Last week Flying photographed Aurora, or at least what looks to be strong evidence of Aurora, the much rumored, never-acknowledged U.S. military spyplane.
I snapped the pic not because I thought I was catching a peek at Aurora but because I thought the contrail was evidence of some strange meteorological phenomenon. The contrail was odd indeed, as you can see here, with a scalloped edge and a smooth edge with a well defined margin at the several-hundred-mile long path. I wondered if the contrail was situated exactly on the edge of a line of wind shear — after all, why else would only one side of the contrail be blown out? In an earlier Facebook post I postulated that the contrail was at around 40,000 feet, the altitude around which most transcontinental flights would fly, but I was probably flat-out wrong. If it was indeed an Aurora spotting, and it likely was, then the altitude in question might as easily have been 200,000 feet, an altitude that would put it well above the range of conventional missiles.
