burchismo

Friday, August 06, 2010

IN THE BLACK

I got an email from an in-law who is notoriously susceptible to "conspiracy" thinking. Attached was a photo he'd taken of a sunset that seemed to contain an image of one of those infamous "doughnuts-on-a-rope" contrails. Was it "Aurora," he asked? I responded:

Nobody would like to believe in Aurora (and even more so, "Brilliant Buzzard" a/k/a "Blackstar") more than I would. I've read just about every word available on the subject. There was a time when I leaned slightly in favor of believing Aurora was real. Back then (five or six years ago?), one of the weaker lines of evidence to which I gave SOME credence was the donuts-on-a-rope contrails. BUT, there is a perfectly "normal" explanation for them, as well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crow_Instability

Meanwhile, just about every category of "evidence" for Aurora has little by little evaporated, to the point where there's probably only three or four items still in the "things that make you go hmmm" category. A whole lot of what seemed quite compelling ten years ago or so has fallen to "prosaic" explanations. For instance, it now seems pretty clear that the "trailhead" of the Aurora story -- the actual "Aurora" line item on the ... what was it ... 1982 or so? ... black budget was in fact a cover for B-2 development money. In the last few years, those budgets have been gone over with a fine tooth comb by people who REALLY know what they're looking at, and the money for BOTH B-2 development and something like Aurora and/or Blackstar just doesn't seem to be there. Many of the line items that appeared and disappeared mysteriously WERE shell-games that the black project accountants were doing to hide money -- no question. But a project the size of Aurora, much less Blackstar, just can't fit.

This isn't to say that there absolutely have been and continue to be black projects that have been and continue to be amazingly successful in terms of hiding the ball. The "Beast of Kandahar" is the most recent example of that. I read about this stuff VERY closely, and I "knew" about the Beast only a few months before the general public did. The ENTIRE project was developed -- AND FIELDED -- COMPLETELY in the black. That's pretty amazing in these days of Internet discussion boards full of people like me ... But the Beast was a project one or even two orders of magnitude smaller than something like Aurora or Blackstar would have to be.

For what it's worth, I'll close with two open ends. First, there ARE still a few indications of a large black project dating back to the 1980s that involved exotic propulsion and/or ultra-high speed and altitude technology. These haven't been explained away yet, so I still put a SMALL possibility on the chance we'll someday learn that something really high and/or fast was flying back then that we didn't know about. And, finally, there is solid evidence that there is a CURRENT substantial black aerospace project in a much earlier stage of development -- that big new hangar at Area 51 with the big pile of dirt to block the view from ground observation sites is for something.

GB

posted by Greg 7:58 AM