SUBJECT: UFO SIGHTINGS ATTRIBUTED TO SECRET US CRAFT         FILE: UFO1143


TIMES & WORLD-NEWS, Roanoke, VA - Feb. 19,1990


By PAUL DELLINGER / SOUTHWEST BUREAU

     WYTHEVILLE-Several people who viewed a pattern of lights hovering above
their heads in a darkened Wytheville Community College room agreed that it
looked like an unidentified flying object they had seen in the skies of
Southwest Virginia.

     They were not seeing a flying saucer containing little green men, but a
model of the radar-eluding Stealth B-2 bomber that Rhode Island businessman Tony
Gonsalves had constructed.

     Gonsalves, 47, visited Wythe County earlier this month because it had been
a hotbed of UFO sightings in recent years.  He said similar sightings have
reported in Hudson Valley, N.Y., and Fyffe, Ala.

     "I believe there's a secret government aircraft flying around that the
public hasn't been advised about," he said.

     Gonsalves is not talking about the Stealth aircraft that was rolled out for
public view in 1988, one of six that reportedly have been built.  Those would
make noise, he said, and the boomerang-shaped aircraft spotted across the
country in recent years have been silent.

     Referring to recent debate on what happened to $22 billion of the money
allocated to developing an airplane that can avoid radar detection, he said: "I
don't think it [the money] disappeared at all. I think they built some
airplanes."

     He suggests that the money went into Stealth craft powered by "UFO
technology"-in his view, some sort of antigravity field generated by nuclear
energy.

     "Now, where did they get it [the technology]?  That's another story, but in
my opinion, they have it," he said.

     One possible source, he said, would be a crashed flying saucer that the
government recovered and kept secret.

     "I am a firm believer that this planet is being visited by aliens.  I think
they've been coming here for a long time," he said.

     Whether they agreed with him on that, at least five of the about 75 people
attending his talk at Wytheville Community College agreed that the Stealth shape
is what they saw.

     What convinced the group was a quarter-size model of the aircraft, built by
Gonsalves, based on what data has been released about the secret plane.

     Using his experience as a jet mechanic on U.S. Navy aircraft carriers,
Gonsalves said he placed lights on his 4-foot model in a pattern that would be
logical for landing purposes or illuminate the ground for a low-flying, slow-
moving plane.

     With the meeting room in Fincastle Hall darkened, he showed how using
different lights on the dark craft could make it seem to have different shapes
in night skies.  A number of people agreed that the lights defined shapes of
objects they had seen.

     Gonsalves said he came to Wytheville to talk with people who might have
seen an experimental-Stealth aircraft.  He is compling the information for a
book.

=END=

              
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