Have you ever seen a UFO?

[Sea Skimmer]

Yeah I'm not talking about anything Broomstick is talking about.

I'm talking about stuff like this, to grab the first images google finds, some right off the morons own sites.

http://www.thelivingmoon.com/46ats_memb ... rail01.jpg
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/14 ... il5xq.jpg/

For a long time, like 1990 or so, morons have been claiming that contrails like this are proof of a pulse detonation engine equipped aircraft flying around at mach 5, because look the puffs must be pulses! Too bad for these people any plausible PDE that can maintain supersonic let alone hypersonic speed would have thousands of pulses per second and would logically make nothing like this sort of contrail. However such claims did at least show up hand in hand with reports of Aurora as an SR-71 replacement, which at least had people with some level of reputableness backing it up.

The chemtrail stuff is just utterly without any basis at all and was started as a deliberate hoax in the mid 90s. The raving idiots who believe in chemtrails will point at any contrail and suggest its a government plot to poison the earth and engage in simultaneous weather and mind control.

[MrDakka]

The raving idiots who believe in chemtrails will point at any contrail and suggest its a government plot to poison the earth and engage in simultaneous weather and mind control.

Don't forget the HAARP array.

[Sea Skimmer]

I think the working theory at this point is that HAARP is an attempt to hyjack the chemtrails mind control by boiling the poisons in the air. Its not like the vast world conspiracy doesn't intentionally work against itself to keep people even more confused and meek.

[Simon_Jester]

The Aurora theories at least had the virtue of making sense- it was very plausible that the USAF would want another, better recon plane to replace the SR-71, and that the new aircraft would be both greatly superior in performance and very, very hush-hush.

Didn't the Aurora rumors start shortly after the B-2 was unveiled? That probably added even more credibility to "Air Force has top-secret plane with unprecedented capabilities" rumors, since exactly that had just happened like three years ago.

[Zaune]

The eyewitness account of one was in 1989 according to Wikipedia, and that was from a guy who was in the Royal Observer Corps. I'm inclined to think there might be something to this one, actually.

[Broomstick]

Yeah I'm not talking about anything Broomstick is talking about.

I'm talking about stuff like this, to grab the first images google finds, some right off the morons own sites.

My first guess on that is possible disruption of the contrails by wing/tail surface votices, but yeah, now I see what you mean.

[Sea Skimmer]

The Aurora theories at least had the virtue of making sense- it was very plausible that the USAF would want another, better recon plane to replace the SR-71, and that the new aircraft would be both greatly superior in performance and very, very hush-hush.

If you give the idea lip service, yeah it makes sense, in reality we know the USAF extensively studied replacements even in the 1960s and 70s, and with speeds up to mach 9 using rocket power and concluded none of them were worth it. The faster you go the less and less advantage having a man in the plane can possibly be, because your turning radius gets so high you start measuring it as fractions of countries, meaning you can't make multiple passes on the same target reasonably, and maximum flying endurance, as opposed to range, also steadily drops yet further reducing the value of the man. You've got no time to decide to change course over the mission plan. End result, we build satellites.

Didn't the Aurora rumors start shortly after the B-2 was unveiled? That probably added even more credibility to "Air Force has top-secret plane with unprecedented capabilities" rumors, since exactly that had just happened like three years ago.

The earliest Aurora reports are mid 1980s which would predate that. We do know the USAF was heavily working on some classified stealth UAVs in the period, but they were rather highly subsonic and never suggested as supersonic platforms.

[Simon_Jester]

What I mean, Skimmer, is that by the standards of conspiracy theories Aurora is pretty tame- it's not like anyone would have been especially surprised had the Air Force rolled out a new Mach 4 higher-faster-stealthier recon plane in 1995 or 1997.

But it's interesting to think about the reasons that this wasn't done, so thanks for posting those.

[Sea Skimmer]

A lot of the people behind pushing the Aurora stuff should know better and are not your standard conspiracy ilk. But then a lot of generally logical people still think SR-71 was 'flexible' too, even though it couldn't even use a standard refueling tanker. Like not just do we need different fuel in the plane, we need a custom aircraft as it must have two separate fuel systems on board. Slight operational problem with this.

[PainRack]

"twice".

Both was during my conscript days. I was waiting beside the runway and looking out towards a block of apartments when I saw 3 lights zoom past it and hold level above the flat. Around ten minutes or so later, the lights zoomed itself past the flat and disappeared.


I was able to reconcile this a few days later with a construction crane with lights on.


The second, nope. But it was just a ball of light holding stationary in the sky before fading away.