Big Black Delta Mystery Solved?

jonerik writes "According to this article from Space.com, hundreds of sightings of enormous arrowhead-shaped aircraft that have been logged since the 1980s just might have been solved. According to a new report by the National Institute for Discovery Science, the craft (referred to as Big Black Deltas, or BBDs) are massive black airships on the order of 600 feet long, 300 feet wide, and 40 feet tall, weighing on the order of 100 tons and capable of carrying huge loads over long distances. Since a 2001 NIDS study correlated sightings of large triangular or delta-shaped objects with Air Force Materiel Command and Air Mobility Command bases throughout the United States, it's assumed that the BBDs are DoD transport airships. Dr. L. Scott Miller, professor of Aerospace Engineering at Wichita State University, agrees with much of the NIDS report. 'I do think that a large airship, with a heavy lift and other mission objectives, has been built,' says Dr. Miller. 'Lockheed has shown a great deal of interest in airships for many years. The real question is whether the Department of Defense has committed to buy and use such machines.'"

Comments

Bullshit. I saw one.

[revscat]

I was going to post this anonymously, but then decided it would just lessen my credibility.

I saw one of these in (of all places) Denton, Texas in 1992. I was going to the University of North Texas, and was hanging out at this friend of mine's house. We had stayed up all night talking politics and philosophy, and had gone out onto the balcony so I could smoke.

Her apartment was on the second floor, facing the pool, behind which was another two-storey apartment building. We hadn't been out there long when I noticed something moving just above the building opposite us. It was triangular in shape, with lights at each of the points. In appearance it was dark grey, and the lights at the points were just a tad brighter than the stars around the thing. It's orientation was almost completely vertical: imagine holding up a mostly-equilateral triangle in front of you and moving it from left to right, with the point facing right. It was moving very slowly, I would estimate at around 20 or 30 MPH.

I shouted out "Hey, what's that?" It took a short while for her to see it, but eventually she did. We watched it for a minute, chattering excitedly, before it slowly turned away from us and disappeared off to the west.

It didn't make a sound, and it was very big. It was unidentified, it was flying, and it was an object. Beyond that I make no claims. But if the DoD can build something like that, then I'm damned impressed.

No, I'm not bullshitting in some weak attempt to get karma. This really did happen to me.

Re:Bullshit. I saw one.

[david.given]

It was probably a jet.

The eyes can play very funny tricks on you. I live under the flight path for Heathrow, and at night you see these huge diamond-shaped aircraft flying over. I look at one, I know it's a jet, I tell myself it's a jet, but I can clearly see the lines connecting the nose and tail with the wing tips, and the body is easily visible.

The brain's got this amazing pattern-recognition system as part of the visual processing. Unfortunately, when it doesn't know what something is, it tends to guess, and one of the algorithms it uses is to connect points with lines... and to fill in shapes... and the four beacons on the nose, wingtips and tail of a 747, seen at night, is perfect material for this.

Of course, I don't know exactly what you saw, I wasn't there. But I strongly suspect what it was was a jet, a lot further away than it looked, banking away from you (so making the tail beacon invisible). You didn't make any sound because passenger jets are pretty quiet and it was a long way away, and any noise that reached you was drowned in the traffic noise.

Sorry.

Re:Bullshit. I saw one.

[revscat]

Well, that's certainly a possibility. I agree with you on the pattern-recognition abilities of the brain. However, if it were a passenger jet:

It was flying on its side

It was flying at an altitude of less than 200 feet

It was flying slower than any passenger jet I have seen before

Again, I am probably wrong, and just got excited about my siting. But I live in a flight path for DFW airport, and I also know how passenger (and private) jets look at night. It didn't look anything like this.

Re:Bullshit. I saw one.

[Tackhead]

> It was flying on its side
> It was flying at an altitude of less than 200 feet
> It was flying slower than any passenger jet I have seen before

I can't speak to what you saw - I wasn't there. But how did you know its altitude?

Suppose an aircraft is flying at 2000 feet and normal airspeed.

Suppose an observer estimates (for whatever reason) that it's flying at 200 feet, when it's really at, say, 2000 feet.

Such an aircraft will appear to be flying extremely slowly (and quietly) if you think it's at 200 feet when it's really at 2000.

Your description of "flying on its side" indicates it may have been at an odd attitude relative to you - consistent with a previous poster's hypothesis that it was a jet banking away from you.

The mind does funny things when given insufficient information. My funniest one was when I was driving to an air show, and I swore I'd seen a Rafale or Eurofighter, which made me wonder (a) what the hell it was doing here, 'cuz there was nothing like it on the list of planes scheduled to show up, and (b) why it was so quiet at that altitude, as a nearby propeller was able to drown it out.

As it turned and overflew us, I realized it was one of those funky "build-it-yourself" kit experimental planes with an impeller ("pusher") design and a funky delta-wing configuration, and that's where the prop sound was coming from. A very slick homebuilt/kit plane, to be sure, but no EF2000. :-)

Why keep a transport airship secret?

[Goonie]

As was discussed in the slashdot writeup, there have been serious proposals for transport airships for some time now. This British company is proposing 1000-tonne capacity cargo airships.

This kind of cargo airship would be very large, take a long time to get anywhere, and would probably fly much, much lower than a plane. Trying to keep its existence secret would be a substantial challenge to say the least.

So, given the non-secretness of the whole idea of a big cargo airship, the difficulty of keeping one secret if it existed, and the fact that the exact capabilities of a transport aircraft aren't generally the most important things to keep secret anyway, why bother?