Aurora was a rumored mid-1980s American reconnaissance aircraft. There is no substantial evidence that it was ever built or flown and it has been termed a myth.

The U.S. government has consistently denied such an aircraft was ever built. Aviation and space reference site Aerospaceweb.org concluded “The evidence supporting the Aurora is circumstantial or pure conjecture, there is little reason to contradict the government’s position.”

Others come to different conclusions. In 2006, veteran black project watcher and aviation writer Bill Sweetman said, “Does Aurora exist? Years of pursuit have led me to believe that, yes, Aurora is most likely in active development, spurred on by recent advances that have allowed technology to catch up with the ambition that launched the program a generation ago.

Black triangles are a class of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, with certain common features which have reportedly been observed during the 20th and 21st centuries. Media reports of black triangles originally came from the United States and United Kingdom. Credit: ALittleNightvision

Reports generally describe this class of UFOs as large, silent, black triangular objects hovering or slowly cruising at low altitudes over cities and highways. Sightings usually take place at night. These objects are often described as having pulsing colored lights that appear at each corner of the triangle. UAP Formation of the Triangle Type

Black triangle UFOs have been reported to be visible to radar, as was the case with the famous Belgian UFO wave. During these incidents, two Belgian F-16s attempted to intercept the objects (getting a successful missile lock at two occasions) only to be outmaneuvered; a key conclusion of the Project Condign report was that no attempt should be made on the part of civilian or RAF Air Defence aircraft to outmaneuver these objects except to place them astern to mitigate the risk of collision. Many UFO researchrs believe the black triangles are part of of a U.S. Air Force program of nuclear powered air craft that are able to hover and move silently, and are the successor to the the TR-3B Aurora and are known as the TR-3B Astra.

Credit: Liveleak One of the more famous appearances of these craft was during the event known as the “Phoenix Lights”, where multiple unidentified objects, many of them black triangles, were spotted by the residents of Phoenix, Arizona and videotaped by both the local media and residents with camcorders across multiple evenings beginning on Thursday, March 13, 1997. Some lights drifted as low as 1000 feet and moved far too slowly for conventional aircraft and too silently for helicopters. Some of the lights appeared to group up in a giant “V” formation that lingered above the city for several minutes. Many residents reported one triangle to be over a mile wide that drifted slowly over their houses blocking out the stars of the night sky. Other reports indicated the craft were spotted flying away from Phoenix as far away as Las Vegas, Nevada and Los Angeles, California. An official report made by the Air Force about the incident concluded that the military had been testing flares launched from conventional aircraft during that time. Eyewitnesses confirmed military jets were scrambled from nearby Luke Air Force Base, but instead of launching flares, they were seen chasing after some of the objects. The next few nights, in an attempt to recreate the incident, local pilots flew prop-planes over the city in a “V” formation, but the sounds of their engines were easily heard. The original lights made no sound. Flares were also deployed above Phoenix. Comparison of the video taken of the lights (which appeared at night) against daytime images of the same scene show that the lights “disappear” at the exact moment they are shown to fall behind a mountain range. The mountains were invisible against the night sky. There were apparently no reported radar sightings of the objects which appears to be consistent with the flare theory.

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The “St. Clair Triangle”, “UFO Over Illinois”, “Southern Illinois UFO”, or “Highland, Illinois UFO” sighting occurred on January 5, 2000 over the towns of Highland, Dupo, Lebanon, Summerfield, Millstadt, and O’Fallon, Illinois, beginning shortly after 4:00 am. Five on-duty police officers around these locales, along with various other eye-witnesses, sighted and reported a massive, silent, triangular aircraft operating at an unusual treetop level altitude and speeds. The incident was examined in various television shows including the ABC special Seeing is Believing with Peter Jennings, an hour-long Discovery Channel special UFOs Over Illinois, an episode of the Syfy series Proof Positive and a half-hour-long independent documentary titled The Edge of Reality: Illinois UFO, January 5, 2000 by Darryl Barker Productions. An artist’s concept of a black triangle object. Credit: Wikipedia The Aurora legend started in March 1990, when Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine broke the news that the term “Aurora” had been inadvertently included in the 1985 U.S. budget, as an allocation of $455 million for “black aircraft production” in FY 1987. According to Aviation Week, Project Aurora referred to a group of exotic aircraft, and not to one particular airframe. Funding of the project allegedly reached $2.3 billion in fiscal 1987, according to a 1986 procurement document obtained by Aviation Week. In the 1994 book Skunk Works, Ben Rich, the former head of Lockheed’s Skunk Works division, wrote that the Aurora was the budgetary code name for the stealth bomber fly-off that resulted in the B-2 Spirit

By the late 1980s, many aerospace industry observers believed that the U.S. had the technological capability to build a Mach-5 replacement for the aging Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird. Detailed examinations of the U.S. defense budget claimed to have found money missing or channeled into black projects. By the mid-1990s, reports surfaced of sightings of unidentified aircraft flying over California and the United Kingdom involving odd-shaped contrails, sonic booms and related phenomena that suggested the US had developed such an aircraft. Nothing ever linked any of these observations to any program or aircraft type, but the name Aurora was often tagged on these as a way of explaining the observations Credit: AlienScientist In the controversial claims of Bob Lazar, he states that during his employment at the mysterious S-4 facility in Nevada, he briefly witnessed an Aurora flight while aboard a bus near Groom Lake. He claimed that there was a “tremendous roar” which sounded almost as if “the sky was tearing.” Although Lazar only saw the aircraft for a moment through the front of the bus, he described it as being “very large” and having “two huge, square exhausts with vanes in them.” Upon speaking with his supervisor, Lazar claims he was informed that the aircraft was indeed an “Aurora,” a “high altitude research plane.” He was also told that the aircraft was powered by “liquid methane.” By 1996 reports associated with the Aurora name dropped off in frequency, suggesting to people who believed that the aircraft existed that it had only ever been a prototype or that it had had a short service life. In 2006, aviation writer Bill Sweetman put together 20 years of examining budget “holes”, unexplained sonic booms, along with the Gibson sighting and concluded: “This evidence helps establish the program’s initial existence. My investigations continue to turn up evidence that suggests current activity. For example, having spent years sifting through military budgets, tracking untraceable dollars and code names, I learned how to sort out where money was going. This year, when I looked at the Air Force operations budget in detail, I found a $9-billion black hole that seems a perfect fit for a project like Aurora.”

In late August 1989, while working as an engineer on the jack-up barge GSF Galveston Key in the North Sea, Chris Gibson and another witness saw an unfamiliar isosceles triangle-shaped delta aircraft, apparently refueling from a Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker and accompanied by a pair of F-111 fighter-bombers. Gibson and his friend watched the aircraft for several minutes, until they went out of sight. He subsequently drew a sketch of the formation. On March 30, 1990, citizens of the city of Eupen spotted what appeared to be a large black triangular craft hovering silently over the city for several minutes. Local police officials arrived on the scene and reported observing the object as it appeared to hover over apartment buildings. One officer reported that the object released a red glowing disk of light from its center which flew down to the ground and darted around several buildings before disappearing Credit: InformityAffect

Gibson, who had been in the Royal Observer Corps’ trophy-winning international aircraft recognition team since 1980, was unable to identify the aircraft. He dismissed suggestions that the aircraft was an F-117, Mirage IV or fully swept wing F-111. When the sighting was made public in 1992, the British Defence Secretary Tom King was told, “There is no knowledge in the MoD of a ‘black’ programme of this nature, although it would not surprise the relevant desk officers in the Air Staff and Defence Intelligence Staff if it did exist.” A crash at RAF Boscombe Down on 26 September 1994 appeared closely linked to “black” missions, according to a report in AirForces Monthly. Further investigation was hampered by aircraft from the USAF flooding into the base. The crash site was protected from view by firetrucks and tarpaulins and the base was closed to all flights soon after Credit: nikos4812