Here is a report from "Brian," dated   10 & 11 Apr 2003:      Thanks Brian ...

10 Apr:  "I seen a 'Aurora' or UFO aircraft seen 1 to 2 week ago going out west coast out the ocean going mach 1.6 to 6.0?  It was going up in Low to High altitudes maybe 30,000 to 80,000 feet.  I was driving my car to a friend which 20mile away and I was driving 70 mile per hour on the highway to get there.   I see the smoke contrail from the plane is different then 747 or jet fighter because I seen what normal contrail look like."

11 Apr:  " It was 2:00 P.M. to 2:30 P.M. pacific time northern California march 2003 when I saw the ufo or Aurora plane at high speed like a "F-14 tomcat with a supercharger at max speed for over 30min flying time."   I driving my car north to Eureka, the ufo was heading northwest out to pacific ocean from the southeast or south."

Here is a report from "Mark," dated 21 May 2003:      Thanks Mark ...

Unfortunately this was about four years ago however I have seen a few things since then around here mainly in the area of nothingness except farm-land (of course flat land to test out a unknown plane).  Anyway I've heard the roar of this plane only once on two other occasions I've seen what looks to be one in formation with two T-38 Talon fighters.   However, in this part of the United States it's not common for fighters and trainers to be flying around, the closest Air Base to the west is Offutt and to the south we've got Scott there is an old abandoned air field in Whiteside County just about 69 miles east of here never been out there either.  I have heard this plane refered to as the UI-4054 too.  Anyway since about July 2001 not much has happened in terms of unknown aircraft.  Perhaps a brief testing of a different terrain, I do not know."

Here is a report from "Vince," dated 9 July 2003:      Thanks Vince ...

Here is a report from "Chris," dated 14 July 2003:      Thanks Chris ...

Here is a report from "Mark," dated 24 July 2003:      Thanks Mark ...

We'll I have again seen Aurora after four years of nothing. It was yesterday July 23 over a field near where I live. This time two F-5E Fighters were escorting it to the northeast. I think the government is conducting something over at the airfield in Whiteside County.

We'll upon returning from some shopping and telling my mom I was "Investigating" this stuff we see a bright light in the sky about 5 seconds later it completely disappeared. After we got home she then informed me that there was another light moving... now at first I thought I talked to her too much about this... sure enough there is a light. I ran to get my telescope through it kind of looked like Aurora I have reson to beleive it was the XR-7 Thunderdart due to the super sharp delta style wing formation. This all happened in about 15 miniutes, then it was gone. Like I said something is going on out at that air field 69 miles from here... I think I might look into that. I took a picture of the light if you want I'll send it to you... of corse it's not of the actual plane but just to show you how bright the light was... If I get any info on this base over in Whiteside County I'll let you know.

Here is a report from "Brian," dated 8 Sep 2003:      Thanks Brian ...

   I might have seen the plane.  Well, at least the con trail.  I live in Harrisburg PA.  Which is odd.  Most sightings of planes are done in the SW USA.  However I was on my porch yesterday about 1730 EDS  when I saw something and my father in law commented did you see that plane just go up.  I did not really see anything but a black streak and then the con trail with the line through the donut holes.  I was unaware of rumors of this spy plane.  I did an Internet search for the type on con trail i saw.  This is what I came up with.  Can other planes cause that type of con trail?  Is there any way to confirm sighting?  Well, it was odd so I sent you the e-mail.  later.

Here is a report from "Mark," dated 9 Sep 2003:      Thanks Mark ...

Here is a report from "Tim," dated 17 Sep 2003:      Thanks Tim ...

Hi, Dan.  Boy, was i glad i found your website.  I knew that i'd heard about a plane that looked like the one i saw.   My story follows below.  It doesn't get to the plane til the end, but i felt it was important to get the whole scenario in case some of the details were valuable.   Man, i wish i had my camera that night!!!!

 I guess i just want to tell some one about this.  It occurred about a year ago during the annual summer meteor shower.  It was supposed to be extra spectacular in 2002 so i went to a friend's place in a rural area to get a better view of the event.  It seems that the 'view' couldn't have been any better.  My friend and i stayed up till about 2 am.   Together we saw hundreds of shooting stars.  They came in groups of 2 or 3 to groups of a dozen or so.  We saw some so large that we gasped and 1 that got larger & larger and we began to worry, till it too faded.  We also saw one other strange event.  To the north we saw brightly illuminating flashes of light.  Almost as if some one had set off a giant flash bulb over beyond a set of hills.  They lit up the far horizon, but not our immediate area.  Could it have been a meteorite landing, we speculated??  That is what shooting stars are, small bits of dirt & debris encountering the atmosphere.  Could it be that stellar stuff simply exhausting closer to the ground??  Who knows?? 

It was late and we went in to take a break.  My friend went to sleep.  Me??  I'm a night worker.  Been working the night shift consistently for 10 years.  Previously lots of it outdoors.  I went back outside at about 3 am.  That's when the real action began. I knew that i would see the most powerful meteors towards morning when the rising sun would illuminate more objects.   I was not prepared for the rest.  Shortly after i went back outside i saw so many shooting stars that it looked like the confetti at one of those ticker tape parades that you see on TV.  I saw lights shoot straight to the left, straight to the right.   I saw them come down so fast that they could have been shot from a gun or so slow that looked like they were floating down.  I even saw some that appeared to be going up instead of down!  I knew that was a trick of the atmosphere of some sort.   And they were numerous, too.  I finally gave up counting somewhere in the 3 hundreds when i couldn't count fast enough to keep up!!! 

 All of this happened by 4am.  Somewhere during that time i noticed one light that was different from all the others.  It was a glowing ball of light about 1/4 or 1/3 the size of the full moon and around that bright.   It was in the southern direction and i don't think i noticed it when it 1st appeared.  When i did begin to observe it i was a little taken aback because of its size and brightness.  After observing its "descent"  for a few minutes it could be seen that it was taking that floating, sauntering motion that i mentioned earlier.  Almost like a feather swinging back & forth as it falls.  At that point i decided that i must have been some sort of illuminating flare or other light producing mechanism that some one a long distance away had deployed.  Then it stopped descending.  I had a fixed view of the object.  I had moved around to get a good look at it and to get an idea of its direction and distance.  When i finally had a good spot, it kept up the slow, slightly back & forth descent for a bit and then just stopped.  For my view it was directly in a small gap between a couple of stands of trees.  And there it stayed.  I waited half an hour, still figuring it to be an illumination tool of some sort, but what would keep it up there so long???  Was it actually attached to some sort of machine that kept it at a place where some one needed it??  You know like on a helicopter or something??  I don't know.  I tried to get my friend up to see this, but he was out like a light (so to speak).

 Well, i determined to keep up my vigil & see how long it stayed, but the shooting stars were too beautiful & numerous to ignore & that thing never moved so i started walking & looking around again.  That's when the last, most spectacular and most unexpected (to my thinking) event occurred.  I was standing in the middle of the yard, it was fast approaching dawn.  It was my favorite time of the night.  The pre-dawn time about 45 minutes before the   actual sunrise.  Its the time when it goes from the darkest time to when the sky just begins to lose its inky blackness & the lighter colors of purple and grey are about to begin.  I had been facing to the north or at least the opposite direction form the glowing ball and turned around to see if that thing was still there when flying overhead was a plane like I've never seen before.  It was big and black and as silent as the night itself.  Now i grew up observing planes every day for the first 20 years of my life.  I lived so close to one of the 20 largest airports in the world that i got used to not trying to talk when planes flew overhead.  I had my first paycheck job at that airport which was less than 1 mile from my house as the crow flies.   Regular town entertainment at night was to go to the beach to watch planes land & take off.  We were so close that you could see that little puff so smoke that occurs as the tires hit the ground.  We could hear the tire screech & see some of them bounce as they landed.  It was great stuff for a kid.  I can judge how high up planes are & there relative size.  I was in absolute shock over this one.   It had literally crept up behind me.  It was totally & completely silent.   And it wasn't silent because it was so far away, no.  As far as quadrants of the sky go this vehicle took up 1/2 of my total viewing area when it was directly overhead.  It moved very slowly almost dominatingly as if it knew it could take its time.  Its shape was also quite unusual.  It was the shape of a giant triangle with a small v-shaped indent in the rear.  My estimate is that it was flying less than 1000 feet up, i'd say 500 or 600 hundred if i had to. I remember thinking to my self at the time that i could almost hit it with a rock.  And it was huge.  It had to be half the size of a football field.  It was enormous, and as silent as a ghost.   A giant black mechanical flying ghost.

At that point i'd had enough.  I didn't even check on the glowing ball.  I went in & went straight to sleep.  I hadn't really thought about it much since then and never told anybody, except my friend recently.   Why bother.  Who'd believe me??  Even if they do believe me, what difference does that make??  The government has lots of stuff  like that that they're working on, don't they???

Tim

Here is a report from "Michael," dated 17 Sep 2003:      Thanks Michael ...

I suspect what I saw today at about 12:30pm Oakland California time was
the contrail of the 'Aurora' spyplane.  It was quite an odd experience.
I was outside doing some work on the yard and then turned around and
noticed an odd looking contrail that wasn't there a minute or two
earlier.  Further, there was absolutlely no noticible sound of a jet
overhead.  Virtually every commercial jet that flies in that same area
produces an audible noise.  The contrail was like from a single engine,
and was like closely repeating knots on a rope.  The contrail was at a
very high altitude, and was quite large, more so than what a single
engine could produce.  When I traced the source of the contrail, it was
already somewhere to the east side of California.  It seemed to be
moving fast, but I didn't realize how fast until I had a commercial
aircraft to compare it with.  The commercial aircraft was barely moving
compared to the Aurora.  Based on a very rough guesstimate, I would say
the Aurora was moving on the order of 3,500 to 4,000 mph.  Further, it
went from one end of the observable horizon to the other within just a
few minutes (3 or so??).  Eventually it came into a part of the sky
where no contrails appeared.  So, some observations about this airplane:

1.  You are not likely to hear it overhead.
2.  You are only likely to know of it presence by its contrails.
3.  It doesn't always produce contrails.
4.  It flys at a very high altitude, and even with 10x binoculars, I
doubt if you would see much.

Michael

Here is a report from "Michael James," dated 18 Sep 2003:      Thanks Michael ...

Here is a report from "Erik," dated 21 Sep 2003:      Thanks Erik ...

I live in Michigan and every few weeks durring the year, there is a lot of plane activity in our area.  The flights are usually at late afternoon, early evening.   We always hear heilcopters first then a few minutes later, there is always a loud booming sound that last only a few seconds.   My family has only seen a streak of light once of the 17 years of living in MI.  I have not seen this con trail that others speak of, but im sure i can find it.

Here's some interesting information I extracted from a Web Page about the X-43A hypersonic reuseable vehicle.    Sep 22, 2003   Dan

Coupled with smoothe wing-body technology, and perhaps you would have the Aurora ...

NASA began a multi-year hypersonic flight-test program in 1996 by contracting for the fabrication of four Hypersonic Flight Experimental Vehicles that will fly up to ten times the speed of sound. The five-year Hyper-X program will demonstrate hypersonic propulsion technologies. Hypersonic speed is defined as above Mach 5, which is equivalent to about one mile-per-second, or approximately 3,600 miles per hour at sea level. We usually think of speed in terms of miles-per-hour. With high-performance aircraft like the SR-71, speed is measured in tens of miles-per-minute. Hyper-X opens up the frontier for airbreathing aircraft with speeds measured in miles-per-second.

One of the primary goals of NASA's Aeronautics Enterprise, as delineated in the NASA Strategic Plan, specifies the development and demonstration of technologies for air-breathing hypersonic flight. Since the cancellation of the National Aerospace Plane (NASP) program in November 1994, the United States has not had a cohesive hypersonic technology development program, so the time is right for a new "better, faster, cheaper" program. Hyper-X is capturing NASP technology, quickly moving it forward
to the next step, which is demonstration of hypersonic airbreathing propulsion.

The goal of the Hyper-X program is to flight validate key propulsion and related technologies for air-breathing hypersonic aircraft. The world's fastest air-breathing aircraft, the SR-71, cruises slightly above Mach 3. The highest speed attained by NASA's rocket-powered X-15 was Mach 6.7, back in 1967. Heading the technology wish-list for the Hyper-X program is demonstration of a ramjet/scramjet engine, followed by demonstration of design tools and methods for air-breathing hypersonic vehicles. The scramjet engine is the key enabling technology for this program. Without it, sustained hypersonic flight could prove impossible.

Ramjets operate by subsonic combustion of fuel in a stream of air compressed by the forward speed of the aircraft itself, as opposed to a normal turbojet engine, in which the compressor section (the fan blades) compresses the air. In comparison to turbojets, ramjets have no moving parts. Scramjets (supersonic-combustion ramjets) are ramjet engines in which the airflow through the whole engine remains supersonic. Scramjet technology is challenging because only limited testing can be
performed in ground facilities. Long duration, full-scale testing requires flight test speeds above Mach 8. Hyper-X will build knowledge, confidence and a technology bridge to very high Mach number flight.

Here it is ... a scaled model.   The entire bottom of the vehicle makes up the scram engine

http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov

Here is a report from "Steve," dated 19 JAN 06.      Thanks Steve ...

"I have been trying to find out what this is.  This plane moved across
the sky from mid hemisphere in about 4-5 seconds.  I am a pro
photographer and was only able to get 4 shots of with my d-70.  The
speed and the distance of the jet wash from the back of the plane...in
addition to the shape is what caught my attention.  Additionally...I
have shot thousands of shots...and in every situation when I shoot
skyward to a blue sky and I auto level the shot in photoshop it just
brightens and sharpens the already blue sky.  This shot did something I
have not ever seen...it turned the black color you will see in the
bottom picture.  The top picture is the natural shot...it was a RAW
file and was saved a a jpeg...the other is the photoshop cleaned shot.
nothing but color was altered in this shot.  Strangely the dark color
actually enhances the shape and detail.  Would appreciate any help."

CAUTION ... the original photo submitted is a large file, and may take "Dial Up" quite a while to load.

For ease, I cropped the photos, as shown below.  The original photos are on a separate LINK, containg nothing but the original photo.  See it       HERE

Here was my response: 

Nice photos.  The aircraft seems to be in full afterburner (2 engines), and with what little experience I have on SR-71 Blackbirds, it looks like none other than an SR-71.

Kind of odd, because NASA is the only organization that still flies one of them (last I heard).  The use it for weather and meteorlogical (sp) purposes.

An old Air Force joke that used to go around, in aircraft circles, was:  "how do you spell weather?"  This was of course referring to weather observation aircraft in the Air Force, i.e., WC-135's (had "Weather" painted on the sides of the aircraft).  When I was stationed at Yakota AFB, Japan, in 1968 - 1971, there were some of them stationed there.  Did this mean weather or whether?  U-2's and SR-71's were also referred to as weather observation aircraft, in some circles.

Congratulations on getting the photo.  I'll try to get it on my Web Site, on the page dealing with UFO's.  I don't keep it up to date any more - there just wasn't time enough to keep up with all the questions I got.

Thanks,

Dan Walters

Cibolo, Texas

Well...Sorry to burst your bubble on your theory that that is the SR-71 Blackbird,That is most certainly NOT a Blackbird.I have access to a Blackbird and many other fighters new and old whenever i want,and that is not the SR-71.I think that is an aircraft that hasn't been publicly acknowledged yet..."COULD THIS BE THE AURORA"? i think so.This photo amazes me quite a bit.I want to say It looks like a MIG-25 Foxbat,but the engines in photo are displaced to low in the aft center of the fuselage for any known aircraft.And the stabalizers are out to the edge of the fusalage and it doesn,t appear to have any wings.                    Thomas .... E-Mail dated 9 Apr 06.

  _____________________________________________________________________________________

Response:  Upon looking at it again, considering all of the distortion, you're right ... the afterburners are too low to be an SR-71, and the rest of the fuselage is hard to make out.  The twin tails could belong to a number of aircraft. 

Thanks for the feedback.

Dan Walters