by Phil Patton
MiGs might be confused with saucers, but they still looked like fighters when you got a clear look. They did not look like the strange flying beast I had seen at the boneyard, nor did they look anything like the far stranger shapes that had flown above Groom Lake and whose cousins were about to come into plain sight.
18. El Mirage and Darkstar
Tumbleweeds cleared, read the sign by the side of the road, a fair indication of the nature of local enterprise. This was the desert east of Palmdale, California, center of America’s high-tech aerospace industry.
I had passed Plant 42, where the B-2 bomber was hatched. The new Skunk Works was nearby, its huge hangars crisply painted in a gray worthy of the most shipshape vessel in the Navy.
The road ran east from “Aerospace Valley,” formally known as the Antelope Valley, although no such animal has been seen there for years. Instead, you saw the new malls, Kmarts, and fast-food franchises, giving way eventually to acres of sod farms and fruit trees. The map showed a huge expanse of lettered avenues and numbered streets, the projection of a vast city dreamed up by some wildly optimistic boosters. It centered around a planned super-airport that had never been built; the map even showed the runways and terminal sites.
It resembled one of the Nazca earth markers that Erich von Däniken thought represented a landing strip for the gods. It was a dream airport, as if for the ghost craft watchers frequently saw here—the mother ship, the giant triangles, the bats and whales. An airport of the imagination, I thought, like the airbase of the imagination at Dreamland.
Out of the corner of my eye I caught the same evil-looking shape I had seen at the boneyard many years before. The spot was Blackbird Park, a strip of grass near the Lockheed Skunk Works where examples of its proudest works are parked: A-12 and SR-71 Blackbird aircraft. Beside them sat the little craft I now knew was a D-21 drone, the last of the Blackbirds, kept secret for years, which had flown from the back of an SR-71, then from beneath the wing of a B-52.
It was a transitional design between a manned spy plane and a UAV—unmanned aerial vehicle. The engineers called it a “parasite.” Once released from the back of the Blackbird, the D-21 was automatically guided. Out of control of any ground station, it would pass over a target—the denied area—and photograph it, then fly to a friendly country and land by parachute.
It weighed several tons, a chunky cylindrical shape with stubby wings and tail that clearly suggested the SR-71; it was like a larval version of the big craft. The whole project was called Tagboard.
The D-21 foreshadowed a new generation of UAVs. I wondered if many of the shapes flying out of Dreamland were not of this type. Unmanned craft could and did take on shapes that were, in the words of many observers of things flying above Groom Lake, “otherworldly.” Because they did not have cockpits or windows, because they did not need to provide protection for a human pilot, they could be more batlike or more saucer-shaped. They could be pumpkin-seed-shaped.
How many UAVs, flying secretly, had been taken for UFOs? And how many others had been hidden as well as the D-21 had been? How many aerial sharks and mantas?
Mine was not the only suspicion. The first assumption, incidentally, of those who encountered flying saucers was oftentimes the same as my own: They must be secret planes of some sort. The famous front page of the Roswell Daily Record, now reproduced on thousands of T-shirts and in many books that proclaimed the “capture” of a saucer or disc, also included a story on “man in the street” reactions. H. M. Dow of Roswell declared, “I have come to the conclusion that there are some disks flying and I think it is an experiment of some tactical branch of our armed forces.” One Rolla Hinkle opined that “the United States government is trying out something new. These disks may be radio-controlled instruments of some kind.”
I drove past old ranches, with corrals jury-rigged from wire and discarded doors, looking for a very different kind of airplane. I was heading for El Mirage. The dry lake there had long been a favored spot for hotrodders and motorcyclists, who cut loops and doughnuts into its surface. For artists, too, it was a useful canvas. In the late sixties and early seventies, earth artists had created temporary sculptures here. Inspired in part by the vast canvas of the desert, one had poured strips of asphalt on El Mirage in an X shape that looked from the air like the little x of the airstrips at Dreamland when Kelly Johnson and Tony LeVier had first flown over them. Another artist had sliced long trenches into the lake bed to define “negative space” and what were called “nonsites.” Weren’t the Air Force and CIA into “nonsites” too when they ran bases they wouldn’t acknowledge?
I had just parked next to an old aircraft boneyard when I caught sight of it: a tiny fleck that came closer, turning into what looked like a giant white paper plane, with wing tabs turned down, wheeling over the small airfield. But the strangest thing was its nose—it had no cockpit, no windows. It looked blind.
There were no windows because there was no pilot. This was Predator, the most recent UAV, flying for the CIA and the military, being tested at the El Mirage desert airstrip of its builder, General Atomics, Inc.
For a long time, we didn’t even have a good name for these things. Once, they were dismissively called “drones,” then “remotely piloted vehicles.” By the mid-nineties, the term of choice had become UAVs, and in the Pentagon the field was chic. A new generation of UAVs was arriving, relying on advances in electronics and computing, miniaturized sensors and cameras and relay systems. Today’s UAVs are spy planes; tomorrow’s will be fighters.
For years, UAVs inhabited a world of their own, a shadow of a shadow. Overlooked, ignored, they never attracted the kind of attention the black planes did. Before they became fashionable, how long had they been flying out of Dreamland?
Even the most famous of imagined Dreamland projects may have been a UAV: The “Glossary of Aerospace Terms and Abbreviations” in the September 1994 issue of Air International claimed Aurora is an acronym for AUtomatic Retrieval Of Remotely-piloted Aircraft. And the builder of the huge Perseus UAV for NASA was a company called … Aurora.
Hovering high above unfriendly countries, their proponents say, UAVs can relay via satellite to distant ground stations video, radar, or infrared images of anything that moves. “Lingering” is the favored term. The Predator, for instance, can fly three hundred miles and “linger” for up to two days in the air, where it is virtually invisible to the human eye and difficult for radar to spot. (Despite a fifty-foot wingspan, it shows up only as a square meter radar “signature.”)
Proponents have proclaimed the dawn of a new era in aviation and a new kind of pilot—the right stuff of the future. The joystick in the cockpit may be replaced by one on the desktop, and Top Gun may be replaced by Captain Nolo—traditional Air Force lingo for “no live operator.”
Like robots of any sort, UAVs have the advantage of requiring no room and board, no training or food. They can pull more G’s than human pilots (fighter aircraft are limited in their acceleration and deceleration not by the strength of their airframes but by the G-tolerance of the human body). Cases of “temporary interruption of consciousness”—blackouts—have been suspected in several crashes over the last few years, including General Bond’s. UAVs cannot be held hostage or suffer torture. Politically, UAVs benefit from the new post–Cold War/post–Gulf War emphasis on inexpensive high-tech weapons that avoid putting human lives at risk. And of course UAVs cost less than manned aircraft. Predator was tagged at just $1.6 million per craft.
A couple of days after I saw it in the air, four Predators were on their way to the former Yugoslavia to conduct round-the-clock observation of forces on the ground. Predator, a so-called Tier II UAV, follows the Tier I “Gnat 750,” which was less successful when tried out by the CIA from Albanian bases.
That afternoon I drove back west, straight up to the gray and blue buildings of the Lockheed Skunk Works—it was the post–Cold War Skunk Works now, as neatly groomed and carefully patrolled as any Hollywood set, pr
operly outfitted as the high holy of American aviation. I had come to watch the unveiling of Darkstar.
Inside the hangar called Building 602, we were given press kits in neat black folders. Representatives were there to brief us. Until 2:28, when the curtain was to be pulled back, “the configuration was sight sensitive” and therefore officially classified. Lockheed, Boeing, DARPA, and DARO, the Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office, were all partners in the project, and the craft, they told us, would go from drawing board to first flight in an unprecedentedly short twelve months.
“How,” I asked later, “was such rapid development possible? Were there other programs that helped?”
They were, the DARPA man said, able to rely on experience from other programs.
“Could you tell what those programs were?”
“I could,” he said, “but I won’t.” General laughter ensued.
The room was darkened. There was a great rumbling sound from above. I looked up and saw that the yellow roof crane that spanned the whole hangar was sliding slowly in the dark, a cluster of orange lights on its center, pulling back the black curtain. As stirring music played, dry ice spread a soft and ghostly fog around the craft: a white object that looked like nothing so much as a flying saucer with a large porthole. It took a few seconds to see that narrow wings grew from the saucer. It was just like the rollouts I had seen in Detroit for new cars—music, stage effects, lights: technology as theater.
One eager young PR person running around seemed to have nothing to do. I collared him and asked what music was playing. He disappeared and returned in a few minutes with the answer: It was from the Disney film The Rocketeer, based on a comic book about a man with a rocket backpack. The film and the music evoked the romantic days of aviation, when Howard Hughes was setting flight records and making movies, and the alliance of Hollywood and aerospace was being formed. The name Darkstar was taken from John Carpenter’s mid-seventies film about the crew of a roving spaceship.
Darkstar was the new so-called Tier III Minus UAV. The “Tier” designations are DARPA project names, bestowed by a law, the “Section 845—Other Agreements Authority,” that gave DARPA special powers for prototype development outside the normal channels of Pentagon procurement procedures. The Tier designations had been dreamed up to delineate the pecking order of UAVs by size, cost, and stealthiness. No one knew how, but Lockheed had managed to develop Darkstar in a matter of months. Rumor held that Darkstar was the son of a UAV called Tier III. By interesting coincidence, that name echoed “TR3A,” the name of the Manta, the craft Steve believed he had spotted in Roswell. Tier 3—TR3. Was there a secret meaning? Or just a general confusion?
Predator is Tier I; Tier II Plus or “Global Hawk” was being constructed by Teledyne Ryan in San Diego and could fly at 65,000 feet for twenty-four hours or more. Darkstar was Tier III Minus. It cruised at 180 miles per hour using a single jet engine buried inside what looks like a porthole. It could fly as high as 45,000 feet and survey some 1,600 square miles with synthetic aperture radar or electro-optical cameras. But its flying-saucer-like shape would make it more stealthy than the Tier II Plus. It had been, the briefers said, “optimized for low observables”; in other words, made to look like a saucer to avoid radar detection.
By talking to Interceptors and their network, I got an idea what the programs that could have aided in Darkstar’s creation might be. One program was the Senior Prom stealthy cruise missile that had been tested at Dreamland. Another was Tier III itself, which the Lore said was also called “Q.” According to various accounts, it was a successor to the Aurora debacle, an offspring of Lockheed’s unsuccessful, alternative design for what became the B-2 bomber. It was a flying wing with a 150- or 220-foot wingspan. Others said that it, too, was a debacle. Two had been constructed and flown, manned, from the Groom Lake runway, but the program had been canceled because the cost of the individual aircraft had risen to nearly a billion dollars.
After the smoke and the oohs and aahs faded away, I talked to Maj. Gen. Ken Israel, the head of DARO, which along with DARPA, the agency that gave us the original Stealth fighter, had developed Darkstar.
General Israel used to fly in an EB-66 electronic spy plane probing Soviet electronics defenses. Now he quotes Shakespeare and touts the future of UAVs as a revolution in aviation. Israel’s leading arguments for UAVs are humanistic: “In the next century, we will definitely rely more on pilotless aircraft to place people out of harm’s way.” But he also speaks in the terms of the new Pentagon fashion—“infowar.” “We need to know what’s on the battlefield before we get on the battlefield.” With its ability to linger over an area, Israel says, a UAV can “view the battlefield with impunity.” It can give the generals not just desktop infowar but real time infowar.
Look, too, he says, at “cost of ownership.” The SR-71 Blackbird costs $38,000 an hour to fly, and a U-2 $6,000 an hour; a UAV costs only $2,000 an hour. These were craft for the post–Cold War world: cost-conscious, self-promoting, and aimed at very different enemies than Curtis LeMay’s bombers had been.
The logic for UAVs had been obvious to some for years. Kelly Johnson predicted twenty years ago that they were the future of military aviation.
“UAVs are part of the great American tradition of substituting technology for human beings,” says Randy Harrison, a member of the Darkstar team at Boeing. The Gulf War, and especially the difficulty of locating SCUDs on the ground, gave impetus to UAV proponents.
While for most American TV viewers the Gulf War seemed a model of information efficiency and intelligence gathering, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf and other generals complained about their lack of “real time” information. The images we saw of smart bombs riding lasers down air vents were actually films, carried back to base and developed. Real information about enemy targets was much harder for the generals to get from space or the air. By the time satellite and other images reached the field from Washington, the tanks had often moved, the SCUDs shifted.
To be sure, this was the classic case of fighting the last war, but it also offered a look at the information war of the future.
General Israel and his friends imagine a war fought with batlike robot planes. Their strategy for overcoming conservative resistance is clever: “We are like Billy Mitchell,” he said, invoking the prophet of airpower and his struggle for acceptance. The aspirations of UAVs to be real fighting aircraft are hinted at by their names: Hunter, Raptor, Talon, and Predator—pretty aggressive for mere reconnaissance craft. There is no reason at all, Israel says, that UAVs could not take over the job of the manned interceptor—that Captain Nolo could not supplant Chuck Yeager. And if the Pentagon goes to war with UAVs, won’t the TV networks need them too? They will act as the high-tech equivalent of the news chopper.
The next step will be to use UAVs as target designators: eyes in the sky that will “paint” targets with lasers for smart bombs to ride down. The incentive for the UAV to replace the fighter, despite our affection for the chivalry and heroism of the dogfight, also comes as a result of the Gulf War. The Vietnam syndrome has been replaced by the Gulf War syndrome: total intolerance of casualties or the national humiliation of having pilots become prisoners displayed for the TV cameras.
Cases in point go back as far as Francis Gary Powers in 1960. But another conveniently popped up the very day after the Darkstar unveiling, when an F-16 was shot down over Bosnia carrying pilot Scott McGrady. With UAVs, there would be less need to send manned aircraft over such areas, and considerably less chance of pilots becoming hostages or pawns. A couple of days after McGrady was rescued, the decision was made to send the Predator over Bosnia. Had it been used earlier, it might have warned of the SAMs on the ground.
Studying Darkstar at the unveiling was a man in a blue fatigue cap and a leather A-2 jacket of the sort pilots wear. Lt. Col. Jim Greenwood was an RSO—the observer or backseat man in an SR-71—from 1986 to 1990. Now that America’s dearth of aerial reconnaissance tools had led the Pentagon to pull
the Blackbird out of mothballs, he was getting ready to fly again.
In the meantime he had become a proponent of UAVs—one of the few within the Air Combat Command, the fighter pilot’s command. “Hey, it’s a pilot’s air force,” Colonel Greenwood admits. Some pilots will resist UAVs to their last breath. But as for computers replacing the “human element” at the controls, Greenwood notes, that began happening long ago.
Computers fly airplanes much more often than pilots like to admit. Commercial airliners full of passengers are more readily trusted to computer systems than to human pilots during bad weather landings. Many aircraft, such as the F-117 Stealth fighter, are unstable without controlling computers.
The first controllers for Darkstar, Greenwood told me, would be trained pilots. “But in the future, you might take people straight off the street and give them pilot training, instrument rating, and then have them stop flying real planes and go to UAV school.” The prospect of video-game stars taking over for the Top Gun hotshots did not seem to faze the colonel. “Gotta go,” he said. “I’ve got a date with a T-38.” Not half an hour later, he was arcing skyward at a steep angle, in the sort of airplane that may one day seem as quaint as a Sopwith Camel.
No one was quite sure yet whether the operator of a UAV should still be called a pilot. Captain Nolo flew the drones of the past, but today’s UAVs don’t necessarily need any pilot at all. Darkstar is programmed to roll out of the hangar, take off, fly its mission, land, and return to the hangar without human intervention. The Predator, by contrast, is directed by a joystick kind of mechanism. Darkstar uses Global Positioning System satellites to determine its location. Its flight plan can be changed in mid-course, but its interface is a series of maps and graphs of way points, a software system manipulated by mouse and keyboard.