The SR-91 “Aurora”: The Plane that Doesn’t Exist…

in the quietest darkest vaults of Aerospace Legends lies a whisper a mere fleeting shadow of an airplane that if it ever existed at all might have been amongst the most incredible aircraft ever created presumptively referred to as the sr91 and given the informal name of Aurora by those who believe it exists this mysterious creation could just as easily have been a real life airplane or just a myth those who would have commissioned it the US government have said nothing those who would have built it locki Martin claim it never existed at all and those who claim it did exist or still does regarded as the most incredible secretive black project in American history so today Mega projects we're going to be peering through the mist and trying our best to see the aurora for what it really was perhaps a legend perhaps a hoax or perhaps a masterpiece soaring through our skies Without a [Music] Trace before we Contin I've got something special to share with you something that will add a touch of 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and they' even got 10 physical stores in Germany and Austria now my lovely audience if you're excited as I about adding some wood to your style head on over to holzkern H Oz K rn.com Simon and don't forget to use the code Simon and you'll get 15% off so thank you holen for bringing nature to fashion and sponsoring today's video of course and now back to it the is6 military is really good at keeping secrets from the locations of its nuclear submarines to the capabilities of its fifth generation fighters to the identities of its intelligence assets around the world but there's one group of secrets that Pentagon keeps better than any other the black projects a series of projects dependent on close workking relationships between the United States and its defense contractors the pentagon's black projects consume tens of billions of dollars every year disappearing into a hole from which precious little information has ever escaped in many cases the results of these projects are never known in others they represent some of the most impressive Innovations of the United States military take the stealth attack F1 117 night talk which was mass-produced in secret and announced just months before it flew in a combat mission for the first time or the sea Shadow an experimental stealth ship completed in the mid 1980s by and large these are not projects that become known to the public before the Pentagon is good and ready to let the public know and it's that ve of mystery that has bred one of the most fiercest rumor Mills in the world one such rumor began circulating in 1985 when while pouring over United States annual budget for that year reporter Ralph V be and of the Los Angeles Times noticed something rather odd according to an unclassified budget report for the Pentagon the defense department intended to spend a whole lot of money on something called Aurora what Aurora was the report didn't specify but it was clear from the budget projections that two things were true Aurora was a not insignificant program and it was in its early stages with the expectation that it was going to get a lot bigger the dod had allocated $80 million for the project in 1986 and in 198 87 that number was scheduled to grow exponentially to an investment of $2.3 billion at face value both the numbers involved and the general Rush towards stealth technology in the US government around this same time LED vedan and the general public to believe a few key things first this was probably going to be a stealth program of some kind perhaps working with Northrup or locked to develop a stealth fighter aircraft second the program was moving really fast $80 million was a pretty small amount of R&D money whereas 2 .3 billion is a whole lot even for the Pentagon those numbers spoke to a high priority program and an ambitious timeline for reference the Pentagon was only spending about a billion dollars each year on what would eventually become the B2 Spirit bomber as for who exactly was involved in this Aurora business it was most likely locked the company was recruiting intensively at the time and had been seen sending a Plane full of locked workers out to an Air Force plant every morning traveling to an unknown facility according to vard obedian the windows on that plane were taped over meaning that not even the project staff knew where they were headed of course we know in the modern day that that could have been for any number of ongoing locked programs at that time but that wasn't information that the news sources of the day had finally the LA Times and the other reporting news sources knew that it would be highly unusual for the name of such a program to be included in a report after the existence of an aurora program or Aurora something was publicized the Department of Defense refused to answer questions about it according to the dod the matter was official classified at this point in the Aurora story we've got to emphasize that this has stayed the official line from the US government ever since that there was never an aurora no such aircraft was ever built and there has never been an aircraft designed for the purposes that we're about to discuss specifically a follow on to the SR71 Blackbird but of course if we put on our Skeptics hat then that's exactly what the government would say isn't it regardless of the dod's official stance on the matter the Aurora had emerged into a realm of speculation and well speculate we [Music] would so once the defense analysts and neens of the world latched onto the idea that an aurora aircraft might exist the next question obviously became well what is it one clue as to what it wasn't came from the name the United States's fighter aircraft before and after the Aurora was publicized had typically used the names of not necessarily predatory animals but animals that can be very aggressive when they need to be see the F14 Tomcats the F-15 Eagle the F-16 Fighting Falcon or if you prefer Viper The fa18 Hornet the F22 Raptor disregard the F35 lightning too that's a tribute to the P38 Lightning of World War I another significant clue was that the Aurora budget was referenced right after a reference to the tr1 a batch of U2 aircrafts that were made for tactical reconnaissance missions combine those two scraps of information and it was conceivable to work out that the aura was wasn't a fighter but perhaps a reconnaissance plane instead the next question to tackle was just why it would be so expensive and those who examin the potential project had a few ideas in that department too Chief among them was that the plane was a successor to the SR71 filling a role that was expected to be vacant within a few years but obviously this new plane with a couple of decades to work would be better in some way than the SL 71 had been those improvements were expected to come in three main areas speed altitude and stealth in terms of speed the United States was believed to have the potential to create a Hypersonic aircraft one that could fly at five times the speed of sound or more those would use ramjets or scramjets air breathing engines that allow for incredibly fast travel which the United States was believed to either be on the fringes of developing or already had in its Arsenal in hindsight we know that the Air Force NASA and private firms were indeed designing and learning about Mac 5 aircraft during the years immediately preceding 1985 when again Aura itself first showed up not only that but work was well underway on the sorts of structures that would allow such an aircraft to survive the intense seed generated by Hypersonic travel of course with the capacity to travel at insane speed a would come stealth technology which seemed more and more to be a Cornerstone of just about everything the dod worked on and it would also of course have the potential to travel at high altitudes as well as for the shape of the aircraft both conjecture and the witness reports that we'll discuss in a moment each suggest that the Aurora aircraft would have been wedge shaped with small Delta Wings hugging tight to the main fuselage of the plane that would allow the aircraft to fly with fewer heating issues the aircraft was believed to be manned and believed not to be armed although for a spy plane logic followed that it would likely have carried onboard cameras sensors and other intelligence equipment it would have been crewed by two people equipped with a real-time data link for reconnaissance and would be able to reach most spots around the world quickly and with minimal fuss at a speed of between Mac 5 and Mac 6 flying dozens of kilometers above the ground it would have been well outside the range of any current missile technology feasibility studies on a Hypersonic commercial jetliner suggested that a scale nailed down aircraft might have a range of up to 10,000 Mi while carrying a one ton sensor Suite according to Aerospace analyst wolf Gand de Mish the program of this size may have yielded some 30 production line aircraft in total while security expert Lawrence Harris suggests a probable First Flight in or around 1989 and entry into Service as early as 1995 Harris's analysis extrapolated a total price tag from 4.4 billion to $8 billion for development and up to another $24 billion to actually produce the fleet this would put prices potentially as high as a billion dollar per plane finally it most likely got a different name given that the Aurora name if indeed it corresponded to the secret program would probably have been considered compromised in 1985 when it was released to the public the Aurora program never appeared in later Department of Defense materials at least under that name and while that in itself shouldn't be much of a surprise it also meant that any later budget allocations after 1987 were completely hidden to the public the program could have grown and grown for years it could have held steady it could have disappeared we just don't know regardless the dod wasn't going to say a word about it and for a little while it seemed as if that might be the end of this odd little anomaly then the sightings [Music] began one of the earliest sightings of an aircraft that's since been tied the Aurora Legend and perhaps the most credible one to this day came in 1989 when one Chris Gibson working on the Galveston key oil rig in the North Sea just Eastward of Brit saw something unusual now if you're the Department of Defense and you're going to be flying an ultra secret aircraft around Chris Gibson was not the guy that you wanted to be spotted by he had spent 12 years with the Royal Observer Corp a British civil defense organization whose entire job was spotting identifying and tracking aircraft and he was very very good at knowing what aircraft he was looking at according to Gibson he observed an unfamiliar aircraft in the sky in the shape of an isoceles triangle that is one with two long sides of equal length and a short third side something like an equilateral triangle if you stretch it out by pulling on one of its tips the unidentified aircraft appeared to be refueling from a Boeing made KC 135 Strat tanker with a pair of f111 arvar fighter bomber aircraft operating as an escort for several minutes the group of aircraft lingered in a part of the sky that Gibson could see before eventually moving out of sight Gibson sketched the incident although he wouldn't publicize it until 1992 when he presented the account to Jane's defense weekly by that time sightings of a strange identified aircraft over the British Isles had grown far more common most of the reported incidents took place over Scotland and England with press rumors suggesting that whatever they were seeing was operating out of RAF MRA Hanes on Scotland's Peninsula canar locals reported not only seeing an aircraft that matched the aar's visual description but produced loud Sonic booms and other noises the British government appeared to investigate the report always as if they too were being kept in the dark about whatever was going on as British defense secretary Tom King said in 1992 there is no knowledge in the mod of such a black or program of this nature although it would not surprise the relevant desk officers in the air staff and defense intelligence staff if it did exist and nor was Chris Gibson the only person who believed had seen the Aurora in the sky one Royal Air Force officer group Captain Tom eels reported that in the Autumn of 1993 a strange plane had passed over his home near the US Air Force's miden hall base in suffk according to eels there was quote a very strange sounding aircraft passing overhead the engine noise was a pulsing sound quite unlike anything I'd ever heard before eels didn't get much of a look at the plane but saw lights disappearing in the direction of the Minden Hall Base when he asked a senior RF officer about the aircraft the following day he received very forceful instructions to stop asking about the thing and while this alleged secret aircraft would have been in Britain there are at least some indicators that something might have gone wrong a few weeks prior to E's sighting an unknown US aircraft had been forced to land at the base but was quickly hidden from sight and taken away from the airbase in a C5 Galaxy aircraft a year l later a mysterious crash in the boscom down RAF base at known testing Cipher military aircraft saw a massive response by US military aircraft and British Special Air Service personnel with the base itself being closed shortly afterward since that time reports have emerged that the crash was due to a towed missile decoy malfunctioning but even if we accept that premise it certainly fueled aora speculation at the time several news sources including the independent reported that a top secret Hypersonic American spy plane had crashed based on a report by Air Forces monthly the independent or o referenced unexplained Sonic booms over the Netherlands in 1992 and intercepted radio Transmissions from an airplane descending from 65,000 ft altitudes that at that time were not thought to be reached by any aircraft other than the U2 plane or the space shuttle then there's the sightings that came out of the United States starting with a series of unusual Sonic booms across Southern California with a profile that suggested a small vehicle with no known match later analysis has indicated that it was traveling at a speed of between Mac 4 and Mac 5.2 at an out of around 90,000 ft in 1990 Aviation weak and space technology published claims that there was an high altitude aircraft crossing over the night sky at extremely high speeds over the continental United States sometimes seen as a single pulsating bright light in 1992 an observer in Texas spotted unique contrails referred to as Donuts on a rope which he associated with a deep pulsating roaring sound that caused his home to vibrate not only that but without same Observer Steven Douglas claims that he had intercepted radio transmissions in which two aircraft were heard using the call signs darkar November and darkar Mike call signs that did not make sense given how aircraft known to use the darkar moniker would not have produced those specific aerial phenomena in a separate 1992 instant observers around be Air Force Base the longtime home of the SR71 reported a triangular aircraft that seemed to resemble the Aurora an Area 51 Enthusiast named Chu Clark even claims to have filmed the Aurora taking off from Groom Lake although he claims to have kept his tape of the incident locked away given the array of witness statements and test testimonies analysts who followed the Aurora legend for years believed that the aircraft would have been undergoing testing in the southwestern United States and possibly in Scotland as well but could very well have assumed an operational role explaining the instances in which it allegedly popped up around the world by mid 1992 analyst Bill Sweetman was confident enough to suggest that whatever program was responsible for a wave of Sonic booms believed to be attributed to Aurora wasn't just working with a prototype instead it was going on missions around the world doing who knows what and when it operated in closely the Allied countries the people at the heads of those National governments didn't appear to know what was going on but all this speculation was blunted in a major way in 1994 when a book by Ben Rich the former heads of the locked skunkworks division that's been responsible for the SR71 and many of the United States's other coolest black projects attempted to put the Aurora issue to bed once and for all as rich said himself although I expect few in the media to believe me there is no code name for the Hypersonic plane because it simply does not exist according to him Aurora been a budgetary code name to refer to the project that would eventually evolve into the B2 Spirit bomber and the name had bumbled its way into the budgetary report as a simple mistake of course how much Credence you give this idea is really up to you on the one hand Ben rich is perhaps the most knowledgeable person outside the Pentagon on what Aurora might have been and he was out of locked Martin by the time he published his book on the other he was also a deeply ined civilian inside the dod's mess of Secrets and the question of whether his assertion is believable has been the subject of debate in [Music] itself so with a nebula sensity that might or might not be known as the Aurora program represented here as fully as we hear Omega projects arel we're left with one really critical question did the Aurora ever exist in our answer we're going to refer to Alex Hollings writing for the national interest in October of 2023 said Hollings after pouring over historical media reporting Declassified documents eyewitness accounts and more foreign posts than you could photograph from the You2 it seems extremely unlikely that the United States ever had an operational Fleet of secret Hypersonic aircraft but that doesn't mean something like it never darkened the massive hang of doors at Area 51 now we're going to take Mr Hollings at his word when it comes to all of those foreign posts but we concur that even if an aurora or an aurora like program has flown even if whatever flyable end product It produced did at some point fly over Britain and other us allies in Europe that a production line Fleet in the multiple dozens of planes was probably never built at an Incredible cost per plane it would have been very difficult for the US government to hide such a large scale procurement and while the incident rate of sightings is by no means low it's not nearly on the level that would suggest a large number of aircraft in continual operation not only that but it is hard to keep a secret this big for this long between program staff current and former employees at Skunk Works Pilots maintenance Crews foreign military members who saw the thing at foreign air bases and more it's more likely than not that all these people would have let something slip but that likelihood goes way down if we're talking about the circles that would be in the know if a prototype or a small handful of four to six aircraft were ultimately produced that being said the witness reports we've covered here from seemingly credible sources for the most part they share enough commonalities that it's not unreasonable to assess that there was something in the sky spreading strange Sonic booms and funky pulsating sounds in the early to mid 1990s some of the most compelling evidence of the Aurora the profiles of the Sonic booms It produced suggest that a plane matching the Aurora's description and capabilities might well have been flying around out there not only that but there would have been real strategic value in having a replacement for the SR71 but with a plane that can travel so far and so fast even a couple of working prototypes or a very small air fleet could have made a big impact while keeping the overall Fleet number small would have simultaneously kept costs low kept the program in the shadows and reduced the likelihood of a plane crashing malfunctioning being spotted or otherwise becoming known to either the general public or America's adversaries also of note is the Department of Defense is rationale for ending the SR71 program which of course has been regarded as the reason the Aurora would need to exist at all according to the dod the sr-71's operating and maintenance costs were simply too high to justify its continued operation but a second equally important piece was to consider that satellites could perform Global surveillance more efficiently and for much cheaper than Mann aircraft like the Blackbird but that claim has come under Fire too with a wide range of analysts before and after the program's cancellation all emphasizing that the intelligence value of a high-speed High stealth reconnaissance aircraft goes beyond what satellites can offer they're lower flying they can get to a spot over a Target just as fast or even faster they can move with a lower probability of being tracked and they're easier to dispatch on a moment's notice to deal with emerging crisis most days satellites will be enough but when geopolitical attentions really start getting serious you're going to want to have an aurora in your back pocket and lastly we turn back to Skunk Works for an indicator that Hypersonic plane technology has evolved even further than it hypothetically would have in the days when the Aurora was said to have flown that indicator comes in the form of the sr-72 a Hypersonic unmanned aircraft proposed privately by loed marting to the US government in 2013 according to locked Martin itself in 2018 a prototype Sr 72 was then expected to fly by 2025 and recently locked Martin has been more and more willing to drop hints that a Hypersonic something does indeed exist and was possibly already delivered to the US Air Force we bring up the SR 72 not because we believe that it's the Aurora we would in fact argue that that's not the case at all instead we bring it up because if indeed it is real then it would be a massive Evolution on any of the Technologies included in the Blackbird or any other known aircraft belonging to the United States government the development of advanced military technology like this is not something that happens in Leaps and Bounds or all at once instead progress is typically incremental with each new development building toward the next and the next and the next after that for the United States to go from the SR71 to the SR 72 with nothing in between would be highly unusual here at Mega projects our best guess is that the USA didn't go from the 71 to the 72 at all looking at all the information we know and all the information we think we know we'd be willing to bet that there was an aircraft in the middle possibly a whole series of them we don't know what they did we don't know how many there were we don't know how long they were operated but there is a hole in the United States's chronology of high-speed intelligence aircraft and if that hole was ever filled then it was by a plane we call Aurora even if its true name might stay forever lost to history now just before you go today don't forget to check out our fantastic sponsor today holen there is a link in the description below don't forget to use the code Simon as well in get 15% off and I'll see you next [Music] [Music] time

Channel: Megaprojects

Views: 1,408,899

Keywords: the sr-91 aurora - does it exists - documentary, the sr-91 aurora aircraft, world's fastest plane takeoff, world's fastest plane top speed, air force's secret hypersonic plane, world's fastest plane speed, fastest plane ever recorded, fighter planes, air force's secret 6th-gen hypersonic plane, fastest jet plane, spy planes, fastest plane, planes, aurora, spy plane, black plane, plane

Id: 6Y8RVqCBLvM

Length: 22min 14sec (1334 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 26 2024