The only way the B-2 could get into the air, therefore, was for it somewhere along the line to shed some of its weight. And that, of course, was impossible, unless you applied the heretical principles of Thomas Townsend Brown to the aircraft's design spec. The B-2 wasn't a black world aircraft program anymore. It was operational, had been blooded in combat and was frequently exhibited to the public. If it used an antigravity drive system, the proof of the phenomenon existed in plain sight.
If it didn't, then someone, somewhere had gone to some lengths to make a number of highly respected aerospace experts believe that it did.
In October 1990, Aviation Week published a report based on an analysis of 45 different daylight and nighttime eyewitness observations of strange aircraft over the desert Southwest — Bill Scott's backyard. In this, he concluded that there were "at least two — but probably more — types of vehicles" beyond the F-l 17A and B-2 under test. One was a "triangularshaped, quiet aircraft seen with a flight of F-l 17A stealth fighters several times since the summer of 1989"; another was a "high-speed aircraft characterized by a very deep, rumbling roar reminiscent of heavy lift rockets"; a third was a "high-altitude aircraft that crosses the night sky at extremely high speed … observed as a single, bright light — sometimes pulsating — flying at speeds far exceeding other aircraft in the area." Because the latter was always seen above 50,000 feet, where you wouldn't routinely expect to hear engine noise, Scott deduced that the second and third aircraft might be one and the same type.
Speculation that the Reagan administration had embarked on a massive program of black world aerospace and defense research began circulating in earnest among Washington reporters and defense journalists following the publication of a "line item" called "Aurora" in the Pentagon's fiscal year 1986 budget. Aurora was supposedly a "sleeper site" used by the Pentagon for burying B-2 funds at a time when the Stealth Bomber was still highly classified. But this explanation, put about by "highly placed Pentagon sources" when the Aurora story hit the streets, simply smacked of backpedaling. As Aurora was listed under the "Other Aircraft" category and was projected to receive a huge increase in funding between fiscal years '86 and '87—a jump from $80.1 million to $2.272 billion — the sleuths concluded that its inclusion in the budget request was a genuine mistake, that the aircraft was real and, because it was listed in the "reconnaissance" section, must have been a replacement for the Mach 3.2 Lockheed Blackbird, which was earmarked to retire from its strategic spying duties in the early 1990s.
Then, when that dark triangular shape was seen by a trained Royal Observer Corps spotter over the oil rig in 1989, people put two and two together and deduced that Aurora wasn't just a line item, but a real flying aircraft.
One of the supreme ironies of the black budget system is that, thanks to U.S. bureaucratic procedure, you can work out, almost to the cent, what the Pentagon is spending on its most deeply classified programs. Every year its financial planners submit an unclassified version of the defense budget to Congress. It is a remarkably detailed document, listing major line items of expenditure in the military research and development (R&D) and weapons procurement arenas. Trawl down the list, however, and some of the dollar values of these line items are missing. Many of those in this category have strange-sounding code names like Forest Green, Senior Year, Chalk Eagle or Centennial. Others have curiously nondescript headings such as "special applications program" or "special analysis activities."
These are black programs. Because the unclassified budget includes accurate total budgets for all three armed services, all you need do is subtract the total dollar value of the line items from each category, and the difference is what the Pentagon is spending on black world research and acquisition.
In 1988, the total was computed to be $30 billion for R&D and secret weapons programs — more than the entire annual defense budget of a major European NATO nation such as Britain, France or Germany.
What we were talking here was an industry within an industry, multiple layers deep and compartmentalized to death horizontally. The black world's inaccessibility was based not just on its segregation from the outside, but on the inability of managers and engineers in one of its compartments, or on one of its layers, to have oversight of anything that wasn't within his or her "need to know."
In a system whose existence had been designed to be denied, examples were few and far between, but one shone clear. General George Sylvester, head of the Air Force's R&D program in 1977, was not "accessed" to the Lockheed Have Blue program, even though the program itself was run out of his office at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. One of the "bright young colonels" at Air Force Special Projects in Washington who ran the Air Force's portion of the black budget had decided to cut Sylvester out of the loop.
It was small wonder, then, that reporters and investigators began to level the charge that the black world had spiraled out of control.
How deep did the layers go? How many compartments did the system contain? What kind of technologies were being pursued within it?
The truth was, nobody knew. The black world was labyrinthine and it was essentially unaccountable; its whole system of compartmentalization so convoluted, so tortuous, that if people like Sylvester had been excluded, then God only knew how many others who should have had the "need to know," didn't.
It was in this climate of hidden expenditure that Bill Scott reported what he was seeing and hearing in and around Palmdale.
The prognosis was that Aurora was a massive leap forward in aero space terms, that it was powered by a new form of "combined-cycle" engine fueled by liquid methane or hydrogen to give it a cruise speed anywhere up to Mach 8–5,300 mph. It was also a fair bet, Scott and others reported, that the Lockheed Skunk Works, which was in the process of shifting to Palmdale, was the firm responsible for building it.
Outwardly, the Skunk Works had next to no work on the stocks, but something was keeping its 4,000 employees busy just the same and something was rattling the windows of the desert Southwest at night.
From mid-1991 until the mid-'90s, the U.S. Geological Survey, the agency that monitors earthquake activity, revealed that an unknown aircraft, with sound footprints different from the SR-71 or the Space Shuttle, was causing "airquakes" as it crossed the California coastline from the Pacific, heading inland for southern Nevada. Couple this with some fresh U.S. eyewitness sightings after the North Sea encounter of a huge, arrow-shaped aircraft that left a weird, knotted contrail in its wake and made a noise "like the sky tearing apart," and a recent program of expansion at the Air Force's test site at Area 51 in southern Nevada, and it all added up to a black world economy that was, so to speak, booming, too; a situation that continued even after the Cold War ended.
Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the U.S. Air Force budget, in concert with those of the other armed services, was cut and black world funding along with it. But as a proportion of the overall budget, the classified segment of the USAF's R&D and acquisition spending actually increased and, even in the mid — late 1990s, hovered comfortably at around the $11 billion a year mark. This left more than enough money for the Air Force to pursue a range of exotic technologies for the 21st century.
In early 1992, Scott was contacted by a group of black world engi neers who had decided to break cover and talk about some of the programs they were working on. Their reasoning was simple. The Cold War was over and there was no need for the U.S. government to protect some of its most highly classified technologies any longer. Some of these technologies, the engineers told the reporter, could actually be spun into the white world of commercial aerospace programs to give the U.S. an enormous economic advantage over its international aerospace trade rivals.