MILITARY TECHWe’ve Probably Just Seen the USAF’s Secret Electromagnetic Attacker
Another element in the US Air Force’s plans for long-range operations, essential for Asia-Pacific deterrence, may have emerged from under cover of secrecy: a shadowy uncrewed aircraft designed to fly far and slip into an enemy’s defended zone, undetected until it starts jamming radars. Quite likely, it would carry missiles to knock out radars. Put another way, the evidence adds up to an electromagnetic attack aircraft.
Another element in the US Air Force’s plans for long-range operations, essential for Asia-Pacific deterrence, may have emerged from under cover of secrecy.
It looks like we’ve just got a good view of a shadowy uncrewed aircraft designed to fly far and slip into an enemy’s defended zone, undetected until it starts jamming radars. Quite likely, it would carry missiles to knock out radars.
Put another way, the evidence adds up to an electromagnetic attack aircraft—like the Boeing EA-18G Growler but highly stealthy and uncrewed. Northrop Grumman or, more likely, Boeing would seem to be the prime contractor. And the evidence suggests that the aircraft is not new: it was glimpsed a decade ago and was an active program in 2010, so either development has been in fits and starts or the type is operational.
Secret aircraft projects are dangerously fascinating, and excessive interest can get you on to CIA files. YouTuber Anders Otteson is one of the latest to follow the trail of the early 1990s Interceptors (a loose confederation of Area 51 observers). He bounces around the Mojave Desert in a comfortably equipped schoolie—a modified school bus, named Janet—with radio and a stack of cameras with low-light and infrared front ends.
Otteson just hit more pay dirt than most Mojave miners have done in decades, with an infrared video of an aircraft (10:00 mark) with a pure triangle shape. In the secret-airplane community, such things have long been dubbed mantas or doritos, the latter being a brand of triangular corn chip, and that’s the nickname given to the one that Otteson caught on video. ‘Dorito’ was also the nickname of the McDonnell Douglas and General Dynamics A-12, which defense secretary Dick Cheney ruthlessly killed off in 1991.
Is the A-12’s ghost haunting the desert? This is not the three-sided phantom’s debut. Back in 2014, Steve Douglass (one of the original Interceptors) and Dean Muskett caught a flight of three aircraft of similar shape over Amarillo, Texas. A month later, another unidentified aircraft—which likewise did not resemble a Northrop Grumman B-2—was seen over Wichita, Kansas.
It was not at all clear at the time what purpose such an aircraft might serve, but one of the more satisfying aspects of the secret-aircraft hunt is when a piece of evidence in hand contains more data than you thought it had.
