What's that in the sky over Amarillo?
"It was the strangest thing I've seen, as far as aviation," said Dean Musket, part of the motley crew of airplane buffs who sits down at an airport restaurant in this West Texas city and looks up.
"They are aviation junkies," waitress Erin Williamson said. "They love it."
And they are seeing things you can't see anywhere else.
Military aircraft cruise over Amarillo like sharks looking for baitfish.
"If you're flying east, west, or vice-versa across the United States, you're probably flying over Amarillo," Steve Douglass said.
A group that might be called the "interceptor club" watches everything military that flies over. But back in March, they spotted three craft they'd never seen before, about six miles up.
"We had captured something completely unique," Douglass said.
It was trianuglar, like a stealth bomber... but not a stealth bomber.
"The back edge was smooth like a Dorito," Douglass said. "It wasn't jagged."
A few weeks later, the same shape was snapped by another spotter in Kansas.
"This is when we first saw it flying in formation from the backside of the airport," said Douglass, who is something between an aircraft enthusiast and a fanatic.
He's sitting in what he jokingly calls "Kitch Com," a nook of his kitchen crammed with electronic gear to monitor aircraft traffic. He's got a special antenna to pick up satellite transmissions.
"On this side, it's my bunker, and on this side, it's my kitchen, which is microwave ovens and food," he said.
On the day the mystery planes were spotted, Douglass recorded air traffic controllers giving the aircraft a clear lane through the sky. The Air Force confirms nothing.
Now Douglass suspects the triangular shape may be a stealth transport. "You could put a dozen Navy SEALs in, fly them over Afghanistan or Pakistan or whatever-stan, and have them inserted in some way without an adversary being any the wiser," he said.
At the Old English Field House Diner, Erin Williamson has become part of the group.
"They're out here four or five days a week," she said. "They watch the planes; they take pictures; they'll let us know if there's an important or cool looking plane coming in."
The patches on the wall show all the military pilots who've stopped for lunch, along with a movie star or two.
On this day, six Air Force trainers landed; a special ops plane from a nearby airbase buzzed; three air force tankers passed at six miles high.
But no flying Dorito.
The contrail has the signature shape of one of the rumored hypersonic spy planes too...more like a chunky string of pearls than a normal trail.
I didn't know such aircraft existed until I had a sort of remote viewing lucid dream experience about it which motivated me to research whether such a thing existed.
"Flight on experimental military plane
I was experiencing this dream as a young male with two other males and a female pilot of an experimental military craft. We were going on a test flight...the craft had a sort of triangular shape and was dark in color. This craft had an ability to fly up into areas outside of our atmosphere. The first part of of the flight was to achieve an altitude just at the edge of the earth's atmosphere and then some kind of atmospheric conditions had to be just right for the flight to proceed to the area up above the atmosphere. We were in place and the word came back from "control" or base that the conditions were not right for the flight to proceed. So basically we were to abort the test flight.
The female pilot told us that it would be fine, she was going to proceed with the second part of the test-flight.
The three of us passengers looked at each other and told her we were, "not comfortable with that decision." This seemed to make the pilot angry and she flew back down to base and dropped us all off, abruptly, on a paved area that was quite a ways from the original tarmac. We had to walk quite a ways and pass through one of the military security check gates where there were several MPs and even a dog guarding.
We didn't pay much attention and the two other men just walked past them into the gate and the main MP confronted me and stepped in front of me and asked who we all were (we had suits on.) I told him, "Those guys are 'government', and "I'm with them." He said, "Not CIA, are you?" CIA seemed to be bad and government okay. I told him, "I'm ex-FBI, that's all. No CIA here." He relaxed and let me pass.
Note: My son told me that such an experimental craft does exisit, that he thinks it's called the "Aurora" or something like that. I'd never heard of it, before."