A top US defence expert has branded the US’s mysterious X-37 Orbital test vehicle an elaborate flying hoax, writes Bradford Davies.
John Pike, editor of the online website Global Security and one of the world’s most respected experts says that the top secret project is a deliberate intelligence diversion designed to soak up the Chinese military budget.
Last May, saw the landing of the U.S.A.F.’s X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle space plane, a hybrid design that allows the vehicle to function in space and re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere and land as a plane.
This latest mission, during which the X37B orbited the earth for nearly two years, is the fourth mission the USAF has flown in the last seven years using two X37B’s in relay.
Commenting on the mission Pike said: “This X-37 space plane that has been flying around for years now, do you know what it’s for? Do the Chinese know what it’s for? No, they don’t, they are just as bewildered as everyone else and that’s the whole idea!” said Pike, Director of GlobalSecurity.org and a widely-regarded defence expert talking in a rare and exclusive interview with Future Intelligence.
Beyond the latest official email sent out to news agencies claiming the: “The X-37B is the newest and most advanced re-entry spacecraft. Managed by the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office, the X-37B program performs risk reduction, experimentation and concept of operations development for reusable space vehicle technologies.”, the full details of the X-37B’s systems and its mission is still regarded as top secret.
Something that Pike says is part of a sophisticated disinformation exercise and that the mysterious space craft is quite simply pie in the sky: “that thing had already been paid for, before its original sponsors NASA lost interest in it. And so, DARPA (Defence Advanced Research Agency) picks it up and now it’s part of their disinformation program. [otw_shortcode_info_box border_type=”bordered” border_color_class=”otw-black-border” border_style=”bordered” background_pattern=”otw-pattern-3″] Over the years this ongoing series of missions has caused much speculation. May 2010: Space Daily speculated that the space plane could be a weapons platform or spy satellite. January 2012: America was accused of using the X-37B to spy on the Chinese’s Tiangong-1 space station. October 2014: The Guardian printed claims that security experts believed the space plane to be testing how resilient spy cameras and sensors are to radiation and other low orbit hazards.[/otw_shortcode_info_box]
“The trick is the Chinese can come up with three of five different things that it could be doing and they will need to develop counter measures to everything it might be. It becomes the sum of all fears.”
Which means according to Pike that in an age, where misinformation and fake intelligence is now the norm in international politics, that the X37 is simply an exercise to waste part of the Chinese military budget, by presenting the Chinese with something that they can never understand but cannot ignore.
“Joseph Stalin had all this intel about the Manhattan Project and he didn’t believe it until we (America) bombed Hiroshima. It was only then he was convinced the program was real and not a massive effort by the Americans to deceive the Soviets into wasting war effort”
The USAF plans to put another X37 into orbit later this year.
