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- TIMES & WORLD-NEWS, Roanoke, VA - Feb. 19,1990
-
- UFO SIGHTINGS ATTRIBUTED TO SECRET U.S. AIRCRAFT
- By PAUL DELLINGER / SOUTHWEST BUREAU
-
- WYTHEVILLE-Several people who viewed a pattern of lights hovering above
- their heads in a darkened Wytheville Community College room agreed that it
- looked like an unidentified flying object they had seen in the skies of
- Southwest Virginia.
-
- They were not seeing a flying saucer containing little green men, but a
- model of the radar-eluding Stealth B-2 bomber that Rhode Island businessman Tony
- Gonsalves had constructed.
-
- Gonsalves, 47, visited Wythe County earlier this month because it had been
- a hotbed of UFO sightings in recent years. He said similar sightings have
- reported in Hudson Valley, N.Y., and Fyffe, Ala.
-
- "I believe there's a secret government aircraft flying around that the
- public hasn't been advised about," he said.
-
- Gonsalves is not talking about the Stealth aircraft that was rolled out for
- public view in 1988, one of six that reportedly have been built. Those would
- make noise, he said, and the boomerang-shaped aircraft spotted across the
- country in recent years have been silent.
-
- Referring to recent debate on what happened to $22 billion of the money
- allocated to developing an airplane that can avoid radar detection, he said: "I
- don't think it [the money] disappeared at all. I think they built some
- airplanes."
-
- He suggests that the money went into Stealth craft powered by "UFO
- technology"-in his view, some sort of antigravity field generated by nuclear
- energy.
-
- "Now, where did they get it [the technology]? That's another story, but in
- my opinion, they have it," he said.
-
- One possible source, he said, would be a crashed flying saucer that the
- government recovered and kept secret.
-
- "I am a firm believer that this planet is being visited by aliens. I think
- they've been coming here for a long time," he said.
-
- Whether they agreed with him on that, at least five of the about 75 people
- attending his talk at Wytheville Community College agreed that the Stealth shape
- is what they saw.
-
- What convinced the group was a quarter-size model of the aircraft, built by
- Gonsalves, based on what data has been released about the secret plane.
-
- Using his experience as a jet mechanic on U.S. Navy aircraft carriers,
- Gonsalves said he placed lights on his 4-foot model in a pattern that would be
- logical for landing purposes or illuminate the ground for a low-flying, slow-
- moving plane.
-
- With the meeting room in Fincastle Hall darkened, he showed how using
- different lights on the dark craft could make it seem to have different shapes
- in night skies. A number of people agreed that the lights defined shapes of
- objects they had seen.
-
- Gonsalves said he came to Wytheville to talk with people who might have
- seen an experimental-Stealth aircraft. He is compling the information for a
- book.
-
- =END=