ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

134 The Hunt for Zero Point
impossible to see with the naked eye. But at cruise altitude, with enough
plasma buildup around its leading edges, an aircraft—particularly a
supersonic or a hypersonic platform—would glow like a lightbulb. It
would pulse.
"A high-altitude aircraft that crosses the night sky at extremely high
speed . . . observed as a single, bright light—sometimes pulsating—
flying at speeds far exceeding other aircraft in the area," one of the
nighttime eyewitness observations reported in the October 1990 edition
of Aviation Week.
"Northrop has been playing around with electrostatics for years,"
Marckus said. "In 1968, it submitted a paper called 'Electroaerodynamics
in Supersonic Flow' to the American Institute of Aeronautics
and Astronautics."
"I know," I told him, happy for once I had something he didn't. "I
tried to find it on the AIAA website, but the papers on their electronic
database don't go back far enough. I'll have to request a copy from their
archives instead."
Even across eight time zones, I caught Marckus' withering sigh.
"Don't bother. I applied eight years ago. It's missing. They couldn't
find any record of it. Almost certainly, some special projects office in the
Pentagon pulled it. Made it disappear. That happens occasionally.
Someone screws up and the black world has to go clean up. Actually, it
wasn't all Northrop's fault. Back in the '60s, they had some noble ideas
that this technology could be applied as a drag-reduction device for
supersonic airliners, cutting heat friction and fuel burn. It was only when
someone clocked the fact that a plasma shield around an aircraft also
reduces its radar signature that the military really woke up to it. It's been
rumored for a while that Northrop had come up with something
revolutionary in this field. The missing paper proves it."
Marckus carried on. I closed my eyes and tried to think.
The signal I was picking up was painfully indistinct against the
background mush of interference, but I could see that it added up to
something important.
The B-2 clearly used some kind of skin-charging mechanism to lower
its radar (and quite possibly its heat) signature. But it was also clear, from
the nature of the paper that Northrop had written in 1968, that the
origins of this electric shield, this stealth cloaking device, were actually
rooted in another field of research altogether—drag reduction. According
to Marckus, who now admitted to having witnessed similar experiments
in the U.K., the electrostatic field could also be made to
behave like a big "jet flap," an extension of the wing. Deploy this invisible