and certified airworthy.
Now let's jump to the immediate present and Lockheed's super secret "Skunk Works" where the U-2 and the SR-71 were developed for CIA. A considerable workforce is still at that facility, still working and still being funded to create new and awesome aircraft unheard of just a few years ago. At least one of those aircraft, Aurora, is now flying from Beale Air Force Base near Sacramento, California and landing at a secret base near Groom Lake, Nevada after dashing across oceans and continents at altitudes of 200,000 feet (40 miles) and speeds of Mach 6 (4000 miles an hour).
An unidentified aircraft was tracked by RAF radar operators in 1991 leaving a remote NATO/RAF base at Mackrihanish in western Scotland at a speed of Mach 3 when no aircraft capable of that performance was known to exist.
They have been heard, their contrails spotted and photographed, their sonic profiles recorded by CIT seismologists in Pasadena, California. Eyewitnesses in the western US and in Great Britain have filed reports of sightings. Others have reported hearing the low growling sounds of its engine(s).
The seismic profile of the sonic boom has been recorded by CIT personnel in response to people asking if there had been an earthquake. It is unlike anything ever recorded before. Photographs of the contrail clearly define the power source of Aurora to be a pulse detonation wave engine or pulse jet similar to that used on the German V-1 "Buzz Bomb" during the second world war, but on a much grander scale.
But where the V-1 was relatively slow (Hurricane and Spitfire pilots shot them down if they were lucky, and Meteor pilots had no trouble catching them at all), Aurora's engine produces such thrust that the plane could circle the planet at the equator, a distance of about 25,000 miles, in a bit over six hours.
The sonic booms are produced as the plane decelerates from hypersonic flight (Mach 5+) over north central California to land at Groom Lake, Nevada.
This is an aircraft so radical in design and construction, so powerful, that it can literally take off from the ground, enter space and return to earth without rocket boosters. Just like a flying saucer might do, or exactly as we imagine a flying saucer should do.
I questioned someone who should know if the Aurora was of a classic saucer design and the answer was a quick, "No." A bit too quick, perhaps. But the "classic" saucer shape is not really suitable for hypersonic flight in the heavy air of Earth's atmosphere where friction would cause it to heat to the melting point. If it was constructed of conventional materials.
But the SR-71 would be so hot that no one could touch it for hours after it landed and it stayed together just fine. It was actually a better plane when it was red hot because it wasn't leaking fuel all over the runway!
The argument against the ovate ellipsoid (saucer shape aircraft), and a fairly good one at that, is that the shape creates too much drag for the amount of thrust required to allow it to get off the ground and remain airborne efficiently. The argument has some merit and is one of the problems that arose with the YB-49 Flying Wing. The wing was so thick that the plane could not accelerate to Mach 1, the speed of sound, with the engines that were being produced at that time. Even with eight jet engines laboring behind it, the Span Loader was a subsonic aircraft.
But aircraft technology has changed rather spectacularly since 1947. Aircraft, especially combat aircraft designed for sustained high speed flight, have gotten flatter, longer and wider, and their wings have gotten shorter and thinner, often to the point of being hazardous to ground support personnel. Bulky, protruding tail assemblies have disappeared completely or have been contoured into the fuselage/wing junctions.
In other words, modern aircraft are beginning to look more and more like modified ovate ellipsoids!
A great paradox of aircraft design is that the more stable the aircraft is, the harder it is to fly. A perfectly stable aircraft probably wouldn't get off the ground once it got up a full head of steam since the inertial forces would tend to keep it heading right down the runway until it screamed off into the trees. That's why fast, high performance fighter planes are built to be extremely unstable, flyable only by banks of computers that constantly monitor and vector it in the proper direction when the pilot makes slight pressures on the control yoke.
The pilot doesn't fly the airplane; he sends electronic signals to the computer and the computer flies the airplane. But the computer gives something back. It presents displays on video screens of a quasi-virtual world in two dimensions that allow the pilot to understand where he is, what his plane is doing, what other planes are doing, how many other airplanes are nearby, what ground features are in the way, where his target is, how many weapons are on board and what type they are, and gives precise times and angles to deploy them for optimum kill.
Jump back to Building 248, Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio and the immediate present. Here technicians are creating the ultimate flying computer. It is not an aircraft; it is a helmet. The world outside the aircraft is presented in two dimensions and in color on the visor inside the helmet via an umbilical cord attached to a computer tucked away somewhere in the airframe. It is called VCASS or Visually Coupled Airborne Systems Simulator. The pilot doesn't even have to see what is outside his airplane from the moment he sits down and turns the key until he opens the lid and climbs out!
Future developments, if not already produced, will incorporate sound to alert the pilot of approaching aircraft so precisely that the pilot need only shift his eyes to that side to "see" the aircraft. Speed, altitude, flight attitude, fuel, heading, ground features, man-made features, weapons stores and more are displayed inside the helmet by tiny video cameras receiving information from sensors located all over the aircraft.
The helmet will tell the pilot what kind of aircraft is approaching, its speed, heading, if it is friendly or not, and select the appropriate weapons on standby in case the pilot elects to engage in aerial combat.
The computer, like a real-life R2D2 co-pilot will fly the aircraft through tight maneuvers if the pilot blacks out and will perform the necessary evasive tactics until the pilot regains consciousness and resumes control.
So what does all this modern aircraft technology have to do with what happened, or might have happened, near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947? Just this:
Doesn't it seems strange that all this amazing technology popped up at the same time? We have an airplane flying around the world in six hours that can take off from the ground, enter space and come back to land at the same airfield. We have exotic new materials to use in the construction of sub space and hyper space aircraft. We have a virtual world display in two dimensions, with sound, going on inside a pilot's helmet. We have aircraft computers so intelligent that they can fly airplanes without assistance from the pilot from lift-off on earth to touchdown on the moon or Mars or beyond. We have laser guided weapons so precise that they can hit single buildings. We have communications devises floating around in space that can guide ships and aircraft to destinations anywhere on this planet, precisely, in total darkness.
Think about this: Why is a super secret aircraft flying around taking pictures of the entire planet? Because someday, in the very near future, the computer in an even newer aircraft is going to have to know where to take the airplane when it returns from an interplanetary journey, and the computer will have to know long before it reaches the Earth's atmosphere.
Computers look at pictures and make two dimensional maps to store in memory. Here is O'Hare, here is JFK, here is Atlanta, here is Dallas, here is Roswell, New Mexico. We'll land there.
Or here is Moscow, here is Baghdad. They may be future targets.
Friendly or enemy, the two dimensional images will one day be projected inside a pilot's helmet or on the surface of the canopy, or as three-dimensional displays, in color, in mid-air as holograms (and where did that technology come from just when we needed it?)
The pilot will open and close "windows", just as graphic artists now do with their Macs and PCs, to select desired features or landing sites, enlarging them for detail or reducing them for an overview by simply raising a finger and pushing a button he believes he sees in the helmet. To anyone outside, it will appear as if he is poking the air.
Impossible? Not at all. You can do it with your home computer if you have the right program. Touch the screen with a stylus and the image changes. Draw pictures with your finger. Stretch it, move it, color it. If the computer is programmed to perform a function when you move your finger, the computer will perform the same or different function if it is programmed to "believe" you have touched a button in mid air that really isn't there, that only exists in the computer's memory!
It is being done right now in Building 248 at WPAFB, in Dayton, Ohio, in the USA, and probably in other labs in other countries as well. We are an ace from jumping off this rock and going where no man has gone before.
Before you discount this, consider one last item: Some years ago scientists launched a tiny hunk of iron called Voyager from this planet. Inscribed on its golden skin was the precise address of planet Earth. Inside were the sounds and scenes of earthlings, from songs to poems to whispers and sighs, the very breath and voice of humans and animals right down to the love songs of migrating whales. Carefully patterned directions and arithmetic equations were provided to lead someone back to the launching site. It is now in deep space emitting signals to announce its passing to anyone or anything intelligent enough to hear and understand. Earth scientists expect it to be found and returned!
It does not really matter if flying saucers exist or not. It does not matter much if the Air Force is hiding an alien spacecraft and its pilots or if they are not (frankly, I would opt for the Naval Research Lab in Washington, DC as the final resting place of the Roswell saucer). What matters is that we have obtained the technology, whether as a gift in return for allowing someone to live here or as pure scientific discovery, to create a craft capable of doing most of the things a flying saucer should do.