Message posted by Vahe Demirjian (Member since 04/28/2022) on November 17, 2023 at 19:13:37 PST:
I remember that the page "Secret U.S. Aircraft Projects at Groom Lake" mentioned allegations about the rumored "F-121" Sentinel was a General Dynamics reconnaissance aircraft with a isosceles triangular platform, but on pages 247 and 248 of the book "Dark Eagles" by the late Curtis Peebles, I happened to notice a passage about the alleged "F-121" Sentinel being a Northrop-built equilateral triangular aircraft based on a drawing given to Peebles by an anonymous source: "[The F-121 Sentinel] is described as being an equilateral triangle with the tips flattened. Its three sloping sides met at a point, giving it the appearance of a pyramid. A the center of the F-121's underside was a depression and a dome-shaped nozzle. It is claimed that a squadron of the planes are based at the Northrop RCS facility at Tehachapi. The site had no runway, but the planes take off and land vertically from the underground bunkers." It's unclear if Andreas Parsch was aware of the mention of the "F-121" Sentinel in Peebles' book when he wrote the page "Secret U.S. Aircraft Projects at Groom Lake" and the section of that page about the "F-121" because rumors about the "F-121" being a classified Mach 3+ spyplane were dismissed by Parsch himself as coming nowhere near the truth. Worth mentioning is the fact that page 250 of "Dark Eagles" quoted private sources (cited in a footnote on page 332) as saying that the "F-121" Sentinel could take off vertically with an anti-gravity engine. What we are now left with is whether Northrop built an aircraft with the "F-121" label, bearing in mind the fact that Andreas Parsch correctly dismissed rumors about the "F-121" Sentinel being a classified Mach 3+ spyplane for the NRO as bogus. Given that anti-gravity technology remains the stuff of science fiction, I can speculate that even if the alleged "F-121" Sentinel had no antigravity engine, it might have been a subscale technology demonstrator for the kind of stealthy VTOL special operations airlifter concept encapsulated by Boeing, Lockheed, McDonnell Douglas, and Northrop's design studies in the late 1980s and early 1990s for a stealthy VTOL tactical transport.
Replies: