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Project OXCART Declassified From Area 51
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from the LA Times:
"... the myths of Area 51 are hard to dispute if no one can speak on the record about what actually happened there. Well, now, for the first time, someone is ready to talk ... Colonel Hugh 'Slip' Slater, 87, was commander of the Area 51 base in the 1960s. Edward Lovick, 90, featured in 'What Plane?' in LA's March issue, spent three decades radar testing some of the world's most famous aircraft (including the U-2, the A-12 OXCART and the F-117). Kenneth Collins, 80, a CIA experimental test pilot, was given the silver star. Thornton 'T.D.' Barnes, 72, was an Area 51 special-projects engineer. And Harry Martin, 77, was one of the men in charge of the base's half-million-gallon monthly supply of spy-plane fuels."
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For those unfamiliar, the A-12 is more commonly known as the SR-71. It's not exactly the same aircraft, the SR-71 being the later development, but anyone looking at an A-12 would immediately recognize it as an SR-71.
The answer is in Area 42, but you must bring your own towel.
Any aliens sufficiently advanced to be able to travel to Earth from another planet, would be able to hide themselves......
Nuff said
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
" . . . half-million-gallon monthly supply of spy-plane fuels."
That's no mean trick. They condensed the stuff from the souls of mutilated cattle. The bovine victims stark terror at being lifted up into a saucer (in reality an airship coated with radium paint and filled with below-zero-ground state Helium) crewed by airmen dressed as alien "Greys" increased the fuel's specific impulse by nearly 30%.
I always found the name "OXCART" creepy, because of the famous von Neumann quote "I am not sure that the miserable thing can work, nor that it can be gotten to the target except by oxcart", referring to the weight of the atom bomb.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Pffffff... The gay bomb was declassified years ago.
If you were a government agency in charge of secret weapons testing, what better cover could you possibly come up with than implausibility? It may not have fooled the Soviets, but it sure fooled the American public. Nowadays Area 51 is usually mentioned in the same breath as JFK and Elvis' retirement community.
It would be interesting to check the Soviet archives and see what they thought was going on in Area 51.
Who cares about Area 51? Everyone knows the Stargates are in Cheyenne Mountain and antarctica.
Leave the gun, take the cannolis.
I'll say. We were fucking working on OX CARTS.
Is that the Area 42 over in Base 13?
No existe.
...or (more likely) it was just stamped with a standard 50-year classification, and nobody wanted to be bothered to declassify it earlier. See, they don't know how long in advance things will have to remain classified, so they pick an arbitrary number far enough ahead that it won't release while it could still put our people and operations in jeopardy.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
Geez, you just felt like ranting, right?
Do you seriously question the need to conceal the nation's highest technology from other governments?
Lying to the public is obvious. You need to lie to the public because the public aren't the only people listening. The intelligence agencies know that anything said to the public in general is also being said to foreign agencies. It doesn't work to print a story in the local paper describing what's going on with a byline to make sure no one tells the Russians.
Drugging the pilot also serves an end: they gave him sodium pentathol to ensure that he was telling them all he knew, and didn't leave anything out, consciously or otherwise. This has as much of a use to reveal something the person didn't even realize they were concealing (mental block) than it does at trying to catch someone in a conscious lie.
Forcing civilians to sign a NDA: that should be self-evident. We're dealing with the most secret technology at the time, obviously the government is going to use legal tools to help ensure that it stays secret as long as possible.
The SR-71 was still in official operation late into the 1990s, the official service record is from 1964 to 1998. This year, about 10 years after it was retired, is about the right time I would expect the government to start talking about that plane. A government will only discuss its technology in public when that technology is no longer the best or would not be a threat if another government had it. I think it's fair to assume at this point that if another air force came at us with an SR-71, that we would be able to shoot it down.
Basically what it gets down to is the more people who are in on something, the more likely information leaks out. Now as with any large government bureaucracy, when you involve another arm of the government, you get even more people than just those you needed. I mean if you go to the Air Force and secretly hire away some pilots, well then very few people even know that anything has happened, and all they know is that the CIA wants some flyboys. If you have the AF run it, well now you have all kinds of additional people who know about it.
A big part of keeping secrets is compartmentalizing information, and restricting access to the minimum amount of people.
Most of this info is in Ben Rich's book, "Skunk Works". The story doesn't have much if any new information. The SR-71 story is well known, and there's one at the Museum of Flight in Seattle. (They have the engineering documents for it, too, which can be seen on request.) Most of the stealth aircraft were tested at Area 51.
There are other sites "near" Area 51. Jackass Flats was a well known nuclear test area in the 1950s. (You can't really hide atmospheric nuclear testing.) The Sedan crater, from a nuclear test, is in that area. It's interesting to look at the area in Google Maps. There are all sorts of little abandoned installations in the Nellis Bombing Range area.
Back in the 1980s, the Lockheed Skunk Works ran a small ad in Aviation Week. It said only "If you missed out on this one (picture of U-2) and on this one (picture of SR-71) how'd you like to get in on the next one? Lockheed Skunk Works, Burbank, CA." That's how you got into stealth aircraft.
There's still a big USAF black budget, and it doubled during the Bush years. The question is whether much useful is coming out.
The truth comes out, but was hard to find in the article...
Colonel Hugh 'Slip' Slater, 87, was commander of the Area 51 base in the 1960s. Thornton 'T.D.' Barnes, 72, was an Area 51 special-projects engineer. Xorbz Blazzeet, 179, from the Orion system was dissected and stored in an Area 51 freezer for 16 years. And Harry Martin, 77, was one of the men in charge of the base's half-million-gallon monthly supply of spy-plane fuels.
Satellites in a predictable orbit are much easier to shoot down than the Blackbird (it was done last by an F-15 in 1985). For that reason alone, I am sure the SR-71's that are 'mothballed' are far from retired.
The real problem with satellites is that the predictable orbit allows the enemy to hide his shit when they're overhead.
And I think it more likely that the SR-71 is retired, and that there is "something else" available. The fact that all the airframes are accounted for and only the few NASA airframes are airworthy pretty much makes it unlikely they're still being used. If you look at the history of the multiple retirements of the SR-71 at the AIr Force's request, it becomes fairly obvious that there is something else. All the noise about how "we have no replacement" seems to come from congressmen, who despite their hamfisted attempt to insert themselves into the "classified" military budget process, are really a bunch of dumbass rubes who would spill the beans, so it's unsurprising the DoD has done what they could to keep them out of the loop.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.