This famous UFO is not what it seems

December 31, 1982—the Hudson River Valley, 25 miles north of New York City. Hundreds of witnesses, including police officer Andy Sadoff, report sighting a V-shaped object in the sky. It is enormous—at least the width of a football-field—and moving very slowly and close to the ground. It is completely silent, and only gets noticed because of its very bright, strobing lights.

Similar sightings occur in March 1983, with hundreds of eyewitness reports. For six years, until 1989, the “Hudson Valley Boomerang” is seen by more than 5,000 recorded witnesses, spanning the states of New York & Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and even Massachusetts. They include lawyers, engineers, housewives, mechanics, and even dozens of police officers—including the chief of the Dranbury, Connecticut police department. Later, Dr J Allen Hynek, Philip J Imbrogno & Bob Pratt write a book on the phenomenon titled Night Siege: The Hudson Valley UFO Sightings, published in 1998 by Llewellyn Publications.

Twice is coincidence

November 29, 1989—the Berlin Wall has just fallen. In the small European country of Belgium, an estimated 13,500 people are witness to an extraordinarily large, triangular-shaped craft moving overhead in the direction of Germany. It is flying very low, and would go unseen if not for its blinding, strobing lights. Written reports are filed by 2,600 individuals, and a photograph taken by one eyewitness is later computer-enhanced and verified to be genuine. Sightings continue until April 1990. The event is later dubbed the “Belgian UFO Wave”.

But a third time…

May 25, 1995—over Taiban, New Mexico, a craft 300–400 feet long, lit by bright, strobing lights is sighted in restricted Fort Sumner military airspace by the crew of westward-bound America West B757 airliner Flight 564. It is holding altitude at 30,000 feet, and its structure is only visible when lit by flashes from a lightning storm. The flight crew immediately contact the Albuquerque FAA Air Route Traffic Control Center, and you can listen to a recording of their conversation by clicking the play button below.

…and a fourth

March 13, 1997—Phoenix, Arizona. In an incident now called the “Phoenix Lights”, thousands of eyewitnesses report seeing a vast, triangular or chevron-shaped craft in the night sky. It is completely silent, and illuminated by several bright lights. Among the eyewitnesses is Fife Symington, the governor of Arizona. The craft moves slowly over the state, and is also seen in Nevada and the Mexican state of Sonora.

The reports continue…

January 5, 2000—from Highland, Illinois, to Dupo, Illinois, four unrelated police officers—Ed Barton in Lebanon, Dave Martin in Shiloh, Craig Stevens in Millstadt and Matt Jany in Dupo—all report a vast, black triangular craft moving on a hook-shaped flight pattern between their counties. Three civilians also offer identical accounts. The incident is later featured in a SPACE.com article, and you can read an extremely comprehensive writeup at the Riverfront Times.

February 16, 2000; August 21, 2004; October 31, 2004; October 1, 2005; and Sept 23, 2006—multiple sightings of a triangular-shaped craft in the sky are reported at Rockford, Tinley Park, and Oak Park, Illinois.

The reports prompt the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS), funded by billionaire Robert Bigelow, to investigate. In 2001, they deliver a report on the flying triangles, dubbing them “Big Black Deltas” or BBDs. You can click here to download the report in PDF format.

In 2002, NIDS releases a second report concluding that there is good evidence that the Big Black Deltas seen throughout the United States are Department of Defense aircraft. Click here to download this report in PDF format.

…all over the world…

April 23, 2007—Guernsey England. Two unrelated commercial pilots report the same unidentified object flying at 30,000 feet. Viewed from the side its shape cannot be determined, but one of the pilots, Captain Ray Bowyer, can see it clearly from 40 miles away, and estimates it to be as much as a mile wide. The incident is reported in a local Guernsey paper.

…and particularly the United States…

January 8, 2008—Stephenville, Texas. City residents, including a constable, the chief of police, a pilot, and a former air-traffic controller, report seeing a large object hovering about 300 feet over the ground. Some eyewitnesses claim it to be a mile long and a half-mile wide; all maintain it is very large, very quiet, and equipped with a strobing light configuration which doesn’t match any conventional aircraft.

All told, the number of people who have seen this “Big Black Delta” number in the tens of thousands. The evidence for its existence is widely documented, widely-corroborated by reliable and independent witnesses in independent locations…and quite incontrovertible. For example, it has been sighted by numerous pilots, who make particularly good eyewitnesses because they have a lot of expertise with spotting, evaluating, and identifying objects in the air. Plus, there is also a lot of job pressure to not report so-called UFOs, as noted in this interview with Captain Ray Bowyer, the pilot who spotted the Big Black Delta over Guernsey.

So what is it?

The military's secret romance with quiet sensor laden airships began long ago during the tumultuous Vietnam war. DARPA, The Defense Advanced Research Projects agency (then called ARPA) sponsored several design studies along with the Air Force's Cambridge research lab.

In 1964 a secret airship project named Silent Joe was designed for remote operations over the Ho Chi Mihn trail using infra red and acoustic sensors. It was quickly followed by Silent Joe II, POBOL, HASKV, and then POBOL-S, which was designed to watch targets below from an altitude of 70,000 feet for seven days. And this was in 1974!

Around the same time period, Aereon Corporation proposed the Dynairship Ultra-Large Airlifter. Designed by William Miller, the Dynairship was a hybrid lifting-body airship which combined the lighter-than-air buoyancy of zeppelins with a flying wing design such as that used for the B-2 Spirit bomber.

The concept was tested in the form of the Aereon 26, a scaled, non-hybrid aircraft which confirmed the feasibility of the flying wing design for providing lift. Following flight tests in 1971, Aereon’s board voted unanimously to develop the Dynairship for commercial cargo service. However, the program couldn’t be financed, and never went ahead. According to Aereon, the Department of Defense told Miller back then, “You were 30 years ahead of your time!”

Although the Dynairship program was scrapped, Miller went on to develop designs for Aereon, under Navy and Air Force contracts, for a similar flying wing. This one was designed exclusively to house phased radar arrays, allowing it to function as a powerful high-altitude surveillance platform. Miller patented the designs under US patents 4896160 and 5034751.

In 1981 the Navy contracted Lockheed Martin to develop a lighter-than-air (LTA) high altitude surveillance platform called HI-SPOT—HI Surveillance Platform for Over-the-horizon Targeting. At around the same time, NASA launched a similar program called HAPP—the High Altitude Powered Platform, which was designed to be a flying radar surveillance station. Feasibility studies for both these programs were conducted by ILC Dover. You can download their Final Report on the Design Definition of the Lighter-Than-Air High Altitude Powered Platform, directly from NASA’s online archives. And you can download the report on Phase II of the study from the Corporation for National Research Initiatives.

Shortly after these documents were issued, the program became classified and Lockheed Martin made no further press releases. However, it’s a matter of public record among those in the industry that Lockheed has always been interested in airships for military purposes, and a telling 1982 diagram of a “stealth blimp” is featured in Popular Mechanics, September 1999, page 64 (with supporting notes on page 119).

According to a SPACE.com interview with L Scott Miller, professor of Aerospace Engineering at Wichita State University in Kansas, and a distinguished lecturer of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA),

Lockheed has shown a great deal of interest in airships for many years. The real question is whether the Department of Defense has committed to buy and use such machines. I do think that a large airship, with a heavy lift and other mission objectives, has been built.

Certainly, government interest in using airships for high-altitude surveillance is ongoing; in 2003 Lockheed announced they were under contract by the DoD Missile Defense Agency to develop a High Altitude Airship (HAA), and more recently they won a 2009 contract from DARPA and the US Air Force to develop a high-altitude surveillance airship called ISIS. There is also evidence that projects like HAPP haven’t been jettisoned by NASA, as demonstrated by a 2005 report titled High-Altitude, Long-Endurance Airships for Coastal Surveillance (PDF).

There are numerous benefits to using airships, because in many ways they combine the best features of conventional airplanes with the best features of satellites:

Satellite-type benefits

• Airships can operate at the very edge of space—up to 100,000 feet (30 km), which is well into the stratosphere. This is well above the 42,000 foot maximum ceiling of commercial jetliners, twice as high as the altitude record for gliders, and 40,000 feet out of reach of the most advanced air-superiority fighters. At this altitude, their surveillance horizon is vast—while at the same time they’re incredibly hard to detect. They can therefore keep an eye on a large area, anywhere on earth, with little chance of detection.
• Furthermore, despite their very high altitudes, airships are well below the ionosphere—which means they can pick up radio transmissions that satellites can’t. Radio waves at frequencies below 30 MHz are reflected by the ionosphere, and can’t propagate into space. Many strategically interesting transmissions take place beneath 30 MHz: for example, the ultra low frequency (ULF) 300–3,000 hertz range is used for secure transmissions through the ground, and the VLF 3–30 kHz range is used for submarine communications.
• Like satellites, airships don’t have to rely on fuel to stay aloft. They can therefore operate for extremely extended periods. For example, the USAF’s ISIS airship is intended to stay aloft for up to ten years at a time.

Aircraft-type benefits

• Airships are much cheaper than satellites—because much of a satellite’s cost goes into getting it into orbit. At something like $10,000 per pound of weight, it’s not an economical option for ad hoc surveillance, and requires long-term planning and investment. An airship, on the other hand, could be deployed anywhere in days once it were built. A fleet of surveillance airships would be astronomically cheaper than a similar fleet of satellites—and far more versatile.
• Airships can be deployed anywhere. While a satellite can only cover a certain area of the earth because it’s locked into an orbit, an airship can move about freely.

Other benefits

The versatile nature of airships means they aren’t confined to surveillance roles. Because they can be designed as bouyant lifting bodies, it’s possible to use them for transporting vast loads—tens or hundreds of times what a conventional airplane could carry, and much faster than a ship. For example, DARPA’s Walrus Hybrid Ultra Large Aircraft (HULA) is designed to carry 500–1,000 tons of cargo up to 12,000 nautical miles (22,000 km) in less than seven days.

Is our mysterious friend, the Triangle UFO, actually a “Stealth Blimp”?

It is, of course, impossible to know for sure—unless the government were to declassify the project. But what is certain is that when two explanations are possible, the simpler and less fantastical one is likely to be true. Given that Big Black Deltas are largely seen over the US, given that they always take a wing-shaped configuration, given that they always are very large, given that they are always silent…there is plenty of reason to think they might be classified Department of Defense stealth airships. Take the case of the Belgian sightings for example. These happened the last week of November 1989 through April of 1990. This was right at the exact period when the Berlin wall fell and the East German government collapsed. The crafts were heading to and coming from the area of East Berlin, certainly a job perfectly fitted to a covert reconnaissance craft.

While there is an undeniable mass appeal in the dramatic notion that our planet is patrolled by alien starships, there really is no objective evidence to support it. Given the general unlikeliness of another culture (were it to exist) ever being able to find the earth in our vast cosmos—let alone get here—common sense dictates that these mysterious craft are mundanely human in origin.

So dear readers, the time has come for us to call on you. We call on your endless curiosity. We call on your great wisdom. We call on your unstoppable willpower to help find an answer to this puzzle. Because no great mystery can elude a legion of ravenous detectives starving for the truth. Thank you.