One of the enduring modern legends of ufology is that Lockheed developed advanced UFO-type technology, perhaps due to reverse-engineering extraterrestrial spacecraft.
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| (Updated Sept. 20, 2023 with comment on Ben Rich from Steve Justice.) |
In his 1994 autobiography, Skunk Works, Ben Rich wrote that while Lockheed was developing the stealth plane:
"Some of our senior engineers thought it might be easier to build a flying saucer. The problem was how to build one… We don't know how to do that. The Martians wouldn’t tell us.”
Rich had a sense of humor, and he could engage in some boastful sensationalizing (BS for short) to improve a story.
It came from Area 51
The myth of the Skunk Works super technology is closely tied to the lore of UFOs. The stories told by Paul Bennewitz were repeated by John Lear, who grafted Area 51 onto the narrative. Shortly afterwards, Bob Lazar surfaced to spotlight Area 51, which soon gave rise to stories of the legendary Aurora.
The Area 51 "Interceptors," Jim Goodall and John Andrews were involved in pursuing this, as well as Andrews' friend Lee Graham, who got tangled in the MJ-12 document circus. Andrews and Goodall tried to coax Stealth secrets and UFO stories out of Ben Rich, but he mostly responded in friendly deflecting replies. If Ben Rich ever made extravagant statements about Lockheed spacecraft, there's no indication that it was anything more than words.
Kooks and Charlatans
"Ben Rich, stated during a 1993, Alumni Speech at UCLA,
We already have the means to travel among the stars, but these technologies are locked up in black projects and it would take an Act of God to ever get them out to benefit humanity...Anything you can imagine, we already know how to do.
A traceable context for the quote, if he actually did gave it?"
There were several floundering answers, but using the screen name Shadowhawk, aviation historian Peter Merlin joined the conversation:
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Peter Merlin
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Merlin replied:
Ben Rich is constantly misquoted as saying "We now have the technology to take E.T home." That is not what he said.
At the end of his presentation he showed his final slide, a picture of a disk-shaped craft – the classic “flying saucer” – flying into a partly cloudy sky with a burst of sunlight in the background and he gave his standard tagline. It was a joke he had used in numerous presentations since 1983 when Steven Spielberg’s "E.T. the Extraterrestrial," a film about a young boy befriending a lost visitor from space and helping the alien get home, had become the highest-grossing film of all-time. Rich apparently decided to capitalize on this popularity. By the summer of 1983, he had added the flying saucer picture to the end of a set of between 12 and 25 slides that he showed with his lecture on the history of Lockheed's famed Skunk Works division.
Rich had long used a standard script for his talks, tailoring the content as necessary to accommodate his audience. Since most Skunk Works current projects were classified, it didn’t matter whether he was addressing schoolchildren or professional aeronautical engineers; he always ended the same way. At a Defense Week symposium on future space systems in Washington, D.C., on September 20, 1983, he said, “Unfortunately, I cannot tell you what we have been doing for the last 10 years. It seems we score a breakthrough at the Skunk Works every decade, so if you invite me back in 10 years I’ll be able to tell you what we are doing [now]. I can tell you about a contract we recently received. The Skunk Works has been assigned the task of getting E.T. back home.” The audience laughed, as it was meant to do.
If something is successful, it is worth repeating. Rich gave an identical speech at the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland, on September 6, 1984, and continued using his script during successive appearances. Sometimes he refined the details a bit. “I wish I could tell you what else we are doing in the Skunk Works,” he said, wrapping up a presentation for the Beverly Hills chapter of the National Society of Daughters of the American Revolution on May 23, 1990. “You’ll have to ask me back in a few years. I will conclude by telling you that last week we received a contract to take E.T. back home.”
Three years later he was still using the same line and the same slide. “We did the F-104, C-130, U-2, SR-71, F-117 and many other programs that I can’t talk about,” he proclaimed during a 1993 speech at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, home of Air Force Materiel Command, the organization responsible for all flight-testing within the Air Force. “We are still working very hard, I just can’t tell you what we are doing.” As usual, he added his by now infamous punchline, “The Air Force has just given us a contract to take E.T. back home.”
Within the UFO community, Rich’s words, and additional statements attributed to him without corroborative proof, have become gospel. He is named as having admitted that extraterrestrial UFO visitors are real and that the U.S. military has interstellar capabilities, and although nearly two full years passed between Rich’s UCLA speech and his death in 1995, some believers have touted his comments as a “deathbed confession.” It was nothing of the kind.
Rich, a brilliant scientist, apparently believed in the existence of other intelligent life in the universe, though only as something distant and mysterious. In July 1986, after Testor Corporation model-kit designer John Andrews wrote asking what he thought about the possible existence of either manmade or extraterrestrial UFOs, Rich responded, “I’m a believer in both categories. I feel everything is possible.” He cautioned, however, that, “In both categories, there are a lot of kooks and charlatans – be cautious.”
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| Slide 13 |
Merlin went on to say in another comment:
The main point of my earlier posts was simply that Ben Rich did not say what some people claim he said. Most of his so-called quotes are not traceable back to a reliable source. The Keller/Harzan accounts of his 1993 UCLA speech are based solely on memory and were only reported years after the event. The overall description of Rich's presentation matches (for the most part) his standard script, though I'm not sure that I believe he ended that talk with a discussion of the F-117A. By 1993, he was ending with the YF-22 winning the Advanced Tactical Fighter fly-off competition, something the Skunk Works was justifiably proud of at the time. Perhaps he mentioned it earlier in his UCLA speech, or maybe Keller and Harzan simply forgot. It is not really important. I won't hold it against Keller and Harzan that they describe his UFO slide as a black disk flying into space, rather than as a metallic flying saucer in a cloudy sky with a sunburst. Their description is not bad for being based on memory, and I was just looking at a photocopy of the original slide last week. Quoting Rich as saying, "We have the technology to take E.T. home" is a close but memory-distorted version of what he actually said, as evidenced by his presentation scripts, which he followed closely.
Peter Merlin later greatly expanded the material, providing documentation in an excellent article for Tim Printy's SUNlite,
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| "Taking ET Home: Birth of a Modern Myth." See pages 17-19 SUNlite5_6.pdf |
Steve
Justice on the Ben Rich and the Lockheed UFO Legends
In 2020, more evidence surfaced, testimony from one of Ben Rich's Skunk Works colleagues. Steve Justice, as described in his bio at VirginGalactic:
“A 39-year veteran of Lockheed Martin and a ‘legend’
in its Skunk Works division - he brings incredibly deep leadership and
engineering experience. During his career, he led numerous technology
breakthrough programs and served on the teams that developed the F-117A
Nighthawk, the world’s first stealth attack aircraft, the YF-22A prototype for
the F-22A stealth fighter, and the JASSM stealth missile. He also served as
deputy program manager for Lockheed Martin's Blackswift, an innovative reusable
hypersonic testbed for high speed, high-altitude aircraft technologies.”
While Steve Justice was part of Tom DeLonge’s To the
Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences (TTSA), he was interviewed by Luis
Elizondo in July of 2020 for the company’s podcast. Near the end, questions
were read from social media submissions, and one asked about Ben Rich and claims of Lockheed having advanced UFO-level technology.
TTSA Talks Ep. 6: Steve Justice Talks About His
Journey From Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works to TTSA (7/30/2020) YouTube clip starting with Ben Rich question.
Luis Elizondo: John
asks, “All right, Steve please comment on this, according to Ben Rich CEO of
Lockheed Martin Skunk Works in 1993 he said, “We now have the technology to
take E.T home.” The question that John has is, “Is he nuts or what?”
Steve Justice: I'll
- I'm gonna say you know, I've seen this quote and I've seen it just propagate
like crazy especially through the social media world and that kind of stuff, and
I've heard it attributed to a number of things too, private conversations, but
in speeches is where one of the common threads is. And as the historian
for the Skunk Works yeah this this was a question I had too, and I actually
worked with Ben um and sat in his office and talked with him about all kinds of
subjects including this, and he never said that to me okay. But one of the
really interesting things, Ben wrote down all of his speeches they were all
written out including the listing of the slides out there, so what is in the
social media world is that we say we have this ability to take ET home and he
shows a slide of a flying saucer up there.
So I remember looking through Ben's speeches and I
remember this just as clearly as can be, and because there's a slide that's
called out for this little paragraph is ‘Skunk in the clouds’ so that was one
of the slides we would put up as a thing of, ‘hey we're working on pretty cool
stuff out there, you know, wait a decade or two and you might see it.’ But it
was to indicate that the Skunk had a future out there but we couldn't discuss
it. So the Skunk in the clouds was the identified slide and I used it many
times when I was giving speeches to civic groups or schools or whatever. But
his actual words in the speech were, I'm going to try to remember this as
clearly as I possibly can was like, “You may be wondering what we're working on
in the Skunk Works now and we can't talk about it but I want you to know we've
just been awarded a contract to build this (with the Skunk in the clouds [slide])
to fly E.T back home.”
Okay, that's what I have written down that he said. And
so you know, things change over time and that kind of stuff, and there's perceptions
and distortions. I can't like to say I can't speak for any private
conversations Ben had. I can speak to the private conversation he had with me...
[Interrupted by question]
Luis Elizondo: Well
let me ask you this Steve, On that, I mean,
if someone has a technology to send the Mars rover to go, let's say on to Mars,
or an asteroid, or another planet and collect soil samples and bring it back
home and there happens to potentially be microbial life or some sort of alien
life form, is that really that far-fetched? NASA actually has plans to do just
that don't they, to actually take soil samples and bring them back here to our planet
and look at these samples?
Steve Justice: They
do, but the context that I knowing Ben, he was the joke master. I mean just
loved humor and he loved messing with people, and so to me this statement
particularly when he's frustrated that he can't get credit for what you know
the Skunk Work was doing to help Lockheed shareholders you know, and Lockheed
investors, and quite honestly in a lot of cases, executive leadership know what
was going on, it was a frustration point for him, so he would put big fluffy
statements out there that sounded so off the wall they were…
Luis Elizondo: So just provocative statements…
Steve Justice: …just provocative as
could be. I remember when the F-117 Stealth Fighter was black, he made
statements like you know, “We have stuff going on in the desert that's just
decades ahead of your imagination.” And he was specifically talking about the Stealth
Fighter but people attribute that to whatever they want it to be. But he was so
incredibly frustrated that he couldn't get credit for this incredible
breakthrough of stealth technology, so it manifested itself in multiple ways.
So I attribute it more to that, but that's the real life quote of Ben, let’s
say, he may have said the other, but he didn't do it to me, and it was in none
of the transcripts of his speeches.
. . .
Closing words from Ben Rich from Skunk Works:
"The Skunk Works has always been perched at the cutting edge. More than
half a dozen times over the past fifty years of cold war we have managed to
create breakthroughs in military aircraft or weapons systems that tipped the
strategic balance of power for a decade or longer, because our adversaries could
not duplicate or counter what we had created. That must continue to be our role
into the next century, if we are to preserve what we have accomplished and be
prepared for the hazards as well as the opportunities for the uncharted, risky
future"
