Been tracking this for a few months now using FlightAware and cross-referencing with ADS-B Exchange, and yeah - there's a definite pattern. The same corridor keeps going dark, usually between 2am and 4am local time. Not standard NOTAM stuff either, the airspace just... disappears from the record.
What gets me is the timing. It's not random. I've logged at least 11 separate instances since March where civilian traffic gets rerouted around a roughly 40-mile stretch east of the Groom Lake vicinity. We're talking commercial flights, not just small aircraft.
The official line is always ". Military exercises". But I've been doing this long enough to smell the difference between a routine training window and something deliberate. The Men in Black literature is full of accounts where witnesses describe unusual aerial activity immediately preceded by these kinds of blackout corridors - almost like a clearing operation before something significant moves through.
Anyone else running ground-based monitoring in that region? I've got a contact in Tonopah who mentioned unusual convoy activity on the same nights, which adds another layer entirely.
Drop your data below if you've been watching this. Comparing notes is the only way we actually build a coherent picture - the whole point of this community, really. Curious whether anyone's mapped the corridor precisely, because from what I can tell it shifts slightly each time, which suggests it's following something rather than protecting a fixed location.
That detail alone keeps me up at night.