Are UFOs In Actuality the Military's Ultimate Sky Spies?

This article originally appeared in Popular Communications Magazine August 2004. (C) 2004 Steve Douglass. Reproduction here with friendly permission by the author.
If the winds were kind and the technical problems were ironed-out, by the time you read this you may have already heard about the strange "flying V-shaped" UFO that has been seen by citizens over far west Texas and southeastern New Mexico.
Although the event hasn't happened as of this writing, it is likely this huge flying object will be seen at sunset and is flying so high it probably glows bright for maybe more than an hour after dusk and will undoubtedly prompt uninformed citizens to call local authorities and report a unidentified flying object in the area.
In reality the UFO is a prototype of a new lighter-than-air sky spy and might give utility monitors in the area a rare opportunity to intercept some unique communications.
Scheduled for late June and lasting throughout the summer and fall a V-shaped airship bigger than a baseball diamond is due to rise from the West Texas desert to an altitude of 100,000 feet (30.5 kilometers), navigate by remote control, linger above the clouds and drift back to earth.
This joint JP Aerospace/U.S. Air Force project to build a new kind of reconnaissance and battlefield communications platform that some day might lead to even bigger lighter-than-air, gas filled floating platforms that gossamer spaceships could use as high-altitude way stations.
"The full-size station in our grand vision is 2 miles across," says John Powell, the company's founder. "But that's down the road a bit. We take baby steps." You can learn more about this project by pointing your browser to: http://www.jpaerospace.com/
Known as the "Ascender" the unique shaped aerostat is slated to be (as of press-time) launched from the Pecos County/West Texas Spaceport at Fort Stockton, TX, but the liftoff is dependent on the weather and has been delayed several times. According to Powell, "We actually had the first flight window in February, but we sat there and stared at 30-knot West Texas winds for two weeks, so we're going back in June,"
If tests are successful, the Ascender could lead to a much larger military airship being developed as a separate project.
In 2001, the Missile Defense Agency awarded Lockheed Martin a $40 million contract to work on the High Altitude Airship, a 500-foot-long (152-meter-long) blimp, 25 times larger than the Goodyear blimp and much more capable than the Ascender and could loiter at altitudes above 65,000 feet for as long as a year.
One reason airships are becoming more and more attractive to the Pentagon is the cost. The roughly $500,000 cost of building the 175-foot-long (53-meter-long) Ascender airship is far less than the price tag for any piloted airplane or robotic drone.
But the Pentagon's primary motivation is strategic rather than financial. The altitudes best suited for the helium-filled Ascender are virgin territory for the military. It could take a payload higher than any spy plane, above the weather and well beyond the reach of virtually any attack from the ground or the air.
Although the Ascender is considered to be a prototype of a future system there are some who speculate the NRO has been flying top-secret airships for years which have been responsible for may "slow moving" UFO sightings.
A few years ago an American Air West 727 was flying in an air corridor just north of the restricted military airspace known as Area 51, when lightning from a nearby thunderstorm illuminated a huge motionless cigar-shaped object hovering silently over the Nevada Desert. The pilot startled by the sudden appearance of the eerie craft radioed air traffic controllers to report the encounter as a UFO sighting.
Controllers on the ground responded that it was probably a classified aircraft operating out of the restricted Nellis Range. The pilot described the craft as looking something like an elongated big black blimp, invisible except when illuminated by lightning flashes.
What the commercial pilot saw was most likely one of the best kept black world secrets, the stealth airship, a flying Big Brother, prowling the upper reaches of the atmosphere capable of collecting enormous amounts of intelligence for its spy masters on the ground.