It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s … a plane named after a bird. A pair of Air Force F-117 Nighthawks, stealth fighter jets from the 1990s that were being refueled in the air by a KC-135 tanker plane, reportedly flew over the coast last month.
The iconic, all-black, geometric Nighthawks have been officially retired since 2008, but before that, they were “the world’s first stealth warplane, built to sneak past enemy radar and drop laser-guided bombs,” SF Gate reported, saying that their very existence was secret until the Air Force confirmed it in the 1980s.
A site called The Drive wrote that the Nighthawk sightings throughout California might indicate that the retired aircraft are being used to simulate enemy aircraft to help improve development and operations of current military aircraft.