The Pretenders: UFO's And Camouflage The word "stealth", for most people, usually conjures
the image of Lockheed Martin's F-117A. But stealth covers a much
wider range of techniques and technologies commonly known as
concealment, camouflage and deception or CC&D. "The use of
camouflage, concealment, and deception (CCD) is characterized by
hiding a target to conceal its presence,
blending it into the background, disguising its identity, or using
false targets as decoys" (Jane's International Defense Review, April,
1997).
Spotting an aircraft visually is just as effective as
detecting it on radar. Military engineers are directing intense focus
to technologies which may not only reduce radar signature but also
render aircraft virtually invisible to the naked eye - also known as
Visual Stealth.
Visual stealth experiments actually began as far back as
the early 40's with a project code-named Yehudi. This 1943 U.S. Navy
project was designed to give Navy patrol aircraft a better chance of
sinking enemy submarines by lowering the visual acquisition range to
about 2 miles allowing Navy aircraft to get within striking distance
of enemy submarines before they
submerged. Using 10 sealed-beam lights along the wing's leading edges
and the rim of the engine cowling, adjusting the intensity of the
lights to match the sky allowed the aircraft to blend into the
background.
Similar light apertures derived from Yehudi were planned
for Lockheed's Have Blue (later renamed the F-117A) which were to be
installed on the sides and undersurfaces of the airplane. The
apertures would be connected by fiber-optic lines and controlled by
sensors on the upper portion of the aircraft. These sensors would
"read" the background light and adjust the skin's luminance to mirror
the sky above. This system never flew with Have Blue perhaps because
the first prototype crashed.
More recently designed aircraft utilize more
conventional camouflage of varied painted colors and patterns rather
than using light apertures because this renders the aircraft basically
invisible at higher altitudes and functions adequately under most
circumstances. The F-117 which was originally painted black has
recently been seen painted gray and even white (perhaps to blend in
with white cloud cover). And the Raptor is painted various shades of
grays and blues to blend in with the skies above and below thus
reducing visual detection.
Perhaps one project which employs some of the more
exotic camouflage techniques derived from project Yehudi is the use of
electrochromatic panels. This type of technology utilizes panels
comprised of thousands of tiny sensors that operate like video cameras
taking images of the background transferring these images to panels on
the opposite side of the
aircraft.
The aircraft appears "transparent" to observers on the
ground by transposing background images from behind and above to the
observer's side of the aircraft. One type of "proposed" aircraft
which is said to employ such electrochromatic panels is called the
"Stealth Blimp." It is rumored that one can see the stars from above
the blimp projected on to panels covering the underside of the blimp,
giving the illusion of being transparent to ground observers. There
has been much speculation that one of the "UFO's" seen by residents of
Phoenix, Arizona on the night of March 13, 1997 was
actually a Stealth Blimp during psyops maneuvers.
These are just some of the camouflage technologies known
and rumored to be employed by various military agencies. But there
are other technologies being observed in the skies above us. Eye
witnesses report seeing Unidentified Flying Objects pretending to be
everything from airplanes and helicopters to stars and fireballs.
One such sighting occurred on the night of August 25,
2000 in Loveland, Colorado. A man and his 14 year old son observed
what appeared to be a disk-shaped craft that suddenly turned off it's
strobing light on top and an orange rotating light around it's
circumference and then appeared to turn on a pattern of lights
resembling the conventional aviation lights
of a small plane. (Filer's Files, #36-2000)
In her book, Silent Invasion, Ellen Crystall describes
many types of lighting systems used by UFO's observed in the Hudson
Valley area, "It changed its lighting system again to other types of
lights all large and at places all over the craft. In fact the entire
ship seemed to have all colors of lights in various combinations on
every part of it. The aliens
could change the lights in any manner, and we could see why people
could mistake their shapes if the lights defined only portions of the
vehicle. Even more important, the aliens could imitate aircraft
lights."
In Alien Contact, Timothy Good indicates one witness who
volunteered his opinion that the mystery helicopters seen near sites
of cattle mutilations could be spacecraft "camouflaged as
helicopters". Good states, "The idea is not as absurd as it seems.
Mysterious unmarked aircraft have long been associated with the UFO
phenomenon, and it seems to me
to be entirely feasible that aliens might disguise their vehicles or
even produce facsimile aircraft (sometimes of preposterously
unaerodynamic design), as well as render their craft and themselves
invisible, in order to keep us in a perpetual state of confusion. A
clue to this deception is provided by a number of reports from New
Mexico describing UFOs that imitate helicopter sounds.
During 1978, Howard Burgess reports, a Taos city
policeman heard what he thought was a helicopter hovering over his
police car. Stepping out of the car, he observed a large wingless
cigar-shaped vehicle hovering motionless above him. It then took off
and disappeared over the mountains. In another incident, a witness
reported seeing a large round object near
Dulce which made a noise like that of an old two-cylinder tractor!"
One report from the United Kingdom UFO Network describes
a police officer who observed what appeared to be a "stationary white
star" that suddenly "shot up and out of sight extremely quickly". And
a report from UFO Roundup, Volume 2, Number 3, edited by Joseph
Trainor, quotes a witness in Northern California who described a UFO
that imitated an airplane AND a star.
"A bright object similar to an airplane traveling
suddenly stopped and hovered silently. It only moved a small amount
back and forth in the place it stopped. Where it had been flashing
and moving like an airplane, it was now like a VERY bright star. If
you didn't see it moving across the sky, you would've thought it was
just another star. It stayed that
way all the time we watched it."
Could these "UFO's" be merely tests of secret man-made
CC&D technologies in our skies? Or are these genuine UFO's and beings
from other planets using their own forms of CC&D to avoid detection
and perhaps confuse eye-witnesses and military intelligence agencies?
WHO are the Pretenders and what do they want?
**********
This is only a brief summary of the introduction to my
book, The Pretenders: UFO's And Camouflage, to be released in Spring,
2001. My book is based on three years of intense research sparked by
my own sighting of a huge camouflaged UFO I saw hovering over a field
behind my house in June, 1997. What I have learned, and continue to
learn, over the past three years
has changed my perceptions of everything from UFO's to crop circles.
The Pretenders influence our perceptions in ways most people cannot
even imagine let alone recognize.
The first volume of The Pretenders will present
information and concepts that will astound readers and cause
researchers to rethink even their most cherished theories. The second
volume, already in progress, will present further information related
to the concepts presented in the first book.
Amy Hebert
by Amy Hebert, M.Ed., C.Ht.