A story in last month’s L.A. Times reports on efforts to build lighter-than-air platforms that will hover over areas of the Earth for months or years at a time, gathering intelligence data with cameras and sensors. Some of the proposed airships are shaped like huge boomerangs and (it is rumored) triangles. That fact may ring a bell with some readers.
An article in the September, 2004 issue of Popular Communications entitled “Monitoring the Military’s ‘UFO’ Sky Spies” apparently scooped the LAT by almost five years. Author Steve Douglass uncovered that giant defense contractor Lockheed Martin was awarded a contract to develop such a system:
In 2001, the Missile Defense Agency awarded Lockheed Martin a $40 million contract to work on the High Altitude Airship, a 500-foot-long (152-meter-long) blimp, 25 times larger than the Goodyear blimp and much more capable than the Ascender and could loiter at altitudes above 65,000 feet for as long as a year.
JP Aerospace’s Ascender 3 (from the company’s website)
The “Ascender” is a V-shaped airship developed by a small Texas company called JP Aerospace. A company called General Orbital is also working on a high altitude airship, according to information at its website.
Concept of General Orbital’s Manned Airship
Persistent reports of silent, boomerang-shaped UFOs have been occurring for almost two decades, which suggests once again that lighter-than-air vehicles may account for most, if not all of these types of sightings, given the fact that public disclosure of advanced technology is often 10-20 years behind the actual deployment. A few accounts of fast-moving, highly maneuverable craft are harder to explain in this context, however.
Try enetering some creative terms along these lines into your favorite search engine, and tell me what you come up with.
Thank you to my wife Sigrid and her interest in blimps and dirigibles!
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