The SR-91 “Aurora”: The Plane that Doesn’t Exist…

In the quietest, darkest vaults of Aerospace Legends lies a whisper, a mere fleeting shadow of an air

plane

that, if it ever

exist

ed, could have been among the most incredible air

plane

s ever created, supposedly called the SR91 and to which those gave the name. informal name of Aurora. Those who believe that this mysterious creation

exist

s could easily have been a real life plane or simply a myth those who would have commissioned it by the US government have not said anything those who would have built it Locki Martin claim that it never existed at all and who claim it existed or is still considered the most incredible secret black project in American history, so today at Megaprojects we are going to look through the fog and do our best to see the

aurora

for what it really was. , maybe a legend, maybe a hoax or maybe a masterpiece crossing our skies without leaving a trace before continuing.

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Rumor Mills in the world One such rumor began to circulate in 1985 when, while analyzing the annual budget of the United States for that year, journalist Ralph V bey of the Los Angeles Times noticed something quite strange, according to an unclassified budget report for the Pentagon that the defense department intended to spend a large amount of money on something called Aurora. What Aurora was. The report did not specify, but from the budget projections it was clear that two things were true. Aurora was a not insignificant program and was in its early stages with the expectation that it would become much larger: the Department of Defense had allocated $80 million for the project in 1986 and in 1987 that figure was scheduled to grow exponentially. up to an investment of 2.3 billion dollars in nominal value, both due to the figures involved and the general race towards stealth technology.

In the US government around this same time, LED vedan and the general public first believed a few key things: This was probably going to be a stealth program of some kind, perhaps working with Northrup or locked in to develop an aircraft stealth combat. Second, the program was moving. Really quick, $80 million was a pretty small amount of money for R&D, while $2.3 billion is a lot even for the Pentagon. Those figures spoke of a high priority program and an ambitious schedule as a reference. The Pentagon alone was spending about a billion dollars each year. about what would eventually become the B2 Spirit bomber and about who exactly was involved in this Aurora business, it was most likely blocked, the company was recruiting heavily at the time and had been seen sending a plane full of workers locked down to one Air Force plant at a time. tomorrow traveling to an unknown facility according to Vard Obedian, the windows of that plane were sealed meaning that not even the project staff knew where they were going, of course we know today that that could have been for any number of programs blocked in progress. at the time, but that was not information that the news sources of the day ultimately had, the LA Times and the other news sources knew that it would be highly unusual for the name of such a program to be included in a report after its existence. of an

aurora

or Aurora program, something was published, the Department of Defense refused to answer questions about it, according to the Department of Defense, the matter was officially classified at this point in Aurora's history.

We have to emphasize that this has stuck to the official line of the US government. Since then, there has never been an Aurora, an aircraft of this type has never been built and there has never been an aircraft designed for the purposes we are about to discuss, specifically a follow-up to the SR71 Blackbird, but of course, if we put our Skeptics on it then, that's exactly what the government would say, wouldn't it? Regardless of the Department of Defense's official stance on the matter, Aurora had emerged in a realm of speculation and we'll speculate that we would once defense analysts and neens of the world latched onto the idea that a plane might exist.

Aurora, the next question obviously turned out well, what is it? A clue as to what it was not, comes from the name of the United States fighter plane, before and after the Aurora was advertised, not necessarily predatory names were normally used. animals but animals that can be very aggressive when they need to be see the F14 Tomcats the F-15 Eagle the F-16 Fighting Falcon or if you prefer Viper The fa18 Hornet the F22 Raptor also ignore the F35 lightning bolt that is a tribute to the P38 Lightning During World War I, another important clue was that reference was made to the Aurora budget right after a reference to the TR1, a batch of U2 aircraft that were manufactured for tactical reconnaissance missions.

Combine those two pieces of information and it was conceivable to discover that the aura It was not a fighter but perhaps a reconnaissance plane. The next question to address was why it would be so expensive and those who looked at the potential project had some thoughts in that department as well. Chief among them was that the plane was a successor. to the SR71 filling a position that was expected to be vacant within a few years, but obviously this new aircraft with a couple of decades left to run would be better in some ways than the SL 71.

Those improvements were expected to come in three main areas. speed, altitude and stealth in terms of speed, the United States was believed to have the potential to create a hypersonic aircraft, one that could fly at five times the speed of sound or more, would use ramjets or scramjets, air-breathing engines that allow Incredibly fast trips. that the United States was believed to be about to develop or already had in its arsenal. In retrospect, we know that NASA's Air Force and private companies were designing and learning about Mac 5 aircraft during the years immediately preceding 1985, when again Aura itself first appeared.

Not only that, but work was being done on the type of structures that would allow such an aircraft to survive the intense seed generated by hypersonic travel, of course, with the ability to travel at incredible speed. There would come a stealth technology that looked more and more to be the cornerstone of almost everything the Department of Defense worked on and, of course, it would also have the potential to travel to high altitudes, as well as by the shape of the aircraft, both Speculation such as witness reports which we will discuss at a later date suggests that the Aurora aircraft would have been wedge-shaped with small Delta wings hugged tightly to the main fuselage of the aircraft, allowing the aircraft to fly with fewer heating problems.

The plane was believed to be manned and unarmed, although for a spy plane the logic followed that it would probably have carried cameras, sensors and other intelligence equipment on board, would have been crewed by two people equipped with a data link in real time for reconnaissance and could reach most places in the world quickly and easily. with minimal fuss at a speed between Mac 5 and Mac 6 flying dozens of kilometers above the ground, it would have been well outside the range of any current missile technology. Feasibility studies on a hypersonic commercial aircraft suggested that a nailed-down scale aircraft could have a range of up to 10,000 Mi with a one-ton sensor suite, according to aerospace analyst Wolf Gand de Mish, the program of this size may have produced about 30 production line planes in total, while safety expert Lawrence Harris suggests a likely first flight in or around 1989. and entry into service as early as 1995.

Harris' analysis extrapolated a total price tag of $4.4 billion to $8 billion for development and up to another $24 billion to actually produce the fleet, potentially raising prices as high as $1,000. millions of dollars per plane. it was probably given a different name given that the name Aurora, if it did in fact correspond to the secret program, would probably have been considered compromised in 1985 when it was made public. The Aurora program never appeared in later DoD materials, at least under that name, and while that in itself should not be a huge surprise, it also meant that any post-1987 budget allocations were completely hidden from the public.

The program could have grown and grown for years. It could have remained stable. It could have disappeared. Just no. However, little did I know, the Department of Defense wasn't going to say a word about it and for a moment it looked like that might be the end of this strange little anomaly, then the sightings started, one of the first sightings of a plane which has since been linked. The legend of Aurora and perhaps the most credible to this day came in 1989, when Chris Gibson, working on the key Galveston oil platform in the North Sea, east of Britain, saw something unusual now if you are the Department of Defense and you were going to fly a top secret plane around Chris Gibson wasn't the guy you wanted to find out, he had spent 12 years with the Royal Observer Corp, a British civil defense organization whose job was exclusively to detect, identify and track planes, and was very very good at knowing what plane he was looking at, according to Gibson, he observed an unknown plane in the sky with the shape of an isosceles triangle that has two long sides of equal length and a third short side, something like a equilateral triangle if stretched by pulling on one of its points the unidentified aircraft appeared to be refueling from a KC 135 Strat tanker aircraft manufactured by Boeing with a pair of F111 Arvar fighter-bombers operating as escort for several minutes the group of aircraft remained in one part from The Sky Gibson Could See Before It Was Out of Sight Gibson outlined the incident, although he did not make it public until 1992, when he submitted the account weekly to Jane's defense.

By then, sightings of a strange aircraft identified over the British Isles had greatly increased. Most commonly, the majority of reported incidents took place in Scotland and England, with rumors in the press suggesting that what they were seeing was operating from RAF MRA Hanes on the Scottish Peninsula. Locals reported not only seeing an aircraft that matched the AAR's visual description, but also produced a loud sonic sound. booms and othersnoises, the British government seemed to investigate the report always as if they too were kept in the dark about what was happening, as British defense secretary Tom King said in 1992, there is no knowledge in the mod of such a program black. of this nature, although it would not surprise the relevant desk officers of the air staff and defense intelligence staff if it existed and Chris Gibson was also not the only person who believed a group of Royal Air officers had seen the Aurora in the sky Force, Captain Tom Eels.

He reported that in the fall of 1993 a strange plane had passed over his house near Miden Hall U.S. Air Force Base in Suffk. According to Eels, there was a very strange sound from a plane passing overhead, the engine noise was a pulsing sound very different from anything I had seen. He had heard before, Eels didn't look at the plane much, but saw lights disappearing in the direction of Minden Hall Base when he asked a senior RF officer about the plane, the next day he received very strong instructions to stop asking about the plane. thing and while this supposed secret plane would have been in Britain, there are at least some indicators that something could have gone wrong a few weeks before E's sighting, an unknown American plane had been forced to land at the base, but quickly was hidden from view. and taken out of the airbase in a C5 Galaxy aircraft a year later, a mysterious accident at Boscom brought down the RAF base in known tests.

The Cipher military aircraft saw a massive response by US military aircraft and British Special Air Service personnel and the base was closed shortly afterwards, reports have since emerged that the crash was due to a malfunction of a towed missile decoy. . but even if we accept that premise, it certainly fueled some speculation at the time, several news sources, including the independent, reported that a top-secret American hypersonic spy plane had crashed according to a monthly Air Force report. The independent referenced unexplained sonic booms over the Netherlands in 1992 and intercepted radio transmissions from a plane descending from altitudes of 65,000 feet which at the time were not thought to be reached by any aircraft other than the U2 plane. or the space shuttle, then there are the sightings that emerged from the United States beginning with A series of unusual sonic booms in Southern California with a profile that suggested a small vehicle with no known coincidence.

Later analysis indicated that it was traveling at a speed between Mac 4 and Mac 5.2 at an altitude of around 90,000 feet in 1990. Weak aviation. and space technology published claims that there was a high-altitude aircraft crossing the night sky at extremely high speeds over the continental United States, sometimes seen as a single bright, pulsing light. In 1992, an observer in Texas detected unique contrails known as Donuts on a rope. which he associated with a deep, pulsing roaring sound that caused his house to vibrate. Not only that, but observer Steven Douglas claims that he had intercepted radio transmissions in which two aircraft could be heard using the call signs darkar November and darkar Mike, call signs that do not make sense given that aircraft known to use the Darkar nickname would not have produced those specific aerial phenomena at a time separate from 1992.

Observers around the Air Force Base, the former home of the SR71, they reported a triangular plane that appeared to resemble the Aurora at Area 51. One enthusiast named Chu Clark even claims to have filmed the Aurora taking off from Groom Lake, although he claims to have kept the tape of the incident under lock and key given the variety of witness statements and testimonies of evidence. Analysts who followed the Aurora legend for years believed that the aircraft would have been undergoing testing in the southwestern United States and possibly also in Scotland, but it may well have taken on an operational role that would explain the cases in which it supposedly appeared. around the world in mid-1992, analyst Bill Sweetman was confident enough to suggest that whatever The program was responsible for a wave of sonic booms believed to have been attributed to Aurora was not only working with a prototype, but who went on missions around the world doing who knows what and when he operated closely in the allied countries, the people at the head.

Many of those national governments didn't seem to know what was going on, but all this speculation was significantly quelled in 1994 when a book by Ben Rich, former heads of the closed skunkworks division that has been responsible for SR71 and many of the Los other more interesting black projects in the United States tried to solve the Aurora problem once and for all, as Rich himself said, although I hope few in the media believe me, there is no code name for the hypersonic plane because, according to him , it simply does not exist. Aurora has been a budget code name to refer to the project that would eventually evolve into the B2 Spirit bomber and the name had appeared in the budget report as a simple mistake, of course, how much credibility you give this idea is really up to you. .

For one thing, Ben Rich is perhaps the most knowledgeable person outside the Pentagon about what Aurora might have been, and he was already out of jail when Martin published his book. On the other hand, he was also a civilian deeply involved in the Department of Defense's mess of secrets. and the question of whether his claim is credible has been a matter of debate in itself, so with a nebulous feel that it may or may not be known as the Aurora program, it is represented here as fully as we hear the Omega projects, but we we are left with one really Critical question: did the Aurora ever exist?

In our response, we will refer to Alex Hollings who wrote for the national interest in October 2023, Hollings said after reading historical media reports, declassified documents, eyewitness accounts and more foreign publications than could be photographed from the You2, it seems extremely unlikely that the United States ever had an operational fleet of secret hypersonic planes, but that

doesn

't mean something like that never obscured the massive gates of Area 51. Now let's take Mr. Hollings at his word when it comes to all those overseas posts, but we agree that even if an Aurora or an Aurora-like program has flown, even if whatever final flyable product it produced at some point flew over Britain and other American allies in Europe, a line production fleet in the multiple dozens of aircraft were probably never built at an incredible cost per aircraft;

It would have been very difficult for the US government to conceal such a large-scale acquisition, and while the incident rate of sightings is by no means low, it is nowhere near level. that would suggest a large number of aircraft in continuous operation, not only that, but it is difficult to keep such a secret for so long among program staff, current and former employees at Skunk Works, pilots, maintenance crews, foreign military members who saw the thing in foreign air. bases and more, chances are that all of these people would have missed something, but that probability is very low if we're talking about the circles that would be in the know if a prototype or a small handful of four to six planes were ultimately That said, the witness reports we've covered here from seemingly credible sources for the most part share enough commonalities that it's not unreasonable to assess that there was something in the sky propagating strange sonic booms and funky pulsing sounds in the early hours of the night. evening.

In the mid-1990s, some of the most compelling evidence for the Aurora, the profiles of the sonic booms it produced, suggested that an aircraft matching the Aurora's description and capabilities may well have been flying around, Not only that, but there would have been real strategic value in a replacement for the SR71 but with a plane that can travel so far and so fast that even a couple of working prototypes or a very small air fleet could have had a big impact and, at the same time, keeping the overall fleet number small would have kept costs down. program in the shadows and reduced the likelihood that a crashed aircraft would malfunction, be detected, or otherwise become known to the general public or to America's adversaries.

Also of note is that the Department of Defense is the rationale for ending the SR71 program, which of course has been considered the reason Aurora would have to exist according to the Department of Defense, the operation and maintenance costs of the SR-71 were simply too high to justify continued operation, but a second, equally important piece was considering that the satellites could perform global surveillance more efficiently and for a long time. cheaper than Mann aircraft like the Blackbird, but that claim has also been criticized by a wide range of analysts, before and after the program's cancellation, who emphasize that the intelligence value of a high-speed stealth reconnaissance aircraft goes beyond what satellites can offer.

At lower flights, they can reach a point on a target as fast or even faster, can move with a lower chance of being tracked, and are easier to dispatch at a moment's notice to deal with emerging crises, most days. satellites will be enough. but when the geopolitical attention really starts to get serious, you'll want to have an aurora in your back pocket, and finally, we return to the Skunk Works for an indicator that hypersonic aircraft technology has evolved even further than it hypothetically would have. made back in the days when the Aurora was said to have flown, that indicator comes in the form of the SR-72, a hypersonic drone proposed privately by Loed Marting to the US government in 2013, according to Loed Marting himself.

Martin locked in 2018, a Sr 72 prototype was expected to fly. 2025 and recently locked Martin has been increasingly willing to drop hints that something hypersonic really exists and has possibly already been delivered to the US Air Force. We mention the SR 72, not because we think it is the Aurora that in fact we would argue. That is not the case at all, instead we mention it because, if it is indeed real, then it would be a massive evolution in any of the technologies included in the Blackbird or any other known aircraft owned by the United States government and the development of advanced military technology.

Technology like this is not something that happens in leaps and bounds or all at once, but progress is usually incremental with each new development building onto the next and the next and the next after that to move the United States from the SR71 to SR 72. without anything in between, it would be very unusual here at Mega Projects. Our best guess is that the US didn't go from 71 to 72, given all the information we know and all the information we think we know we would be. I'm willing to bet there was one plane in the middle, possibly a whole series of them, we don't know what they did, we don't know how many there were, we don't know how long they were in operation, but there is a hole in the high intelligence aircraft chronology. speed of the United States and if that void was ever filled, it was with a plane we called Aurora, even if its real name might remain forever lost to history now, just before you leave today, don't forget to check out our fantastic sponsor today, there's a link in the description below, don't forget to use code Simon too for 15% off and I'll see you next time.