The Pretenders
UFOs And Camouflage

by Amy Hebert, M.Ed., C.Ht.
11-6-00

from Rense Website
 

The word "stealth", for most people, usually conjures the image of Lockheed Martin's F-117A. But stealth covers a much wider range of techniques and technologies commonly known as concealment, camouflage and deception or CC&D.

"The use of camouflage, concealment, and deception (CCD) is characterized by hiding a target to conceal its presence, blending it into the background, disguising its identity, or using false targets as decoys"

(Jane's International Defense Review, April, 1997).

Spotting an aircraft visually is just as effective as detecting it on radar. Military engineers are directing intense focus to technologies which may not only reduce radar signature but also render aircraft virtually invisible to the naked eye - also known as Visual Stealth.

Visual stealth experiments actually began as far back as the early 40's with a project code-named Yehudi. This 1943 U.S. Navy project was designed to give Navy patrol aircraft a better chance of sinking enemy submarines by lowering the visual acquisition range to about 2 miles allowing Navy aircraft to get within striking distance of enemy submarines before they submerged. Using 10 sealed-beam lights along the wing's leading edges and the rim of the engine cowling, adjusting the intensity of the lights to match the sky allowed the aircraft to blend into the background.

Similar light apertures derived from Yehudi were planned for Lockheed's Have Blue (later renamed the F-117A) which were to be installed on the sides and undersurfaces of the airplane. The apertures would be connected by fiber-optic lines and controlled by sensors on the upper portion of the aircraft. These sensors would "read" the background light and adjust the skin's luminance to mirror the sky above. This system never flew with Have Blue perhaps because the first prototype crashed.

More recently designed aircraft utilize more conventional camouflage of varied painted colors and patterns rather than using light apertures because this renders the aircraft basically invisible at higher altitudes and functions adequately under most circumstances. The F-117 which was originally painted black has recently been seen painted gray and even white (perhaps to blend in with white cloud cover). And the Raptor is painted various shades of grays and blues to blend in with the skies above and below thus reducing visual detection.

Perhaps one project which employs some of the more exotic camouflage techniques derived from project Yehudi is the use of electrochromatic panels. This type of technology utilizes panels comprised of thousands of tiny sensors that operate like video cameras taking images of the background transferring these images to panels on the opposite side of the aircraft. The aircraft appears "transparent" to observers on the ground by transposing background images from behind and above to the observer's side of the aircraft.

 

One type of "proposed" aircraft which is said to employ such electrochromatic panels is called the "Stealth Blimp." It is rumored that one can see the stars from above the blimp projected on to panels covering the underside of the blimp, giving the illusion of being transparent to ground observers. There has been much speculation that one of the "UFO's" seen by residents of Phoenix, Arizona on the night of March 13, 1997 was actually a Stealth Blimp during psyops maneuvers.

These are just some of the camouflage technologies known and rumored to be employed by various military agencies. But there are other technologies being observed in the skies above us. Eye witnesses report seeing Unidentified Flying Objects pretending to be everything from airplanes and helicopters to stars and fireballs.

One such sighting occurred on the night of August 25, 2000 in Loveland, Colorado. A man and his 14 year old son observed what appeared to be a disk-shaped craft that suddenly turned off it's strobing light on top and an orange rotating light around it's circumference and then appeared to turn on a pattern of lights resembling the conventional aviation lights of a small plane. (Filer's Files, #36-2000)

In her book,
Silent Invasion, Ellen Crystall describes many types of lighting systems used by UFO's observed in the Hudson Valley area,

"It changed its lighting system again to other types of lights all large and at places all over the craft. In fact the entire ship seemed to have all colors of lights in various combinations on every part of it. The aliens could change the lights in any manner, and we could see why people could mistake their shapes if the lights defined only portions of the vehicle. Even more important, the aliens could imitate aircraft lights."

In Alien Contact, Timothy Good indicates one witness who volunteered his opinion that the mystery helicopters seen near sites of cattle mutilations could be spacecraft "camouflaged as helicopters". Good states,

"The idea is not as absurd as it seems. Mysterious unmarked aircraft have long been associated with the UFO phenomenon, and it seems to me to be entirely feasible that aliens might disguise their vehicles or even produce facsimile aircraft (sometimes of preposterously un-aerodynamic design), as well as render their craft and themselves invisible, in order to keep us in a perpetual state of confusion.

 

A clue to this deception is provided by a number of reports from New Mexico describing UFOs that imitate helicopter sounds.

During 1978, Howard Burgess reports, a Taos city policeman heard what he thought was a helicopter hovering over his police car. Stepping out of the car, he observed a large wingless cigar-shaped vehicle hovering motionless above him. It then took off and disappeared over the mountains. In another incident, a witness reported seeing a large round object near Dulce which made a noise like that of an old two-cylinder tractor!"

One report from the United Kingdom UFO Network describes a police officer who observed what appeared to be a "stationary white star" that suddenly "shot up and out of sight extremely quickly". And a report from UFO Roundup, Volume 2, Number 3, edited by Joseph Trainor, quotes a witness in Northern California who described a UFO that imitated an airplane AND a star.

"A bright object similar to an airplane traveling suddenly stopped and hovered silently. It only moved a small amount back and forth in the place it stopped. Where it had been flashing and moving like an airplane, it was now like a VERY bright star. If you didn't see it moving across the sky, you would've thought it was just another star. It stayed that way all the time we watched it."

Could these "UFO's" be merely tests of secret man-made CC&D technologies in our skies? Or are these genuine UFO's and beings from other planets using their own forms of CC&D to avoid detection and perhaps confuse eye-witnesses and military intelligence agencies? WHO are the Pretenders and what do they want?
 



This is only a brief summary of the introduction to my book, The Pretenders: UFO's And Camouflage, to be released in Spring, 2001. My book is based on three years of intense research sparked by my own sighting of a huge camouflaged UFO I saw hovering over a field behind my house in June, 1997. What I have learned, and continue to learn, over the past three years has changed my perceptions of everything from UFO's to crop circles. The Pretenders influence our perceptions in ways most people cannot even imagine let alone recognize.

The first volume of The Pretenders will present information and concepts that will astound readers and cause researchers to rethink even their most cherished theories. The second volume, already in progress, will present further information related to the concepts presented in the first book.