Is this a top secret plane?, page 15

My honest opinion (if anyone cares to hear it)

Hoax.

The 'aircraft' just doesn't fit.

Furthermore, 'we' don't test this stuff where people can just whip out a camera and take a picture of it flying within visual range from the ground. I firmly believe governments are incompetent. Thankfully, programs such as this only rely on government spending, and like to keep their distance from the steaming pile of incompetence.

For the last time - the aircraft in the picture is not an F-117, for God's sake. I'm losing faith in humanity with each post that says "looks like an F-117!" I'll rant a bit - the F-117, great for its time, was a product of compromise. Computers didn't have the processing capability to simulate radar return dynamics on curved surfaces. Although we'll not even approach the difficulty imposed on even this by the fact that no radar beam is 'flat' to begin with. So, they could compute a bunch of flat, faceted edges. Remember old computer/console games? Same idea - they built what they could work with in a computer.

The F-117 was an out-dated airframe not ten years after it was flown. We had the technological capability to develop the curved surfaces used today - the B-2, F-23, F-22, etc. We would not be building 'updated' versions of the F-117 anymore than we'd be building upgraded versions of vacuum tube radios. We've got far better things to build.

That said - I don't doubt there is a -similar- type of airframe to the 'aurora.' It doesn't take the brightest cookie in the tool-shed to figure out a 'sharp triangle' is better at going fast than 'box wings.' I don't have a degree - I'm not going to try and make it sound like you need twenty years of schooling to realize the pointy airplane can fly faster, especially if it has much larger and menacing looking jet-blasts coming out of the back of it.

I expect there have been several research-oriented airframes designed that would fit the description of the "aurora." Steak knives are serrated, butter knives aren't sharp. Fast-flying planes will have some features they share in common, even if they are completely different models completed under different contracts.

As for the "aurora" - whatever prompted the original concept is older than I am. I recently 'decommissioned' a bunch of communications gear that was built about that same time - it had sat in storage for half an eternity before it finally was stricken from inventory. Whatever the 'original aurora' was is ancient and probably gone, broken up as per OIC and personnel instructions and sent to the facilities that handle disposal of classified materials.

And for God's sake, even if the photo is 'real' - there's very little that can be learned from it. There are no distinct features, other than some weir 'lobes' (which could be anything from ground-search radars to star-trek warp cores or portals to Mario World) - which are really nothing more than pixels colored more lightly than the rest of the subject image. There's pretty much nothing to use as a scaling reference (not that there is in real photos of aircraft, in many cases - stuff in the sky is just difficult to tell how big it actually is). So it could be anything from a paper airplane to Jean-Luc Picard in the Enterprise. It could also be anywhere between five feet and fifty kilometers away.

At best - it's a pointy airplane. It goes fast. There's only a hundred declassified documents showing funding for aircraft meeting such criteria.