Well this is a bit of a surprise…
I’d seen some videos of Nimitz and / or some other carrier being “buzzed” by reputed UFOs, and I’d seen “gun camera” footage supposedly from the scrambled jets. But just figured it was the usual UFO hype but fun to watch.
Now this? A Tucker clip that supposedly is confirmation of the Navy saying that the events were real and they don’t know what they were dealing with (even though it did things that were not possible with our present understanding of things).
So is it a “Deep Fake”? Did anyone out there see this as a live broadcast?
I sure hope it is really some DARPA Black Project…
A quick search on “Navy admits UFOs real” found several “confirming” links:
It includes a video.
Those UFO videos are real, the Navy says, but please stop saying ‘UFO’
By
Kayla Epstein
September 18, 2019 at 1:19 p.m. PDT
In December 2017, two videos emerged that showed Navy pilots encountering mysterious spherical objects that appeared, at first glance, to move through the air in ways that baffled experts. A third, released in March 2018, depicted a similar encounter.Everyone who watched — including the pilots who filmed them — had the same question: What, exactly, are these things?
Last week, a Navy official publicly called these mysterious objects “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP),” giving name to the inscrutable little dots and reigniting scrutiny around the unidentified flying objects (a term the Navy does not want to use even though the objects that are flying cannot be identified.)
If it isn’t DARPA / Black Project and not something from Russia or some other government, that doesn’t leave much as an alternative. IF the navy is really saying there’s something that can move like that ( sudden near instant start / stop even at Mach along with 90 degree turns “instantly”) and that it isn’t ours, then that alone will be “something big”. If it is confirmed as non-Earth origin, well… I’m still figuring most likely is Black Project followed by deep fake… I’d like to see more confirmation of it in any case.
Here’s the Tucker report:
Tucker Carlson Tonight
US Navy confirms multiple UFO videos are realNavy acknowledges UFO videos in statement; reaction from UFO expert Nick Pope.
CategoryNews & Politics
License
Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed)
I think this was the (half hour) video showing cuts of the “encounter” intercut with a lot of stock footage of Navy / Navy Air…
So “Now what?”…
Musings from the Chiefio 
UFO as you know means Unidentified Flying Object
it does not mean; comes from another planet
it could be a Russian or Chinese or Iranian flying object…or it could be from another planet
but the fact it is not identified does not mean ; from another planet
Yes But…
It still either leaves a choice of:
a) Space Aliens with very advanced tech / physics.
or
b) Someone on Earth with very advanced tech / physics
or
c) Navy / TLA deception operation.
All of those are exotic in one way or another…
Hacker.
Very interesting, in WWII there were reports of flying objects playing tag with our fighters over Germany and going much faster than planes of the day. Generally those sightings have been presumed to be ME-262 jet or the ME-163 rocket plane.
I wonder if gun camera footage from that era would match up with / be similar to these descriptions?
If you accept the ‘impossible’ speeds and maneuvers, then you have to accept that somehow the occupants, if any, have a way to counteract the ‘impossible’ g-forces acting upon them.
Can you imagine the effect on your body doing a 90 degree turn at Mach 4? How about those near instantaneous accelerations to Mach speeds and decelerations from multi-Mach speeds to a stop? That oughta make anyone toss their alien cookies.
If manned, the pilots either are built nothing like us or they have some way to counteract the effects of acceleration and directional changes.
Or they are not manned by a biological organism but , a drone like instrument package being controlled by an intelligence that is not aboard the object.
Lack of sonic boom is the item I find most intriguing, as solid state electronics could survive those g loads but lack of incandescent heating from atmospheric friction and lack of sonic shock wave from moving at speeds clearly in excess of the speed of sound opens all sorts of speculation doorways.
yes, I am very skeptical. If I am wrong we have been very lucky that these visitors seem to be benign. Physics makes it seem pretty nonreal. In the end, all the conjecture and worry is wasted time.
In the end, all the conjecture and worry is wasted time.
Who’s worried?
If it is true, it likely would mean one of two things.
A) There is an intelligence on the planet far in advance of our most advanced known human civilizations
B) we have visitors from some other place/dimension we don’t know about far in advance of our level of science and technical skill.
Either would be profound discoveries regardless of which answer is correct, and would fundamentally change our world view.
Humbling (we are not nearly as sophisticated as we think we are) and a challenge that we don’t know near as much as we think we do, and things we currently think are impossible are simply very difficult with our present understanding of physics and science.
We can, like similar primitive peoples before us, have no conception of the technologies to come from our far future ingenuity, possibly even extent today, or from others in the infinity of the cosmos.
I think Elon Musk conjectured we’re all living in a computer simulation … perhaps these objects are aspects or phenonomena associated with this.
UFO – Unidentified Flying Object
U – They failed to identify it.
F – It was flying (or at least airborne)
O – It is some type of object.
General Curtis LaMay, while the head of the Air Force was at a meeting in the White House, He was asked by a member of Congress about U.F.O.s. He said that “They are not ours and they are of no danger to us” …………………… as for what the means???
UFOs have been around longer then humans have had flight. There is one more possibility. They are us from the future. Warping the 3 dimensions of space may also warp the dimension of time as well…pg
And then we have a current example of individuals in TLAs acting outside the bounds of elected authority to unseat a President. Why couldn’t someone in one or more TLAs effectuate the hacking of a couple of jets? After all, they are just big, fast computers. Why? To create yet another crisis about which something MUST BE DONE!!!
@H.R. “Can you imagine the effect on your body doing a 90 degree turn at Mach 4?”
If you are folding space around you – in effect not moving – than a 90 degree turn at “Mach 4” is trivial.
p.g. said:
“UFOs have been around longer then humans have had flight. There is one more possibility. They are us from the future.”
It pains me to disagree with “p.g.” who is almost as “cool” as our fearless leader.
Carlos Sagan in his “Cosmos” series explained why it is not likely that UFOs have visited our planet. Sagan argued that if we visited other planets we would leave “Artifacts” such as Coke cans and the remains of “Happy Meals”.
Given that nobody can produce a single bit of alien trash it is a safe bet that no aliens have visited us.
We live in an Einsteinian universe which means you can travel amazing distances in a single human life time. Someone told you that nothing can travel faster than light? While that may be literally true there are loopholes in Albert’s equations.
The link below used Einstein’s “General Theory of Relativity” to calculate the performance of a rocket that accelerates at a steady acceleration of one “g”. To remain healthy we need to be subjected to an acceleration of one “g”, so that would be the ideal acceleration for an inter-stellar vehicle.
Here is a link showing how far you can get in a ship that accelerates at one “g”:
https://diggingintheclay.wordpress.com/2013/06/17/bussard-revisited/
Given human curiosity we are going to build inter-stellar space vehicles. The first destination is likely to be “Proxima b” given that it may be in the “Goldilocks Zone”.
Check out this paper:
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/ast.2016.1589
They are looking for “Ocean Glint” but our existing telescopes are not capable of finding it. Maybe there is some software trick that will allow us to improve the SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio) but failing that we will build bigger telescopes.
Our knowledge of physics is primitive given that we don’t understand very much about gravity, “Dark Matter”, “Dark Energy” or black holes.
Every day on my way to lectures in the Cavendish Laboratory I passed the plaque that says “This is where J.J. Thompson discovered the electron (1899)”. We have come a long way since then but scientific progress is accelerating.
Given the number of reports around from pilots, it’s a bit difficult to maintain that nothing unusual has happened. There’s a likelihood that a large proportion of the reports are explainable by people seeing some odd optical phenomenon because of reflections by inversion layers (basically mirages), but where there’s corroboration between radar and people seeing the things, and reports from different people/locations, it gets more difficult to dismiss them as mirages. There is a possibility of ball-lightning providing both a radar echo and something visible, which could move at high speeds and change direction rapidly, but even that explanation would only really apply to a subset of the “otherwise unexplainable” reports. There remain some of the reports that aren’t easily explained because, if we had that technology, it would be in general use.
I used to think that the UFOs were all just military projects that were seen by people who didn’t understand what they were seeing and thus reported what they saw with a bit of exaggeration. However, one late evening just over 2 years ago (early July 2017) I saw an elliptical blue-green light flying over here without making any noise. Hard to tell how high it was or how big, but subtended around 1/3 of the size of the Moon (so around 10′ angle) and took around 2 seconds to pass from around 45° from overhead to where I could no longer see it because of the trees. Colour was wrong for any aircraft I know, and a jet or airscrew would have made a noise I’d recognise.
Around a year ago I came across David Alzofon. His dad Fred’s life work was a unified field theory, starting from Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity and extending it by adding a jitter in time as well as space. However, he based some of the ideas on UFO reports and the theory gave rise to a way of producing such a drive for UFOs. Fairly unsurprisingly, his theory wasn’t really taken notice of because of the UFO connection.
I’ve linked this before, but https://revolution-green.com/alzofon-gravely-go/ is the back story here. During the last year, I’ve been getting to grips with how to deal with microwaves and gathering the kit together to test out Fred’s theory, but instead of looking for a change in weight (way too easy to misinterpret an unexpected force as a weight change, and I expect a force can be produced) I’m looking for a change in inertia, by listening for a change in pitch of an Aluminium tuning-fork connected to the resonant cavity. Initial quick-and-dirty tests didn’t show any effects, but then I was only using around 1mW of RF and not using pure Aluminium for the cavity, and that test was more to test out the techniques than expecting a result. I’m still experimenting with getting the right type of antenna to get the resonances without feeding back into the amp and letting the magic smoke out, so initial tests need to be at low power.
If Alzofon was near-enough right, then making something that corresponds to the reports of UFOs would be possible. Standard theory struggled to produce a reason for inertia, and the Higgs field (and Higgs particle) were invented to give inertia to fundamental particles. Explaining why inertia happens remains difficult in standard theory, though. If we add in Mike McCulloch’s QI theory to Alzofon, then inertia becomes explainable, but the prediction is that it is quantised and not continuous, and there’s a minimum possible acceleration based on the size of the universe (the Hubble radius). It’s of the order of 1e-10m/s². However, Alzofon gives the possibility of producing a Rindler horizon at the shell of a spacecraft, and thus separating out a new universe inside that shell from the universe outside it. Inside the shell, things are not subject to gravity or inertia produced from the universe outside that shell.
Such a spacecraft could accelerate and change direction very fast without the passengers feeling the acceleration, because they are in a different universe. Air molecules hitting the shell would enter the field (the separate universe) and lose inertia, and thus would not slow the craft down and there would be no sonic boom either (producing such a boom requires that the air has inertia). It thus would fit the descriptions of the observed UFOs.
Though Alzofon’s explanation of how the universe works may not be correct, he was a genius (and also somewhat Aspe) and the derivation seems logical. Given the benefits if he was near-enough right, and the costs of doing the testing, seems like a good thing to spend time on. That could give us both cheap FTL space travel and an inexhaustible source of clean energy.
Getting the RF kit and knowledge has also enabled me to get to test the other ideas about reactionless drives. There have been problems in getting to the point of knowing enough about RF to get the things designed, but at the moment I’m almost at the point of testing out the two-loop board, which if I can get the two loops in resonance with the drive frequency (5725MHz) with a high-enough Q I should be able to measure a thrust of around 1 milligram weight (1e-5N) with an input power of around 600mW, which is cheaply available with a drone FPV transmitter. https://revolution-green.com/conservation-of-momentum/ for the logic I’m working from on this one – it doesn’t depend on some weird theory but instead stuff that’s been in the textbooks for a very long time, and experimentally must be there but normally too small to have been noticed unless you were looking for it. Still, this “anomalous” force that can be generated with getting the phases and distances right is the reason why the Alzofon tests need to look at inertia and not a weight change.
As these and other videos show, these UFO things appear to be fascinated by the seas and oceans. Maybe it’s time to research exactly what those big brain, underwater mammals are ‘communicating’ to each other. ;-)
And there are other historic cases
1954 — http://www.nicap.org/docs/castle/castdir.htm
1952 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1952_Washington,_D.C._UFO_incident
@gallopingcamel Another benefit of folding space is that you do not have to break the light speed (sound, snail) barrier to get somewhere. That’s not to say it’s easy… to public knowledge, it hasn’t been worked out (notwithstanding patents/people that disappear when they go against the deep state et.al.)
gallopingcamel said at:
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2019/09/19/navy-confirms-ufos-are-real-wt/#comment-117101
” We have come a long way since then but scientific progress is accelerating.”
Technological progress is accelerating, but pure scientific progress isn’t so much. Now we have a bunch of competing theories for a TOE. But these can’t be differentiated by experiment at the
moment. So theorists are still theorizing apace, but no solid gain in theory will be made until most of the variants are winnowed out. Some day, such experiments may become possible, so theoretical physics is still worth funding :)
The cause of the effects of Mass/Inertia and gravity have perplexed me for most of my life. Are they internal or external to mater?
About 25 years ago I came to the conclusion that it was external. Caused by the Electro-static tension between the energies of “Empty space” and Mater. Mater is embedded in the “Fabric of Space” by the energies involved with relative motion.
From this point of view all of these energy fields behave in the same manner, even gravity follows the basic laws of physics of Electro-Motive-Force over distance. Everything springs from the most simple point of Charge (negative) and Lack of Charge (positive) and relative motion, internal (Mater) and external (space), even the insides of a Atom in nearly all empty space. The Fabric of Space is entirely a thing of energy (charge), while in mater those energies have been converted into organized motion and exhibit apparent lower charge for the area of space it occupies.
E equals Mass times the speed of light squared. Notice Mass! not Mater! Mass and Inertia are measurements of the same thing caused by relative motion. Gravity is an effect of acceleration caused by warpage of the diaelectric field inside an Atom by outside EMF energies that distorts the position of the nucleus inside its Electron shell. We say that Gravity sucks, but really it is caused by relative pressure difference between high pressure, or charge, and low pressure, or lack of charge, in Mater…pg
The above indicates we can manipulate Mass/Inertia and Gravity through the use of EMF. Descriptions of the local effects of UFOs by observers indicate that they have Strong EMF fields about them.
Unfortunately since 1947 it has been Official policy that any efforts in examining UFO evidence was only the efforts of cranks and fools, (and the C.I.A.) so No Real Scientist would risk their loss of position by lending credence to that field. Over many years there has been evidence discovered of nonhuman made things, some of great age. Things that can’t be explained in official circles so tend to disappear into private collections.
Tesla Believed flight through the use of EMF effects was possible and his efforts to develop resonate High Voltage effects were part of his R&D in this field.
The key to gravity is within the core of a capacitor, …pg
UFO things appear to be fascinated by the seas and oceans.
Given the oceans compromise about 73% of the planets surface and are essentially uninhabited by man, they would be the ideal place to set up habitation of some other group.
Given we have substantial evidence that there have been many advanced civilizations on earth going back thousands of years.
The current date in the Jewish calendar is either Elul, 5779 or Tishrei, 5780
The Mayan Aztec long count calendar is about 7885 solar years long.
We have evidence of well developed civilizations exiting in the area of the Black sea and Egypt dating back 4000 – 6000 years ago.
The Old Kingdom Egypt dates back to at least 2686-2181 BCE (about 4700 – 4200 years ago).
We know we came out of the last glaciation of the ice age 10,000 -11,000, what better place to take refuge from the advancing ice and cold which would last 100k years than to go underwater where the temperature is about 3 – 4 deg C.
If a prior civilization reached near our level of technological advancement and retreated into the sea at the onset of the last major glaciation cycle near the Eemian some 120,000 years ago, all of their surface remnants would have long ago turned to dust, but they would have 120,000 years of technological advance on us – in short they would have AR-15s and nuclear weapons compared to our just learning to put a handle on a stone ax.
That is actually more probable than extra-terrestrial presence in my mind. They may just periodically check up on the cavemen on the surface to see how we are doing.
What will we be capable of in the year 122,019 (Julian calendar) ?????
Inertialess drive reminds me of E.E.’Doc’ Smith ‘Lensman’ series of pulp science-fiction. Love em.
Anyway, the excitable kid in me wants this to be our hightech accomplishments starting their ‘coming out’ party. We have things we don’t talk about. Perhaps some of this tech could power air transport/commercial aviation. Who knows, NY-Paris in an hour would make it a commute, esp fun if it could hover ;-)
Oh, and think of NYC to the moon in an afternoon, especially to visit the new permanent optical telescope…
@Larry Ledwick 20 September 2019 at 4:23 pm
Now that is an interesting idea…
Fascinating. Seems it would be in the public’s interest for the military to release all the collected data for proper analysis by suitably skilled and curious scientific types – come to some sort of consensus on what it was. Eg balloons with mismatch in radar cross section vs visual size confusing instruments as to range and speed. If there were indeed sonar logs of the objects moving at speed underwater that would be pretty conclusive.
Pretty solid debunk of the videos using meta data shown on the screen
Gofast is just a weather balloon.
Gimbal is a jet. The perceived rotation is an artifact of the camera rotating on a gimbal.
Nimitz is also a jet. It’s far away, and blurry.
Fascinating. Seems it would be in the public’s interest for the military to release all the collected data for proper analysis by suitably skilled and curious scientific types
I disagree! Why do people think the general public needs a ring side seat to highly classified military events?
A) It is not a safe assumption that they have no idea what the objects or events were.
B) Even if they have a clue what is going on, the data you suggest being exposed would be a gold mine of intelligence information for opposing military. The reaction to their intercept attempt tells me that this operation likely tripped over either a classified project of the US Military or something they have familiarity with and want to keep under wraps.
C) What if the objects are under the control of an opposing government? Would you want them to know exactly what our most sophisticated systems can and cannot see?
The facts already stated in the video (if true) clearly show that the The USS Princeton AEGIS phased array radar can detect and track things that even at close range the air to air radar of the F-18 cannot resolve. The verbal descriptions also give approximate dimensions of the objects.
If this is a world wide phenomenon, other governments may also have had close encounters with this phenomenon and their internal information gathered from such encounters combined with public disclosure of ours from this encounter could give away critical information we don’t want to divulge about our systems.
In any case, we know for a fact that the US government does bring in private citizen experts (properly cleared) to assist with investigations of new phenomenon that they are trying to understand, (see Manhattan project etc.) so the intent of your suggestion is almost certainly already in progress at places like Lockheed skunk works etc. but just throwing the info out into the wild is a really bad idea for dozens of good reasons.
Just for clarification:
Yes I think this event really happened as described (or as near as eye witnesses can give unbiased observations)
Yes I am open to the possibility that it represents a non-terrestrial origin, but like the SR-71 could also be part of a black program. Also information discovered in analyzing the event could greatly aid our studies of things like stealth technology or no boom supersonic flight.
Yes it also could be a misinterpretation of a perfectly natural phenomenon.
(NORAD radars one time picked up reflections of the rising moon and interpreted it as a flight of incoming missiles for example.
These sorts of stories have been around for a very long time (see my comment above about unexplained flying objects observed during dog fights over Germany in WWII)
We may not have a star gate program, but it is conceivable that we know of things that are well outside our publicly acknowledged technology and are simply not ripe for disclosure to the population at large for many reasons.
The Navy has been working in this field since WWll and still haven’t figured it out.
https://pgtruspace.wordpress.com/2019/05/04/navy-patent-to-modify-mass-inertia/
last December they did a blanket Patent on their guess as to what is going on. BUT! accepted Modern Physics does not explain things and I would guess that the C.I.A.-Lockheed people have given up on secretly cracking the art.
Steven Fraser says: 20 September 2019 at 10:30 pm
“Inertialess drive reminds me of E.E.’Doc’ Smith ‘Lensman’ series of pulp science-fiction.”
My very 1st Sci Fi book was E E Doc Smith’s Skylark at the age of 11. After that it was Sci Fi all the way for me.
Simon Derricutt says:
20 September 2019 at 9:03 am
“However, one late evening just over 2 years ago (early July 2017) I saw an elliptical blue-green light flying over here without making any noise.”
I have followed my elder brothers and been a bit Aircraft buff starting at about 8 years of age when my eldest brother took me to Biggin Hill Air Display back in the 50s.
I have experienced two UFO episodes, the first was when I was a teenager and courting my wife.
We watched a single soundless “headlight” in the sky coming straight at us and suddenly do a 90 degree turn and then go straight up and disappear.
The second was very different, in 1979 my son and his 3 friends knocked on our door all excited about “lights in the sky. When I looked and said well I can see a very slow moving and blinkin light , they all shouted what about the other 2. It was then that I realised that I was seeing was an immense triangle in the sky which was occluding stars. The 3 liht on the tips of the triangle were in rotation and no sound at all.
I promptly phoned my eldest brother who lives 100 yards away and his family came outside and saw it as well.
I know planes and compared to an Avro Vulcan this thing was massive.
Do my wife and I believe in little Green Men, No, but we do believe in UFOs.
I am surprised that no one has mentioned the 1948 Mantell incident and the 2 Sabre Jets told to shoot down a UFO in the UK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantell_UFO_incident
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-ufo/u-s-pilot-was-ordered-to-shoot-down-ufo-idUKTRE49J1P620081020
ACO – David Alzofon told me he’d seen one of those triangular ones in California, and he wasn’t alone at the time. I suspect that the triangular ones are USA black-ops designs, but of course I don’t know for sure. Since I’ve also had information from someone I trust that he’s seen something produce lift/thrust with far less power than would be expected, invented by someone he has known for a long time, but said friend of a friend had become extremely paranoid and seems to have vanished, I’ve been more disposed to think that “UFO drives” may have been made by humans (and also that there’s a health-risk involved). There’s also Richard Banduric, who has produced around 100mN reactionless thrust. Apart from the logic of Conservation of Momentum being not actually true, because it’s only absolutely true when we use non-varying fields and becomes less true the higher the frequency you use, which I’m testing out at the moment in a simple form that can be easily replicated, it also made me look less sceptically at the other suggestions for UFO drives. Some are obvious bunk, of course, but Alzofon’s theory looks logical.
Someone suggested I look at the White Sands Incident, but that looks like bunk to me. Also much the same for claims Tesla produced antigravity (charged mercury bath spun at a high speed), or that lifters (asymmetric capacitors run at high voltage) affect the Aether and thus would work in space. Seems like the vacuum tests didn’t spend enough time outgassing and thus had a ready source of ions to provide a force by simple reaction. As usual, a lot of wishful thinking, some fanciful plans about how to build a flying saucer IF the drive worked, and plans for how to build such a drive that should be simple to test but no-one has actually built one and tested it (or at least admitted to it, since it probably didn’t work).
The first part of any experiment is in thinking that something is actually possible. The next thing is, if it’s possible, how do you actually do it, and have you got the skills and materials to make something that has a good chance of working. What’s the minimum system that will prove the point?
There seems to be some unusual aircraft flying our skies. They aren’t necessarily proof of alien visitations, but do imply that some things we think are absolutely true aren’t necessarily true in all circumstances. EM’s point about humans leaving débris such as empty beer cans and Twinkle wrappers around is a good one, but then there are anthropologists who don’t leave such things behind them since they don’t want to change the systems they are studying. Thus as usual you can’t use absence of evidence as evidence of absence. Could be LGM (little green men) involved….
I’ll put up details of the CoM two-loop experiment on the article at R-G. I’m expecting to get a small force of the order of being to lift 1mgwt or so from this, but it should be enough to actually measure.
We know that the US Military has technology well in advance of anything seen publicly. Stealth tech was around a good long while before we let it be known we were flying it.
Therefore it is reasonable to assume there’s “stuff” flying around doing exotic things that one department made and doesn’t want the other department to know about… (No idea if this is or isn’t it, though).
Take Aurora. A geologist who was studying earthquakes noticed “shake detected” on a set of ground sensors. Always going from Nevada, over So. Cal. and out to sea. Then a few hours later, reversing. Apparent velocity of the effect was multiple Mach. (IIRC something like 4+).
He gave a speech about it. He was visited by nice Government Men in Black Suits. He then said it was all just a mistake and “never mind”… and decided to study something else and never talk about it again…
The mostly likely explanation was he detected the fairly quite sonic booms of Aurora cooking out of Area 51 to test over the ocean… A hypersonic plane at a time we supposedly could not do that. It is also reported to now be a shut down project as it’s no longer cutting edge…
Let that sink in. Sustained hypersonic flight is passe…
So my best guess would be that the Back Room Boys have some New Toys and were testing them around the usual Naval test area, and were surprised when the Aegis could see them…
The alternative, that Space Aliens are hanging around watching us but not interested in talking to us at all, seems just a tiny bit extreme. Perhaps they have talked with our “Leaders” and got them well trained while everyone decided The Public could not handle the truth… Some variation on the Prime Directive or anthropologist wanting to study the primitive culture without contaminating it…
But were I placing a bet, I’d put it on Area 51 toys under development…
Consider this: (publicly acknowledged speed records)
B58 hustler super sonic bomber – longest supersonic flight in history. In 1963
flew from Tokyo to London (via Alaska), a distance of 8,028 miles (12,920 km) in 8 hours, 35 minutes, 20.4 seconds, averaging 938 miles per hour (1,510 kilometres per hour). As of 2016, this record still stands. (approx Mach 1.3)
March 5, 1962 2 hours, 1 minute, 39 seconds West to East Robert G. Sowers Convair B-58 overhead Los Angeles to overhead New York; one aerial refuelling (2,450 miles approx 1214 mph mach 1.67)
XB-70 bomber prototype records
XB-70 performance[90]
Longest flight: 3:40 hours (on 6 January 1966)
Fastest speed: 2,020 mph (3,250 km/h) (on 12 January 1966)
Highest altitude: 74,000 ft (23,000 m) (on 19 March 1966)
Highest Mach number: Mach 3.08 (on 12 April 1966)
Sustained Mach 3: 32 minutes (on 19 May 1966)
Mach 3 total: 108 minutes/10 flights
March 6, 1990 64 minutes West to East Ed Yielding and Joseph T. Vida SR-71 Blackbird Flying to museum at retirement of the aircraft, Los Angeles to Virginia’s coast, average speed 2,124 mph (3,418 km/h) approx mach 3.
https://www.sr-71.org/blackbird/records.php
( Speed Over a Straight Course – Date: 28 July 1976
Crew: Capt. Eldon W. Joersz and Maj. George T. Morgan
Average Speed: 2,193.167 mph) Mach 3+
A-12 prototype first flight April 30, 1962
The SR-71’s first flight was on December 22, 1964
Maximum Speed: Mach 3.3+ (Limit Compressor Inlet Temp of 427 degrees C)
Cruising Speed: Mach 3.2
In November, 1961, Air Force Major Robert White flew the X-15 research airplane at speeds over Mach 6. October 2, 1967, in California, X-15 reached Mach 6.7, but by the time the vehicle approached Edwards Air Force Base, intense heating associated with shock waves around the vehicle had partially melted the pylon that attached the ramjet engine to the fuselage.
Mach number of 6.70, the fasted speed achieved in the X-15 program
https://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/history/Speeches/x-15_speech/x15-6spch.html
last flights were testing development flights for a hydrogen fueled ram jet engine but the X-15 never flew with the operational ram jet engine only the dummy engine for testing.
The X-15 would reach a best speed of 4,520 miles per hour (7,274 km/h), or Mach 6.72.
http://www.up-ship.com/apr/extras/serjx15.htm
airframe damage to X-15 during ram jet engine testing flight
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
So we were able 55 years ago to cruise at Mach 3.2 and dash to Mach 3.3+ with air breathing engines and dash to Mach 6.72 using rocket power.
The public open source discussion of hypersonic aircraft talk about the difficulty keeping the engine lit at Mach 5 which is part of the major challenges of sustained hypersonic flight.
That leads me to presume that it is highly likely we have some limited production asset that can operate in the low Mach 4 region at least for short distances newer high temperature materials (like ceramic tiles developed for the space shuttle) may have raised the air frame limits well into the Mach 4-5 range, but engine technology is likely still an issue, although the hypersonic cruise missile development may be debugging a smaller cheaper variant of an already existing design used in such a limited production design.
Or to replace rumored pulse jet engines able to operate at low hypersonic speeds.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2855795/So-secret-existence-not-acknowledged-Futuristic-Aurora-spy-plane-travels-SIX-TIMES-speed-sound-blamed-mysterious-booms-heard-weekend.html
In the 1970’s I was in the Engineering Library at U.C. reading about jet engine design. They, then, had a proposed ‘zero moving parts ‘hypersonic engine’. Basically an external wedge on the air frame with a shallow approach angle and a steeper angle on the backside. Fuel injected at the apex.
Regular engines would get you up to supersonic, then you fired it up by pumping the fuel… A shock wave forms from the apex and that’s the “other half of the nozzle” while the compression heating ignites the fuel in the very hot air. Fuel flow helps to cook the metal wedge hot spots.
I could not see any reason it would not work, and I’ve heard that since then they have been made, though in the test engine they did put a shroud of some sort over the wedge to prevent weather issues or wind buffet effects on the flame.
I do find it surprisingly suspicious that we had fast supersonic aircraft 50 years ago, and then just nothing. Like we “forgot” what we knew and have made zero progress since.
I, for one, just don’t bu it. I think they realized it was better to just keep quiet about capabilities…
Lots of interesting stories about the SR-71
Given it was designed in the late 1950’s (Kelly Johnson began development discussions in 1957-58) and was not officially divulged to the press until President Johnson mentioned it for political gain during the Presidential election cycle, it still was a highly prized and protected asset right up until the time it was retired.
Great care was taken to protect those planes and their crews as a consequence of the Gary Powers shoot down.
https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2018/12/30/finally-declassified-swedish-pilots-awarded-us-air-medals-for-saving-sr-71-spy-plane/
Larry Ledwick says: 22 September 2019 at 4:44 am
Concorde which first flew in 1969 maintained continuous flight at Mach 2 across the Atlantic when in Service with BA and Air France.
In testing it hit Mach 2.23 at 63,700ft.
As E M says we seem to have stalled as far as high speed is concerned, but that is not because we can’t. The BA HOTOL was designed decades ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Aerospace_HOTOL
and Skylon, much later
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_(spacecraft)
But the big problem is development costs.
Didn’t the Hustler have cracking issues with it’s titanium?
They obviously overcame that for the SR71 which was designed to just go as fast & high as possible and did it brilliantly.
It had new methods of skin construction which we now see in commercial aircraft but it was more case of a concept that went away while they were trying to build it.
When originally proposed it was supposed to fly high and fast above conventional AAA and too fast to be caught by interceptor aircraft because their time to climb to altitude would put if far down range, but anti aircraft missiles killed that concept (although the SR-71 did in fact succeed in that strategy to out fly and out run the missiles. It was so fast it out ranged the missiles before they could detect it, get a track assign a missile battery to service the target, be launched and reach altitude).
It had other problems too, as described in this web page.
https://warisboring.com/the-b-58-hustler-was-a-beautiful-mistake/
Skunk Works
Related to this discussion – who will be the winner of the hypersonic race?
Just being the first to field the weapon may not be enough, is it reliable?
Is it accurate and controllable?
Does it have a signature (like aerodynamic heating and the resulting IR signature) that makes it very easy to detect from low earth orbit.
Can its electronics be jammed or spoofed.
Can if fly in all weather or at those speeds does rain become a problem.
https://news.yahoo.com/russia-navy-first-hypersonic-weapons-223300136.html
FYI. The pilot has commented on his sighting.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7811215/Navy-pilot-shot-famous-Tic-Tac-UFO-video-breaks-silence.html
The original article (interview) is much longer:
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/tic-tac-ufo-video-q-and-a-with-navy-pilot-chad-underwood.html