Weird Blue Rocket!

My wife and I were leaving a restaraunt around 4pm last week and we heard a noise (not unlike a jet fighter sound) that caused us to look up.

What we saw mystified us both - as it looked like a Sky Blue vehicle with smallish wings in the back and no cockpit!

At first we thought perhaps this was some Radio Controlled hobbiest kit - but as our eyes adjusted to the sunlight it was clear that its size was that of a small cessna.

It proceeded to rocket in an ellipitical arc - an almost perfect 180 degree banked turn and to shoot off out of our viewing range.

Now this seemed quite peculiar because it was so clearly solid blue with no markings - made the sounds of a jet - and most closely resembled a UAV in that it didn't seem to have a cockpit even tho it approached the size of a small plane.

Is this some kind of next generation UAV perhaps? Or maybe a civillian monitorring model?

Has anyone else heard of / seen such a thing before?

We live near Colorado Springs so military aircraft often fly overhead from time to time, but this thing was entirely different from anything we've seen before.

Anyone have a guesses as to its purpose?

I am very curious as too what it could have been!

looks like a cruise missile test to me..

Maybe you witnessed an ABM test...

Generally speaking, weapons coloured blue are not live and are for practice... Chnaces are you just saw the AirForce playing with one of its new toys

Ahh - very intersting!

I did not know that Blue coloring had a significance in military testing.

I am still quite surprised that they did the test in such a populated area - I was in Parker, CO. at the time I witnessed it.

It's manueverability was quite impressive.

I would hate to be at the wrong end of that thing!

Sure it isnt some kinda target drone maybe?

When they developed the cruise missile didnt they test fly it from one end of america to the other, or at least, over some huge distance?

If you're going to get a true test of the accuracy you're going to have to fly it a large distance, and make it do turns and other manuvers. Some of those are going to be done over a populated area. The risk is fairly minimal as it's a dummy, so there is no warhead, and cruise missiles don't carry lots of fuel like planes do, so if it were to come down it wouldn't do major amounts of damage to the area.

The different variants of the Tomahawk use anywhere from 450 pounds, to 1050 pounds of fuel. They switched from Jp-5 to TH-dimmer which gave an extra 200 kilometers range for the same weight of fuel.

[edit on 10-9-2005 by Zaphod58]

Hmm - good point!

However it really looked more like a drone UAV type craft than a true "rocket" because of the wings at the bottom (as opposed to the fins of a Tomahawk missle)

Aren't they supposed to be testing civilian drone craft in the U.S. now?

I heard they were already using some to assist in Border control potentially?

So it could change direction well could it? Wonder why they cant hit military targets then, they always tend to hit innocents. Must have got a new missile guy.

Heh Heh - well - if it was a UAV type drone it was definately next generation - it did not really resemble those balsa wood looking ones they have been showing us in the news lately.

And oh, I think they hit their targets just perfectly - trouble is - they aren't goin after the bad guys, they ARE the bad guys!

(not the soldiers themselves but their political masters that is)

you may be able to find what you saw at this linnk :

UAV_SITE

if you can give a more precise description - id would be easier , or at least put you no the right track

Cool! Thanks for the site!

I think the closest I could find was the Model 325 Scarab portrayed here:

www.vectorsite.net...

However the fact that the color was exactly the same could be scewing my perception on this.

I also would have sworn the wings went all the way down to the bottom as seen in some other drones so maybe its a new one based on the 325 Scarab body design.

Either way - this site made me think it more likely that it was indeed a UAV Drone as opposed to some other type of military test rocket.

Very Cool!