Satellite photos of the US Air Force’s ultra-secret Groom Lake base – known to UFO hunters as Area 51 – have revealed what appears to be an “exotic” new aircraft prototype.
Ground crews at Groom Lake have always taken great care to clear away any classified assets before surveillance satellites pass overhead but on this occasion, they appear to have slipped up.
In an image published by Planet Labs on January 28, a delta-winged jet can be seen under a partially-transparent covering.
The covering appears to be a fairly standard temporary aircraft hangar, of a type used by the USAF and many other airforces around the world.
But inside the hangar is a triangular aircraft, which at around 65 feet long and 50 feet wide, looks like a miniature Concorde.
The mystery plane’s lines are elegantly curved, notes The Drive’s Tyler Rogaway, “leading to almost scimitar-like wingtips that may be turned upward.
“Overall,” he add, “the wings have a flowing, almost organic appearance”.
The few clues available from the satellite photo suggest that the US may be readying a prototype of its rumoured Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) aircraft.
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The NGAD is thought to be a hypersonic combat aircraft currently under development which will ultimately replace the existing F-22 and F-35 fleet.
It’s thought to be currently under testing.
Will Roper, a physicist and foreign policy strategist who oversaw procurement for the US Air Force and Space Force from 2018 to 2021, told Defence News just before the Air Force Association’s 2020 Air, Space and Cyber Conference:
“We’ve already built and flown a full-scale flight demonstrator in the real world, and we broke records in doing it.
“We are ready to go and build the next-generation aircraft in a way that has never happened before.”
Other possibilities, besides NGAD, include a new revision of the USAF’s fabled Aurora spy plane, which shares the image’s upturned delta wing profile.
However, that hypersonic jet, which has been rumoured since the end of the 1980s, has never been definitively confirmed.
Area 51 plane spotter Chuck Clark claimed to have seen Aurora in 1994. He said: "I even saw the Aurora take off one night – or an aircraft that matched the Aurora's reputed configuration, a sharp delta with twin tails about a hundred and thirty feet long.
“It taxied out of a lighted hangar at two-thirty A.M. and used a lot of runway to take off. It had one red light on top, but the minute the wheels left the runway, the light went off and that was the last I saw of it”.
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