The rumors have circulated for years. Researchers point to a black budget in excess of $2.3 trillion dollars; technology watchers speak of secret mini-shuttles and hypersonic aircraft that are years ahead of civilian science.

According to Linda Moulton Howe in her article "Do Black Budget Trillions Support A Secret American Space Program?", Michael Schratt, an Aerospace draftsman for Armstrong Aerospace has a theory that there is a Top Secret space program that not even Congress knows about. Schratt speculates that NASA is only public window dressing for a much bigger and more advanced American clandestine program to dominate and weaponize space.

Science advisor and author Richard C. Hoagland agrees with this scenario, he points out that with the Space Shuttle, NASA is using technology that is now 25 years old and suggested the reason for this is that there are actually two space programs - the one with public missions, and another which is more heavily funded and kept secret from the American public.

Bill Rose wrote in UFO Magazine UK that there is growing evidence that a mini-shuttle was developed shortly after the space shuttle Challenger disaster on January 28, 1986 and that the trials began in 1992.

Operating under the mysterious Aurora Project, the system is believed to comprise a spaceplane roughly the size of an SR-71 spyplane and a hypersonic launch vehicle resembling the experimental XB-70A strategic bomber designed in 1957-60. This large aircraft could perform a number of roles, but it appears to have been designed specifically to carry the smaller spaceplane to a suitable launch altitude.

The man known by the press as the "UFO Hacker" has said that his computer hacks on NASA uncovered some interesting evidence of a secret space program. Gary McKinnon told the BBC that he had found a list of officers' names under the heading "Non-Terrestrial Officers" that included fleet-to-fleet transfers and a list of ship names that were not U.S. Navy ships. Mckinnon believes that the ships and personnel files he saw were from a space program that operates off-planet spaceships and maintains several secret space stations.

There are also some first-hand accounts of encounters with unknown aircraft that demonstrate flight characteristics and design unknown to civilian aircraft. On August 5, 1992, A United Airlines 747 crew reported a near miss with an unknown aircraft as the airliner headed out of Los Angeles International Airport. The airliner was in the vicinity of Georges AFB, California, when the 747's Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System (TCAS) warned the flight crew that an aircraft was approaching at high speed.

The unidentified aircraft flew past the 747 about 500-1000 feet below it at high supersonic speed. The UFO was described as having a lifting-body configuration, much like the forward fuselage of an SR-71, and being roughly the size of an F-16. It was speculated that the aircraft was a secret spaceplane.

In 1967, former U.S. Navy aviator and aviation writer Jack D. Pickett and his business partner Harold Baker visited MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa Florida to gather information for an Air Force-sponsored article on historical experimental aircraft. At the edge of the base, they were shown four decommissioned aircraft, all of them flying discs, measuring 20, 40, 70 and 116 feet in diameter.

Through interviews with various base personnel, Pickett and Baker discovered that during the 1950s the USAF had developed several models of flying discs for reconnaissance flights over the Soviet Union. Pickett was personally shown hundreds of official U.S.A.F. photographs of these aircraft in formation flight, on the tarmac, and was shown portions of motion picture footage of these aircraft in flight.

The discs had supersonic capabilities and were actually capable of achieving space flight. Many disc flights, particularly those of the highly successful 40-foot version, were no doubt responsible for many "Flying Saucer" reports during the period. By the early 1960s, all had been retired in favor of more advanced aircraft.

In 1978, Warren Botz, a retired WWII P-40 Warhawk Flying Tigers pilot, was attending a flight reunion at Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio, when he inadvertently walked into a restricted hanger. There, taking up the entire hangar, was the identical craft Jack Pickett saw at MacDill AFB in 1967. Botz was only in this hangar for about two minutes, but was able to confirm many of the details mentioned by Jack Pickett 12 years earlier.

One questions needs to be asked...if these secret aircraft, which allegedly had the capacity of flying into space, were decommissioned in the early 1960s in favor of more advanced aircraft, what amazing leaps of technology have been secretly developed by the beginning of the 21st century?

Considering the trillions of dollars of unaccounted for black budget money, ones imagination reels at what could be flying around out there that only a select few know anything about.

It has been alleged that on November 12, 1988 there was a secret exhibit at Norton AFB to garner support for black budget aerospace programs. Displayed at this exhibit were three craft measuring 24, 60 and 130 feet in diameter. Reportedly these craft looked like a classic flying saucer, or almost like a Jell-o mold.

These craft were hovering off the floor and the U. S. general who was giving the lecture at this exhibit stated that these craft could do light speed, or better.

The implications are that starting in the early 1950s, there was an alternative, secret military space program, completely separate from the civilian space program, that was developing nuclear energy for aircraft and spacecraft propulsion. By the late 1950s, work was already underway to crack the gravity barrier. Antigravity may have actually been developed as early as 1960, nine years before astronaut Neil Armstrong landed at Tranquility Base on the moon.

The late Benjamin Rich who was the second director of Lockheed's Skunk Works from 1975 to 1991 and regarded as the "father of stealth," stated during a 1993, Alumni Speech at UCLA, "We already have the means to travel among the stars, but these technologies are locked up in black projects and it would take an Act of God to ever get them out to benefit humanity...Anything you can imagine, we already know how to do."