UFOs Special Operations Mind Control Secret Projects Unclassified Part 1

What is Majestic 12?
In UFO conspiracy theories, Majestic 12 (or MJ-12) is the code name of an alleged secret committee of scientists, military leaders, and government officials, formed in 1947 by an executive order by U.S. President Harry S. Truman to facilitate recovery and investigation of alien spacecraft. The concept originated in a series of supposedly leaked secret government documents first circulated by ufologists in 1984. Upon examination, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) declared the documents to be "completely bogus", and many ufologists consider them to be an elaborate hoax. Majestic 12 remains popular among some UFO conspiracy theorists and the concept has appeared in popular culture including television, film and literature.

Operation Merlin
United States covert operation under the Clinton Administration to provide Iran with a flawed design for a component of a nuclear weapon ostensibly in order to delay the alleged Iranian nuclear weapons program, or to frame Iran.

Operation Paperclip
Secret program of the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians, such as Wernher von Braun and his V-2 rocket team, were recruited in post-Nazi Germany and taken to the U.S. for government employment, primarily between 1945 and 1959; many were former members and some were former leaders of the Nazi Party. The primary purpose for Operation Paperclip was U.S. military advantage in the Russo–American Cold War, and the Space Race. The Soviet Union were more aggressive in forcibly recruiting (at gunpoint) some 2,000 German scientists with Operation Osoaviakhim during one night.[citation needed] The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) established the first secret recruitment program, called Operation Overcast, on July 20, 1945, initially "to assist in shortening the Japanese war and to aid our postwar military research". The term "Overcast" was the name first given by the German scientists' family members for the housing camp where they were held in Bavaria. In late summer 1945, the JCS established the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA), a subcommittee of the Joint Intelligence Community, to directly oversee Operation Overcast and later Operation Paperclip. The JIOA had one representative of each member agency of the Joint Intelligence Committee: the army's director of intelligence, the chief of naval intelligence, the assistant chief of Air Staff-2 (air force intelligence), and a representative from the State Department. In November 1945, Operation Overcast was renamed Operation Paperclip by Ordnance Corps (United States Army) officers, who would attach a paperclip to the folders of those rocket experts whom they wished to employ in America. In a secret directive circulated on September 3, 1946, President Truman officially approved Operation Paperclip and expanded it to include one thousand German scientists under "temporary, limited military custody"

Operation Washtub
Top-secret program In the event of a Russian invasion of Alaska, the FBI and U.S. Air Force had a plan: make ordinary, average Alaskans into federal agent–like spies that could report back to Washington and survive in hiding from the enemy.

Project 1794
As part of a mass declassification of a number of secrets in 2012, the U.S. Air Force revealed that its Aeronautical Systems Division had plans to produce a UFO-style aircraft back in the 1950s. (Of course, they didn’t release the reason why they needed one, but we’ll leave that up to your imagination.) The flying disc–shaped vehicle was supposed to reach speeds of Mach 4; an altitude of 100,000 feet; and have a range of over 1,000 nautical miles. The brakes were put on the project in 1961.

Operation Argus
High-altitude nuclear tests were conducted, these under Operation Argus was Nuclear tipped missiles were fired from ships for the first time as part of Argus. On August 27, 30 and September 6, 1950, nuclear warheads were shot into space by X-17 rockets from the deck of a US warship anchored off South Africa. These missiles went 300 miles out into space. The reason for these nuclear tests in outer space? One scientist theorized that exploding nuclear bombs in the Earths magnetic field (but above the Earth’s atmosphere) could create an electronic pulse that would render incoming Russian ICBM’s inoperative. Though a magnetic pulse was created by the nuclear explosions, the pulse was not large enough to have any affect on the ICBM’s. The project was another dangerous, and ultimately futile, experiment.

What is Project Orion?
Project Orion was a study of a spacecraft intended to be directly propelled by a series of explosions of atomic bombs behind the craft (nuclear pulse propulsion). Early versions of this vehicle were proposed to take off from the ground with significant associated nuclear fallout; later versions were presented for use only in space. 6 tests were launched.
The idea of rocket propulsion by combustion of explosive substance was first proposed by Russian explosives expert Nikolai Kibalchich in 1881, and in 1891 similar ideas were developed independently by German engineer Hermann Ganswindt. General proposals of nuclear propulsion were first made by Stanislaw Ulam in 1946, and preliminary calculations were made by F. Reines and Ulam in a Los Alamos memorandum dated 1947. The actual project, initiated in 1958, was led by Ted Taylor at General Atomics and physicist Freeman Dyson, who at Taylor's request took a year away from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton to work on the project.The Orion concept offered high thrust and high specific impulse, or propellant efficiency, at the same time. The unprecedented extreme power requirements for doing so would be met by nuclear explosions, of such power relative to the vehicle's mass as to be survived only by using external detonations without attempting to contain them in internal structures. As a qualitative comparison, traditional chemical rockets—such as the Saturn V that took the Apollo program to the Moon—produce high thrust with low specific impulse, whereas electric ion engines produce a small amount of thrust very efficiently. Orion would have offered performance greater than the most advanced conventional or nuclear rocket engines then under consideration. Supporters of Project Orion felt that it had potential for cheap interplanetary travel, but it lost political approval over concerns with fallout from its propulsion.Such later proposals have tended to modify the basic principle by envisioning equipment driving detonation of much smaller fission or fusion pellets, although in contrast Project Orion's larger nuclear pulse units (nuclear bombs) were based on less speculative technology.

Dr Freezelove
Not a project really but a mission. On January 21, 1968, a fire started on board a B52G bomber during a secret mission over Greenland. Most of the crew bailed out and the aircraft smashed into the Greenland ice sheet. On impact, the high explosives in at least three of the atomic bombs on board exploded. This spread radioactive plutonium, tritium and uranium over a large area. The CIA and US military now had a real Project 57 on their hands. The fire melted the ice and at least one atomic bomb fell into North Star Bay and below the ice covered sea. Apparently the US tried to recover the bomb but was unsuccessful. Even though project 57 had provided lots of data about what happens when a nuclear warhead explodes and spreads radioactive contamination over a wide area, the military and CIA still did not have a permanent emergency response unit dedicated, equipped and trained to respond to these dirty bomb like disasters. So an ad-hoc group of scientists and military people were put together and sent to Greenland for what would become the toughest dirty bomb clean up operation in history. With temperatures dropping to – 70 F and winds up to 100 mph, the conditions made it all but impossible for the men to clean up all of the radioactive contamination. Less than 50% of the radioactive material was recovered. The crew cleaned and froze for eight months and when they were done had cleaned up 10,500 tons of radioactive ice, snow and crash debris, which was flown to South Carolina for disposal. The crew would call themselves “Dr Freezelove”.

What is Project 57
This was a “safety test” conducted at the Nevada Test Site to simulate what would happen if an airplane carrying an atomic bomb crashed and released radioactive material into the environment. In this way, Project 57 would become America’s first “dirty bomb” experiment. Scientists theorized that the detonation of the high explosives surrounding a nuclear warhead (but that did not initiate a full chain reaction) would release plutonium into the environment. But they did not know for certain, nor did they know how much plutonium would be released, how far the plutonium would travel, etc. The military and CIA felt the test was needed because more and more American nuclear warheads were being carried by more and more aircraft. Sooner or later (and it would come sooner than anyone thought), an airplane accident was bound to happen when the aircraft was carrying live nuclear weapons. A part of the test site called Area 13 was selected and workers began to set up thousands of “sticky pans”, steel pans sprayed with a sticky resin that would capture and hold plutonium particles released into the air by the explosion of the bomb. Mock cities were set up to determine what would happen if the explosion occurred in an urban area. Fourteen hundred blocks of asphalt streets were laid, and cars parked at various locations on the asphalt. Nine burros, 109 beagles, 10 sheep and 31 rats were placed in cages to measure the physical impact of the plutonium release. At 6:27 AM on April 24, 1957, the nuclear warhead was fired in such a way as to mimic a plane crash. When the radioactive dust settled, 895 square acres had been contaminated. Plutonium is one of the most deadly substances known to man; one millionth of a gram of plutonium is lethal if it is inhaled. Plutonium remains deadly for 20,000 years. Scientists learned much about how plutonium acts by studying the effects on the test animals, but the actual data is still classified. They also found that the plutonium did not move far – it tended to settle on the top of the soil and stay there. After a year of study, Project 57 was shut down and the area never cleaned up. It was fenced off, the material (including the cars) were buried. That was it, or so the scientists thought, until the following year when another scientist authored a paper theorizing that earth worms passing through the contaminated area would move the plutonium with them, out of the restricted zone (as would birds which ate the worms and flew off with the radioactivity in them).

Kiwi
In the 1960’s, the US was on its way to the moon. Lesser known is the fact that, at area 25 (a sister top secret site to Area 51) of the Nevada Test Site, NASA and AEC scientists were working on something even more ambitious – a trip to Mars on a nuclear powered rocket. This was called project Nuclear Engine Rocket Vehicle Application or NERVA. Sixteen stories tall, the rocket ship, called Orion, would send 150 men to Mars in only 124 days. Orion would blast off from eight 250-foot-tall towers out of a cloud of radioactivity generated by a powerful nuclear reactor and engine aboard the ship. When running at full power the nuclear engine operated at 3,680 degrees Fahrenheit; it had to be cooled by liquid hydrogen gas. To test such a monster engine and reactor it had to be bolted down to the earth. When tested, the NERVA engine would shoot into the atmosphere a plume of hydrogen exhaust that had passed through a super-heated uranium fission reactor. The Los Alamos scientists then decided they wanted to know what would happen if scientists lost control of one of these nuclear engines, and it exploded. Thus was born Kiwi – a test to deliberately blow up one of these reactor/engines. On January 12, 1965, a nuclear rocket engine, codenamed Kiwi, was allowed to overheat. At a temperature of 4,000 degrees Centigrade, the reactor burst – shooting radioactive fuel skyward, glowing every color of the rainbow. The explosion blew a 100-pound chunk of radioactive fuel a quarter mile away. The radioactive plume rose to 2,600 feet, and the wind eventually carried the radioactive cloud west, passing over Los Angeles and out to sea. Scientists were airborne with instruments measuring the amount of radiation that was released into the atmosphere, but as of today that data remains classified. Though this was passed off as another “safety test”, the release of so much radiation into the atmosphere possibly violated the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, that banned the airborne explosion of atomic bombs. But scientists now knew what they needed. If the rocket engine exploded on the launch pad – anyone standing within 100 feet would die almost immediately from radiation exposure. Anyone within 400 feet would receive a serious does of radiation that could be fatal, and anyone within 1000 feet would be overexposed to radiation. Five months later, the real thing took place when another design of the nuclear rocket engine, code named Phoebus, did overheat. It exploded when one of the liquid hydrogen cooling tanks accidentally ran dry.

Project Kempster-Lacroix
In the development of America’s first stealth aircraft, dubbed “Oxcart”, all manner of new technology was created at Area 51 to make the aircraft invisible to radar, or at least as small a radar image as could be achieved. Materials that would absorb radar, space age design and electronic counter measures were all employed. Yet when President Kennedy gave Oxcart it’s mission to fly surveillance over Cuba to look for nuclear missiles being secretly installed there by the Soviet Union, the aircraft was still not quite ready. Researchers and scientists redoubled their efforts, but it was decided that Oxcart was still not stealthy enough. Some other way had to be found to make it all but invisible to enemy radar.Project Kemper-Lacroix was one possible solution. At Area 51, scientists came up with the idea of attaching two giant electron guns, one on either side of the aircraft. The guns would shoot out a 25-foot wide ion cloud of highly charged particles in front of the aircraft (an aircraft which was already moving at speeds above Mach 3). The ion gas cloud would further absorb enemy radar waves coming up from the ground, providing the plane with more stealth. Testing on scale models of the Oxcart aircraft showed the theory would work. Testing the electron beam guns on the full scale Oxcart aircraft, the researchers soon discovered the radiation given off by the guns would kill the pilot. So more engineers worked on developing an x-ray shield the pilots could wear to protect them from the radiation. But the first test pilot to wear the shield said it was too cumbersome to allow the pilots to fly the aircraft. Project Kemper-Lacroix was abandoned.

Project Teak and Orange
Perhaps the most wrong-headed, ill-advised and dangerous of all the atmospheric nuclear explosions by the US, Projects Teak and Orange were right out of a science fiction story about mad scientists and their crazy experiments leading to the destruction of the planet.Teak and Orange were two massive, 3.8 megaton nuclear devices which would be detonated in the Earths upper atmosphere over the Johnston Atoll, 750 miles west of Hawaii. Teak was exploded at 50 miles and Orange was exploded at 28 miles in the upper atmosphere. The purpose of these tests was to give the US a measuring stick to use so as to determine if the Soviet Union did the same thing (exploded a nuclear device high in the Earths atmosphere). As if such an explosion would be difficult to detect? It seems mad now, looking back, that such tests were green-lighted, but that was the mood of the Cold War in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Test first, ask questions later. How obvious is it to explode a 3.8 megaton nuclear device 28-50 miles up? The fireballs produced burned the retinas of any living thing within a 225 mile radius of the blast. Anything that had been looking at the sky when the blast occurred, without protective goggles was blinded. This included hundreds of monkeys and rabbits flown in aircraft nearby. The animals had their heads locked into devices that forced them to look at the blast. From Guam to Wake Island to Maui, the blue sky turned red, white and gray, creating an aura over a 2,100 mile section of the meridian. Radio communication throughout a huge part of the Pacific went dead. One of the weapons test engineers stated it chillingly – “we almost blew a hole in the ozone layer”. In fact, prior to the explosions scientists had warned that it would be possible to blast a hole in the Earths protective ozone layer, but Teak and Orange went ahead regardless.

Project Aquiline
This project began sometime in the late 1960’s and involved some of the first remote controlled aircraft experiments that would later become the Predator drones that are operating in the Middle East, today. It was a six-foot remote controlled drone designed to look like an eagle or buzzard in flight. It carried a television camera in the nose, as well as sensors and electronic surveillance equipment. The project began as an attempt to investigate a mysterious watercraft the Soviet Union had constructed and was spotted testing (by satellite reconnaissance) on the Caspian Sea (that they later nicknamed the Caspian Monster). The project remains classified today, but a British documentary uncovered what is thought to have been the target for the Aquiline drone – a Soviet hydrofoil called Ekranopian. The Aquiline drone was designed to track in on its target following established communication lines in foreign countries, and be launched from a submarine. The Aquiline drone was built and tested (it crash landed often) but the CIA eventually canceled the program.

Project Nutmeg
Top-secret project that gave birth to the Nevada Test and Training Range. Prior to testing atomic devices on US soil, nuclear bombs were tested in the Pacific Ocean at what was called the Pacific Proving Grounds. While this afforded the US a remote (and huge) area to test secret atomic devices, the cost involved in sending men, materials and equipment half way around the world, was staggering. America felt it had to find someplace secure, yet within its borders that was reasonably close to where most atomic scientists were working at that time (such as Los Alamos, New Mexico). Project Nutmeg was authorized by the President to locate such an area. An ideal location was a region of desolate desert that had been a wildlife reservation. This area also had the benefit of already having a landing strip nearby, left over from military training exercises during WWII. The selected site in Nevada became 687 square miles of government-controlled land, and what we know today as the Nevada Test Site (of which Area 51 is the most well know, and most secret, parcel of land).

Sigma-Four
In July 1947, the US military and Army intelligence recovered something that crashed at Roswell, New Mexico. The initial report was it was a crashed flying saucer and the bodies that were recovered were alien. The military quickly changed this story to it being a weather balloon, and so began the mystery of what really happened at Roswell, and the most famous UFO incident in American history. The author of “Area 51” postulates that it was what was really recovered at Roswell that led to the creation of Area 51, in 1951. Something so stunning that an entire secret area had to be established for it to be studied. Immediately after the crash, the recovered material and bodies were sent to Wright Field (later called Wright-Patterson Air Force Base) in Ohio. The Atomic Energy Commission, under the direction of Vannevar Bush, then took over, created Area 51 and moved it all to Area 51, in Nevada. According to the author, what the US really recovered at Roswell was not a spacecraft with aliens from outer space, but a Soviet aircraft with unknown and mysterious flying capabilities. The US knew the crashed aircraft was of Soviet, and not other-worldly, design because Russian language lettering had been found on the crashed remains. The aircraft had capabilities no one in Area 51, or anyone else, had ever seen. The aircraft could both hover and fly. No US technology at the time could do such a thing. Vannevar Bush ordered six selected engineers, working in total secrecy, to reverse engineer it and figure out how it worked. The project would be so secret, it would remain black forever, it would never be known outside a mere handful of people, such as Bush. The operation would have no name, it would simply go by a letter-number designation, S-4 or Sigma-Four. But there was more……..The engineers also had to reverse engineer the bodies recovered from the crash scene. Not alien bodies, human bodies. But human bodies like none ever seen – mutated, surgically altered children. Two of the child-size aviators were still “alive”, but not conscious, in a comatose state. They were kept alive in life-support chambers at Area 51, so they could be studied. They were tiny even for children, and had very large heads compared to the rest of their bodies. They were estimated to be thirteen years old, and also had oversized eyes. The engineers who would experiment on these aviators were told it was possible Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele had operated on them (in exchange for a promise by Stalin to get his own laboratory in Russia, a promise Stalin did not keep) before he escaped Europe for South America. But why would the Soviet Union send their cutting edge technology aircraft, with their biologically/surgically modified alien looking tiny human children, to the US? The author states the engineers were told Stalin believed the craft would land, and the children-aliens would emerge and send the US into a panic far worse than had occurred only a decade earlier, with the fake alien attack during the radio broadcast of “War of the Worlds”. Stalin believed the US populace would panic at the sight of “real aliens”.

Operation Looking Glass
Code name for an airborne command and control center operated by the United States. In more recent years it has been more officially referred to as the ABNCP (Airborne Command Post). It provides command and control of U.S. nuclear forces in the event that ground-based command centers have been destroyed or otherwise rendered inoperable. In such an event, the general officer aboard the Looking Glass serves as the Airborne Emergency Action Officer (AEAO) and by law assumes the authority of the National Command Authority and could command execution of nuclear attacks. The AEAO is supported by a battle staff of approximately 20 people, with another dozen responsible for the operation of the aircraft systems. The name Looking Glass, which is another word for a mirror, was chosen for the Airborne Command Post because the mission operates in parallel with the underground command post at Offutt Air Force Base.

What is the F-117?
The Lockheed Have Blue prototype stealth fighter (a smaller proof-of-concept model of the F-117 Nighthawk) first flew at Groom in December 1977. In 1978, the Air Force awarded a full-scale development contract for the F-117 to Lockheed Corporation's Advanced Development Projects. On 17 January 1981 the Lockheed test team at Area 51 accepted delivery of the first full Scale Development (FSD) prototype 79–780, designated YF-117A. At 6:05 am on 18 June 1981 Lockheed Skunk Works test pilot Hal Farley lifted the nose of YF-117A 79–780' off the runway of Area 51. Meanwhile, Tactical Air Command (TAC) decided to set up a group-level organization to guide the F-117A to an initial operating capability. That organization became the 4450th Tactical Group (Initially designated "A Unit"), which officially activated on 15 October 1979 at Nellis AFB, Nevada, although the group was physically located at Area 51. The 4450th TG also operated the A-7D Corsair II as a surrogate trainer for the F-117A, and these operations continued until 15 October 1982 under the guise of an avionics test mission.Flying squadrons of the 4450th TG were the 4450th Tactical Squadron (Initially designated "I Unit") activated on 11 June 1981, and 4451st Tactical Squadron (Initially designated "P Unit") on 15 January 1983. The 4450th TS, stationed at Area 51, was the first F-117A squadron, while the 4451st TS was stationed at Nellis AFB and was equipped with A-7D Corsair IIs painted in a dark motif, tail coded "LV".

Project A119
A Study of Lunar Research Flights (Project A119), was a top-secret plan developed in 1958 by the United States Air Force. The aim of the project was to detonate a nuclear bomb on the Moon which would help in answering some of the mysteries in planetary astronomy and astrogeology. If the explosive device detonated on the surface, not in a lunar crater, the flash of explosive light would have been faintly visible to people on earth with their naked eye, a show of force resulting in a possible boosting of domestic morale in the capabilities of the United States, a boost that was needed after the Soviet Union took an early lead in the Space Race and was also working on a similar project.
The project was never carried out, being cancelled primarily out of a fear of a negative public reaction, with the potential militarization of space that it would also have signified, and because a moon landing would undoubtedly be a more popular achievement in the eyes of the American and international public alike. A similar project by the Soviet Union also never came to fruition.The existence of the US project was revealed in 2000 by a former executive at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Leonard Reiffel, who led the project in 1958. A young Carl Sagan was part of the team responsible for predicting the effects of a nuclear explosion in vacuum and low gravity and in evaluating the scientific value of the project. The project documents remained secret for nearly 45 years, and despite Reiffel's revelations, the United States government has never officially recognized its involvement in the study.

What is Aurora?
Rumored in the mid-1980s as an American reconnaissance aircraft. There is no substantial evidence that it was ever built or flown and it has been termed a myth. The U.S. government has consistently denied such an aircraft was ever built. Aviation and space reference site Aerospaceweb.org concluded, "The evidence supporting the Aurora is circumstantial or pure conjecture, there is little reason to contradict the government's position." Former Skunk Works director Ben Rich confirmed that "Aurora" was simply a myth in "Skunk Works", a book detailing his days as the director. Mr. Rich wrote that a young Colonel working in the Pentagon arbitrarily assigned the name "Aurora" to the funding for the B-2 bomber design competition and somehow the name was leaked to the media. Others come to different conclusions. In 2006, veteran black project watcher and aviation writer Bill Sweetman said, "Does Aurora exist? Years of pursuit have led me to believe that, yes, Aurora is most likely in active development, spurred on by recent advances that have allowed technology to catch up with the ambition that launched the program a generation ago." The Aurora legend started in March 1990, when Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine broke the news that the term "Aurora" had been inadvertently included in the 1985 U.S. budget, as an allocation of $455 million for "black aircraft production" in FY 1987. According to Aviation Week, Project Aurora referred to a group of exotic aircraft, and not to one particular airframe. Funding of the project allegedly reached $2.3 billion in fiscal 1987, according to a 1986 procurement document obtained by Aviation Week. In the 1994 book Skunk Works, Ben Rich, the former head of Lockheed's Skunk Works division, wrote that the Aurora was the budgetary code name for the stealth bomber fly-off that resulted in the B-2 Spirit.

What is Ayaks?
The Ayaks (Russian: АЯКС, meaning also 'Ajax') is a hypersonic aircraft program started in the Soviet Union and currently under development in Russia by the Saint Petersburg Institute for the Hypersonic Systems of Leninets Holding Company.In the early 1980s, Soviet scientists began to explore a new type of aircraft. The Ayaks was to be a new Soviet spaceplane capable of flying and conducting a wide range of missions in the mesosphere, for both military and civilian purposes. The original concept revolved around a hypersonic reconnaissance aircraft project, but later was expanded into the wider concept of hypersonic multi-purpose military and civilian jets, as well as a platform for launching satellites. The mesosphere is the layer of the Earth's atmosphere from 50 kilometres (160,000 ft) to 85 kilometres (279,000 ft) high, above the stratosphere and below the thermosphere. It is very difficult to fly in the mesosphere — the air is too rarefied for aircraft wings to generate lift, but sufficiently dense to cause aerodynamic drag on satellites. In addition, parts of the mesosphere fall inside the ionosphere, meaning the air is ionized due to solar radiation. When the aircraft reaches hypersonic speed, it uses the heating energy from air friction to increase the heat capacity of the fuel ("reform" the fuel). The aircraft has double shielding between which water and ordinary, cheap kerosene circulates. The energy of surface heating is used to break up water into hydrogen and oxygen. Thus, the heating capacity of the fuel increases, and the surface of the aircraft cools down. The whole concept is named "Magneto-plasmo-chemical engine"

What is SR-72?
The Lockheed Martin SR-72 is a conceptualized hypersonic UAV intended for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance proposed by American company Lockheed Martin to succeed the retired Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird.

What is X-51
The Boeing X-51 Waverider is an unmanned research scramjet experimental aircraft for hypersonic flight at Mach 5 (3,300 mph; 5,300 km/h) and an altitude of 70,000 feet (21,000 m). The aircraft was designated X-51 in 2005. It completed its first powered hypersonic flight on 26 May 2010. After two unsuccessful test flights, the X-51 completed a flight of over six minutes and reached speeds of over Mach 5 for 210 seconds on 1 May 2013 for the longest duration powered hypersonic flight. Waverider refers in general to aircraft that take advantage of compression lift produced by their own shock waves. The X-51 program was a cooperative effort by the United States Air Force, DARPA, NASA, Boeing, and Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne. The program was managed by the Aerospace Systems Directorate within the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). X-51 technology is proposed for use in the High Speed Strike Weapon (HSSW), a Mach 5+ missile which could enter service in the mid-2020s. In the 1990s, the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) began the HyTECH program for hypersonic propulsion. Pratt & Whitney received a contract from the AFRL to develop a hydrocarbon-fueled scramjet engine which led to the development of the SJX61 engine. The SJX61 engine was originally meant for the NASA X-43C, which was eventually canceled. The engine was applied to the AFRL's Scramjet Engine Demonstrator program in late 2003. The scramjet flight test vehicle was designated X-51 on 27 September 2005.
X-51A under the wing of a B-52 at Edwards Air Force Base, July 2009 In flight demonstrations, the X-51 is carried by a B-52 to an altitude of about 50,000 feet (15 km; 9.5 mi) and then released over the Pacific Ocean. The X-51 is initially propelled by an MGM-140 ATACMS solid rocket booster to approximately Mach 4.5 (3,000 mph; 4,800 km/h). The booster is then jettisoned and the vehicle's Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne SJY61 scramjet accelerates it to a top flight speed near Mach 6 (4,000 mph; 6,400 km/h). The X-51 uses JP-7 fuel for the SJY61 scramjet, carrying some 270 lb (120 kg) on board.

What is a ScramJet?
A scramjet (supersonic combusting ramjet) is a variant of a ramjet airbreathing jet engine in which combustion takes place in supersonic airflow. As in ramjets, a scramjet relies on high vehicle speed to compress the incoming air forcefully before combustion (hence ramjet), but whereas a ramjet decelerates the air to subsonic velocities before combustion, the airflow in a scramjet is supersonic throughout the entire engine. That allows the scramjet to operate efficiently at extremely high speeds.