Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed

by Ben R. Rich

I began picking up rumors that certain officials at the Pentagon were accusing me of rigging the test results of the radar range competition against Northrop. An Air Force general called me, snarling like a pit bull. “Rich, I’m told you guys are pulling a fast one on us with phony data.” I was so enraged that I hung up on that son of a bitch. No one would have ever dared to accuse Kelly Johnson’s Skunk Works of rigging any data, and by God, no one was going to make that accusation against Ben Rich’s operation either. Our integrity was as important to all of us as our inventiveness. The accusation, I discovered, was made by a civilian radar expert advising the Air Force, who had close ties to leading manufacturers of electronic jamming devices installed in all Air Force planes to fool or thwart enemy radar and missiles. If stealth was as good as we claimed, those companies might be looking for new work. His motivation for bad-mouthing us was obvious; but it was equally apparent that we were unfairly being attacked without any effective way for me to defend the Skunk Works’ integrity from three thousand miles away. So I invited one of the nation’s most respected radar experts to Burbank to personally test and evaluate our stealth data. MIT’s Lindsay Anderson accepted my invitation in the late summer of 1976 and arrived at my doorstep carrying a bag of ball bearings in his briefcase. The ball bearings ranged in size from a golf ball to an eighth of an inch in diameter. Profes...