Photo: USAF/Airman 1st Class Victoria Hommel
There are many weird contraptions flying in the skies of the world, but few are as strange as the B-2 Spirit. The thing is so bizarre that we are pretty confident it spawned quite a number of UFO sighting reports since it was introduced in the late 1990s.
The B-2 is one of those strangely-shaped machines that were born with the F-117 out of America’s need to hide its airplanes from military radar while flying combat missions. Unlike the Nighthawk, which looked like a flying cubist sculpture, the Spirit has however a flowing look going for it.
Shaped like a flying wing, the B-2 is supposed to be invisible to the enemy, being capable of sneaking past defenses and dropping anything from conventional bombs to nuclear ones of the heads of the opposing army - and it did so, minus the nuclear part, in the conflicts in Kosovo, Afghanistan, or Iraq.
The one we see here was not out on a combat bombing run, but was up until recently deployed to the Keflavik Air Base in Iceland for the first Bomber Task Force operations over in Europe.
Over the past few months, the U.S. Air Force (USAF) released a number of photos showing these planes in various instances (something it doesn’t do very often when it comes to the B-2). The pic you’re looking at now (click main photo to enlarge), shows the B-2 as it departs Keflavik, having completed its mission there back in September.
As you’ll notice, just like it was the case with the other B-2 pics, this one too is significantly less revealing than what the USAF has gotten us accustomed to with the other planes it uses. That’s probably because this machine, although being public knowledge now, is still largely secret. And it’s also why, at least to some folk, it will always look like an alien spacecraft.
Shaped like a flying wing, the B-2 is supposed to be invisible to the enemy, being capable of sneaking past defenses and dropping anything from conventional bombs to nuclear ones of the heads of the opposing army - and it did so, minus the nuclear part, in the conflicts in Kosovo, Afghanistan, or Iraq.
The one we see here was not out on a combat bombing run, but was up until recently deployed to the Keflavik Air Base in Iceland for the first Bomber Task Force operations over in Europe.
Over the past few months, the U.S. Air Force (USAF) released a number of photos showing these planes in various instances (something it doesn’t do very often when it comes to the B-2). The pic you’re looking at now (click main photo to enlarge), shows the B-2 as it departs Keflavik, having completed its mission there back in September.
As you’ll notice, just like it was the case with the other B-2 pics, this one too is significantly less revealing than what the USAF has gotten us accustomed to with the other planes it uses. That’s probably because this machine, although being public knowledge now, is still largely secret. And it’s also why, at least to some folk, it will always look like an alien spacecraft.
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