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.