The mysterious SR-91 Aurora of the 1980s was slated to become the fastest
manned aircraft in the world, ushering in a new era of aerial performance.
Today the aurora project is little more than a historical footnote of
fleeting glimpse into an aeronautics future that could have been.
The original story goes something like this, for decades ago the u.s
military conceived a next generation reconnaissance plane project to replace
the aging inexpensive to maintain SR-71 blackbirds. The government studied
proposals for a manned, hypersonic stealth spy plane capable of
traveling at a speed of up to mach 5.
The concept which allegedly reached a program cost upwards of two billion
dollars by the late 1980s, was subsequently shelved, never again to be
revisited.
But there is a problem with this narrative. Though it is true the SR-91 does
not exist as a serial product it is still not clear if the plane ever even
existed as a design concept. The government has consistently denied that
such an aircraft was ever built.
To date there is no hard evidence that an SR-91 prototype took flight. there
was a series of alleged sightings in the early 1990s of a plane thought to
be the Aurora, but not one of these has been corroborated.
The purported evidence includes reports of tremors around the los angeles
area, while these quakes could very well have been caused by military
aircraft operating out of the area 51 facility in nevada, there is nothing
to suggest that the plane in question was an SR-91 prototype.
In another famous 1989 sighting over the north sea, witnesses possibly
mistook a B-2 spirit for what they believed to be an SR-91. The spirit was a
recently introduced bomber that somewhat matched the triangular shape
described in eyewitness accounts.
It appears that these aurora rumors, some of which intersected with other
far-fetched ideas about extraterrestrial encounters and secret military
projects, were spurred less by concrete proof than by popular demand for
stories confirming the sr 91's existence.
As it stands, most of what we know stems back to a 1990 aviation week and
space technology article claiming that the term aurora was referenced in
federal budget documents.
A 1994 memoir by Ben Rich former director of lockheed martin skunk works,
goes far in clarifying the confusion that ensued. Rich explained that aurora
was simply the funding code name assigned to the B-2 project by a colonel
working in the air force's black program.
Somehow the name leaked out during congressional appropriations hearings.
The media picked up the aurora item in the budget and the rumor surfaced
that it was a top secret project assigned to the skunk works to build
america's first hypersonic plane. He continued, that story
persists to this day even though aurora was the code name for the B-2
competition funding.
