Agreed. If this was discovered in one of the thousands of other air bases that people know nothing about, maybe it was an accident. With Area 51 the US knows that it's constantly under watch by parties worldwide. I'm skeptical they'd choose to do anything actual secretive there anymore.
It's a test facility. They have to take the aircraft out from overhead cover in order to actually test them. Testing only at night would be much too restrictive.
They track all observation satellites and meticulously schedule aircraft movements for when they're not observed. The problem is Planet Labs alone has over 200 satellites, and that's in addition to other commercial imaging providers and all the governmental earth observation satellites. That means in recent years the margin for error has become increasingly smaller.
Given all that, while it's certainly possible this was deliberate, I don't think it at all implausible for it to be accidental. Some occurrence that delayed them by just a few minutes could potentially have caused this.
It was left out for multiple days. This isn't some accidental misjudgment of the time. This was either placed there knowingly or put there and forgotten about for days on end. The former seems way more probable than the latter.
> That means in recent years the margin for error has become increasingly smaller.
I'm surprised that there are still windows of time where any piece of land isn't "seen" by satellite. I thought there was 24/7 coverage especially on special sites like Area 51.
>All that being said, we must underscore that spotting a totally new and exotic aircraft design in the open at Area 51 is largely unprecedented, and for very good reason.