Chemtrails

[Jan Klimkowski]

Yes - Stealth was rumoured. Just as chemtrails are rumoured.

Indeed, Stealth was often ridiculed, perhaps deliberately in a mockingbird fashion, as the "invisible plane".

As Nick Cook, former Aviation Editor for Jane's Defence Weekly, a supposed bible of the military tech world, wrote in "The Hunt for Point Zero":

...since the money for the F-117A programme - to the tune of several billion dollars - had been appropriated from the Pentagon's "black budget", ringfenced as it was from public scrutiny, that was how things remained until 1988, when the outgoing Reagan adminstration revealed just what it had hushed up for so many years.

The F-117A, the bland press release stated, had gone operational in 1983. For five years, its pilots had operated at squadron strength "in the black", roaming the desert night skies of the US Southwest, practising for the nighttime attack mission they would be required to perform in a war. The disclosure had only been made at all because the air force wanted to expand the training envelope and start flying the F-117A by day. Otherwise it would have remained buried even longer.

During the F-117A's five years of secret ops, thousands of workers had been involved in the assembly process at Burbank; hundreds more in supporting the aircraft at Tonopah. And yet, not one had breathed a word about it.

The big story in November 1988, then, related to the existence and capabilities of the Stealth fighter, a programme that rivaled the scale and daring of the Manhattan Project almost fifty years earlier. Like the bomb programme, the F-117A had been meticulously covered up, but unlike the bomb programme, the secrecy had held.


(p120, Cook)

The historical record clearly shows that after a limited hangout for political purposes by Carter in 1980, Reagan's regime deliberately took Stealth back into the black.

http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airch...1/cunn.htm

A demonstration of just how far the Reagan administration was willing to go with keeping stealth technology secret can be seen in statements by Air Force Secretary Verne Orr in July 1981. Contradicting what Secretary of Defense Harold Brown had stated the year before and disregarding reports of several years in the technical media, Orr called the stealth bomber a "paper airplane" and "wishful thinking." He also expressed doubt that American industry could handle such a "rush program," when in fact the F-117A was developed in record time.24

(snip)

The cost of keeping the F-117A a complete secret for nearly a decade must have been enormous in both human and financial dimensions. The entire facility at Tonopah, Nevada, where the F-117As are based until they are scheduled to be moved in 1992, was constructed for the stealth fighter program. Until the F-117As arrived, the only buildings there werethose of an old World War II training facility.77 Great expense was also incurred when Lockheed personnel commuted daily to the facility from the company's plant in Burbank, California.78 These are but a few of the types of expenses involved in keeping a major program under wraps.

The extreme secrecy of the program had human costs as well. To keep the number of personnel assigned to the F-117A units as small as possible, pilots were made to carry out functions that otherwise would have been handled by a separate staff. This was likely a leading cause of fatigue among pilots flying the aircraft, which led to accidents that otherwise might have been avoided. Additional contributing factors to fatigue and accidents included radio silence orders and the constraint of flying the aircraft only during night hours to avoid detection.79 One report by a retired Air Force general indicates that the pilots of F-117As were all but ordered to die with their aircraft if it became necessary to come down in any unsecured location: "If you can't bring it home, then you auger it in ... even if you have to go in with it."80 Pilots flying in Red Flag exercises at nearby Nellis were supposed to have been "forced down" if they got too close to a stealth aircraft and refused orders to move away.

Under Reagan, the F-117A was a phantasm, protected by national security and rumour.