Last week, the Air Force Museum at Wright Patterson AFB in Dayton, OH broke ground on a third major gallery, some 190,000 square feet in size. The structure is expected to be finished in 2003, and will coincide with events the museum and the Dayton area have planned to celebrate the centennial anniversary of powered flight.

The new gallery is expected to focus on Air Force operations during the Cold War. Expansion plans also include a silo-shaped tower to house the museum's collection of intercontinental ballistic missiles, and a space gallery.

Wright Patterson is also home to another Cold War relic: the remains of the space aliens who crashed at Roswell, NM, and refrigerated Hangar 18 is said to house the Air Force's collection of E.T. material. The base is HQ for the National Air Intelligence Center and the old Project Blue Book. And in the early 60s, Wright Patterson engineers somehow created top secret 40-foot flying disk weapons, code-named Lenticular Reentry Vehicles. So we speculate that the museum expansion is not due to more Ruskie crud, but a growing collection of top secret space plasms, which have forced the now less secret cold war material into public view. [06/10/2001]

February 10, 2012