Message posted by Peter Merlin on August 21, 2010 at 11:51:13 PST:
James Petty's violent overreaction to my mild rebuttal is truly bizarre.Instead of offering a well reasoned argument for his position, he chose to make a personal attack against me. As to Bill Scott's "Blackstar" article, AW&ST Senior Editor Mike Dornheim was horrified that it was published. He couldn't stop it so he left all the glaring deficiencies in so that knowledgeable people could point them out later. The first to publish a powerful rebuttal was aerospace writer Dwayne A. Day in "Six blind men in a zoo: Aviation Week's mythical Blackstar" (http://www.thespacereview.com/article/576/1). His lengthy and detailed analysis is well worth reading, if for no other reason than to see his examination of Petty's sighting. It will make you wonder why Petty is attacking me. Jeffrey F. Bell's "Blackstar: A False Messiah from Groom Lake" (http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Blackstar_A_False_Messiah_From_Groom_Lake.html) is equally illuminating. I stand firmly in Day and Bell's camp because their reasoning is sound regarding the conflation of facts and rumors used to build the Blackstar myth and because there is as yet no solid proof that such a craft was ever built. Sighting reports and sketches are not the same as clear photos or official documentation. I am not calling Petty or anyone else a liar but what you see isn't always what you think it is. I myself am an extremely experienced observer of aerial craft of all kinds from the mundane to the exotic but that doesn't mean I can't make a mistake. Recently, I could have sworn I clearly observed the passage of a high-speed vehicle in the skies above the Antelope Valley. It traveled in a straight line for some distance before making a sudden turn and disappearing behind or into a plume of smoke from wildfire. Imagine my surprise when the object turned out to be the planet Venus, its apparent motion noting more than an optical illusion. Noted aerospace author Curtis Peebles once observed what appeared to be an XB-70-like aircraft approaching an airbase. He was absolutely certain about its configuration until it got close enough to reveal that it was actually an F-14. As to claims about the J58 engine, why don't we just look up this mysterious component in the Technical Manual, Illustrated Parts Breakdown, Aircraft Engines, USAF Model J58 (2J-J58-14) and see what it looks like? Thanks to all the people who have stood up for me and defended my hard won reputation on this forum. I have always based all of my claims on lengthy, in-depth research that includes documentation, interviews with people who have worked on these programs, and high-level sources in positions of intimate knowledge. To my credit, I always let my data speak for itself rather than engaging in ad hominem attacks.
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