LAS VEGAS (KLAS) — Something large and ominous has been reported flying the skies over Nevada in the dead of night. Aerospace experts say the next generation stealth bomber, the B-21 Raider, is still years away from deployment.

But is a prototype version already being tested in and around the mysterious Area 51 air base?

What will the new bomber look like? And when will the Pentagon be ready to admit it exists?

The years Joerg Arnu has spent living in Rachel, Nevada, within spitting distance of Area 51’s back gate, have given him the perfect vantage point for catching fleeting glimpses and wispy hints of the black projects under development in his back yard.

“I’ve seen things fly at night, and you have no idea what it is. I have not seen it in a way you could identify it,” says Arnu.

For more than half a century, the once secret base at Groom Lake has been the location of choice for the development of America’s most advanced, most highly classified warplanes and platforms. Arnu is pretty sure that some early version of the rumored B-21 bomber is already flying.

“They talk about, we have a prototype, it’s not flying. We’re just building a prototype,” Arnu says.

“No, it’s been flying for years out of Area 51, right over these hills.”

Arnu is the webmaster for dreamlandresort.com, which is devoted to facts and scuttlebutt about area 51 and assorted black projects, including the B-21 Raider, a next generation, long range, stealth bomber.  For the last few years, aerospace publications and websites have speculated that the B-21 probably wouldn’t be operational until the mid-2020s, but Air Force officials recently moved up the timeline, with a possible first flight by the end of 2021. They also released new artist renderings of what the B-21 may look like: slightly smaller and lighter than the B-2 stealth bombers, which, by the way, are now 30 years old.

Arnu believes he’s seen glimpses of a B-21 prototype flying at night in central Nevada. And he recorded interesting scanner audio chatter. Listen to a test flight of aircraft “Romeo” — possibly a B-21.

“The most fascinating capability to me is that it is optional demand. That means it can fly without a pilot, without a crew,” Arnu says.

“Another big feature is that it is capable of going supersonic, so those two things I think are the big kickers about it.”

Savvy aerospace writers think the new images of the B-21 Raider might include a little disinformation meant to confuse our adversaries about its capabilities. There have been news reports of ramped-up production capabilities near Palmdale, California, the same place where the B-1 and B-2 bombers were built. But multiple witnesses have reported seeing something that already looks like a version of the B-21 flying in the desert at night.

“I can see the red and blue warning lights of the radar sites active all the time, so I know they’re flying something secret out there,” Arnu says.

The B-21’s nickname, “Raider,” was reportedly inspired by the exploits of “Doolittle’s Raiders,”  the American air crews who staged a daring raid on Tokyo during World War II.