Very OFF: weird shit

[fatrat]

Just a thort - but as far as flying over Phoenix is concerned, I reckon those
USAF etc. guys get pretty sick of keeping secrets and probably have a sense of
humour too. The idea of reading the local rags with reports of alien visitors,
UFOs and rehashed abduction stories probably tickled them pink!!!

Jon Jarrett wrote:

> On Tue, 19 Jun 2001, M Holmes wrote:
>
> > Channel 5 here had one of those "SF and Aliens" nights where they show
> > cheesy SF films (Close Encounters) and even cheesier "documentaries"
> > about aliens, Roswell, and how the yanks faked the Moon landings.
> >
> > Still, being a sucker for cheesy SF and liking a laugh at conspiracy
> > theories, I naturally watched some of this.
> >
> > So imagine my surprise when video was shown of a "UFO" over Phoenix a
> > few years back and I realised that this is the same damn thing I saw on
> > the west coast of Scotland a couple of years ago and could never really
> > figure out what the hell it was (not of course that the documentary had
> > anything more to offer than that it might be extraterrestrial visitors).
> >
> > I can already sense the guffaws rising in throats. I'd point out that
> > those who know me well realise that I'm a pretty extreme rationalist and
> > that I know enough about astronomy to both know what I'm looking at in
> > the sky, and just how difficult interstellar logistics would be.
> >
> > I also know that I saw something that isn't part of the usual panoply of
> > things seen in the sky at night. IMHO it's some sort of military
> > hardware that they don't want folks to know about (the west coast of
> > Scotland isn't exactly densely populated). Admittedly flying it over
> > Phoenix for a few hundred people to watch seems at odds with this.
> >
> > So on the plus side, I'm not the only person who's ever seen this thing.
> > On the minus side, a number of the other folks are fully fledged nuts.
> > It's kind of annoying when I had a perfectly workable skeptical gig
> > going and I'd just about persuaded myself that I saw a line of NOSS
> > satellites.
>
>         For what it's worth, the west coast of Scotland is nice and close
> to the operating area of RAF Machrihanish (sp?). I've never seen anything
> official about what the place is used for but it's got a perimeter miles
> wide and is more or less the RAF equivalent of Edwards AFB in the US. One
> of the things I've seen it suggested that goes on up there is flights of a
> US reconnaissance birdy called Aurora, which was (not that it
> exists, indeed its existence has been officially denied just like
> the Stealth Fighter's) slated to replace the SR-71A Blackbird. No-one
> knows what the thing looks like but it's supposed to be capable of Mach 4
> plus. The support for this is that air traffic controllers in Scotland
> have occasionally told papers/scrappily-printed 'zines that they've picked
> up blips doing that sort of speed, in non-ballistis trajectories and so
> forth. The SR-71A went back into service not so very long after I first
> read this but whatever the truth about the Aurora, it's most definitely a
> prime candidate area for top secret military aircraft testing. Yours,
>                                                                       Jon
>
> n/p: Disarray - `Shrieking Monster Who Could Not Die'
> --
>        Jon Jarrett (01223 514989)     jjarrett at chiark.greenend.org.uk
>    =====================================================================
>   "There is a certain pleasure in being mad, which none but madmen know"