Awwwwwright, now you've done it. A cuppla Nevada aerospace stories and an oddity.
I like to drive and ride - and I like ghost towns, back-backroads, and deserted ruins - abandoned mines, decaying factories (yes, I love ghetto-touring too). And Nevada is a great place for oddities.
Three incidents:
1. Driving from somewhere east of Carson City and south of Fallon - don't remember exactly where butt somewhere in the rough vicinity NE of Hawthorne Ordnance storage facility, and off the side of this lonely, deserted, nowhere-in-hell road I'm on I see a green street sign of the type they have in the Bay Area for street names. And it marks a loooooong driveway/narrow road going off to the north. I can't recall the exact name of the 'street' sign, butt it was related to eBay which had gone public and shot up like a rocket years prior. I think it may have been Omidyar Street or some word that made me associate it with eBay. And way in the distance, in the middle of frickin' nowhere, is this Aaron Spelling-style home, compound, outbuildings, tennis court, and who knows what else - like maybe 7 miles away from where the driveway meets this podunk side-backroad I'm on. It appeared to me that this was one of the eBay hunnert-millionaires who fled to no-income-tax Nevada, cashed in his eBay stock/options as a Nevada resident, and built his palace compound about as far as one can get away from city lights as you can get in the Lower 48. Didn't see an airstrip, so I guess the person drives all the way to Carson City to do major shopping.
2. Driving on a lonely road between Luning and Gabbs, I notice this soaring 'hawk' or eagle/condor-like bird soaring over my vehicle on the right side tracking the highway and never flapping its wings - just soaring. I watch as it flies ahead of me, maybe a mile (hard to judge distance and size out there) then executes a 90 degree left turn and flies across my path and is now on my left forward, and it executes another 90 degree turn - again never flapping its wings and slowly descending. Now I recognize this as how you fly an airfield landing pattern and I watch it descend in a straight line and a steady glideslope, and notice on my left - in the middle of nowhere - is a large metal pole-barn building with a gravel parking area that has maybe 25-30 cars and pickups parked there. It was a drone - a bird-sized drone (or appearing like a large bird at distance) that was made to LOOK like a hawk/eagle/condor and it fooled me right up until I recognized the traffic/landing pattern and watched it glide towards the metal building. This was in 1994 or 1995.
3. I was driving down to Las Vegas from Reno to meet up with some old grad skool buddies for the first week of March Madness. We rented a condo off the Strip and were ready for 6 guys to watch 4 days of basketball. I was night driving down 95 near Indian Springs (west of the Nevada Test Site) and dawn was breaking. Off to my left was a low mountain range and every once in awhile I'd note some movement in my left peripheral vision, so I pulled to the shoulder and watched. Periodically, I'd see a small, black object shaped something between a triangle and a boomerang making incredibly tight turns at ungodly G forces and rising up above the rim of the mountains so I could see it just at the peak of these incredible, short radius turns. No human could possibly survive the G forces of those turns at that speed - nott even close. It had to be doing 400 knots - that fast - even though it was relatively small (guessing a 12 to 15 foot wingspan, again, hard to judge at the distance without a reference item). There was/is an old airfield right off 95 in that area off to the east, and it appeared that while none of the buildings had lights on, there were a number of vehicles parked there. Over the mountain ridge to the east was where this black flying boomerang/triangle was ripping around apparently in a bowl surrounded by mountains. Butt every once in awhile in a tight turn it would bob up over the top of the ridge and you could see it for maybe 2-3 seconds - going quite fast (I estimate 350-450 kts) and a ridiculous tight turn radius. This was in the late '90s. It was nott a F-117 and I'm shure it could nott have been manned because of those turns at those speeds would crush any human from the Gs. I have no idea what this thing was, butt it was some type of drone/remotely piloted vehicle and it could make turns that would rip the wings off any conventional fighter aircraft that we know of. I think it would be quite difficult for an anti-aircraft missile to be capable of deflecting its path in a pursuit course at close range to match the offset that this little bugger was able to pull. AA missiles do use lead pursuit guidance and various intercept strategies, butt this little bugger could change direction and cut like Walter Payton on meth or Barry Sanders on bath salts and crack.
I often wonder what became of these two drone/drone-like gizmos I saw back now 20 years ago. And I wonder what gizmos we're working on now.
And mostly I wonder what materials that fast, high-G aircraft I saw was made of such that it could pull those Gs and nott crumple.
Thus endeth the Nevada weird stuff reminiscences.
