Mystery Surrounds NASA's Secret Mission in Africa
Mystery Surrounds NASA's Secret Mission in Africa
Dec 3, 2014, 12:57 PM ET
By LEE FERRAN
Investigative Reporter
A NASA official recently confirmed that one of the agency’s aircraft had been spotted on an American military airstrip in eastern Africa a few weeks ago, but like a series of U.S. military officials, declined to say what the space agency’s high-tech bird was doing there.
“I really can’t give you any of the details,” Jim Alexander, a NASA official with the WB-57 High Altitude Research Program, told ABC News. “You know, the airplane was there, you see it in the picture. But I really can’t tell you what it was for.”
The broad-winged white plane belonging to the agency best known for putting a man on the moon was photographed by the satellite company Digital Globe back in September sitting next to some tilt-rotor aircraft at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, a development reported by the military blog War Is Boring last month.
A NASA website that tracks the agency’s three WB-57s shows that one of its planes, number 926, was on a “foreign deployment” from July to November this year. A NASA handbook for the WB-57 posted online lists 14 international deployment sites for the aircraft around the world, but the American base near Djibouti isn’t one of them.
More:
http://abcnews.go.com/International/mystery-surrounds-nasas-secret-mission-africa/story?id=27337925
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