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It's come to my attention that in addition to the F-117 everyone acknowledges that they had shot down, Serbian military records list a shoot-down of a B-2 , which crashed in Croatia, using a similar method - booting up the radar extremely briefly during a NATO bombing mission. Saw loads of targets - one of them was ~ 15km away, looked very peculiar. Fired two S-125 missiles at it. The plane immediately started evading but was damaged by either or both 60 kg blasts, and then crashed just outside of Serbia, in Spačva basin.
Here's the fairly pretty interesting in-depth account on how it supposedly went down. It opens up with claiming that after may 20, 1999, all B-2 bombing missions of Serbia ceased, that the Spirit of Missouri was withdrawn from combat operations on May 20 and also presents a possibly verifiable claim that a section of near border woods in Croatia had an unusually heavy military presence.
At the end is they also present a Serbian hypothesis that the 2008 crash of B-2 in Guam was staged by crashing a remote-controlled B-2 test article that was secretly assembled at Guam, crashed via stall at takeoff and then passed off as the plane lost in '99.
Found this interesting bit of information on Quora, from a Serbian.
/images/1751914589569709.webp
EDIT: interesting info on in New York Times from 1991.. Full article.. I was previously unaware B-2 was ever found insufficiently stealthy in tests.
Strange and convenient coincidences of this kind happen more than you might think. Pakistani civilians in Abottobad reported that several Navy SEALS were killed during the Bin Laden raid when their Blackhawk crashed, and that they saw bodies and body parts being loaded onto another helicopter for evacuation. A few weeks later, a helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan, killing about half of the exact same SEAL team that were on the Bin Laden raid.
Carrier groups fighting the Houthis in the Red Sea suffer all manner of random bad luck. Bad luck that strangely always seems to coincide with Houthi claims that they have struck American carriers. The USS Eisenhower had to be towed out of the Red Sea due to unspecified mechanical issues a day after the Houthis claim to have struck it. A few months later several members of its air wing died in a helicopter training crash. The USS Truman suffered extensive damage due to a freak collision with a civilian merchant ship just days after its Red Sea deployment. It also lost a fighter a few days after that because... because it just fell off the ship ok??
An American Marine general was mysteriously found dead in his quarters at 29 Palms Marine Base in California. Coincidentally he had just returned from unspecified duties in Ukraine. Coincidentally there had just been a particularly large round of Russian ballistic missile strikes against Ukraine, many of which OSINT analysts theorized were targeting NATO military advisors in Kyiv.
Members of elite special forces units tend to die in helicopter crashes during training exercises off the East and West coasts. Usually these training mishaps happen a few days or weeks after major Ukrainian offensives. A particularly nasty one claimed the lives of several Delta Force soldiers about a month after October 7, 2023. It was confirmed that Delta Force was assisting the IDF during raids to rescue hostages held in Gaza, but this crash is of course completely coincidental and did not happen anywhere near the Middle East.
For the first one, I haven't heard anything about the damage being extensive. And what I saw of it was much more in line with a collision than a missile hit. Also the part where the emergency repairs took only a few weeks, which is goddamn lightning where the USN is concerned these days.
As far as the fighter falling off, they straight up admitted it was during evasive maneuvers, which given the speed at which those hunks of metal can move and turn, is incredibly plausible (also the pilot recovery with zero issues). I also still credit the Houthis with "shooting down" that fighter, given that it was their action which led to its loss.
Disagree, see my comment here.
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