Құпия ғарыш ұшағы "Аврора": Миф немесе шындық?

Rumored aircraft

Aurora is a rumored mid 1980s American reconnaissance aircraft. There is no substantial evidence that it was ever built or flown and it has been termed a myth. The U. S. government has consistently denied such an aircraft was ever built. Aviation and space reference site Aerospaceweb. org concluded, "The evidence supporting the Aurora is circumstantial or pure conjecture, there is little reason to contradict the government's position." In 2006, veteran black project watcher and aviation writer Bill Sweetman said, "Does Aurora exist? Years of pursuit have led me to believe that, yes, Aurora is most likely in active development, spurred on by recent advances that have allowed technology to catch up with the ambition that launched the program a generation ago."

The Aurora legend started in 1985, when the Los Angeles Times and later Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine broke the news that the term "Aurora" had been inadvertently included in the 1985 U. S. budget, as an allocation of $455 million for "black aircraft production" in FY 1987. According to Aviation Week, Project Aurora referred to a group of exotic aircraft, and not to one particular airframe. Funding of the project allegedly reached $2.3 billion in fiscal 1987, according to a 1986 procurement document obtained by Aviation Week. In the 1994 book Skunk Works, Ben Rich, the former head of Lockheed's Skunk Works division, wrote that the Aurora was the budgetary code name for the stealth bomber fly off that resulted in the B 2 Spirit.

By the late 1980s, many aerospace industry observers believed that the U. S. had the technological capability to build a Mach 5 (hypersonic speed) replacement for the aging Lockheed SR 71 Blackbird. Detailed examinations of the U. S. defense budget claimed to have found money missing or channeled into black projects. By the mid 1990s, reports surfaced of sightings of unidentified aircraft flying over California and the United Kingdom involving odd shaped contrails, sonic booms, and related phenomena that suggested the US had developed such an aircraft. Nothing ever linked any of these observations to any program or aircraft type, but the name Aurora was often tagged on these as a way of explaining the observations. Group Captain Tom Eeles, RAF, writes of a mystery aircraft flying over his house, near to the Mildenhall USAF base in Suffolk, at about 2:00am on a Sunday morning in the autumn of 1993. He had been awoken by "a very strange sounding aircraft passing overhead; the engine noise was a pulsing sound quite unlike anything I'd heard before." He saw lights disappearing towards Mildenhall. Enquiries were made of a senior RAF officer at Mildenhall the following morning, at which point he was told firmly "to stop making inquiries at once". Group Captain Eeles attributes this sighting to a new stealth aircraft called Aurora. A few weeks earlier, there had been "an unexplained incident at Boscombe Down apparently involving an emergency landing by an unknown US aircraft, after which it was covered in tarpaulins and removed with great secrecy by an American C5 transport aircraft." A crash at RAF Boscombe Down in Wiltshire on 26 September 1994 appeared closely linked to "black" missions, according to a report in AirForces Monthly. Further investigation was hampered by USAF aircraft flooding into the base. Special Air Service personnel arrived in plainclothes in an Agusta 109. The crash site was protected from view by fire engines and tarpaulins and the base was closed to all flights soon afterwards. More recent analysis, however, indicates that the Boscombe Down crash was a towed missile decoy. An unsubstantiated claim on the Horsted Keynes Village Web Site purports to show photos of the trail left after an unusual sonic boom was heard over the village in July 2002. In 2005 the information was used in a BBC report about the Aurora project.

A series of unusual sonic booms was detected in Southern California beginning in mid to late 1991 and recorded by United States Geological Survey sensors across Southern California used to pinpoint earthquake epicenters. The sonic booms were characteristic of a smaller vehicle, rather than of the 37 meter long Space Shuttle orbiter. Furthermore, neither the Shuttle nor NASA's single SR 71B was operating on the days the booms had been registered. In the article, "In Plane Sight?" which appeared in the Washington City Paper on 3 July 1992 (pp. 12–13), one of the seismologists, Jim Mori, noted: "We can't tell anything about the vehicle. They seem stronger than other sonic booms that we record once in a while. They've all come on Thursday mornings about the same time, between 4 and 7." The boom signatures of the two different aircraft patterns are wildly different. A month later, radio enthusiasts in California monitoring Edwards AFB Radar (callsign "Joshua Control") heard early morning radio transmissions between Joshua and a high flying aircraft using the callsign "Gaspipe". "You're at 67,000 feet, 81 miles out" was heard, followed by "70 miles out now, 36,000 ft, above glideslope." As in the past, nothing linked these observations to any particular aircraft or program, but the attribution to the Aurora helped expand the legend. In February 1994, a former resident of Rachel, Nevada, and Area 51 enthusiast, Chuck Clark, claimed to have filmed the Aurora taking off from the Groom Lake facility. In the David Darlington book Area 51: The Dreamland Chronicles, he said:

I even saw the Aurora take off one or an aircraft that matched the Aurora's reputed configuration: a sharp delta with twin tails about a hundred and thirty feet long. It taxied out of a lighted hangar at 2:30a. m. and used a lot of runway to take off. It had one red light on top, but the minute the wheels left the runway, the light went off and that was the last I saw of it. I didn't hear it because the wind was blowing from behind me toward the base." I asked when this had taken place. "February 1994. Obviously they didn't think anybody was out there. It was thirty below zero – probably ninety below with the wind chill factor. I had hiked into White Sides from a different, harder way than usual, and stayed there two or three days among the rocks, under a camouflage tarp with six layers of clothes on. I had an insulated face mask and two sleeping bags, so I didn't present a heat signature. I videotaped the aircraft through a telescope with a five hundred millimeter f4 lens coupled via a C ring to a high eight digital video camera with five hundred and twenty scan lines of resolution, which is better than TV." The author then asked, "Where's the tape?" "Locked away. That's a legitimate spyplane; my purpose is not to give away legitimate national defense. When they get ready to unveil it, I'll probably release the tape."