Hidden Truth/Hidden Truth.iso/data/misctexts/archive-texts/15-darke.txt

Text File | 1996-03-04 | 5.4 KB | 91 lines

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`DARK' PLANES ALTERED AVIATION WHILE LAUNCHING UFO HYSTERIA            15/01/96
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Source: Insight Magazine

For the past 50 years, the military has shrouded its most clandestine
operations in the remote deserts of California and Nevada, producing aircraft
that pushed the limits of technology and military intelligence. With evocative
names such as Dreamland, the Ranch, Area 51 and Groom Lake, these secluded test
sites served as launching pads for aeronautical innovation, not to mention
several waves of UFO hysteria. It was commonly known that "something strange
was going on in the desert," but accounts in the media ranged from partial
truths to complete fabrications.

In Dark Eagles: A History of Top Secret U.S.  Aircraft (Presidio Press, 400
pp), aviation historian Curtis Peebles doggedly extracts fact from a mountain
of speculation and conjecture that festered during the Cold War. Sifting
through volumes of declassified military documents, he chronicles the
development of a series of "black" airplanes - planes tested and operated under
deep secrecy -and the fundamental changes in airpower and military strategy
that resulted from such efforts.

The book opens at the dawn of the jet age with a detailed explanation of the
XP59A, the first black airplane produced and tested in the early 1940s. Peebles
then focuses on the United States' quest for information about the Soviet Union
during the 1950s and developments in reconnaissance aircraft, especially the
U2. He uncovers the earliest beginnings of stealth technology and the success
Lockheed Corp. reached with the Have Blue 1001, a plane virtually invisible to
ground radar, and the phased out ultrasecret A-12, one of the most exotic
aircraft ever built. Jet and stealth technology then converge to produce the
F-117A Senior Trend, the aircraft credited with the swift Allied victory in the
Persian Gulf War.

Laden with technical detail, Dark Eagles appeals more to the aerospace
aficionado than the curious layman. Peebles painstakingly presents the
development of each aircraft textbook style - replete with footnotes. The
book's cast of characters changes with the crew of each new plane, and readers
unfamiliar with military history may find it difficult to appreciate the
author's finer points. For example, each chapter begins with a quote from Sun
Tzu, a fourth century B.C. military strategist and reputed author of the great
Chinese classic Ping-fa (The Art of War), although Sun Tzu is never identified
in the book.

If the reader is patient enough, however, Dark Eagles offers intriguing
anecdotes: narrow escapes in enemy territory, botched flights and lost planes,
secret reconnaissance missions and Cold War hostilities. The F-117A project was
so clandestine that the pilots could fly only at night - like vampires, they
were indoors before sun up.

"There was one thing wrong with flying higher than any other man had flown,"
says U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers. "You couldn't brag about it."

But efforts to keep the eagles in the dark did not go unchecked. Peebles
focuses on the adversarial relationship between the press and the military and
reiterates a debate that fomented during the Cuban Missile Crisis and
resurfaced during the gulf war: "What is more important - the public's right to
know or national security?" Peebles' opinion is undeniably clear. He criticizes
the fourth estate's attempt to shed light on the black aircraft during the Cold
War - reports that informed the American people but also gave clues to the
Soviets that helped them develop their own spy planes.

In the final chapters, Peebles grows increasingly impassioned, lauding the
successes of the dark eagles and lamenting the public's obsession with the
Aurora, a rumored stealth aircraft that is believed to achieve Mach 5 (3,800
mph) and reach altitudes of more than 100,000 feet. Despite several formal
denials by Pentagon officials, antigovernment hysteria has linked the Aurora to
sightings of flying saucers.

In fact, Peebles has written about the Aurora and UFOs extensively, most
recently in Watch the Skies! A Chronicle of the Flying Saucer Myth. Again, he
blames the media - including television shows such as the X-Files and Hard Copy
- for fueling outlandish government conspiracy theories. According to Peebles,
no member of the popular press is immune to sensationalism. "The media at all
levels increasingly slips into a tabloid mentality," he writes in Dark Eagles,
"and coverage is often presented as entertainment, where the `story' becomes
more important than the facts, and the truth becomes irrelevant."

Certainly, Dark Eagles makes no attempt to resemble a Tom Clancy thriller.
Instead, it offers an informative if academic glimpse into the military's most
closely guarded secrets - those Peebles believes will carry aeronautical
innovation into the 21st century. "Out in the desert at a place whose name is
never spoken," he concludes, "the future of military aviation technology
awaits."


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