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But What About Maru's Helicopters?
Space.com has this extremely interesting article about the possible origins of "Big Black Triangle" UFOs seen since the mid 80s all over the country. Their verdict: deep-black airships moving huge cargos around.
The only immediate problem I can think of is it requires a big crew to unload a big ship. Lots tougher to keep such a secret with a lot of teenage airmen doing the loading and unloading.
My question, one that isn't raised at all by the article, is what the hell are they building that requires such monstrous cargos to be moved around in complete secrecy?
Does it make any sense at all? I take it the assertion is that the military has large (but presumably not too heavy) cargoes that need to be moved aroung the country but are so secret that conventional transportation won't do. So they've constructed a fleet of large, black airships and use them only at night to carry these cargoes around.
The obvious trouble is that there isn't really anything that secret - the US military is very open about practically everything except intelligence gathering systems - even things like nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles are moved around without this sort of thing.
But doesn't an airship strike you as an odd choice for this mission? Airships are slow, so if this thing is limited to the hours of darkness it would have to operate between bases that are quite close together. Also airships even today don't have the solid reliability of jet aircraft (they don't crash because there are so few of them). Things like attitude and buoyancy control are still major issues and severe weather is a problem too. Could you really take the risk of something like this crashing?
Finally most nights aren't really that dark - if there's any moon at all this thing would be clearly visible. Would this thing show up on radar - how much RAM would you need to squelch the return, could it still take off?
Posted by: Robert UK on August 6, 2002 04:22 PMYeah, the longer I think about it, the less sense it makes. I mean, where the hell are you going to put it in the daytime? The hangars the navy built to house their 1930s airships still stand over in New Jersey, and they're ENORMOUS. You can't just hide these things.
But it's a fun idea!
Posted by: scott on August 6, 2002 08:25 PMHmmmmm...I'm going to check the site out tomorrow. I'm ready to crash now, if the cats will let me.
:)
Posted by: maru on August 6, 2002 09:15 PM