oughly eight years since its construction began, the massive hangar located at the remote southern end of the Air Force’s clandestine flight test center at Groom Lake, better known as Area 51, has seemed to have had little to no activity. Based on commercial satellite imagery and sporadic video taken by hikers from Tikaboo Peak dozens of miles away, there have never been more than a handful of vehicles nearby and nothing of significance in terms of infrastructure has been built up around it. Now, for the first time, satellite imagery from Planet Labs not only shows activity around the mysterious hangar, but the nature of that activity is a never-before-seen exotic delta-wing aircraft parked on its northern apron.
We came upon this development after doing our regular scans of Planet Labs’ low-resolution imagery of various locales of interest across the globe. Area 51 is always a popular spot when it comes to publicly available satellite imagery. When glancing at daily 3-meter resolution images of the base we noticed the appearance of a roughly delta-shaped blob on the north apron of the large southern hangar. The first shot that contained this object was dated January 26th, 2022. Since we had never seen any action around this hangar, we found it odd. Maybe it was a large group of vehicles or some sort of new construction?
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The blob remained there in Planet Labs’ low-resolution imagery through the 28th. A high-resolution Planet Labs image, dated January 29th, 2022, told a much richer story — that the blob was actually an exotic delta-shaped aircraft under an unenclosed skeleton-like structure just sitting in the middle of the apron.
Read more: The Drive
