From [url]http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/Central/11/28/contrail.scramble/index.html[/url]

[b]NORAD investigates vapor trail reports[/b]

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colorado (CNN) -- Fighter jets scrambled in an unsuccessful attempt to investigate a contrail of unknown origin first seen over the Caribbean and later reported over the midwestern United States, the Department of Defense said Thursday.

The North American Aerospace Defense Command scrambled the jets soon after unverified reports were received around 4 p.m. Wednesday that the contrail, seen near the Turks and Caicos Islands, was headed northwest toward the United States, said Lt. Cmdr. Curtis Jenkins, a spokesman for the Colorado Springs-based group.

A contrail is a white trail of condensed water vapor that sometimes forms in the wake of an aircraft.

The jets were scrambled from more than one base and more than one location, he said, though he did not know how many jets or from how many locations.

Commercial airline pilots later reported the contrail over Florida and then over Indiana, after which no more sightings were reported, he said.

The jets attempted to intercept and identify the source of the contrail, but no visual or confirmed radar contact was made, he added.

"I don't know that anybody was predisposed to think it might be some thing or the other," he said. "We don't even know that it was a thing. It was just simply reports of contrails. We don't even know that it was the same one. We had reports from different places and NORAD did its job and tried to find out."

NORAD is coordinating with the Federal Aviation Administration and is continuing to investigate the reports, he added.

Santa, (the ol' claus), testing his new rig...

More Recon Flights for the coming Alien Invasion.

Mother Ship is hiding behind dark side of the Moon gathering data.

[img]http://www.stopstart.freeserve.co.uk/smilie/rolleyes2.gif[/img]

Chinese ICBM?

Hmmmm.....I saw a "strange" contrail yesterday morning.

A big semicircular contrail. Someone made a U-turn. This was over Western Colorado. But the wind was blowing it south east.

Never saw the plane that made it. Just the contrail.

Chem-Trails!

[url=http://www.chemtrailcentral.com/]Chemtrail Central[/url]

Ever hear of the Aurora Project?  Some sort of high stealth, high thrust technology that replaced the Blackbird.  Try a search, the 'rumors' have been flying for a while too..

A buddy of mine's wife is a composite engineer for Skunkworks. She denies that there is an Aurora. She says all their work is going into very small surveillance aircraft.

Flock of geese passing gas?

Hmmmm. Isn't She SUPPOSED to deny everything?? [:D]

DK [(:|)]

ya, they need to go smaller.  Something like a flying insect  (bee, Fly...etc)  could load it with some sort of HE, small amount and fly it up some terriorists nose and blow it up, wouldn't take much of an explosion to cause death.  Like they say bigger isn't always better.

She hinted that the aircraft look and fly like birds. Hmmmmm.....

Uh huh, just like the guys working on the B2 and the F117 and the U2 and the SR71 all told everyone exactly what they were working on....[rolleyes]

FOTBR

It was Wonder Woman, in her invisible jet.

More likely a meteorite that skimmed the upper atmosphere and was either not slowed down enough to be pulled in or burned up without touching ground.

Yep, that just confirms it!

A Russian rocket body re-entering the Earth's atmosphere about 6:15 a.m. The U.S. Strategic Command in Omaha, Neb., and the North American Aerospace Defense Command confirmed a Russian rocket fell back to Earth, but gave no further details.

She is trained to deny everything and provide disinformation.

You better hope she never tells you the truth or she will have to kill you.

Your house is probably bugged.

All yuor contrails are belong to us!

I think they [b]HAVE[/b] to deny it exists.....


Scott

Have you seen the new RPVs they are working on fro the Warrior project? Each soldier can carry acouple in a pocket. They are smaller than the balsa wood toy planes you usta could get in the check out line at the supermarket.....


Scott

Gotta get some more of that heavy duty aluminum foil to tack to the ceiling.
                    [;)]
"Art Bell....Coast to Coast"

It was me.

[img]http://www.bd-micro.com/bljet.jpg[/img]

Russian rocket.

People that were over for thanksgiving, saw it and pulled over and watched.

They claim the trails it left were huge.

I tend to believe her about the Aurora. There is nothing that an aircraft flying mach 5 at 80,000 feet can do that a satellite can't. Now if you tell me that the Aurora is just a high speed test vehicle I would probably believe it, but not a surveillance aircraft.

[img]http://home.achilles.net/~jtalbot/humour/Marvin.gif[/img]

I disagree.

Satellites are predictable, their orbits can be know days/weeks ahead of time.  A recon bird is unpredictable.

Driving down to Fort Collins the other day and saw the same contrail u-turn mentioned at the start of the thread. Maybe the pilot left something at the airport.

Not those in geosynchronous(sp?) orbit.

doesn't geosynchronous mean that the sat. stayes over one place on the globe. it's orit is synchronized with the earth's rotation.

what's unpredictable about that?

Uh-huh.  You just keep on telling yourself that...

A bird parked in a Clarke is the most predictable asset.  One-pass Low Earth Orbit devices are OK if you have the booster staged and a relay in place.

Satellites are great, but their orbits are predictable and they can't be everywhere at once.

As a result, there IS an ongoing need for flexible recon-on-demand missions.

It's well known that certain terrorist groups were well informed of the times at which their camps would be in view of recon satellites, and they simply scheduled activities around those passes.   This information could be gained from the Russians, who maintain a space radar net (akin to Norad's space radar net) that can track anything in orbit to the size of an egg, roughly. And the orbital parameters alone suggest the mission of the satellite.

The SR-71 was retired years ago.  

We've never retired an asset that was of strategic significance without putting a replacement for it FIRST.  

It turns out, now, many years later, that Jimmy Carter cancelled the B-1 because he knew about something we didn't, and that'd be the F-117 and the B-2 programs.   In retrospect,  his decision was more sensible than it seemed at the time, though it was still a bit optimistic.


Do you think those guys in the Skunk Works, and the entire black budget crews have been doing nothing?

Hell, the B-2 Stealth bomber AND the F-117 Stealth fighter BOTH flew for a decade or more before they were revealed to the public...and you know what?   I never ONCE saw a "ufo sighting" photo of EITHER type of aircraft before they were revealed publicly.   The military's secrecy machine works very well indeed.

Only those who actually KNOW about the SR-71's replacement really know what's up.  I'm not sure myself, not having been involved in any way with any of that, but I AM quite certain that the replacement DOES exist and is in regular service. I believe that it was used in Desert Storm,  and its flight path was down the Eastern seaboard, across to the Azores and then to Africa, and then to the middle east,  jumping from one airborne tanker to the next all the way.

During the time of Desert Storm,  there were occasional faint sounds of thunder that came from the ocean (I'm beachside) yet there wasn't a cloud in the sky.   I speculate that the 'thunder' I was hearing was actually Aurora (or whatever it's really called) running super- or hyper-sonic on the southern leg of the journey.

I haven't heard this distant thunder (with no clouds in the sky) since the end of Desert Storm, more or less.

Yeah, it's out there.  And be glad it is.


CJ

When you start really pushing the envelope - the man in the machine starts to introduce some onerous requirements on size and payload. Trying to streamline a human container to fly at mach 3+ generally requires a relatively large pointy tube.

Having said that - why does it NEED to fly at mach 5 if you have a relatively inexpensive vehicle small enough that size alone presents a very low radar and visual cross section?

The needs that require really high resolution, up to date stuff are generally better served UAV's controlled by the organization that needs them, than by big monolithic organizations shrouded with secrecy at levels which impede the useful flow of information to the desired consumers, flying large supersecret superexpensive vehicles that nobody wants to foot the bill for.

If an aurora exists, and if it's a large manned super high speed high altitude vehicle, then it has most likely been overtaken by events in the UAV arena. It would only remain secret, because the people who run such things are used to secrecy and they worry about the budget axe if details were known. More than likely it's a  research vehicle and all things I said in the previous sentence still apply.

I have no insight into any programs but something like the GTD-21B drone seems more plausible.  Small, very fast, maneuverable, long range and most important no pilot exposure.  They were retired years ago.  Last indication of deployment was Panama.  JMHO.

i seen the contrail in CT. with a couple smaller ones near it. i  just wrote it off and my wife looked on space.com because shes into astronomy. the smaller ones now i know where the fighters trying to find out what it was. i thought meteor because just a little while ago one passed by that they didnt notice pretty close to earth. i also said jokingly that saddam must of squeaked one by ;) yeah right heheh