X-Wing Fighter??????? Sighted in Utah 1998

Hey everyone,
In 1998, while working at an outdoor wilderness camp for teens in southern Utah, west north-west of St. George about 35 miles out of town, I witnessed a "stealth fighter" flyby at about 2am in the morning. The bizarre thing was that it looked like someone stuck a railroad crossing sign across the fuselage of a F117 and cut the wing tips flat, with the front forward swept wings a little shorter than the rear. It had no vertical tail and the tailing edge was more serrated than anything I have ever seen. It flew by about a quarter of a mile away, 500ft off the ground and was traveling at around 400-500MPH. As weird as this was, there was NO ENGINE NOISE WHAT SO EVER and the only sound audible, "BARELY", was the air blowing around the airframe, it made no contrail and there was NO visible ENGINE EXHAUST.

I originaly thought it was the wind blowing thru the leaves of the aspen trees and expected to see the ripple of the wind blowing thru the trees as it approached from down canyon but nothing was moving. I caught a glimps of movement to my left and looked up to see this aircraft making a hard left banking turn and was illuminated by the full moon. I have been trying to identify this "craft" ever since and the closest thing I can come up with is a full sized advanced military combat demonstrator of NASA's X-36 research vehicle.

My family has been involved in aviation since the 20's when my great grand father flew his rebuilt Jenny to Sacramento High School everyday and used the track for a landing field. Everyone in my family knows airplanes and this was unlike anything ANYONE has seen or heard about. Only my aunt, who was in the navy and is now a consultant for "stuff", gave any inkling to what it could have been. And she just giggled and walked away without saying a word!

Has anyone else ever seen this thing??????????????????
I can send a drawing to anyone who requests it.

PS The location of this sighting was due east of AREA 51, about 70 miles away from the base.

If you could scan up a drawing that would be fantastic please

That type of craft sounds like the Blackworld equivalent of the
Switchblade aircraft which is DIFFERENT than the oft-derided white
world craft that is called Switchblade.

The "Black Budget" Switchblade is supposed to go way beyond simple
variable sweep wing technology into fully deformable wing and
super-structure for both low-and-slow flying plus high-speed
long range attack and bomb.

From what I understand LMCO (Lockheed Martin) is using at least
one technology called "Metallic Glass" :

en.wikipedia.org...

which has an ability to both flex AND be strong at the same time
in both the wing portions and some body panels.

In some test demonstrators another technology called
Peizo-Actuation on flight surfaces to deform wings to perform
maneuvers that are pretty much beyond the physical capabilities
of a human pilot to take.

These new "Smart Materials" allows aircraft bodies and wings
to deform and change shape based upon sensing the current environment
and surroundings OR change shape based upon the application
of electro-magnetic energies or other type of initiators
or environmental stressors

See:

en.wikipedia.org...

and

cat.inist.fr...


---

On a side note we've pretty much WAY EXCEEDED the abilities
of the human body and mind in terms of G-Force loads and cockpit
workload so it's pretty much CUAV and remote piloting that will
BE THE FUTURE of aerial warfighting.

DO MORE GOOGLE SEARCH on "Deformable Wings"
and "Smart Materials" or "Memory Metals"
if you want to find out more!

reply to post by StargateSG7


I believe the project you are referring to is the JO between NASA and Skunk Works.

Related Thread to NASA Morpher

From what I understand the vast majority of these craft would be drones, or UAV's.

www.dfrc.nasa.gov...

A future aircraft might morph its wings, use smart sensors and actuators and more accurately mimic nature's methods of flight. The concept could also transform the image of tomorrow's aircraft and create additional flight research projects for Dryden.

During a NASA budget briefing April 9, NASA Administrator Dan Goldin described the aircraft that will be one of the linchpins of the Agency's aerospace research for the next 20 years.

www.dfrc.nasa.gov...

I knew about the NASA version which used an F16 with one wing
replaced as a test bed for deformable wings technology.

HOWEVER:
I have some unsubstantiated reports about TWO Switchblade Aircraft
that are NOT part of the NASA deformable technologies development system.

One a Whiteworld-style research platform that used scissor-wings
to reduce CX (Drag) and another "Black Budget" project which had
the SAME NAME but used truly revolutionary technologies such as
Metallic Glass, Smart Materials and Peizo-Reactive skinning
technologies to enhance airflow across the aircraft body.

The NASA test bed has nothing to do with LMCO
and is designed for research & development
of a more general commercial aviation basis.

In U.S.-style defence projects, there are numerous overlaps
and outright duplications in effort due to inter-service rivalries,
costing and budget reasons and of course "Internal Feifdoms"
which are part and parcel of any CAP (Compartmentalized Access Program)
or SAP (Special Access Program)

There is also the issue of specific technologies being used for varied
purposes specific to a particular service's need. i.e. Deformable structures
for Marine AH-64's chopper blades or Flexi-Wings for Short Surface
Runways for the Navy, etc.

All these technology overlaps are one of the issues that Congress
has researched and inquired into regardiung budget overruns
at the DOD. Some estimates have run at 70 BILLION DOLLARS
worth of overlapping R&D and Testing within the last 5 years alone!

And some members of the GAO (General Accounting Office)
have indicated their desire to create a MASTER R&D and Testing
budget office that will COMBINE all White-World and Black Budget
requests into a single oversight committee that has the highest security
clearances and is educated enough to detect the overlap and
perhaps combine specific programs into a single R&D and Testing
budget request that would be applicable to ALL arms requesting
access to the technology in question.

They would all share a common pool of knowledge and specific
high-level secretive programs could be made into joint-efforts
using inter-service SAP methodologies AND the budget would be
overseen by a SINGLE entity rather than the myriad management
offcies we have now.

HMMMM.....Maybe the GAO should hire me so I can standardize
all the R&D computer accounting systems so as to manage
ALL special access programs from a central oversight committee,
then I would combine specific R&D projects into single projects
that would SHARE their expertise with ALL arms (i.e. Air Force, Navy,
Army, Marines) within a project-specific encrypted online database
system that stores those results and test data in a PROPERLY secured
and encrypted manner sort of like a combined Facebook/Wikipedia
for each SAP program.

I would also include a master scheduler/daytimer/calendar/
costing/purchasing/personnel/project management functions
within the database so that the project technical & management
people could SEE what each project is costing us.

At specified intervals, I would FORCE BOTH and TECHNICAL and FISCAL
audit to see if a project is still on the straight rails by at least determining
that technical goals are being met and there is some oversight on how
much is being spent on which portions of the project.

Ironically, the company I work for has ALREADY developed
such software and systems for SAP/CAP high-security project
oversight capabilities....for....highly encrypted technical and fiscal
project tracking and R&D/Test results management over WIDE AREA
NETWORKS using secure, platform & CPU architecture independent
software systems.

Give me a call or U2U and we'll tell you what we can do for you!

I finally have a picture of the x-winged aircraft. I quickly drew it in Microsoft Paint and some of the dimentions may be slightly off, as it was 10 years ago and in the middle of the night, but you get the basic idea.

I am grateful for all the replies to my post. It was suggested it might have been a UAV. This is a possibility but it was a FULL size aircraft, not a scaled down demonstrator.

X-Wing Aircraft

Looks suspiciously like the X-36...



Its the small one, right infront of the SR-71.