Aurora

A budget line that vanished, a triangle over the desert, sonic booms with no plane.

A line item reading 'Aurora' appeared in a 1985 Pentagon budget document near the SR-71 and U-2, feeding three decades of lore about a Mach-6 successor aircraft. Documented: the budget line (officials later said it was a B-2 funding code), sonic-boom 'skyquakes' recorded by USGS sensors over California in the early 1990s, and repeated denials. No airframe, photo, or defector has ever surfaced. Aurora is the cleanest specimen of black-budget folklore: one ambiguous document plus real anomalous data plus institutional silence.