Pentagon Plans Airship UAVs
A story in last month’s L.A. Times reports on efforts to build lighter-than-air platforms that will hover over areas of the Earth for months or years at a time, gathering intelligence data with cameras and sensors. Some of the proposed airships are shaped like huge boomerangs and (it is rumored) triangles. That fact may ring a bell with some readers.
An article in the September, 2004 issue of Popular Communications entitled “Monitoring the Military’s ‘UFO’ Sky Spies” apparently scooped the LAT by almost five years. Author Steve Douglass uncovered that giant defense contractor Lockheed Martin was awarded a contract to develop such a system:
In 2001, the Missile Defense Agency awarded Lockheed Martin a $40 million contract to work on the High Altitude Airship, a 500-foot-long (152-meter-long) blimp, 25 times larger than the Goodyear blimp and much more capable than the Ascender and could loiter at altitudes above 65,000 feet for as long as a year.
JP Aerospace’s Ascender 3 (from the company’s website)
The “Ascender” is a V-shaped airship developed by a small Texas company called JP Aerospace. A company called General Orbital is also working on a high altitude airship, according to information at its website.
Concept of General Orbital’s Manned Airship
Persistent reports of silent, boomerang-shaped UFOs have been occurring for almost two decades, which suggests once again that lighter-than-air vehicles may account for most, if not all of these types of sightings, given the fact that public disclosure of advanced technology is often 10-20 years behind the actual deployment. A few accounts of fast-moving, highly maneuverable craft are harder to explain in this context, however.
Try enetering some creative terms along these lines into your favorite search engine, and tell me what you come up with.
Thank you to my wife Sigrid and her interest in blimps and dirigibles!
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Apr 06 2009 
April 6th, 2009 at 8:51 am
I vaguelly remember seeing similar photo to the top one.
Greg, speaking of old ufo stuff. I recently came across one of the alien photos you posted last summer in a *very interesting place*; along with a bit of interesting historical info. Please contact me via my email as I would love to find out more about what you know about the photo so that I can come up with a decent article/post on it. Thanks. Rob.
P.S. it’s the little guy with the secret agents…
April 6th, 2009 at 10:30 am
“The dirigible will be filled with helium and powered by an innovative system that uses solar panels to recharge hydrogen fuel cells. Military officials said those underlying technologies — plus a very lightweight hull — were critical to making the project work.”
Given that most giant boomerang/triangle sightings are made during night time, if this kind of vehicle was involved,then it might mean that the Military has made significant improvements in the field of solar panels/fuel cell technology. Otherwise how do we reconcile the fact that those UFOs are almost always reported displaying a full array of lights turned on—something that should drain the batteries of any conventional UAV in no time.
Then again, maybe the ’solar panel + hydrogen fuel cell’ is a cover-up, and these vehicles are nuclear-powered.
April 7th, 2009 at 3:44 am
Rob,
I’m still not sure of the provenance of that photo. It’s almost certainly a pre-photoshop job. For what purpose, I have no idea.
The JP Aerospace site has many more pictures of the Ascender series in the hangar and in the air.
April 7th, 2009 at 3:47 am
RPJ,
LEDs use much less power than conventional incandescent bulbs, and they are far brighter than they used to be. I suspect that is what lights up the slient boomerang-type UFOs. That, or something else that we don’t even know about yet.
I wonder if someone has ever taken a potshot at the big V-shaped UFOs. Might put a hole in the gas envelope and bring them down!
April 7th, 2009 at 5:45 am
Greg, Yes, its pre-photoshop.
I had a link to another Aerospace site that had more v-shaped aircraft; including ones from the 70’s and 80’s. Wish I could find it right now. Oh well, another day.
April 7th, 2009 at 5:53 am
Doubtless the whizzers at the Pentagon
already have the base covered, but the
Hindenberg aside, the real enemy of the
airship has always been the wind. While
the Hinderberg was a spectacular disaster, all the other major airship losses in the 20’s and 30’s could be
attributed to bad weather. ( There is
an amazing photo of one US military Zep,
the Shennendoah, I think ) actuallly standing on its nose while
still attached to a mooring mast. 65,000
feet will put it above most of the worst weather conditions, but not all.
April 7th, 2009 at 7:31 am
The reality is pretty crude compared with their (p)eye in the sky renderings, not that it’ll never happen!
Probably not powered by hydrogen fuel cells as that means packing fuel.
Interestingly Lockheed Martin has also signed a contract with EEStor, another Texas company that’s supposedly made the first ultracapacitor. That seems a more likely form of electrical storage from solar. See http://www.zenncars.com
for your fist ultracapacitor powered car available this year, supposedly.
April 7th, 2009 at 8:34 am
My close encounter with the big black equilateral triangle (with no fuselage) — made this humming noise but it didn’t seem lighter-than-air even though it was creeping along at a slow speed. I considered the blimp comparison but dismissed it in a flash since there was no kind of hovering — no floating or gliding — it was definitely a propulsion that seemed more high-tech, like an electrogravitic differential. The craft seemed totally solid for material — I could have hit it with a rock and thought about it — it went right over the tree on the edge of our yard, a big oak. Summer, 1997.
April 7th, 2009 at 9:46 am
Tell me something Drew: was this black triangle full of lights, and if so, how intense were they? because I still have a problem with Greg’s supposition that these UAVs could have LED lights that are as powerful and intense as conventional incandescent lights.
And what about the tracking lights some witnesses report? That would need a lot of juice!
Just throwing some ideas in the pen to play with
April 7th, 2009 at 11:26 am
Speaking of lights, why do UFO’s even have lights? I can understand 1 or 2 for anti-collision purposes, but why are some lit up like Christmas trees? Apologies, Greg, if you’ve already covered this topic.
April 7th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
Given the quantum leaps in materials and other technologies since the last time dirigibles were used, this looks like a peek behind the curtain. A nuetral buoyancy aircraft could climb much higher and with much greater range than any aircraft of similar size and weight.
April 7th, 2009 at 2:45 pm
Curious,
That’s a good subject for a post!
April 7th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
Euphemystic and RPJ,
The super capacitor is used to store energy, which can be released later. I’m not sure how long the capacitors can store power, but using those, and fuel cells and solar could fit the bill.
Looking around for about a minute, I found that a company called Osram has developed a unit that puts out 1000 lumens of light from ONE LED:
The Ostar Lighting LED, which will be launched on the market this summer, can provide sufficient light for a desk from a height of two meters, for example. Its small size also enables the creation of completely new lamp shapes.
A lumen (lm) is the unit of measurement for the amount of light emitted by a light source. A 60-watt light bulb emits 730 lm, while a 50-watt halogen lamp has an output of approximately 900 lm. To achieve the 1,000 lm output for the tiny Ostar Lighting LED, the experts at Siemens’ Osram subsidiary employed a sophisticated system for high chip-packing density, whereby the researchers managed to integrate six high-performance LED lighting chips into the unit’s small housing. Each chip has an area of only one square millimeter, which makes for very concentrated overall luminosity.
So, what might be available to the military, if this technology is just hitting the consumer market?
April 8th, 2009 at 1:14 am
Just to clarify, there is a big difference between a supercapacitor and an ultracapacitor. Ultracapacitors are the holy grail of electricity storage but haven’t been made yet and are a game-changing technology. Therefore EEStor is understandably a very secretive company, yet they have signed contracts with a Canadian car company and Lockheed Martin. Just google “EEStor Lockheed Martin”. Zenncars, http://www.zenncars.com has press releases about EEStor at its web site, bottom left. A big ultracapacitor can power a small town from solar energy. EEStor has made lots of incredible claims about its new technology but If this pans out then hydrogen fuel cells will be seen as quaint.
Re: bright lights, I saw a new plasma (there’s that word again) light that was simply a tiny, pill sized glass ampule filled with xenon, I think, and had no external contacts. A strong EM field was used to excite the atoms inside through induction and produced light twice as bright as a street light using only about 250 watts.
April 8th, 2009 at 1:15 am
Very interesting, Greg!
April 8th, 2009 at 1:36 am
Re: “…why do UFO’s even have lights?”
That’s not a good subject for a post, that’s a good subject for a thesis or a book! Why do people see lights?
April 8th, 2009 at 2:35 am
Just three lights on each corner, red, green, yellow.
April 8th, 2009 at 2:50 am
Here’s a youtube clip about the plasma light I mentioned, it uses argon not xenon as I wrote… except my post hasn’t appeared yet:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTGsM9pplUs
April 8th, 2009 at 3:12 am
Thanks for the answer, Drew.
April 8th, 2009 at 3:32 am
Speaking of bright LEDs: Cheap and efficient white light LEDs new design described in AIP’s Journal of Applied Physics Link: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-04/aiop-cae040709.php
April 8th, 2009 at 4:36 am
That’s how I first spotted the craft — I saw the lights on the horizon and they were doing inexplicable maneuvers. I stood there with my sister and she got bored having seen the same type of lights in Taos and a bit further north of where we were in Minnesota, along the St. Croix river. I watch the lights and think: Not a helicopter, not a tower light, not car headlights. Then I see a craft approaching me from the horizon — it came over the forest from the northwest, then over our neighbor’s driveway, then right over the hill at the top of my parents’ yard and then over the tree. So I knew the distance we really close since I could get a size comparison with the different heights and the size of the craft was larger than the crown of the oak tree — so maybe 50 feet? It was humming loudly but it didn’t seem to be floating or gliding — the craft looked solid and metal. It seemed to be relying on the humming noise in order to maintain both lift and thrust. Whether the lights were part of the propulsion system was hard to tell — but I don’t think the lights were just direction beacons.
April 8th, 2009 at 7:42 am
Given my warped ex-military mind, the flying vee shaped airships are likely to have a multipurpose role or reconnaisance,Communications, Command & Control aka 3C, and offensive/defensive capability. Recon is a natural for this type of aircraft. The military likely has created the craft with radar absorbent skin to hide it from enemy radar, a lower speed that will likely hide it’s accoustic signature from listening devices and active visual camoflage to hide it from any aircraft trying to find it. Fill it full of passive sensors and you have a very cheap spy satellite system that could blanket and area the size of say Afghanistan at the fraction of the cost of spy satellite and it could be repaired/replaced very cheaply. The C3 could give realtime, multiple imaging data(optical,infrared and synthetic aperature radar) to intellignece and command centers for determining enemy troop movements and strenght and target acquisition. If current lift capabilities aren’t exagerated, a single ship could easily carry as much ordinance as 10 B-52 bombers with nearly indefinite loiter time or given that it could operate from much higher altitude, it could launch satellites or anti-satellites at a fraction of the cost of land based launch systems. It could also act as a mother ship for dozens of other smaller aircraft. Think that the gov’t was really wasting all those billions on the ill performing anti-ballistic missile programs or were they simply hiding the cost of the stealth blimp project which really worked?
April 9th, 2009 at 3:17 am
Wow, a lot of replies with really good info. Thanks all!