The SR-71 Blackbird was a Mach 3.2 aircraft in the 1960's. That is amazing! With advancements in ramjet/scram jet technology, don't you think we must have at least a Mach 6 aircraft today? However, having said that, with the demise of the Soviet Union, no longer needing to overfly large amounts of land/territories, plus the increase reliance on satellites, do we even need an aircraft that goes that fast? Looking at the F22 and F35, I believe we are looking at Mach 2 at most, instead placing more importance on stealth technology, radar evadence, and avionics. Plus all the work we've done on UAVs/drones, it wouldn't suprise me if we had stealth drones! With all the speculation about the "Aurora Project," do we even have a tactical need for such an aircraft. I know this subject matter is something of blasphemy in UFO circles, but its clear the U.S. is putting a lot of time and energy into drones, given our current enemies don't have an air force to speak of, no fighters, no bombers, no need to intercept anything at 30,000 feet. But, I won't aruge that having a "black budget" of $50 billion is alot to just spend on drones...hehehe...afterall, just our defense budget alone is approximately $600 billion! I'm sure we are not spending all this money on toilets and hammers. lol.

What do you think?

600 billion dollar budget is what their willing to show they spend. Secret black budget projects I'm sure is not included in that. Like you I've always questioned why they haven't released a new project in almost twenty years, since the Stealth fighter and B1 bomber. I'm mean the F22 Raptor is the best think they could come up with of late!

With all the triangle sightings of late, that would be the most likely their new project. For all we know that's been around since the 80's.
Whatever they have, they don't what any other countries spotting it. After all we/USA have to have the upper hand at all times!

I've often thought about this question. What have they replaced the sr-71 with? I've heard they have a Black Triangle which supposedly uses some sort of cloaking device. But that could simply be interweb dis-info

Who Knows what their working on... i wish i knew what was going on with all the U.F.O sighting and also the big triangle every one seems to see but me. I have never seen a U.F.O before, i thought i saw one like a week ago. it was a light in the sky that would turn on and off like a light and also would dim like it was on a dimmer switch. Would i need to actually look for these things or just hope i happen to see one some day?

probibly some state of the art aircraft for WWIII

PROBIBLY GOOD VERY GOOD

One of the things I did not put in my initial introduction was the number of Rocket Scientists I once knew. I taught several how to fly para-gliders and knew a couple of others pretty well. Two worked at Rockwell, one at Hughs, one at Lockheed Martin.

One was my close friends was a Russian rocket scientist on "trade" to Rockwell. He specialized in "micro satellites"
One led the department at Hughs that designed the first camera that took the first color picture of Earth.
One was a mathematician working on the Star Wars Project. He did a lot of the math involved.
One of them got his very first job at....... The Skunkworks!

As you can imagine I often gave each and every one of these guys a fair bit of alcohol on more than one occasion. Here are ALL of the tid-bits I EVER got.

Satellites - More than you can imagine, some quite small. Some most likely carrying anti-satellite weapons.
Top secret aircraft - ten years ago I was told that with-in 20 years we would no longer need a wing to develop lift. All he said was that they were playing with Plasma.
Aurora - I specifically asked about it and was told it was total disinfo; When I expressed disappointment he followed that revelation with the following question "Have you ever known the military to take anything out of service (SR-71) without something that will fly higher, faster and stealthier?"

Now imagine if a lowly guy like me heard this kind of stuff from friends with T.S. clearances imagine what must really be happening out there!

P.S. Not a one of these people were "disgruntled or unhappy employees" and all but one (retired) still has their jobs.

Originally posted by SkyMuerte
One of the things I did not put in my initial introduction was the number of Rocket Scientists I once knew. I taught several how to fly para-gliders and knew a couple of others pretty well. Two worked at Rockwell, one at Hughs, one at Lockheed Martin.

One was my close friends was a Russian rocket scientist on "trade" to Rockwell. He specialized in "micro satellites"
One led the department at Hughs that designed the first camera that took the first color picture of Earth.
One was a mathematician working on the Star Wars Project. He did a lot of the math involved.
One of them got his very first job at....... The Skunkworks!

As you can imagine I often gave each and every one of these guys a fair bit of alcohol on more than one occasion. Here are ALL of the tid-bits I EVER got.

Satellites - More than you can imagine, some quite small. Some most likely carrying anti-satellite weapons.
Top secret aircraft - ten years ago I was told that with-in 20 years we would no longer need a wing to develop lift. All he said was that they were playing with Plasma.
Aurora - I specifically asked about it and was told it was total disinfo; When I expressed disappointment he followed that revelation with the following question "Have you ever known the military to take anything out of service (SR-71) without something that will fly higher, faster and stealthier?"

Now imagine if a lowly guy like me heard this kind of stuff from friends with T.S. clearances imagine what must really be happening out there!

P.S. Not a one of these people were "disgruntled or unhappy employees" and all but one (retired) still has their jobs.

See that's a story I can believe...bunch of guys talking shop, yeah, they got security clearances but they didn't leak anything you didn't already know, or guess. Its reasonable and logical. The fun part of it is that they confirmed what you were thinking, bout stuff like Aurora and the Blackbird.

I have a friend who recently was hired at a defense contractor. He is doing project managment type of work, other than that, I don't know what projects he works for, other than he travels a lot. Well one day he tells me that he overhead a couple employees discussing something about alien hardware. He said we have some hardware, its broken but we're trying to make it work. He also said we don't have any bodies. Now, I immediately asked 1) are you messing with me? 2) Did he think it was an attempt at disinformation? He said no on both accounts, and specifically, he didn't feel these geeks were the disinformation types. I still don't know if I believe him. But, it certainly gets my imagination going. Again, at this day and age, I really don't see the usefullness in the Government disseminating disinformation about UFO's. We are all aware that government works on advanced technologies, we know where they do it even! What's the point nowadays?

Thanks for the reply!

Given that any actual answers to the "What now?" question are probably so deep black that they don't even show up on infrared, and so classified that the President doesn't see them without need-to-know and an escort, anything we do here will be guesswork. Disclaimer in place, here's my best guesswork, all based on open-source information.

Aurora (or some other ultra-fast manned recon airframe) - I'm really doubtful about this one. I'd *like* to believe it's out there, but reality argues against it. The SR-71 was already more than fast enough, and flew more than high enough, to get intelligence data from anyplace on Earth. The Blackbird was retired, not because it was obsolete, but because it was considered too expensive to maintain and fly. Why would an air force (or intelligence agency) that considered the Blackbird too expensive spend billions on the R-and-D needed to create something that was faster, and flew higher, using exotic (and therefore expensive) technologies? Why spend money you don't have on performance you don't need?

Stealth - Reduced-observable ("stealth") characteristics are still valuable..one look at the F-22 and F-35 can show you that...but the sort of extreme stealth that shaped the F-117 and B-2 seems to have fallen out of favor for a variety of reasons. Now, stealth is what you get when you can get it, but you don't trade off mission capability for it. Personally, I think that's a good trend.

Remotely Piloted vehicles - As much as I like fighter pilots (posthumous salutes and raised mugs for Sir Douglas Bader, Adolf Galland, R. Stanford Tuck, and Greg "Pappy" Boyington. Great men all, with great stories to tell!) and bomber pilots (More salutes and more mugs for General Paul Tibbets!), remote piloting offers too many advantages *not* to be the wave of the future...there are problems, but that's what development is all about.

Taking just those three rambling points, here's my composite vision of "what's next". The hypothetical BSR-72 (Brother Stormhammer's Reconnaissance 72) will be a remotely piloted platform...Ideally, it will be a combination aircraft, with a subsonic 'carrier' platform designed for maximum stealth, long range, and carrying data-relay equipment. The payload craft will be a supersonic (Mach 3+) platform that sacrifices some stealth for speed and good stability (to make best use of its sensors).

No idea if anything like this is in the pipeline, but it seems like as reasonable a guess as any.