Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Pentagon Airship UAVs

A story in last month’s L.A. Times reports on efforts to build lighter-than-air platforms that will hover over areas of the Earth for months or years at a time, gathering intelligence data with cameras and sensors. Some of the proposed airships are shaped like huge boomerangs and (it is rumored) triangles. That fact may ring a bell with some readers.

An article in the September, 2004 issue of Popular Communications entitled “Monitoring the Military’s ‘UFO’ Sky Spies” apparently scooped the LAT by almost five years. Author Steve Douglass uncovered that giant defense contractor Lockheed Martin was awarded a contract to develop such a system:

In 2001, the Missile Defense Agency awarded Lockheed Martin a $40 million contract to work on the High Altitude Airship, a 500-foot-long (152-meter-long) blimp, 25 times larger than the Goodyear blimp and much more capable than the Ascender and could loiter at altitudes above 65,000 feet for as long as a year.

The “Ascender” is a V-shaped airship developed by a small Texas company called JP Aerospace. A company called General Orbital is also working on a high altitude airship, according to information at its website.

via UFOMystic » Pentagon Plans Airship UAVs.

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