TR-3B The Black Triangle

Yes I know you've seen the photo on the Aurora page, but as it's the only one I have it will have to do. I do ask if this is Aurora or "Something Else". I think it just may be possible that it is the TR-3B, but as very little is know about the aircraft it is by no means certain.

I have received many enquiries concerning this vehicle and after a lot of research I have discovered very little. The one thing that is apparent is that if it does exist it is certainly the Blackest of Black Projects the US Airforce has so far undertaken. If only 25% of the information I have found is true then this aircraft belongs in the realms of Star Wars fiction and not as an ongoing program.

Over the last few years numerous sightings of a Black Triangular aircraft have been reported . A number of these can be discounted as they were probably either F111's, F14's or even RAF Tornado's in full swept-wing configuration. However that still leaves a number which are "Unexplainable".These constitute reports of a vehicle that can hover as well as a capability of extremely high speed level flight, and invariabley accompanied by either complete silence or a loud pulsing engine note. This would certainly fit the profile as reported in the "Belgian Incident".(See Aurora Page).

I would like to thank Scot Cullen for pointing me in the right direction where I obtained the following article.The article was extracted from a speech made by Edgar Rothschild Fouche give at the International UFO Congress, Loughlin, Nevada in 1998.Mr. Fouche states that has worked in the Defence Industry and associated Goverment Programs for the last 30 years including having worked at Area 51, Groom Lake and Nellis Air Force Base for a number of years on very highly classified projects indeed.

I have also included extracts where he refers to the SR-75 Penetrator (Aurora) as I thought that this might be of interest as he seems to have further, so far unreleased information, on the subject I do not normally give much credence to UFO material but in this case as Mr Fouche's credentials are extremely impressive I thought I would pass it on and you can make your own mind up.

Extract 1 SR-75 Penetrator (Aurora)

Area 51 - the Groom Air Base facilities, has a 6 mile long runway, the longest in the US. The Department of Defense and CIA’s most exotic aerospace vehicles are tested and modified at the Groom Lake facilities.Why a 6 mile long runway? You need a runway this long if the minimum, or stall speed of an aircraft, is a very high speed. Aircraft without wings, like wedge shaped lifting bodies, or those with 75 degree swept back wings, have a very high stall speed. So they take off very fast and land even faster.

It’s a place where curious outsiders circulate rumors, about aliens and extra-terrestrial technology, being utilized to accelerate the various programs at Area 51.My sources estimate that up to 35% of the SDI funding was siphoned off to provide primary expenditures for the Air Force's most secret 'Black Program’, which started in 1982. It is called - The Aurora Program.

Aurora is the code name of the ongoing project to build and test advanced aerospace vehicles.For the last few years, high-tech buffs speculated that at least one new and exotic aerospace vehicle existed. The SR-75, the first operational Aurora Program vehicle, went operational after 2 years of flight testing and modifications in 89.

The top secret SR-75 is a hypersonic strategic reconnaissance, or SR spy plane, and is called the Penetrator. It is also a mothership, which I will explain shortly. Hypersonic speeds start at approximately Mach 5. The SR-75 replaced the SR-71 spy plane, which was retired in 1990, by the Air Force, who said, "there is no replacement, all we really need is our spy satellites to do the job. Ha! The new SR-75 is capable of positioning anywhere in the world in less than 3 hours. It carries multi-spectral sensors, such as optical, radar, infrared, and laser. It collects images, electronic’s intelligence, signals intelligence, and illuminates targets.

The Top Secret SR-75 far exceeds the classified military speed and altitude records set by the old SR-71, which could fly at a still classified Mach 3.3 and reach a ceiling of 85 thousand feet.The SR-75 attained altitudes of over 120,000 feet and speeds exceeding Mach-5, or 5 times the speed of sound. That’s over 3300 miles per hour. From take-off to landing, the stealthy 75 can make the round trip from central Nevada to Northeast Russia and back in under 3 hours. It's 162 feet long and has a wing span of 98 feet. The belly of the vehicle stands 10 feet off the ground.

It carries a crew of 3 - a pilot, a reconnaissance officer, and a launch control officer, who doubles as the electronics warfare officer.

Two methane and LOx fueled, high bypass turbo-ramjet (combined cycle) engines are housed under each wing, and the bays run some 40 feet under the wings, terminating at the trailing edge of the wing.The explosive Pulsed Detonation Wave Engines that push the huge SR-75 to speeds above Mach 5, are now reported to be pushing Mach 7, or 4500 miles per hour, with the latest engine modifications.

Although this plane has been sighted on numerous occasions, has been picked up on military radar, and the pulse detonation wave contrail it leaves behind it has been seen, the Air Force vehemently denies its existence.

The 2 large engine bay inlets located under each wing of the awesome black SR-75 mother ship, hang down 7 feet from the underside of the wing and are twelve feet wide. You could drive a Volkswagen Beetle into one of the engine exhausts.The SR-71, and 75, and the daughter ship, the SR-74, were all built by the Lockheed Advanced Development Company, commonly known as the Lockheed "Skunk-Works."

A friend said, he would never forget the sight of the alien looking TR-3B based at Papoose. The pitch black, triangular shaped TR-3B was rarely mentioned--and then, only in hushed whispers--at the Groom Lake facility where he worked. The craft had flown over the Groom Lake runway in complete silence and magically stopped above Area S-4. It hovered silently in the same position, for some 10 minutes, before gently settling vertically to the tarmac. At times a corona of silver blue light glowed around the circumference of the massive TR-3B. The operational model is 600 feet across.

The TR-3B is Code named Astra.

The tactical reconnaissance TR-3B first operational flight was in the early 90s. The triangular shaped nuclear powered aerospace platform was developed under the Top Secret, Aurora Program with SDI and black budget monies. At least 3 of the billion dollar plus TR-3Bs were flying by 1994. The Aurora is the most classified aerospace development program in existence. The TR-3B is the most exotic vehicle created by the Aurora Program. It is funded and operationally tasked by the National Reconnaissance Office, the NSA, and the CIA. The TR-3B flying triangle is not fiction and was built with technology available in the mid 80s.Not every UFO spotted is one of theirs.

The TR-3B vehicle’s outer coating is reactive to electricalRadar stimulation and can change reflectiveness, radar absorptiveness,and color. This polymer skin, when used in conjunction with the TR-3Bs Electronic Counter Measures and, ECCM, can make the vehicle look like a small aircraft, or a flying cylinder--or even trick radar receivers into falsely detecting a variety of aircraft, no aircraft, or several aircraft at various locations.A circular, plasma filled accelerator ring called the Magnetic Field Disrupter, surrounds the rotatable crew compartment and is far ahead of any imaginable technology.

Sandia and Livermore laboratories developed the reverse engineered MFD technology. The government will go to any lengths to protect this technology. The plasma, mercury based, is pressurized at 250,000 atmospheres at a temperature of 150 degrees Kelvin and accelerated to 50,000 rpm to create a super-conductive plasma with the resulting gravity disruption. The MFD generates a magnetic vortex field, which disrupts or neutralizes the effects of gravity on mass within proximity, by 89 percent. Do not misunderstand. This is not antigravity. Anti-gravity provides a repulsive force that can be used for propulsion. The MFD creates a disruption of the Earth's gravitational field upon the mass within the circular accelerator. The mass of the circular accelerator and all mass within the accelerator, such as the crew capsule, avionics, MFD systems, fuels, crew environmental systems, and the nuclear reactor, are reduced by 89%.This causes the effect of making the vehicle extremely light and able to outperform and outmaneuver any craft yet constructed--except, of course, those UFOs we did not build.

The TR-3B is a high altitude, stealth, reconnaissance platform with an indefinite loiter time. Once you get it up there at speed, it doesn’t take much propulsion to maintain altitude.At Groom Lake their have been whispered rumours of a new element that acts as a catalyst to the plasma.With the vehicle mass reduced by 89%, the craft can travel at Mach 9, vertically or horizontally. My sources say the performance is limited only the stresses that the human pilots can endure. Which is a lot, really, considering along with the 89% reduction in mass, the G forces are also reduced by 89%.

The TR-3Bs propulsion is provided by 3 multimode thrusters mounted at each bottom corner of the triangular platform. The TR-3 is a sub-Mach 9 vehicle until it reaches altitudes above l20,000 feet--then God knows how fast it can go!The 3 multimode rocket engines mounted under each corner of the craft use hydrogen or methane and oxygen as a propellent.In a liquid oxygen/hydrogen rocket system, 85% of the propellent mass is oxygen. The nuclear thermal rocket engine uses a hydrogen propellent, augmented with oxygen for additional thrust. The reactor heats the liquid hydrogen and injects liquid oxygen in the supersonic nozzle, so that the hydrogen burns concurrently in the liquid oxygen afterburner.The multimode propulsion system can; operate in the atmosphere, with thrust provided by the nuclear reactor, in the upper atmosphere, with hydrogen propulsion, and in orbit, with the combined hydrogen\ oxygen propulsion.

What you have to remember is, that the 3 rocket engines only have to propel 11 percent of the mass of the Top Secret TR-3B. The engines are reportedly built by Rockwell.Many sightings of triangular UFOs are not alien vehicles but the top secret TR-3B. The NSA, NRO, CIA, and USAF have been playing a shell game with aircraft nomenclature - creating the TR-3, modified to the TR-3A, the TR-3B, and the Teir 2, 3, and 4, with suffixes like Plus or Minus added on to confuse further the fact that each of these designators is a different aircraft and not the same aerospace vehicle. A TR-3B is as different from a TR-3A as a banana is from a grape. Some of these vehicles are manned and others are unmanned.

They are big, black, and triangular. In UFO folklore they are proof-positive that planet Earth is a rest stop for joyriding, but road-weary, extraterrestrials.

A just released study by the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS), based in Las Vegas, Nevada, sheds new light on the dark and mysterious craft. They offer a more down-to-earth hypothesis.

NIDS researchers contend that these type vehicles are lighter-than-air, blimp-style craft of the U.S. military's making. Likely powered by "electrokinetic" drive, the lifting body-shaped airships have been skirting the skies from perhaps the early to mid 1980s.

Estimated to be 600 feet long and 300 feet wide, with a height of 40 feet, the Black Triangle could weigh as much as 100 tons. Courtesy of National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS)

NIDS has followed up on their study of last year that correlated sightings of large triangular or delta-shaped objects with Air Force Materiel Command and Air Mobility Command bases throughout the United States. Matches were made suggesting flight paths in and out of certain base locations.

The new assessment focuses on what four police officers, and more than a dozen others observed on January 5, 2000: A large, silent, low-flying black triangular shaped object. It flew on a southwesterly direction between Highland, Illinois and Dupo, located less than 30 miles (48 kilometers) from St. Louis, Missouri.

Part of the flight path took the enormous object near the perimeter of Scott Air Force Base.

NIDS does not come up with definite conclusion regarding the origin of the object sighted in Illinois.

However, the reports jibe with over 150 separate reports of sightings of large triangular or deltoid shaped objects. Those eyewitness accounts, accumulated by NIDS, have mainly come from the United States. A small number of the sightings they have on file come from Canada and Europe.

To bolster their case about military airships being taken for UFOs, analysts at NIDS make a historical note.

Lighter-than-air vehicles held all records for payload, distance, duration, and altitude within the first four decades of the 20th century - even with the advent of the airplane. In fact, save for rocket-powered research aircraft, like the X-15 and the space shuttle, all absolute altitude records are still held by high-altitude scientific balloons.

NIDS makes the case that Big Black Deltas, or BBDs, are U.S. Defense Department airships. They are so large they can carry massive payloads at low altitudes, cruising at speeds three to five times as fast as surface ships.

Among a range of NIDS observations, the group believes the BBDs are powered by electrokinetic/field drives, or airborne nuclear power units. These craft also fly at extreme altitudes, high above conventional aircraft and the pulsing of ground-based traffic control radar.

Elecrokinetic propulsion means that no propellers or jets are used. A hybrid lighter-than-air craft would rely on aerostatic, lift gas, like a balloon. No helicopter-like downwash would be produced. Except for a slight humming from high-voltage control equipment -- and in older BBD versions an occasional coronal discharge -- a Big Black Delta makes no noise.

Given a slew of BBD capabilities -- from silent running, diminished drag, elimination of sonic shockwaves, to operation from ground level to full vacuum -- NIDS calls for pushing this black world technology out into daylight for commercial benefit.

"What we're trying to do is transform unidentified flying objects, UFOs, into IFOs, or identified flying objects," said Colm Kelleher, deputy administrator for NIDS.

"We want to limit the number of cases that are unidentified in our data base. The more that are identified, obviously the less we have to work on. That's our prime motivation& to eliminate the wheat from the chaff," Kelleher told SPACE.com.

NIDS has amassed some 1,000 cases that are under review. Of those, about 200 are Big Black Delta sightings. In the last year or two, BBD reports have been on the rise.

Kelleher said that military may well be ready to take the wraps off the black triangle vehicles. The Illinois case, for instance, has been built on hours of public views of the mystery airship. "That's not exactly stealth mode. It's inevitable that it will be declassified," he said.

L. Scott Miller, professor of Aerospace Engineering at Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas, said the idea of a large, still-classified airship floating about is on the mark.

"I do think that a large airship, with a heavy lift and other mission objectives, has been built," Miller told SPACE.com.

Miller is also a distinguished lecturer of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), and specializes in black aircraft and the world of secret flight.

The NIDS research documentation parallels, about 50 percent of the time, a theory that Miller has detailed in his AIAA talks for some two years.

"Lockheed has shown a great deal of interest in airships for many years. The real question is whether the Department of Defense has committed to buy and use such machines," Miller said.

Large airships are of benefit to the military.

They are capable of carrying extremely large and heavy payloads at a reasonable speed, for which there is a real mission need, Miller said.

The U.S. airlift fleet is getting old, taking a great beating in the last 10 years in such locales as Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. Some new aircraft are making it into the inventory, but they still have limits. For instance, to move loads of tanks and other gear requires lots of flights and support.

"An airship that could carry a large number of tanks, troops, and supplies into a region overnight would be fantastic," Miller said.

"There appears to be an increase in deployment of these vehicles," Kelleher said. "The only time you see these things are when they are leaving or coming in. A lot of these sightings are at night. Our information is that they spend a long time aloft, weeks at a time. They can be thought of as ocean-going ships, rather than aircraft," he said.

Over the years, the BBDs appear to fall into different size categories. "The ones that dominate our database are very, very large. They are low-flying, silent, and are reported to be about the size of a football field," Kelleher said.

The BBDs have been seen accelerating very rapidly from a hovering position. "They can look as though they are leaping across the sky. Being silent, it's almost spooky," Kelleher said

Miller does take issue with the NIDS study's view of a black triangle's propulsion. "Interesting, but I'm not sure it is necessary," he said.

"I suspect that a neutrally buoyant aerodynamically lifting airships using conventional prop-rotor systems would be useful in implementing a practical airship design," Miller said. Such a vehicle could be a cross between the V-22 Osprey -- a craft having short wings and thrust vectoring rotors -- and a blended wing aircraft, he said.

Miller said that by careful shaping, the systems used, and carefully orchestrating operational procedures, the vulnerability of an airship in a combat environment could be reduced.

"Low altitude flights, at night, and an awareness of enemy capabilities would be critical. Indeed, slow flight at the right time can render enemy radar useless. A 'stealth blimp' would be feasible in this respect," Miller said.

till, the true nature and use of the black triangle craft remains a head scratcher.

"I suspect that the people in Illinois saw an airship of some type. Is it operational? I don't know. Would it be 'sexy enough'

for the Defense Department inventory, compared to other high-tech aircraft like the B-2? I don't know," Miller said.

"Each sighting requires a great deal of analysis. A witness's perceptions of speed, acceleration, and size are likely of very little value,"

Miller said.

"I have taken an approach of first identifying needs -- or mission requirements -- and technology availability. Then I compare

those with the cold raw, simple facts of a sighting, not the conjecture or guess work of a witness," he said.

"I suspect that, as a result, perhaps up to 30 percent of the recent 'Triangle UFO' sightings are of black world aircraft,

jets or airships," Miller concluded.

The following article was taken from Wikipedia the free encyclopedia which I would like to thank and,whilst it includes some of the meterial I have already mentioned also gives further information which you may find interesting

Black triangles are a kind of Unidentified Flying Objest (UFO) that have been observed in the skies since the 1970's and possibly earlier, to the present day. They have appeared more commonly over the cities of the United States and England, but have been spotted world wide including a mass sighting over St.Petersburg, Russia on February 19th 1997.

Since then hundreds of observers have reported enormous, totally silent,black triangular craft hovering or slowly cruising at low altitudes over cities and highways, usually at night. Making no attempt to evade detection, the craft are even described by many observers as having some sort of "running lights", either bright white lights or flashing coloured lights. These lights usually appear at each corner point of the triangle.Sometimes a red pulsing light can be seen at the center.

Well there you have it, thought provoking isn't it, I told you that if only 25% is true then we are now in the realms of science fiction (OR COULD IT BE FACT?) I leave you to decide.If any of you would like to read the full speech from Mr Fouche it can be found at:www.fouchmedia.com I apologise for the lack of photographs but so far I have only managed to find one for which I am grateful to Mr Fouche for allowing me to use. If anyone out there has any further info or pictures of any kind of the TR-3B I would be grateful if you could contact me. Thanks in advance.