by Phil Patton
Aurora, the story soon came to include, was powered by methane, a technology involving cryogenics, which the Skunk Works had explored as early as 1957. At that time, it had nearly built the hydrogen-powered CL-400 or Suntan, but Skunk Works boss Kelly Johnson killed the project at the last minute when he realized the prohibitive cost of setting up an infrastructure for handling liquid hydrogen at bases around the world and refueling in flight.
Liquid methane might work better. It might power an Aurora that girdled the globe, a recon plane, but one that might also be able to drop a wicked heavy projectile on a hardened command post with an uppity dictator inside it. Johnson had advocated such a system years ago, using the SR-71. Dropped while flying at such speeds, a heavy hardened-steel projectile is like an A-bomb—each thousand miles of velocity is worth a pound of TNT.
In 1991 a series of “skyquakes,” as the local media liked to call them, long rumbling sounds, rolled over Los Angeles. To seismologist Jim Mori, these suggested the sonic booms of a craft returning from an altitude of, say, 100,000 feet, or even from space, descending over L.A. to land in Dreamland.
Sightings around the same time in Palmdale and the Antelope Valley proliferated. Many of the reports depicted a long triangular craft, with wings swept back about 70 degrees. Others suggested an XB-70-like craft, or a “mother ship” carrying a smaller “daughter” craft on its back.
A TV writer named Glenn Emery reported a sighting in May 1992 near Atlanta, hardly black-plane country. In August 1992 more reports surfaced of delta shapes. The sound described in several reports, including one near Mojave, California, was a “low-pitched rumble.” That month, a viewer near Helendale, California, location of Lockheed’s radar cross-section (RCS) test facility, described a craft crossing the road at an altitude of less than two hundred feet. It may have landed at Helendale, the reports said, because the Groom and Nellis areas were covered with severe thunderstorms.
There were reports of shrouded shapes being loaded onto cargo planes at the Skunk Works in Burbank and of airliners in near misses with strange craft. Airline pilots reported several near misses with triangular craft.1
In August 1992, John Pike and the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) published their Mystery Aircraft report, which took at best an agnostic view. The study pointed out the epistemological problems: There were too many sightings, too much information, too many possible planes—and yet not enough evidence. And despite the budget document listings, the FAS report pointed out, no money had ever actually been appropriated for the Aurora item before it was removed.
As usual, the signal-to-noise ratio was invoked. Based on the report, The New York Times came out with a story in January 1993 that denied Aurora’s existence. But Aurora flew on. At least on aviation and popular science magazine covers, it flew with all the fidelity skilled airbrush and gouache could convey. The paintings and models made the near mythical craft seem as real as any Piper Cub at the local landing strip—or, rather, more real. Amphibian, feline, raylike shapes, delicately modeled, seen against orange sunsets and blue depths of sky—if they did not exist they should have.
In 1993 the Testor company released a model John Andrews had designed. It adopted the theory that Aurora was a “mother ship” with a smaller vehicle on its back. The mother ship bore the name “SR-75 Penetrator,” and on its back rode the “XR-7 Thunderdart.” The Thunderdart was supposed to fly at Mach 7 and boasted the pulse detonation wave engines that emitted the already famed doughnut-on-a-rope contrail.
The model made the idea of Aurora inescapable. Such craft should exist whether it did or not. It was hard not to believe in a craft that someone had so carefully and thoroughly imagined, designed parts of, and written instructions for that that read like this: “Podded Engines. Assembly. 1. Cement centerbody vane, 71 G, to centerbody wall and vane, 72 G. Now cement the vane/wall unit into the center spike, 73 G. Now cement the centerbody flow ring, 74 G, to the centerbody.”
Jim Goodall, aviation journalist and black-plane expert, was convinced. Goodall believed that about $15 billion had been spent on the thing, that it was there to sniff out Third World nukes, a joint project of the United States and the former Soviet Union.
Even Bob Lazar claimed to have seen what he thought was Aurora, inside Dreamland.
Speculation over Aurora brought all sorts of proposed hypersonic craft designs out of the closet as stealthies rushed to find corroboration for a real plane. These were dream wings, paper airplanes. Aircraft companies and engineers are constantly dreaming up possible airplanes. Sometimes they are simply fantasies, aeronautical engineers’ wet dreams, and sometimes they are teasers, like concept vehicles shown at car shows, intended to whet the public’s appetite and that of the generals in the Pentagon.
By the fall of 1993, Bill Sweetman had written a book on Aurora, consisting mostly of citations of these earlier hypersonic aircraft proposals, going back to the early supersonic X planes. There were dozens of them, pictured with slick contractor illustrations of lifting bodies and wave-riders (triangular aircraft that surf on the shock wave produced when they push beyond the speed of sound), many of them intended to be launched from the back of another aircraft. Also included was Lockheed’s hypersonic glide vehicle, which was designed to reach Mach 18.
One version of the Aurora story held that work began in 1983 to create a successor to the SR-71. It was called Q, Aerotech News reported, from “quantum leap” in technology, but it had become too expensive and was canceled. To Jim Goodall, cost was no problem. The airplane would cost, say, a billion dollars a year. What airplane didn’t cost that much? he argued. The number was easy. And it was easy to hide that much.
Black-budget watcher Paul McGinnis, known as Trader, at first believed that Aurora was a program code-named Senior Citizen. But he tracked that one down and concluded it was a stealthy transport—a short-takeoff-and-landing craft for sneaking troops behind enemy lines. Later, the program he finally decided was the real Aurora was one he knew only by the budget-line code number 0603223F.
In another theory, Aurora was not hidden at all, but was the shadow of Ronald Reagan’s “Orient Express,” a supersonic dream plane that would fly from New York to Tokyo in a couple of hours. No one could figure out how this projected passenger craft, formally called the National Aerospace Plane (NASP), made any economic sense. John Pike speculated that Aurora might be hiding in plain sight as the NASP—“a purloined letter” of an airplane, Pike called it. Sweetman noticed, too, that the NASP planners were confidently counting on building the Orient Express from a titanium alloy that had never been used before—at least in any publicly known aircraft.
Was it conceivable that Aurora was not a manned airplane, but a robotic one, an unmanned aerial vehicle, rumored to be called Q or Tier III? Perhaps the romance of the name was elusive as well: The “Glossary of Aerospace Terms and Abbreviations,” a supplement to the aerospace magazine Air International, claimed that Aurora was an acronym for “AUtomatic Retrieval Of Remotely-piloted Aircraft.”
One theory held that the plane had been canceled in 1986 because it was too expensive or didn’t work. Another said it had suffered catastrophic failure on the eve of the Gulf War. Yet another reported that it had been pushed ahead because of the Air Force’s desperation for a space plane in the wake of the Challenger disaster in January 1986 and the failure of two Titan booster rockets carrying spy satellites. But the dates did not jibe with the budget document. The B-2 had been given the go-ahead in 1981, and did not fly until 1989. How long would it take even the Skunk Works to bring an Aurora to fruition?
Supporting the “it was a bust” theory was a report in July 1994 by the Senate Appropriations Committee stating that “The system which some hoped would be developed and procured as a follow-on to the SR-71 has not materialized.”
The myth of the airplane came to resemble its possible namesake, the aurora borealis. It suggested a shimmery, elusive veil of rumint, charging the imaginations and dreams of the Inte
rceptors and stealth watchers.
After Sweetman’s report in Jane’s, which The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post picked up, the government responded. Donald Rice, Secretary of the Air Force, issued a categorical denial in a letter to the Post in December 1992.
“Let me reiterate what I have said publicly for months,” he wrote.
The Air Force has no such program either known as “Aurora” or by any other name. And if such a program existed elsewhere, I’d know about it—and I don’t. Furthermore, the Air Force has neither created nor released cover stories to protect any program like “Aurora.” I can’t be more unambiguous than that. When the latest spate of “Aurora” stories appeared, I once again had my staff look into each alleged “sighting” to see what could be fueling the fire. Some reported “sightings” will probably never be explained simply because there isn’t enough information to investigate. Other accounts, such as of sonic booms over California, the near collision with a commercial airliner, and strange shapes loaded into Air Force aircraft, are easily explained and we have done so numerous times on the record. I have never hedged a denial over any issue related to the so-called “Aurora.” The Air Force has no aircraft or aircraft program remotely similar to the capabilities being attributed to the “Aurora.” While I know this letter will not stop the speculation, I feel that I must set the record straight.
The Air Force commissioned an independent testing lab to show that the “skyquakes” in Los Angeles were nothing more than booms from offshore Navy fighters. Yet whether it was due to Rice’s denial or the arrival of a new administration, skepticism in the press began to grow.
In Amarillo, the arch-Interceptor Steve Douglass had scanned a revealing conversation from an Air Force aircraft phone. The transmission took place on the “Mystic Star” network used by aircraft transporting heads of state and military VIPs, including Air Force One. The transmission was made in the clear on December 10, 1992, when a general placed a phone-patch from SAM (Special Air Mission) 204 through Andrews AFB to “AF public relations.”
Aurora was discussed. The general quoted the article in The Washington Post as well as the one in Jane’s. He said, “It’s almost laughable the number of hokey inputs they had. It’s kind of similar to the UFO flap. We need to develop a release in response to inquiries. The guts of this should be that we’ve looked at the technical aspects of the sightings and what the logical answers for them are. You can quote Dr. Mori and cite the Lincoln Lab physics and the FAA’s efforts to debunk other incidents. Go through three or four of the sightings, take each one on and conclude with a paragraph that says the fantasy of Aurora doesn’t exist.”
They went on to discuss the sighting in the North Sea from an oil drilling platform. “Someone saw something accompanied by three F-111s. The secretary wants us to say it was an F-117.”
To Steve, there was clearly a cover-up under way.
Aurora vanished from the next round of budget documents, and Ben Rich would later report that Aurora was the code name for the funding of the B-2 competition between Lockheed and Northrop. Others in the industry made fun of the legend. A stealth expert at Northrop once asked me, “Have you heard the news about Aurora?” He waited the requisite two beats and then said, “It’s an Oldsmobile.”
And true enough, Oldsmobile had come out with a dramatic-looking new car named Aurora (the designer credited the F-15 as one inspiration for its shape) that was supposed to help the company’s laggard sales. The ads for the Oldsmobile even referred to the airplane: You can’t see the Air Force’s, they said, but you can buy ours.
In 1985 a movie loosely based on the 1897 Aurora, Texas, airship story appeared. It featured an elfin ET who wore jeweled, medieval clothing and piloted a Victorian flying saucer amid sets left over from a cheap Western. The spaceship, its rivets exposed like Captain Nemo’s Nautilus, suggested an 1890s and not a 1980s version of high-tech.
“It was a squatty shape with wings,” says the movie’s colorful old coot, who makes patent elixir, “but the strangest thing was the little feller driving it.”
The film spins out the original story: The landing is real, and a newspaper editor capitalizes on it to save her ailing publication and bring the town fame.
At the time of the great airship wave, William Randolph Hearst denounced the reports of the sightings in the same tones that future newspaper editors would use for castigating tabloid newspapers. In a San Francisco Examiner editorial of December 5, 1896, Hearst intoned: “Fake journalism has a good deal to answer for, but we do not recall a more discernible exploit in that line than the persistent attempt to make the public believe that the air in this vicinity is populated with airships. It has been manifest for weeks that the whole airship story is pure myth.” It was a shrill tone to take for a man who, two years later, would be largely credited with puffing up tensions in Cuba that propelled the United States into the Spanish-American War.
Was the latter-day Aurora a headline without a war? Or could Aurora have been as mythical as the long-ago airships over Aurora, Texas? A craft full of hot air, a shape compounded of disinformation?
Significantly, Aurora as an imaginary aircraft could have had some of the effects of an actual plane. It could, for example, have made potential enemies aware that they could be observed at any moment. Did whoever named the craft Aurora know about the Texas town and its tale? Was this an inside joke, deliberate political disinformation?
By the mid-nineties a flock of new high-speed aircraft came into the open. One was called LoFlyte, a so-called waverider. And when Lockheed Martin received a contract to build the X-33, the hypersonic suborbital aircraft, Skunkers became suspicious. The promised delivery date and comparatively low bid suggested that Lockheed had technology already available—possibly from Aurora—to give it a head start. Was the X-33 simply the “white” version of Aurora?
If there was no Aurora, or nothing like it, why were buildings going up so fast at Area 51? Why were Wall Street analysts pointing to large, mysterious sources of income in Lockheed’s annual reports? Why were Lockheed’s parking lots full? What was it that needed a six-mile runway across Groom Lake, in Dreamland? Questions like these, as much as the tales of Lazar’s saucers, drew the curious in greater and greater numbers to the perimeter of Area 51.
5. Maps
The Little A“Le”Inn did a good business in maps—bought from the government and significantly marked up. Naturally they did not show the base over the Ridge.
The fascination Dreamland radiated began with the fact that for years it did not officially exist. A map I bought at the Bureau of Land Management office in Las Vegas did not show it. The 1:100,000 metric scale, 30 × 60 minute map from 1985 claimed to display “highways, roads and other man-made structures” but bore no signs of runways, hangars, or the buildings that housed hundreds of workers and engineers at the base. But why should Dreamland be on the map? It was after all not a real but an imagined place, a virtual landscape, a “notional” land, and its map was to be found drawn not on the ground but on the mind.
Groom Lake and Dreamland were part of a wider map of secret facilities, mystery spots that represent a significant portion of tax dollars at work: air bases and test sites, controlled airspaces and anonymous buildings housing research facilities. It belongs to the same cultural landscape as the nuclear labs in Los Alamos and Sandia, New Mexico, the Blue Cube in Sunnyvale, California, which controls spy satellites, the CIA training facility at Camp Peary, Virginia, and the National Reconnaissance Office’s headquarters outside of Washington, D.C.—the “stealth building” kept secret from Congress even while under construction. Many of these facilities make up the Southwest Test and Training Range Complex, which runs from White Sands and Fort Huachuca in the south to the Utah Test and Training Range in the north. Included are the Air Force Flight Test Center at Edwards, the best known, most open of the areas, even including the closed-off “North Base,” and China Lake, the Navy’s radar and electronic test site to the nort
h and east of Edwards. There is a difference, though: All these other facilities have long been acknowledged.
Dreamland had no edges—the Minister’s phrase kept coming back to me. But it had ties and umbilicals to Edwards, to the contractors in Las Vegas, to the Air Force labs at Wright Patterson in Dayton. The ties reached all the way back to the Pentagon, whose shape has transformed from that of an old star-shaped fort into an icon of the new military-industrial complex. I thought of the whole network of facilities that were kin to Dreamland as a mysterious distant land: Pentagonia, marked with its own patterns, somehow similar to the Dreamings of the aboriginal peoples of Australia; or as an expanding metropolis, a ghost metro area with its own suburbs, industrial parks, malls.
Dreamland was born of the culture of secrecy; its owners—the Department of Energy and before that the Atomic Energy Commission, on the one hand, and the Air Force on the other—sat at the junction of the twin ideologies of nuclear power and airpower. This invisible culture cast a great shadow, which was the culture of ufology—the antimatter of the matter.
I tried to create a mind-map of Dreamland, based on certain marketing presentations I had seen. A car maker, for instance, might mind-map the image of a vehicle. One axis—latitude—would mark “sporty” versus “practical” while another—longitude—might distinguish a range of impressions from “luxury” to “basic transportation.” It seemed to me you could mind-map the cultures of the world of nukes and the world of airpower in a way that could neatly correspond with the overlaps of the test site and the Nellis range on the physical map.
