Mysterious aircraft spotted at Area 51 in satellite image
As noted by others, a.) it really looks like a Draken, an old Swedish supersonic jet fighter used by contractors and the National Test Pilot School for a variety of roles, and b.) nothing like this ever gets "caught out" by a satellite unless it's the result of a crash (recall the panic over an F-117 going down decades ago because it 'pancaked' in a manner that could reveal its shape).<p>I have had acquaintances and a grad school mentor that worked on projects out at the remote test site (among other facilities). They had very, very good situational awareness about what was overhead and when, and established & practiced procedures on sanitizing things before anything got to where it could image the site. We also have decades of lessons-learned on things like heat signatures where airplanes were parked, such that their shape could be divined even when the test article was safely ensconced in a hanger.<p>We also practiced (and I would assume still practice) a variety of denial & deception activities to foil all manner of collectors and confuse the opposition, from RF to visual to various MASINT measures. One example is the Wet Site at China Lake, which was covertly built to assess the RCS of various maritime platforms (most famously Sea Shadow). When Soviet birds went overhead the radar dishes were pointed in a different direction and radiating on misleading frequences. The dirt spoil and vehicle tracks from the concealed construction of the test facility's saltwater pond was hidden like the tunnels in <i>The Great Escape</i>. Cool stuff.