“Aurora – Flight of Fancy?”
This article written by the author of this site Geoff Richardson

Aurora – Flight of Fancy was published in EYE magazine

Aurora”We heard Aurora two days in a row – you can almost feel it beating against your chest more than you actually hear it – you feel the pulsation on your body. It’s like one of the lowest notes on a pipe organ, about thirty-two cycles per second. Once you have heard it you will never forget it, it’s very low and very, very loud. Bob Lazar told me he had seen it – he was on a bus with opaque windows when he first heard it “. So spoke Area 51 observer Walt Andrews , describing his encounter with a mystical hypersonic craft developed by Lockheed and flight tested at Area 51 – reputedly the home of crashed or captured UFOs and reverse engineering.
According to Ben Goodall ,an Andrews’ co-observer, “I called Ben Rich (the former head of Lockheed’s top secret development site – Skunk Works) just before he died and he told me he was disappointed in the mach 12 Aurora because of it’s incredible fuel consumption (liquid methane)”.

Chuck Clark, who replaced Glenn Campbell as Arch expert on all things Area 51, claims to have seen Aurora, remarking “I even saw Aurora taking off one night in February 1994 and I managed to videotape it through a telescope with a five hundred millimeter f4 lens coupled via a c-ring to a high-eight digital video camera with five hundred and twenty scan lines and that is better than T.V.” Clark also remarked that when the Military reveal the existence of the craft his video tape will also be revealed – until then it is in safe keeping.
However, Aurora has not only been seen in the wastelands of Nevada but, in effect, in many other parts of the World. A spate of sightings of dark triangular craft over Belgium in the late 1980s was explained away as the U.S. Military testing their new Top secret aircraft. Initially described as stealth but when this was obviously not so , Aurora provided an ideal solution. Another wave of sightings (this time Boomerang shaped craft) in the Hudson Valley resulted in similar opinions being expressed.

Web sites appeared on the Internet dedicated to Aurora – artistic impressions of this elusive craft became available and it is also alleged that R.A.F. Machrihanish in Scotland (regarded by some as the U.K.’s Area 51) is hosting the hypersonic craft.
Indeed, Aurora has been test flown over the North Sea , along the East coast of the U.K. in 1989 – according to a qualified witness.
But just what caused the initial interest in this fascinating aircraft? The original reference to Aurora was a censor’s error in a military budget relating to a request for production funding in 1985 – some person with a very observant eye picked it up and the quest began.
But apart from the investigations and observations made by apparent UFO experts, who else could possibly throw some light on the matter? Is there any other source of reference to who we can look for definitive evidence regarding the reality of Aurora? Perhaps the man himself Ben R. Rich – the former head of Lockheed’s Skunk Works – had something to say in the matter.

In his book – Skunk Works (Warner Books) – Ben Rich writes, ” A young colonel working in the Air Force “black program” office at the Pentagon, named Buzz Carpenter , arbitrarily assigned the code name “Aurora” to an article of funding . Somehow this name leaked out during congressional appropriation hearings, the media picked up the Aurora item in the budget, and the rumour surfaced that it was a top secret project assigned to the Skunk Works – to build a hypersonic plane. That story persists to this day even though Aurora was the code name for the B2 competition funding. 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”.
Words that have “the ring of truth”! No wonder that, after almost twenty years, all we have are artistic impressions of this hypersonic craft. The concept of an incredibly powerful, fast aircraft linked to Area 51 and the possibility of reverse engineering is indeed a fascinating subject – but in the case of Aurora a futile one.
But has this endless and futile search for the mythical Aurora caused any harm?

Of course it has – the subject of Ufology is difficult and complex enough without the addition of false and time consuming information. The regular sightings of “Black Triangles “, for instance, can easily be explained away – “it must have been Aurora”. Even though Black Triangles have capabilities that are very much outside our current technological envelope – it is easy and convenient to make Aurora ” fit the bill”.
Also, the hours spent in researching, hypothesizing and writing about Aurora must be incalculable. Not least the false statements made by some relating to Ben Rich and his true remarks regarding hypersonic craft.hypersonic craft
It must be difficult for researchers who have mistakenly invested years of effort into a “non-existent” subject to accept the fact that it was futile but perhaps when they do Ufology will take a step closer to the truth.

Artistic impression of Aurora – a hypersonic craft that has never existed!