Keith Thomson's Blog, page 11

This Month in Birdwatching

Here is a gallery of birds I spotted this month on the Internet. Click left and right arrows to advance gallery/go back. If you want them, bird i.d.s will show on hover.

X-29

F-16

F-117

Jaguar

B-47 with rocket assist

Phillips Multiplane

fictitious plane from movie Stealth

X-32

Cat

Aardvark

Spruce Goose

BAE Lightning

F-15

Dassault Rafale

Tomcat

Concorde

Vark

Tupolev ANT-20 Maksim Gorky

Cat

Buran reusable spacecraft

Airacobra

Dreamliner

F4

Cat

XB-70

C-141 Starlifter

X-47A unmanned combat aerial vehicle

Cat

Cat

Growler

'Cat

Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo

Hammerhead UAV

BAE Systems unmanned combat aerial vehicle

Starfigher
 

Tornado

Front clockwise, F-4 Phantom, French Mirage 2000, Mig 19 Farmer , A-6 Intruder, Mig 15, A-7 Corsair, Mig 21 Fishbed, F-16 Falcon & Middle is F-14 Tom Cat.

C-130s

Titanium Goose

Tornado

Atlas Cheetah

Either an F-14 nearing the speed of sound with the biggest vapor cone of all time or an F-14 demonstrating travel through folded space and time.

F/A-18

MIG-29

Dassault Rafale

RELATED: Check out hundreds of additional Birdwatching photos here. Check out a novel in which a spy with Alzheimer's unwitting reveals a secret about the Blackbird fighter.

The Vancouver UFO

Here are photos taken in Vancouver of an unidentified flying object.

Here's one of the videos in which it was spotted by fans at a baseball game.

How about a better look?

Not incidentally, here's the nearby Vancouver Space Centre:

And here is a commercial for the same.

So, yes, Vancouverites did see a UFO, by design. It was a radio-controlled helicopter dressed up as a UFO.

Related links: My True Area 51 UFO Story

ONCE A SPY

Captured Alien Spacecraft?

How a Kitten Saved a Marine

In eastern Korea, in 1952, a 1st Marine Division Sgt. Frank Praytor adopted a kitten after another solider shot its mother to death for “yeowling” Praytor used canned milk and a medicine dropper to feed the kitten, whom he named Miss Hap because, "she was born at the wrong place at the wrong time." He later weaned her on meat from ration cans. His mistake was sending this photo of him and Miss Hap home.

The photo quickly went the pre-Internet equivalent of viral, appearing in more than 1,700 American newspapers, including The New York Times. Praytor then faced a court martial for allowing a civilian publication to run a combat photo without proper authorization. When handed the court martial papers, however, his commandant tore them up. Evidently cat photos were a thing pre-Facebook.

Read Praytor's account in Graybeards (volume 23, no. 3), the official publication of the Korean War Veterans Association.

Related links: Cat Photos

F-19: The Most Secret Aircraft Ever?

I don't need to know, but I hope we have top secret stealth fighter jet that, years from now, will be declassified and part of the same discussions as the Blackbird. Here's the primary evidence—what there is of it—that the F-19 exists and remains classified:

[image error]

Testors' "1/48 model" of the F-19

1. Since 1962, fighter planes have been designated by consecutive numbers, beginning with the F-1 Fury. F-13 was never assigned due to superstition. After the F/A-18, the next announced aircraft was the F-20.

2. The venerable Jane's All the World's Aircraft listed a Lockheed RF-19 in a 1987 reference book—"erroneously."

3. There's an F-19A Ghostrider in Tom Clancy's 1986 novel Red Storm Rising.

Here are some additional "facts" and "photos" culled from the Internet.

Yeah, the rest of the refueling photo looks grainier than the plane, but maybe that's because it's made of a classified supermaterial.

Next up, supposed Northrop catalog copy from the mid-’80s. Did Northrop used to sell classified fighters by catalog? Let's go with it.

There's also this ad Northrop supposedly had to pull in order to preserve the secret.

And this Google Earth shot of disassembled F-19s at an airplane boneyard in Arizona:

Hit me with your evidence. In the meantime, in conclusion, the F-19 would be cool. And if the government's managed to keep it secret: cooler.

 

Related links: My True Area 51 UFO Story; ONCE A SPY

This Week’s Supermodels

Like giant radio-controlled planes and/or gawking at them? Then click through this gallery (19 photos, and, below, a link to more pix and videos):

Click here for more supermodel photos—and videos.

An Attempt to Fly Under the Eiffel Tower

In 1984, 38-year-old American Bob Moriarty was a veteran of two years in Vietnam and 824 missions as a Marine F-4B pilot and O-1C/G Forward Air Controller.  But he still had a healthy appetite for danger—or, depending on your perspective, unhealthy.  After a couple bottles of wine one night, he decided to fly underneath the Eiffel Tower.

On March 31, 1984, at Paris's Le Bourget Airport, home to Lindbergh's landing some 60 years earlier, Moriarty took off in a Beech V-35 Bonanza (35-foot wingspan).  He'd filed a flight plan to Shannon, Ireland, but neglected to mention the unique route he intended to take.

Let's go to the videotape, shot from cockpit:

Related links: Moriarty's account.

Great Aerial Badasses: Godefroy Tries to Thread the Arc de Triomphe

Novel with similar plane action: Twice a Spy

Giant Nuclear-radiation-proof Battlebots are Real and Nothing New

It turns out that giant nuclear-radiation-proof battlebots exist, and are nothing new. Meet "the Beetle," built in 1960 for the Air Force Special Weapons Center—by General Electric's  Nuclear Materials and Propulsion Operation division—to service and maintain a planned fleet of atomic-powered bombers.

11 feet in height, the Beetle weighted in at 77 tons. The name was a reference to its beetle-like arms.

Related link: 7 Grams of Lead

To drive the Beetle, you needed to open the 15,000-pound canopy using hydraulic lifts and climb into the cockpit. Once inside, it was cramped, but you had a/c, a TV, and, of course, an ashtray. The Beetle never saw active use, and its current whereabouts are either unknown or secret.

The Roswell Cover-Up, Explained

Chief of Staff Steelman briefs President Truman

The following is a transcript from the July 7, 1947 breakfast meeting of President Harry S. Truman and White House Chief of Staff John R. Steelman, who had flown to Key West, Florida, overnight and interrupted the president's vacation to deliver the following news:

 

CHIEF OF STAFF:  Mr. President, late last night on a ranch in Roswell, New Mexico, the Air Force recovered a- crash-landed alien spacecraft with extraterrestrials aboard.

PRESIDENT:  Why, that is without a doubt the most significant piece of news in the whole of human history!  After millennia of speculation, the citizens of Earth will finally learn and rejoice in the knowledge that we’re not alone in the universe!

CHIEF OF STAFF:  About that, sir, we propose we cover it up.

PRESIDENT:  Cover it up? 

CHIEF OF STAFF:  We'll say that it's simply one of a classified weather balloon that crash-landed.

PRESIDENT:  But why?

CHIEF OF STAFF:  In case the aliens have technology that the military can use against the Russians.

PRESIDENT:  Oh, okay.

Related links: Once a Spy, Twice a Spy, 7 Grams of Lead

Cat Photos

Like cat pix? Then let's get to it…

F-14 Tomcat

Grumman F7F Tigercat

Grumman F6F Hellcat

F-14 Tomcat

SEPECAT Jaguar

AgCat

Grumman F7F Tigercat

F-14 Tomcat

Grumman F8F Bearcat

Cessna AT-8 Bobcat

CMC Leopard

F-14 Tomcat

Atlas Cheetah

Tigercat

Grumman F9F Panther

Atlas Cheetah

XCOR Lynx

Siamese

Tomcat

Hipps J3 Kitten

[image error]

 כְּפִיר (Kfir "Lion Cub")

Tomcat

Tomcat tail

Related Links: BIRDWATCHING (hundreds of plane, rocket and UAV pix); ONCE A SPY

Identify this UFO and Win 7 Grams of Lead

NASA classifies it as space debris. It was first spotted by Astronaut Gordon Cooper during his twenty-two-orbit Mercury-Atlas 9 flight in 1963. A spacecraft or satellite or some sort, he believed, much larger than any other man-made satellite of the time.

It was seen, on radar, by multiple witnesses at a NASA tracking station near Perth, Australia. The only official explanation given was that Cooper had breathed in too much CO2, giving him hallucinations. Which was all the confirmation UFO-cover-up-conspiracists needed. It became known as TBK—The Black Knight.

Then in 1987 the Endeavour Mission, STS-088, turned in these photos:

So what TBKF is it?

Use the form below to answer (by May 10, 2014). Best answer wins a copy of 7 Grams of Lead or Once a Spy (winner's choice). Note: All information above post came by way of websites I'd never heard of.

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Thank you!