Very OFF: weird shit

[Jon Jarrett]

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
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  "There is a certain pleasure in being mad, which none but madmen know"