June 24, 2025 • 62 mins
For almost 80 years, Lockheed Martin has been working hand in hand with the US government to create cutting-edge, classified tech and craft, working in secret to build some of the world's most iconic spy planes. Nowadays, the so-called "Skunk Works" are more open about their projects ... or are they? Tune in to learn more.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Fellow conspiracy realist. Have you ever wish that your workplace
was stinky? Have you ever walked in and said, I
wish this was a little more skunky.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Yeah, no, maybe, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
Well, that's what happened almost eighty years ago at Lockheed Martin.
We must imagine, because in this week's classic episode, we're
learning about something that isn't open secret now, but was
much more of a secret and indeed a cradle of
conspiracy back in the day. Lockheed Martin has worked hand
(00:36):
in hand with the US government to create a lot
of weird, weird secret stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Weird wild stuff. Indeed, Johnny Carson would be proud. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
Well, and you know, just this past week, as we're
recording this, the US Army celebrated I think two hundred
and fifty years of existence, and off air, we were
just talking about the technology on display during the parade
that occurred for that stuff, thinking about how far the
like the leaps and bounds the technology has taken, specifically
in aircraft, but then also on you know, ground stuff
(01:09):
that the Army uses, and a lot of those leaps
and bounds occurred inside.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
This place, and we jump right into the history of
skunk works.
Speaker 4 (01:21):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
Hello, welcome back to the show.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
My name is Matt, my name is Nolan. They call
me Ben.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
We are joined as always with our super producer Paul.
Mission control decands. Most importantly, you are you. You are here,
and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know. Honestly,
it's great to see you.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Guys.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Have no idea what time it really is. I'm looking
at a clock here now that says it's right around
four PM or a little bit before Eastern time, but
who knows.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
Maybe it's it's eight GMT.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Okay, there we go, There we go, and body clock wise,
it's I think fourteen hours ahead for me.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
But I'm a little out of it.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
But I think we're gonna have fun with with today's topics.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
What's it like in the future, Ben.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
It's interesting, it's interesting. No flying cars yet. Velcro is
making a comeback in a big way for that everywhere, everywhere, everywhere.
I'm a little weirded out by all the buttons around
us right now. But but yes, the show must go on, right,
(02:56):
today's episode is has nothing to do with the oscar.
There's not a good segue. Today's episode has nothing to
do with that, but could be could be fertile soil
for a different episode in the future. Today we're talking
about something strange that's happening every single moment of every
(03:20):
single day here in the US and abroad. It's military research.
And this is a very spooky, Boogeyman esque sort of
phenomenon for a lot of us. You know, some folks
like maybe like Matt, you and I grew up on
X files, right. I know, I know you watch I
(03:41):
don't know how into it you were.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
I was into it, yeah, medium I watched it typically
with no lights on while listening to the bare naked
ladies so on. One week.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
So the three of us then we're very much into
X files, right, and X Files paints this picture of
a vast, locking conspiracy between corporations and governments right to
advance suppressed technology to better the elite's control of the
(04:11):
world as we know it. The thing is, that's sort
of true. It's sort of true. You don't need aliens
for that to be true. It's no secret that the
world's militaries have loads and loads classified weapons, hardware, strategies,
including psyops, techniques, and all this other stuff. But where
do they come from? In the United States? One of
the answers to this question is inevitably something called skunk works.
Speaker 3 (04:35):
It's a cool name, right, yeah, potentially pretty smelly.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Yes, yes, there's something stinky about it. But what exactly
is skunk works? To answer this, we have to start
with this story of something called Lockheed Martin. So here
are the facts. What is Lockheed Martin. You've surely heard
of it before. There are buildings here year around Atlanta
(05:01):
with the names plastered across the top of them. This title,
or this term, let's say, skunk works, can really be
applied in a lot of different ways to a lot
of different things, but normally to secretive some kind of
experimental facility like a lab or a factory, something like that.
But the origin of the phrase skunk works really does
(05:22):
come from this single company, Lockheed Martin Corporation. And to
really learn about it, you have to go all the
way back to nineteen forty three, and there you find
if the United States Armies Air Tactical Service Command or
ATSK or ATSC.
Speaker 3 (05:39):
Because you see, the ATSC had a bit of an issue.
They were worried about German rocket science, specifically jets as
well as you know, the things that would become missiles
in the potential technology that existed there, because as we've
learned in previous episodes, German technology or scientists there in
Germany really were the ones that created rocketry.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
Right, Yeah, Nazis are the reason the US got to.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
The moon vanv bron Right did I say that? Right? Yeah?
I think I left the N out of the Vaughan,
but you got what I was getting at.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
So, so the officials there from the ATSC they met
with the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation and they said, okay, guys,
let's figure out what we can do on this end
to catch up with this technology and make some of
our own revolutionary rocketry happen here.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
Yeah, And they also said, let's do it quickly, yesterday, right,
Let's do it yesterday. About a month after this meeting,
in nineteen forty three, there was a team led by
an engineer named Clarence L. Johnson, playing ol'kelly to his friends.
They came back to ATSC and they said, Okay, we're
gonna build a jet for you, the XP eighty Shooting
(06:49):
Star jet fighter. Uncle Sam gave it the green light.
Lockey began developing the first US fighter jet in June
of nineteen forty three. This is we should know, so
the official narrative. You're gonna have some You're gonna have
some other reporters and historians who will argue that the
true story begins a little bit earlier in the late thirties.
(07:12):
But this is like, if you ask someone at Lockheed
what happened what skunk Works, this is the official answer,
and that jet fighter, the XP eighty Shooting Star is
the birth of what today is known as skunk Works, and.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
Lockheed was surprisingly is surprisingly transparent about the origins of
this of this organization. It emphasizes that it was a
pretty informal and urgent need that created this collaboration. The
formal contract for the Xpad did not arrive at Lockheed
until October sixteenth of nineteen forty three, which was four
(07:47):
months after work had already begun, and this would prove
to be kind of a common theme within the Skunkworks story.
Many times a customer would come to Skunk Works with
a request, and on a handshake, the project would began.
That's crazy to me, given the amount of money some
of these project must have costs, No contracts in place,
no official submission process at all.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
Right, yeah, just some make it happens and some handshakes
Johnson and his team. Eventually, they didn't just design the
XP eighty. They built one in less than one hundred
and fifty days and only one hundred and forty three days.
Their deadline was one hundred and fifty. This was only possible,
(08:29):
by the way, because he broke the rules. He broke
all of the rules that were in place. Johnson, you see,
felt that the primary problem with Lockheed and government contracts
was all the red tape.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
All the bureaucracy.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
Wanted to shoot from the hip, so we don't need
these plans and all these reviews. So he didn't just
ignore the status quo. He built his own set of
rules fourteen commandments, the first of which is the manager
of skunk Works must have comp deleete control over everything
in his program and should not have to answer to
(09:04):
anyone higher than a president and a company. So he
wanted complete control. He wanted a fiefdom essentially that was
answerable to very few people. And he also, in direct
contrast to a lot of the normal standard operating procedures,
Kelly wanted a minimum number of people involved, and he
(09:26):
was brutal about it.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
Yes, and this is number three. The number of people
having any connection with the project must be restricted in
an almost vicious manner. Use a small number of good
people ten five percent compared to the so called normal systems.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
And he also said less reports. Yes, we want to
look well, well, we'll show our work, but we don't
want to have to check in with you. This guy,
I get the feeling of this guy hated meetings.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
Yeah, and also less inspections or at least use subcontractors
and and other things for some of the testing stuff
and inspection. He's like, don't duplicate so much inspection. We
can't do this in that amount of time.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
And don't let people outside skunk works get in. It's
kind of fight clubbish, you know, it is the first
rule of skunk works.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
Anyhow.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
We have to note though that when this started out,
it was just a cool idea, and it was just
a desperate measure to get something in the air that
could fight the Axis forces. They didn't actually call it
skunk Works for a while, so we have to ask
ourselves how did it get its name?
Speaker 2 (10:38):
How indeed? Well, oddly enough, it's kind of a sweet story,
at least the way Lockheed pr tells it. Because the
war effort was in full swing, there was no space
available at Lockheed's facility for Johnson's effort. Johnson's organization operated
out of a rented circus tent next to a manufacturing
(10:59):
plant that made plastics formerly, and that produced a very
strong odor which permeated this tent. So members of Johnson's
team were cautioned that design and production of the XP
eighty had to be carried out in strict secrecy. No
one was to discuss the project outside the small organization,
(11:19):
and team members were even warned to be careful how
they answered their phones. Right So, a team engineer by
the name of IRV Culver was a big fan of
Al Capp's newspaper comic strip Lil Abner, in which there
was a running joke about a mysterious and mattt odris
place deep in the forest called the Skunk Works sko
(11:41):
n K. There there was a strong beverage being brewed
from Skunk's old shoes and other odd ingredients.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
Yeah, So one day this guy IRV gets a phone
call and he answers it in kind of a glib manner,
and he goes skonk Works inside Mankova speaking.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
And people loved it.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
It was a great inside joke because you know, when
you work in an office with the same people, you
love an inside joke. So other employees started adopting this,
and they started calling their division of Lockheed skunk Works,
and eventually that changed to Skunk Works. So it's not
it may be surprising to find that they weren't secretly
(12:26):
working on some kind of weaponized odor. This was just yeah,
this was just actually a neat little office job joke.
Speaker 3 (12:34):
Well yeah, well it's not even an office job. It's
a circus tent. It's a rented circus tent outside of
plastics facility, and the whole place reeks, and they're in
there like doing really important technological work and engineering work.
It's so weird to me.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
It's so weirdly punk rock, yeah, and kind of like DIY.
When you think of government work, you think of everything
being all buttoned up in these like air tight labs,
like clean rooms and all that stuff, and this was
not that, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
It's strange too, because skunk Works is often brought up
as an example of old school conspiratorial corporate warmongeringe you know,
it's part of the war machine, the stuff Eisenhower warned
us about, and rightly so. But if you learn about
Skunkworks today, it's actually a registered trademark of Lockeed. That's
(13:25):
a far cry from any off the books operation. Their
official name is not skunk Works. That's just the name
everybody likes. Their official name is Lohey Martin's Advanced Development
Programs or a DP. But again, why the hell would
you call it that when you have a fun name
like skunk Works just begging for you to say it
(13:46):
and shout it to the rooftops.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
I don't know. Advanced Development program also sounds pretty dope.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
Like advanced idea mechanics. The Marvel fans out there, yes.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
And the elite squad of scientists operating at Skunkworks well,
no affectionately as the smelly Boys.
Speaker 1 (14:01):
And now let's look at skunk Works today. So Skunkworks
still conducts a ton of classified research.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
We actually do.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
Not know how much it We don't know what it's doing. Really,
we know a little bit. And it's a well known
organization in the world. It's not even an open secret,
you know. They in fact have published a glossy brochure
with a ten point agenda. This was back from twenty fifteen.
(14:30):
That was focused on kind of selling it to the
public and then selling it to the government or at
least the people who signed the checks for contracts and all.
It was kind of boring and it's very it's very
full of trade jargon. It's like, we're focusing on keeping
costs down. We work closely with the government. We also
(14:51):
build these prototypes and we give the savings to you,
uncle Sam. And today the primary site is out there
in Palm Dale, California. It's the middle of nowhere. Why
would you drive their desert about sixty miles from LA.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
Yeah, and that's almost directly north across the mountain range
there together there near Lancaster. Really, I don't know, it's isolated,
but it really is close to Los Angeles.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
Yeah, sixty miles is not that far. It's just up
the way from the Antelope Valley mall and in.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
LA traffic It probably only take you about three days
to get.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
There, unless you had an experimental skunk Works helicopter or
hypersonic vehicle. This place is huge. There are one hundred buildings,
there's an estimated three million square feet of floor space,
and the vast majority of this stuff here is off limits,
but there are occasional press tours and journalists get a
(15:48):
peak behind the curtains. So this is all on the
up and up right. This is not just It is
no longer a secret lab something that we think of
an association with DARPA. This is actually a government contractor
who's trying to work on its public image. And you know,
you have to look no further than something like Boeing
to know how important public image can be. There's no
(16:12):
question skunk Works has played a huge role in military innovation,
especially in the field of spy, aircraft, material tech, things
like that. But the question for today is what else
are they cooking up in there and what's coming out
in the future.
Speaker 3 (16:30):
And we're going to get to that, at least what
we've been able to find. After a quick word from
our sponsor.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
Here's where it gets crazy, all right, So we have
to open this conversation with an age old dilemma the
problem with secrecy, which is, you know what, sometimes I
think we should just make this a children's book and
make it a pop up and put it out in
every school in America.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
This is a.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
Huge problem, and people don't think about it as often
as they should.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
Well, Ben and that children's book. I mean it really
just boils down to one age old added, which is
secret secrets are now fun. Secret secrets hurt someone.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
Where's that from?
Speaker 2 (17:16):
You know? Children? Really? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (17:18):
But also secret secrets protect the nation from security threats
to society.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Well, there's no judgment in brainstorming. We're spitball in here,
you know, I like where I think we're going in
the right direction. It's true, though, it's a huge problem.
If you're a government, you have to have secrecy because
you want to keep your rivals from stealing your technology
or getting a jump on your research. That's a huge deal. Now,
like the primary intelligence operations of the Chinese government are
(17:54):
almost entirely corporate and military espionage, and if you don't
have operational security, you could find yourself in a situation
where facilities are bombed and people genuinely die. That old
saying loose lips sink ships is meant to be taken literally,
got the right idea, been there like that, I didn't
(18:16):
write it one. But here's the other side of the problem.
If you are a government, especially if you're the kind
of government that allows citizens to vote, which has been
you know, enjoying a brief moment in the sun. We'll
see how long. Yeah, we'll see how long the fag goes.
But right now it's about as successful as say, beanie
(18:37):
babies in the nineties. Hacky Sacks perhaps, Hacky Sacks. Perhaps. Yeah.
If you're one of those governments, you also need at
least the illusion of transparency. You need, at at the
very minimum, you need performative transparency, meaning that people want
to know where their tax dollars are going totally, they
want to say in what their government does totally. You
(18:59):
have to at least make them feel like that is
an option, even when and especially when it's not, especially
when you consider that old Eisenhower quote.
Speaker 3 (19:09):
Every gunship that is made, every warship launched, every rocket
fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those
who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold
and are not clothed.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
And it's true, right, if voters don't know what is
being built, they cannot reasonably determine whether that money was
well spent, right, especially when you consider every dollar that
goes to a battle is a dollar that goes away
from the people of a country. Eisenhower is right about this.
(19:44):
We can argue that this trade off is worthwhile if
we know what's happening we as voters. This leads us
to an important, heartbreaking problem. There are no shortages of
countries that spend tremendous some amounts of cash, blood, and
treasure on their militaries while they are people literally starve.
(20:05):
We're not being hyperbolic while they die of starvation, dysentery,
things like that. But you know, the rockets keep firing.
We need gas, we need bullets, we need more radar capability,
and so in the absence of transparency, speculation thrives. Like
I always think of that creepy Tom Waits thing. I
don't even know if it's a song, Maybe it's more
(20:27):
a performance piece. What's the building in there? You guys
know that one.
Speaker 3 (20:30):
I'm unfamiliar with this.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
Yeah, I don't know that one either, man. It's uber creepy.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
It's like peak Tom Waits creeping around going want in
building in there? And it's a good question, right, because
we are we are giving our if we're voters, we
are we are giving a portion of our income to
a thing in a tremendous trust fall. We're asking this leviathan,
this gigantic mechanism, to make our lives better or to
(20:58):
at the very least maintain a standard of living to
which we're accustomed. And now we're throwing money in a
black box. So what is Lockheed building in there? And
is it worth the expense? That's the question. And it's
tough to answer because we know some stuff about skunk Works,
(21:19):
But how much do we actually know?
Speaker 3 (21:21):
Well, let's we know some from the past, we know
some from the present, and all of it from the
future because we've been consulting with an oracle. No, I'm
just kidding. We don't know anything about the future. But
let's talk about the past. Stuff that we can talk about,
and hey, let's make a determination. Was this worth it
while some of us starved? That's really what we're saying here,
(21:42):
So let's think about it. Here's the first one, Lockheed
Yo three, No.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
What is that well, I'm glad you asked, Matt. The
Yo three A, as it were, was designed to a
US Army speck from the nineteen sixties nineteen sixty eight
to be precise, which called for an observation aircraft a spyplane, right,
that would be acoustically undetectable from the ground when flying
(22:08):
in an oultitude of twelve one hundred feet at night.
Nine of the eleven Yo three a's produced operated in
South Vietnam at night from nineteen seventy to nineteen seventy one,
only fourteen months and never took a single round. Absolutely,
we're never shot down, right, These.
Speaker 3 (22:28):
Are a fascinating aircraft. Ben, I was wondering if you've
ever talked about these on car stuff for any of
the other shows.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
No, no, this is this is I think the first
time any of us have mentioned this on Okay, Yeah,
this is a pretty this is a pretty neat one.
It's now at the box thing. And you know, whenever
we talk about research in these sorts of fields, we're
looking at a huge attrition rate. A ton of stuff
never makes it off the blueprint stage, you know, and
(22:56):
a ton of the stuff that makes it to a
prototype never never gets beyond where the what the Horton
HO twenty two was, Yes, exactly right, But this.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
Was just to stay on here just for a second.
It was a smaller aircraft. You can find pictures of
the Yo Dash three online and if you look at
the pilot, it's like, the pilot looks pretty big in
the photo is because the plane is relatively small. It's
got a tiny little propeller upfront, single propeller wings that
are not large in width, and just to fly around
(23:26):
at night being quiet, observing troops. It did its purpose
and like Noel said, it didn't get shot down, so
you know, it was certainly helpful for the military, right.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
Yeah, it was helpful for the military. You could also
argue that it saved the lives of US forces there
you go through its surveillance capabilities. One that one craft
that might be more familiar to some of us would
be the Lockheed U two. In nineteen fifty five, Skunkwork's
got this contract from the CIA to build a spyplane
(23:59):
known as as the U two. Later, you know, this
one was so popular that a certain Irish band named
themselves after it.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Are you and the numeral two? Yes?
Speaker 1 (24:10):
And yeah? They were right on the edge with that one,
and the ideal for the U two was to fly
over the USSR and try to photograph sites that they
couldn't see using other methods. They operated for a number
of years. The first flight happened on Independence Day on
July fourth, nineteen fifty six. But the U two stopped
(24:33):
flying when a guy named Francis Gary Powers was shot
down over Russia. So the U two was not as
successful as the U three A. I should call it
the YO three A.
Speaker 3 (24:45):
But I like you though it did operate for a
much longer time it did.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
It did operate for a much much longer time. And
then we also know about the Lockheed A twelve, which
which was a a logical successor to the U two
because when skunk Works was a lot of people don't
know this.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
When Skunk Works was building the U.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
Two, they baked into their predictions that this would have
a short shelf life. They said, look, this is gonna
work really well for a second, and then it's it's
gonna blow up in our faces like the Spice Girls
or the Macarena song.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
You know, why would they build a plane that was
designed to blow up in their faces? That doesn't seem
very effective.
Speaker 3 (25:28):
So okay, let's just talk about this really quickly. So
the You two plane, the lockyed version of You two
was a really cool spy plane. It was huge, like
really really large, and generally the ones that I've seen
at least in in museums and a couple of other
places were playing it. We're painted this like gun metal
(25:51):
black or like a dark gray, you know that color
they order to operate in the sky to be you know,
almost undetectable and flying over those places. Right, But it
looks kind of like a jet that you if you
think about a jet the way a jet plane looks,
it kind of looks like that. The one that we're
talking about now, the what is it, the A twelve.
(26:14):
This thing looks out of this world really yes, big,
just it looks like a fully different kind of aircraft.
If you look at a picture.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
I see what you're saying. So, like, the designs were
really's next level stuff, sort of like those crazy that
the design started to get a little more angular and crazy,
like with those stealth bombers that Donald Trump really thinks
they're invisible.
Speaker 3 (26:37):
Well, well yeah, because they had a specific thing they
were trying to do with this plane, right.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
Yeah, they wanted it to be invisible essentially, and it
is the ante seton of the much more famous SR
seventy one Blackbird. The interesting thing about A twelve is
that they it was already in the works when the
utwo was rolling out because they predicted that correctly. As
(27:03):
it turns out that USSR detection technology would catch up
with the evasive capability of the U two. And then
the A twelve was strange because it required some help
from the CIA. Now you might be saying, guys, the CIA,
they're not exactly experts in engineering, nor the experts in aviation.
(27:26):
That's correct, but the problem here's where they came in.
So skunk Works had to build five of these A
twelve aircraft. They wanted it to go mock three plus,
and they wanted to build it out of titanium. It
was very tough because in the Cold War, the USSR
controlled the titanium game. They they had like ninety plus
(27:52):
percent of the titanium trade. So these folks went to
the CIA and they said, hey, we know one thing
you're good at setting up front companies. And the CIO said, yeah,
we're all about that.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
Oh, we know, we heard about that in the very
recent episode, didn't we about the NGOs exactly?
Speaker 1 (28:09):
So the CIA set up a dummy corporation entirely to
acquire titanium for the A twelve. That was very stuff
they don't want you to know, and it worked. How
pissed off would you be if you were the USSR
where it turned out, you know, when you found out that,
like you know, Socialist Titanium Consortium of Eastern Turkey was
(28:32):
actually the agency and you sold them the stuff they
needed to build the spy planes that were flying over
you right now.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
WHOA right, dirty deed's done quite expensively.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
Yes, Sarah Well said, Let's let's pause for a second
for a word from our sponsor, and then we'll dive
into some more examples and we're back now. We mentioned
this earlier. This is one of the more famous US
spy planes, also built by Skunkworks, the Lockheed s R
(29:10):
seventy one Blackbird. And I don't want to get in
too deep with the Marvel fans, but I think didn't
the didn't the X men have a Blackbird at some point?
Speaker 2 (29:21):
Me And there's their plane.
Speaker 3 (29:23):
Yeah, it looks kind of like that you're talking.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
About the one that would take off from the ground,
you know, and then it would zoom off. It was
called the X something it was. It was definitely called
the jet. Yeah, probably there you go.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
I don't I think it looks like a blackbird. Well
that's the thing, the one we talked about before the
break there. The A twelve and the SR seventy one
look very very similar, just slightly different shape of the
nose basically is what you look at when you're looking
at it. It looks very very similar.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
No, No, it's the X men Blackbird X jet.
Speaker 3 (29:55):
What it was, straight up a blackbird.
Speaker 2 (29:57):
The Blackbird, also nicknamed X, is a fictional aircraft appearing
in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. Nailed it, man,
What does it look like? It's the one you know
from the movies. It's real narrow, tapers off like it's
got the wings are in the back, and then the
body is real skinny and kind of goes goes forward.
At least that's how they depicted it in the films.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
And I think you're right, Noel, that it does have
that vertical takeoff and landing capability which the real blackbirds
can't right, Okay.
Speaker 3 (30:25):
Okay, the wings are very different and they are.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
Axes, but but.
Speaker 3 (30:30):
It's a blackbird. It looks like a blackbird.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
But the real blackbird's cool too. It's not comic book
level cool, but it is.
Speaker 3 (30:37):
Cool, dude. When I was in middle school, yeah, this
was the coolest thing that it ever existed.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
Did you were you one of those guys at a
poster of it?
Speaker 3 (30:46):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (30:46):
Did you build a model?
Speaker 3 (30:47):
I did, and I went and checked it out at
the museum that they have their warder robins and this
I wanted to pilot one of these things. It was
my biggest dream, that's true.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
I don't know if a lot of people are aware
of this, but Matt, you grew up relatively close to
an actual skunk works facility. I did, right, yep, Okay,
well we'll move on then, yep.
Speaker 3 (31:13):
So so, but no, I think a lot of maybe
you listening out there, like, saw a picture of this thing.
It just looked so futuristic and unreal, and when you
started to learn about the physics of it, how it
actually expanded a little bit when it got up to
the speeds that it could reach because of the heat
(31:33):
that was going on with the metals that were involved.
It felt it just felt like it was out of
this world, like and it was alien technology or something
that we had captured. You combine that with the whole
X Files enthusiast thing.
Speaker 1 (31:47):
I mean, come on, it also seems like it was
really difficult to fly.
Speaker 3 (31:51):
Oh, I'm sure you know.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
Well, that's a that's a problem with a lot of
spy planes is that they're they're terrible to their terrible
on the ground. They're terrible to take off. They're terrible
to land because they're just designed to float a high altitude,
so you have to get up there first. It's kind
of like, you know birds that there are so many
(32:13):
birds that are terrible on land but amazing the air.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Like the Great frigate bird.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
It looks like a nincompoop when it's trying to walk
around because it's not made for the ground.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
It's made for this guy, Ben, you missed a really
great voicemail we had on the Listener Mail episode where
someone proposed a conspiracy theory that ducks are in fact
not floating on the surface of the water, but that
they have weird, gangly legs that extend all the way
down to the bottom of the lake or what have you.
And that really triggered me the whole the thought of that, Yeah,
(32:45):
the image of that. In just a minute when you
were saying, you know, some birds are terrible, I was
really hoping you would just stop short and just say
birds terrible.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
Yeah, I'm just I'm going to give this to you.
It's an evil gift. And I'm sure you're already aware
of duck penises. They're screwed right, there are many.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
Did you bring me one from? Never mind? Don't want.
I don't want to scoop you.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
No, no, no, I did I. Duck penises are Lovecraftian.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
It is probably the best way to do, don't. They
like hook in and won't let go.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
They're evil because ducks reproduce non consensually. That is the
most diplomatic that you say it.
Speaker 3 (33:25):
So the uh, that's.
Speaker 2 (33:31):
My planes.
Speaker 3 (33:33):
I have to talk about this a little more interesting.
So the previous model, the A twelve, you can only
have one pilot in there. It's just you, by your
loansome flying around up pretty dang high and going ridiculously fast.
So you're maneuvering away from people being able to shoot
you down. At least hopefully, this SR seventy one. You
could have two one pilot copilot in there, helpful in
(33:56):
case one one operator loses consciousness because you are travel
so fast. And the other thing is that this thing
operated for longer than anything that Lockheed was producing before.
Then when it comes to these advanced programs, it went
from nineteen sixty six, This thing, this futuristic thing, went
from nineteen sixty six until nineteen ninety eight. That's when
(34:19):
it was in service.
Speaker 2 (34:20):
Like they didn't even like massively updated or they would
have had to give it a new model name.
Speaker 3 (34:24):
Right, it was just awesome and it stayed awesome.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
And it was expensive, so it's okay to do. You know,
they're still researching the next step of the evolution, but
they have to be very sure that it's worth sinking
billions of dollars into a new design.
Speaker 2 (34:41):
Into the R and D alone I mentioned the manufacturing right.
Quick question for my own edification here, what do these
things actually do? Like, I mean, I know they are
spy planes and they're surveilling, but like, is it with radar?
Is it taking aerial photography? Is are there their listening devices?
Just wonder like what the implementation of this absurdly expensive
(35:04):
technology is and how does it benefit us?
Speaker 1 (35:06):
Well, I mean it looks cool and it's just nice
to kind of have a flex Okay.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
Yeah, it's.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
What's called a long range strategic reconnaissance craft. Essentially, they
have a bunch of eyes in the sky. They have
infrared imagery, they have radar, airborne radar, electronic intelligence gathering systems.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
They have.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
Counter missile systems, right, so they can avoid both ground
launched missiles and other birds in the air. And they
have these huge cameras. One thing to your point, Matt,
about why there was only one person in the in
the predecessor, in the A twelve, and while there were
two in the Blackbird. For that second person to be
(35:57):
able to fit in the Blackbird, the designers had to
remove the principal censor which was on the A twelve,
which was this huge, large, focal length optical camera. So
they were flying over and taking pictures more or less,
and they weren't, you know, they weren't dropping bombs on
(36:17):
civilians or freedom fighters, got it. So another thing that's
interesting here is this spy plane. These these spy planes
specifically saw the rise of government mandated drug use because
It's the only way that pilots could remain alert while
(36:38):
they were on these missions. This has been confirmed. It
used to be considered a secret, but even up to
the up into the Gulf War, pilots were taking amphetamines.
There's one brand name, dexadrine, which is the brand name
for dextro amphetamine. This was given to pilots to keep
(36:58):
them alert during flight's law longer than eight.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
Hours like Benny's was another one, right, like Poppin' Benni's
the housewife pill of the nineteen twenties and thirties, I guess.
And then didn't the Nazis take some form of this
as well? Or that was more of an they're amphetamines,
it's all.
Speaker 1 (37:15):
Right, yeah, blitzkrieg Blitzgreeg operatives took them.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
Hitler loved them.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
And amphetamines were I mean very common in war because
they work.
Speaker 2 (37:25):
Yeah, and now we give them to our children to
help them pay better attention.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
That's adderall right, which.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
Essentially, I mean, studies have shown they act very similar
to amphetamines.
Speaker 3 (37:34):
Yay.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
So we know that the technology Lacky was capable of
creating was years and years ahead of what the public
would be aware of and we also know that the innovation,
the pace of innovation there was much more precipitous than
the public might have thought. We also know that skunk
(37:56):
Works projects were not confined to the air Please don't
think that all skunk Works does is work on aircraft.
It's just that we know the most about the aircraft.
They also made things that worked on the water.
Speaker 3 (38:12):
Yeah, talking about the Sea Shadow here as one example. Again,
like Lockheed's got this look now at this point, once
we enter the eighties, it's now nineteen eighty four. They're
using that gun metal, black coated looking crazy awesome stuff.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
Cyber truck didn't come from nowhere.
Speaker 3 (38:32):
Exactly right now. Their developer or they developed in nineteen
eighty four. It started working being deployed in nineteen eighty five.
A stealth boat essentially our transport vehicle. And it looks
crazy aka the duck penis.
Speaker 2 (38:50):
No, that was.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
They changed the name to the Sea Shadow when they
rolled it out.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
Oh yeah, and that was just the working title whenever,
keeping on or aps and skunk Work in the family,
you know.
Speaker 3 (39:02):
Yeah, And it's it's either called the nine dash five
two nine or I X dash five to nine. This
thing it looks crazy. If you you know, you can
just google sea Shadow, maybe blockheed. That's probably the best
way to find it.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
It doesn't look seaworthy.
Speaker 3 (39:20):
No, it doesn't. And it's hard to understand what you're
actually seeing. It's like, oh, wait, is that a submarine?
But wait, those sides are just diagonal? How far down
do they go? Wait? What is this raised part or
people inside that thing?
Speaker 2 (39:34):
It's like Darth Vader's helmet or something like the top
of a Darth Vader helmet, or like that weird dude
in the first Star Wars movie you had just kind
of the dome thing on his head, and you know, oh, sure,
he's kind of like that, and there's people standing on
top of it in this image that I'm looking at,
and there's an antenna of some sort. But yeah, it's
got like a weird little windshield, like four kind of
(39:55):
little trapezoidal interlocking windshields. And then there's open space underneath it,
which is the part that really throws you off. It's
like it's above the water, but there's this like it's
almost like a moving tunnel kind of it looks.
Speaker 1 (40:09):
Like a chronoplan You guys, remember those chronoplan is somewhere
between a ship and an aircraft. It uses the ground
force effect to hover over the water.
Speaker 2 (40:23):
They're so cool. E k R A n O plan.
Oh would that be what I would maybe have always
heard of as just a hovercraft.
Speaker 1 (40:30):
They're different from a hovercraft, different.
Speaker 2 (40:32):
Don't They don't have anything interesting? They look like this.
They're so cool. So they use propulsion to literally hover
above the surface of the water with like fans or
something like that. That's interesting.
Speaker 1 (40:45):
I always wanted to ride one, but a lot of
them are either decommissioned or in countries that are difficult
to get to.
Speaker 2 (40:52):
Interesting what's going on with the sea Shadow? Because I'm
with you, guys, I'm like, how how is this thing functioning?
Speaker 1 (40:58):
It was an experimental ocean surveillance vessel and was built
way back in nineteen eighty four, which is crazy. The
idea is that it's reducing its footprint its radar profile,
so that's part of why it's floating like that with
this hydrofoil on board. So it has two separate holes
(41:25):
and they're connected by struts, so the holes that you
see are underwater. So there is more to it than
just a flat plane. And the ship was used in
secret experimentally until nineteen ninety three. So for almost a
decade this thing existed off the grid and was not
(41:45):
universally acknowledged. People are saying, hey, I saw some weird
stuff out there in the ocean, and people were saying, whoa, Donnie,
slow down on your whatever their version of Adderall.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
Was at the time.
Speaker 1 (41:58):
And this was also one of the first tests of
automation to reduce the number of actual people on the vessel. Interesting,
and now this one has an ignomonious end because in
two thousand and six the US Navy gave up on
the Sea Shadow and they tried, they literally tried to
(42:20):
sell it at an auction and nobody would buy it.
And so then they said, okay, we're just going to
sell it for dismantling. You can dismantle it and can
take away the parts. We get rid of the secret stuff.
And they said, look, if you buy this, there are
two conditions. One you cannot sell it to you have
to scrap it. And they sold it in twenty twelve
(42:41):
when it was dismantled. But it lives on because there
are ships like the Impeccable and the Victorious that have
still have the same kind of structure. I mean, just
show you, guys, this is an actual ship. It's working now.
Who they took that weird missing missing piece of the
whole or the center cut out, and they kept the
(43:03):
twin hole design, but they made.
Speaker 2 (43:05):
It much bigger. Man.
Speaker 3 (43:06):
That's fascinating and there's a.
Speaker 1 (43:08):
Lot of money there. So these are things that have
all happened in the past. We know currently that Lockheed's
doing a couple of pretty fascinating things. One of them,
one of them makes sense, and one of them is
an out of nowhere thing that I guarantee will sound
like sci fi to ninety five percent of us listening.
(43:28):
The first is the Lockheed Martin SR seventy two. That
makes sense, right, Wait, oh wait.
Speaker 3 (43:34):
Can we do one thing before we hit the seventy
two totally because it's something that Noel brought up that
I have another picture of my mind that I'm assuming
other people do too. Yeah, And it's the I think
it's the F one to seventeen Nighthawk, which is I
think that's.
Speaker 2 (43:47):
What it called.
Speaker 3 (43:48):
Was it called uh, it's lockeyed, it is skunkworks. It
is Skunkworks, and it's the Nighthawk. It's the stealth fighter
jet looking thing that looks kind of like like a
hawk or an owl or a bird of prey or
something similar to all the other designs we've been talking about.
Speaker 2 (44:06):
Oh yes, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's.
Speaker 3 (44:08):
The one that I remember seeing when I think it
was desert storm was occurring in the nineties. The thing
was built in the eighties, around the same time that
they were building the what were we just talking about,
the Sea Sea Shadow, The Sea Shadow, and it wasn't
publicly acknowledged until five years later, and then it didn't
(44:28):
actually make an appearance anywhere operationally until a desert storm.
But it's just another one of those iconic planes that
was used for a lot of different things in secret
for a long time, and then eventually it was made published.
Speaker 2 (44:43):
So what it was just like a big unveiling when
they decided to make these public? Is it only when
they decommissioned them? Like, what when is the moment the
public gets to know about these cool, you know sci
fi looking spy planes.
Speaker 3 (44:56):
Well, here's here's the way. I think it goes down
years in an operational capacity somewhere in another country, probably
where there is you know, a conflict occurring. Sure that
one of these things gets used and either it gets
shot down, one of them gets shot down, or one
is caught, you know, operating, and then the United States
(45:20):
military has to kind of.
Speaker 1 (45:21):
Just yeah, kind of like the stealth helicopters win right. Yeah.
The Nighthawk was publicly revealed or I would even say
publicly acknowledged in nineteen eighty eight.
Speaker 3 (45:36):
Okay, yeah, and.
Speaker 1 (45:38):
People still didn't really didn't really clock it until, as
you said, Matt, in the Gulf War in nineteen ninety one.
It's weird to call it a stealth fighter because as
stealth fighter capabilities, but it's mainly a ground attack aircraft. Yeah,
dropping dropping bombs like hot mixtapes. So that yes, So
(46:01):
that's amazing. That's one of the posters I had. Yes,
you know, because it's just so iconic.
Speaker 3 (46:08):
I apologize that I jumped back to that. Ben.
Speaker 2 (46:11):
We have to.
Speaker 3 (46:12):
So let's let's go. Let's I'm going to take you
back now to the what the big brother of the
Lockheed Martin SR seventy one, the SR seventy two.
Speaker 1 (46:22):
Oh yeah, this one is still in the works, still
in the skunk works. According to Lockheed, it's going to
replace the seventy one.
Speaker 2 (46:32):
It's going to have.
Speaker 1 (46:34):
A middleman role between surveillance satellites, manned aircraft and unmanned.
Speaker 2 (46:41):
Aerial vehicles UAVs.
Speaker 1 (46:42):
Those creepy blimps, they're so far up in the sky
you can't see them. I think I'm supposed to call
them airships now. So the idea here is that the
SR seventy two is going to be able to leverage
all this communicative ability and its high speed to get
in and out of protected airspace and sneak pictures, sneak surveillance,
(47:06):
or blow up a target before people can detect it
at all, much less intercept it. This is dangerous stuff
and it's you know, if you're going to be alive
for the next few years, you're gonna you're gonna see
it in action or you're gonna hear about it. The
last thing that this blew me away, I don't know.
I don't know what you guys think about this. Paul
(47:26):
and I were talking about this earlier. The last thing
that Lakie Martin has confirmed that they are working on
is a compact fusion reactor. Yeah, fusion fusion, the thing
that we can't really do efficiently. They're jumping the gun
from a fusion reactor. Those can exist in a very
(47:47):
inefficient way to a compact fusion reactor. So if you
ever been walking around with your backpack and you're like, man,
this laptop's okay, and I like my notebook, but I
sure wish I had a fusion reactor, Well it's not
that compact, but it's on the way.
Speaker 3 (48:03):
We just talked about this with Chris Cogswell as like
the Pine in the sky thing.
Speaker 1 (48:08):
And how he said it would never happen. Yeah, yeah, Olwen.
Thanks to everybody who wrote in to let us know
about that interview. We got some great feedback from that.
Speaker 2 (48:16):
I'm really looking forward to listening to it. I had
to miss that one.
Speaker 3 (48:20):
This is crazy. I'm just reading about this right now
for the first time. Ben I what yep?
Speaker 1 (48:27):
What skunk Works is officially building a fusion reactor. They're
actually as of twenty nineteen, they were on the fifth
iteration of it, known as T five. It's a huge
engineering challenge because they have some stuff that they have
to keep very very cold and some stuff that they
have to keep very very hot, and they have to
(48:49):
put it all together and make it work without tearing
itself apart or you know, exploding and raining death down
upon us.
Speaker 3 (48:56):
I'm gonna go ahead and call bs on this whole thing.
I am reading about this online right now in twenty
twenty talking about how this was unveiled in twenty fifteen,
and Ben, if this was actually a program they were
doing that Skunkworks was working on, it would never be
(49:18):
revealed until, as we've seen with each other example here
like five ten years later. This is this. I'm just
calling it right here, and this is my opinion. But
this is Skunkworks in Lockheed like putting up a smoke
a smoke grenade just to be like, hey, look over here, guys,
put all your money Russia and China and other large
(49:41):
state actors into this technology that you'll never be able
to do. That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (49:48):
Wow, Okay, I see what you're saying. That's crazy, because
the official line from Lockheed is that the US military
wants to create something that can be a portable generator.
Of course they do, because think of the supply chain
for you know, diesel or gas powered vehicles. Right, that's
one of the move that's a huge expense in war,
(50:10):
if not one of the most egregious expenses. But yeah,
a compact fusion reactor.
Speaker 2 (50:15):
What Yeah, a compact are we're talking here, guys.
Speaker 1 (50:19):
I mean, it's not a backpack again, but if you
if you look at some of the articles, you can see, let.
Speaker 2 (50:27):
Me, bigger than like a generator. You might buy it
on depot.
Speaker 3 (50:31):
Dude. Yeah, dude, there's a picture on this. Uh there's
a picture I'm assuming that they're saying is from this
thing in the skunk quorks from the drive dot com.
And it looks like a big pr photo of a
bunch of engineers touching one individual piece of this compact reactor. Dude,
(50:54):
this is this is not real, man, that's probably just
that's probably a vacuum chamber.
Speaker 2 (51:00):
Yeah, it looks like it's probably.
Speaker 3 (51:01):
An image of a vacuum chamber that they're just messing with.
Speaker 2 (51:03):
It looks like one of those tanks. You'd see it
a beer brewer, Mike when I say that, but really,
I mean it's it's so it's it's it's an industrial
piece of industrial equipment. You know, it's not when they
say compact, I mean it's smaller than like a you know,
a reactor. You'd see it with one of those cool
cooling towers and the whole nine and all that stuff.
Obviously that's not the actual reactor, but uh, fascinating.
Speaker 3 (51:23):
No, that I mean, I think it is.
Speaker 2 (51:26):
You know, this is self contained. That it's mean like
a nuclear power plant. The reactor is not the cooling,
the big thing that you cooling. Yeah, that's a separate
and people have some some people mistakenly believe that that
is the reactor. Ah, yes, it's a good point.
Speaker 1 (51:40):
So the predecessor of this current, when this T five
was only one meter in diameter and two meters long,
which is big. You know, again, it's bigger than a
backpack or a bread box. I was just thinking about,
you know, I was thinking about a conversation we had
a while ago. Man, I just wanted to double check
your pay parents actually do use a bread box?
Speaker 3 (52:02):
Yes, weird?
Speaker 2 (52:03):
Do they also keep their eggs out at room temperature?
Do they churn their own butter?
Speaker 3 (52:08):
Never room temperature?
Speaker 2 (52:10):
That's a thing though, you know.
Speaker 1 (52:10):
I know, yeah, because of the goop, the gunk that's
on the eggs. When you know, that's that's the reason
grocery store eggs have to be refrigerated. The gunk is
washed off of them that's fluid. Uh No, it's like, well,
it's like a protective it's like a protective thing that
keeps bacteria from coming into rotting eggs, so you don't
(52:31):
have to refrigerate eggs if you buy them from a
farmer's market, or if you just get them from a chicken,
if that's where you're at.
Speaker 2 (52:38):
Yeah, the gunk I got it. Yeah, technical term. I'm
sure it's an acronym. Well, guys, we're approaching. We're approaching
the end of this episode, but we got a few
kind of housekeeping issues take care of what else? I mean.
Given's long histories, kunk Works is often a kind of
go to for a lot of fringe researchers who believe
the government may be develop, uping, or hiding advance suppress technology,
(53:03):
which they almost certainly are.
Speaker 3 (53:05):
They were, they have been their whole career.
Speaker 2 (53:07):
That's what I'm saying. So that means they still are.
We just don't know. We won't know about it for
another ten twenty, however many years.
Speaker 1 (53:13):
It's kind of like it's kind of like saying, is
mel Gibson gonna say something anti semitic? Well, he's got
a track record, you know, what I mean, maybe maybe it's.
Speaker 2 (53:22):
Hey, hey, but people can change ben sure, government agencies
can know anyway, But who's done to do this? And honestly,
this isn't an inherently like negative thing. It doesn't have
to be seen as some kind of nefarious, shrouded kind
of activity. Just because we don't know about it doesn't
mean it's bad for us. In fact, us not knowing
about it is kind of important. That's sort of part
(53:43):
of the deal, right, But gone unchecked and we can't
follow the paper trail of the funding and all that stuff.
I mean, you know there certainly can can run amock.
Speaker 1 (53:54):
Now I do I do object to calling this housekeeping
because I would say the most important part of this
episode is this. The concern of active secret research and
suppressed technology in Lockeed's case, does not come from just
some rabbit hole or some sort of creepy copy pasta,
(54:15):
nor does it come from the dilemma of state secrecy.
In June of two thousand and eight, Skunk Works went
on an unprecedented, unexplained hiring binge. And they didn't fire
a bunch of people either. They hired a bunch of
people to do something. We just don't know what it was.
The reason or the reasons behind this hiring spree are
(54:36):
still not clear. They increased their size by a third,
by thirty three percent. That's a crazy amount of people
to hire, and we don't know. Again, we don't know
what they were doing. We know what they acknowledge they're doing.
They're these pretty I wouldn't say necessarily, I wouldn't say
super specific, but they have these categories. There are things
(54:57):
like next gen fighters, quieter supersonic planes, and then they
have stuff that's pretty vague, like revolutionary technologies.
Speaker 2 (55:05):
What is that that would be anything? It's technology that
promotes revolution, I would assume.
Speaker 1 (55:11):
Right, And that's where we are today. You know, today's
skunk works employees three thousand, seven hundred people and these
are facilities in Palmdale, California, that's the big one, also
Fort Worth, Texas, also in Georgia. They're working on at
least five hundred projects, most likely more, and it's in
(55:32):
a range of stuff.
Speaker 2 (55:34):
Now, do you think it's public information? No, I can't
imagine it would be. As to who these people are
that work for them. Are there high level positions that
are public facing and skunk Works that we can know
about and talk to.
Speaker 1 (55:45):
Sure, Yeah, there are pr folks, they are admin folks.
The engineers are pretty locked down with the DAS, and
we've got some engineers in the audience today. If you're
bound by an NDA, don't let us be the reason
you break it. We don't want your jail time on
our conscience or your fines. But if you can talk
(56:08):
about it, we would love to hear your insight on
what's going on here.
Speaker 2 (56:12):
But like Lockheed itself and especially skunk Works, it's so
government adjacent that it's essentially like an extension of the
government in some small way. I mean, it's a private industry,
but there's so much back and forth between the two
that I feel like it's almost inseparable. I don't know,
maybe i'm reaching there. What do you guys think?
Speaker 3 (56:34):
No, yeah, I mean to me, it's very similar. I mean,
it is just a contractor and that's just the way
it is, right. It's money changing hands to get to
the experts.
Speaker 2 (56:43):
But what if they wanted to do business with China?
Speaker 3 (56:48):
Lockheed, Yeah, I.
Speaker 2 (56:50):
Mean we export things to China all the time. You know,
if they're a private industry, why can't they sell these
planes to other countries.
Speaker 3 (56:59):
Well, just speaking of China is simultaneously trying to produce
a reactor based off of Lockheed Martin's reactor yep.
Speaker 1 (57:08):
And also we know that the government or the US
government has to approve certain sales and they can they
can do this through a through a Carritoris stick approach,
so they can sanction certain sales, meaning they will disallow them,
and then they can incentivize other ones through through a
number of different ways. It's it's strange because everybody's trying
(57:31):
to learn the same thing. They're trying to apply it
in one way or another. The ultimate the ultimate goal,
of course, is to be the hedgemond, to have the
sovereignty and control of a given technology or domain. And
that's why places like that's why Boeing, even if it
goes bankrupt, something like that will rise up in its stead,
(57:53):
because the state needs to have manufacturing capabilities like this.
And that's why we know the people at Lockheed and
other associated things like North Grumman will be working around
the clock for the foreseeable future. The stuff we named
is already crazy, but that's just the stuff we know about.
So what do you think, folks has skunk works moved
(58:15):
more or less completely into the public eye, or, like
Matt just argued, are there still secret unacknowledged projects at play.
If so, what are they and what are they going
to do? And when will we find out about them
twenty years afterwards?
Speaker 3 (58:31):
Yeah, thirty probably. I'm telling you that SR seventy two
is out there right now. It's been spotted. It's the
reason for numerous UFO sightings over the past ten years.
I guarantee it.
Speaker 1 (58:44):
And now we've you know, we spent eighty percent in
this episode just talking about the different spy planes. Who
else knows what they're working on there, like ice cream
that doesn't need to be cold to be good, or
like Dorito fla ice cream or yeah, I'm just spitballing here.
I'm not a member of skunk Works. Oh God, But
(59:07):
we want to hear from you. We hope you enjoyed
this episode. And again, if you're an engineer in the audience,
we would love to hear your take on this because
a lot of the reporting on these sorts of things
can be alarmist at times when it doesn't.
Speaker 2 (59:19):
Have to be.
Speaker 1 (59:20):
But you should if you are lucky enough to live
in a country where you can vote. You should pay
attention to where your tax dollars are going, and you
should have a conversation with yourself and your friends about
the dilemma between secrecy and transparency. How much transparency do
you deserve and how much secrecy does your government need?
Speaker 2 (59:41):
Let us know.
Speaker 1 (59:41):
You can find us on Facebook. You can find us
on Instagram, where we're all over the internet. Say hello
to our favorite part of the show, your fellow listeners
on our Facebook page. Here's where it gets crazy. But wait,
you can also follow us as individuals online.
Speaker 2 (59:57):
You can follow me exclusively on Instagram at how Now
Noel Brown. I try to get verified, but they rejected me.
But you can still find me there. Just I promise
I'm me.
Speaker 3 (01:00:07):
It's true, It's true. You could find me too. I'm
Matt Frederick underscore iHeart. I think.
Speaker 2 (01:00:14):
Are you verified? Do they verify you? Matt? No, they don't.
I just the whole idea of verification is really trippy
to me because it's sort of like, I can't prove
that I am myself if I don't have that blue
check mark next to my name.
Speaker 3 (01:00:27):
Would you have to send them like a birth certificate?
Speaker 2 (01:00:29):
You got to send them a copy of your photo ID.
Speaker 3 (01:00:32):
Oh, we'll do that.
Speaker 2 (01:00:32):
I tried, like I rejected. I'm not a public figure enough,
I guess for Instagram nir rigorous standards understood.
Speaker 1 (01:00:41):
You can also find me on Twitter where I'm at
ben Bolland HSW. You can find me on Instagram where
I am inn a burst of creativity at Ben Bollan
I thanks so much for tuning in, thanks to our
super producer Paul Mission controlled decand. And if you are
the kind of person who says I love this show,
(01:01:02):
I love you guys. I hate social media. I heard
your Facebook episode and I don't understand how you guys
are still on that thing. How else can I contact you?
Speaker 2 (01:01:11):
Boy? Do we have good news for you?
Speaker 3 (01:01:13):
You can call us. Our number is one eight three
three std WYTK. Leave a message.
Speaker 2 (01:01:22):
We'll hear it, because you'll hear it first and foremost,
you're the first line of defense. It rings with the
stuff that I want you to know. Beat the unquantized
beat theme quite loudly. Every time you call right into
Matt's sleeping ears and he wakes up and deals with
it post haste. Yeah, I get a call back personally
from him. In fact, that's right, He's been known to
do that.
Speaker 3 (01:01:43):
Dan, if you're still listening to this show, I would
love to get a message from you. I think that
would be hilarious. That would put it out there. Yeah,
I'd love to play it on the air. That would
be fun.
Speaker 1 (01:01:54):
At least it'll make it worth it because we just
freaked you out while you're in traffic.
Speaker 3 (01:02:00):
Escially, nobody listens this far into the episode. I'm telling
you this. Nobody is listening to me.
Speaker 2 (01:02:06):
Yeah, we've seen the statistics.
Speaker 3 (01:02:08):
All right, Well, goodnight everyone. Email us.
Speaker 5 (01:02:11):
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (01:02:33):
Stuff they don't want you to know is a production
of Iheartradios How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Fellow conspiracy realist. Have you ever wish that your workplace
was stinky? Have you ever walked in and said, I
wish this was a little more skunky.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Yeah, no, maybe, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
Well, that's what happened almost eighty years ago at Lockheed Martin.
We must imagine, because in this week's classic episode, we're
learning about something that isn't open secret now, but was
much more of a secret and indeed a cradle of
conspiracy back in the day. Lockheed Martin has worked hand
(00:36):
in hand with the US government to create a lot
of weird, weird secret stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Weird wild stuff. Indeed, Johnny Carson would be proud. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
Well, and you know, just this past week, as we're
recording this, the US Army celebrated I think two hundred
and fifty years of existence, and off air, we were
just talking about the technology on display during the parade
that occurred for that stuff, thinking about how far the
like the leaps and bounds the technology has taken, specifically
in aircraft, but then also on you know, ground stuff
(01:09):
that the Army uses, and a lot of those leaps
and bounds occurred inside.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
This place, and we jump right into the history of
skunk works.
Speaker 4 (01:21):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
Hello, welcome back to the show.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
My name is Matt, my name is Nolan. They call
me Ben.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
We are joined as always with our super producer Paul.
Mission control decands. Most importantly, you are you. You are here,
and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know. Honestly,
it's great to see you.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Guys.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Have no idea what time it really is. I'm looking
at a clock here now that says it's right around
four PM or a little bit before Eastern time, but
who knows.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
Maybe it's it's eight GMT.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Okay, there we go, There we go, and body clock wise,
it's I think fourteen hours ahead for me.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
But I'm a little out of it.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
But I think we're gonna have fun with with today's topics.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
What's it like in the future, Ben.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
It's interesting, it's interesting. No flying cars yet. Velcro is
making a comeback in a big way for that everywhere, everywhere, everywhere.
I'm a little weirded out by all the buttons around
us right now. But but yes, the show must go on, right,
(02:56):
today's episode is has nothing to do with the oscar.
There's not a good segue. Today's episode has nothing to
do with that, but could be could be fertile soil
for a different episode in the future. Today we're talking
about something strange that's happening every single moment of every
(03:20):
single day here in the US and abroad. It's military research.
And this is a very spooky, Boogeyman esque sort of
phenomenon for a lot of us. You know, some folks
like maybe like Matt, you and I grew up on
X files, right. I know, I know you watch I
(03:41):
don't know how into it you were.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
I was into it, yeah, medium I watched it typically
with no lights on while listening to the bare naked
ladies so on. One week.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
So the three of us then we're very much into
X files, right, and X Files paints this picture of
a vast, locking conspiracy between corporations and governments right to
advance suppressed technology to better the elite's control of the
(04:11):
world as we know it. The thing is, that's sort
of true. It's sort of true. You don't need aliens
for that to be true. It's no secret that the
world's militaries have loads and loads classified weapons, hardware, strategies,
including psyops, techniques, and all this other stuff. But where
do they come from? In the United States? One of
the answers to this question is inevitably something called skunk works.
Speaker 3 (04:35):
It's a cool name, right, yeah, potentially pretty smelly.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Yes, yes, there's something stinky about it. But what exactly
is skunk works? To answer this, we have to start
with this story of something called Lockheed Martin. So here
are the facts. What is Lockheed Martin. You've surely heard
of it before. There are buildings here year around Atlanta
(05:01):
with the names plastered across the top of them. This title,
or this term, let's say, skunk works, can really be
applied in a lot of different ways to a lot
of different things, but normally to secretive some kind of
experimental facility like a lab or a factory, something like that.
But the origin of the phrase skunk works really does
(05:22):
come from this single company, Lockheed Martin Corporation. And to
really learn about it, you have to go all the
way back to nineteen forty three, and there you find
if the United States Armies Air Tactical Service Command or
ATSK or ATSC.
Speaker 3 (05:39):
Because you see, the ATSC had a bit of an issue.
They were worried about German rocket science, specifically jets as
well as you know, the things that would become missiles
in the potential technology that existed there, because as we've
learned in previous episodes, German technology or scientists there in
Germany really were the ones that created rocketry.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
Right, Yeah, Nazis are the reason the US got to.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
The moon vanv bron Right did I say that? Right? Yeah?
I think I left the N out of the Vaughan,
but you got what I was getting at.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
So, so the officials there from the ATSC they met
with the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation and they said, okay, guys,
let's figure out what we can do on this end
to catch up with this technology and make some of
our own revolutionary rocketry happen here.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
Yeah, And they also said, let's do it quickly, yesterday, right,
Let's do it yesterday. About a month after this meeting,
in nineteen forty three, there was a team led by
an engineer named Clarence L. Johnson, playing ol'kelly to his friends.
They came back to ATSC and they said, Okay, we're
gonna build a jet for you, the XP eighty Shooting
(06:49):
Star jet fighter. Uncle Sam gave it the green light.
Lockey began developing the first US fighter jet in June
of nineteen forty three. This is we should know, so
the official narrative. You're gonna have some You're gonna have
some other reporters and historians who will argue that the
true story begins a little bit earlier in the late thirties.
(07:12):
But this is like, if you ask someone at Lockheed
what happened what skunk Works, this is the official answer,
and that jet fighter, the XP eighty Shooting Star is
the birth of what today is known as skunk Works, and.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
Lockheed was surprisingly is surprisingly transparent about the origins of
this of this organization. It emphasizes that it was a
pretty informal and urgent need that created this collaboration. The
formal contract for the Xpad did not arrive at Lockheed
until October sixteenth of nineteen forty three, which was four
(07:47):
months after work had already begun, and this would prove
to be kind of a common theme within the Skunkworks story.
Many times a customer would come to Skunk Works with
a request, and on a handshake, the project would began.
That's crazy to me, given the amount of money some
of these project must have costs, No contracts in place,
no official submission process at all.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
Right, yeah, just some make it happens and some handshakes
Johnson and his team. Eventually, they didn't just design the
XP eighty. They built one in less than one hundred
and fifty days and only one hundred and forty three days.
Their deadline was one hundred and fifty. This was only possible,
(08:29):
by the way, because he broke the rules. He broke
all of the rules that were in place. Johnson, you see,
felt that the primary problem with Lockheed and government contracts
was all the red tape.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
All the bureaucracy.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
Wanted to shoot from the hip, so we don't need
these plans and all these reviews. So he didn't just
ignore the status quo. He built his own set of
rules fourteen commandments, the first of which is the manager
of skunk Works must have comp deleete control over everything
in his program and should not have to answer to
(09:04):
anyone higher than a president and a company. So he
wanted complete control. He wanted a fiefdom essentially that was
answerable to very few people. And he also, in direct
contrast to a lot of the normal standard operating procedures,
Kelly wanted a minimum number of people involved, and he
(09:26):
was brutal about it.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
Yes, and this is number three. The number of people
having any connection with the project must be restricted in
an almost vicious manner. Use a small number of good
people ten five percent compared to the so called normal systems.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
And he also said less reports. Yes, we want to
look well, well, we'll show our work, but we don't
want to have to check in with you. This guy,
I get the feeling of this guy hated meetings.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
Yeah, and also less inspections or at least use subcontractors
and and other things for some of the testing stuff
and inspection. He's like, don't duplicate so much inspection. We
can't do this in that amount of time.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
And don't let people outside skunk works get in. It's
kind of fight clubbish, you know, it is the first
rule of skunk works.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
Anyhow.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
We have to note though that when this started out,
it was just a cool idea, and it was just
a desperate measure to get something in the air that
could fight the Axis forces. They didn't actually call it
skunk Works for a while, so we have to ask
ourselves how did it get its name?
Speaker 2 (10:38):
How indeed? Well, oddly enough, it's kind of a sweet story,
at least the way Lockheed pr tells it. Because the
war effort was in full swing, there was no space
available at Lockheed's facility for Johnson's effort. Johnson's organization operated
out of a rented circus tent next to a manufacturing
(10:59):
plant that made plastics formerly, and that produced a very
strong odor which permeated this tent. So members of Johnson's
team were cautioned that design and production of the XP
eighty had to be carried out in strict secrecy. No
one was to discuss the project outside the small organization,
(11:19):
and team members were even warned to be careful how
they answered their phones. Right So, a team engineer by
the name of IRV Culver was a big fan of
Al Capp's newspaper comic strip Lil Abner, in which there
was a running joke about a mysterious and mattt odris
place deep in the forest called the Skunk Works sko
(11:41):
n K. There there was a strong beverage being brewed
from Skunk's old shoes and other odd ingredients.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
Yeah, So one day this guy IRV gets a phone
call and he answers it in kind of a glib manner,
and he goes skonk Works inside Mankova speaking.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
And people loved it.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
It was a great inside joke because you know, when
you work in an office with the same people, you
love an inside joke. So other employees started adopting this,
and they started calling their division of Lockheed skunk Works,
and eventually that changed to Skunk Works. So it's not
it may be surprising to find that they weren't secretly
(12:26):
working on some kind of weaponized odor. This was just yeah,
this was just actually a neat little office job joke.
Speaker 3 (12:34):
Well yeah, well it's not even an office job. It's
a circus tent. It's a rented circus tent outside of
plastics facility, and the whole place reeks, and they're in
there like doing really important technological work and engineering work.
It's so weird to me.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
It's so weirdly punk rock, yeah, and kind of like DIY.
When you think of government work, you think of everything
being all buttoned up in these like air tight labs,
like clean rooms and all that stuff, and this was
not that, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
It's strange too, because skunk Works is often brought up
as an example of old school conspiratorial corporate warmongeringe you know,
it's part of the war machine, the stuff Eisenhower warned
us about, and rightly so. But if you learn about
Skunkworks today, it's actually a registered trademark of Lockeed. That's
(13:25):
a far cry from any off the books operation. Their
official name is not skunk Works. That's just the name
everybody likes. Their official name is Lohey Martin's Advanced Development
Programs or a DP. But again, why the hell would
you call it that when you have a fun name
like skunk Works just begging for you to say it
(13:46):
and shout it to the rooftops.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
I don't know. Advanced Development program also sounds pretty dope.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
Like advanced idea mechanics. The Marvel fans out there, yes.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
And the elite squad of scientists operating at Skunkworks well,
no affectionately as the smelly Boys.
Speaker 1 (14:01):
And now let's look at skunk Works today. So Skunkworks
still conducts a ton of classified research.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
We actually do.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
Not know how much it We don't know what it's doing. Really,
we know a little bit. And it's a well known
organization in the world. It's not even an open secret,
you know. They in fact have published a glossy brochure
with a ten point agenda. This was back from twenty fifteen.
(14:30):
That was focused on kind of selling it to the
public and then selling it to the government or at
least the people who signed the checks for contracts and all.
It was kind of boring and it's very it's very
full of trade jargon. It's like, we're focusing on keeping
costs down. We work closely with the government. We also
(14:51):
build these prototypes and we give the savings to you,
uncle Sam. And today the primary site is out there
in Palm Dale, California. It's the middle of nowhere. Why
would you drive their desert about sixty miles from LA.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
Yeah, and that's almost directly north across the mountain range
there together there near Lancaster. Really, I don't know, it's isolated,
but it really is close to Los Angeles.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
Yeah, sixty miles is not that far. It's just up
the way from the Antelope Valley mall and in.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
LA traffic It probably only take you about three days
to get.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
There, unless you had an experimental skunk Works helicopter or
hypersonic vehicle. This place is huge. There are one hundred buildings,
there's an estimated three million square feet of floor space,
and the vast majority of this stuff here is off limits,
but there are occasional press tours and journalists get a
(15:48):
peak behind the curtains. So this is all on the
up and up right. This is not just It is
no longer a secret lab something that we think of
an association with DARPA. This is actually a government contractor
who's trying to work on its public image. And you know,
you have to look no further than something like Boeing
to know how important public image can be. There's no
(16:12):
question skunk Works has played a huge role in military innovation,
especially in the field of spy, aircraft, material tech, things
like that. But the question for today is what else
are they cooking up in there and what's coming out
in the future.
Speaker 3 (16:30):
And we're going to get to that, at least what
we've been able to find. After a quick word from
our sponsor.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
Here's where it gets crazy, all right, So we have
to open this conversation with an age old dilemma the
problem with secrecy, which is, you know what, sometimes I
think we should just make this a children's book and
make it a pop up and put it out in
every school in America.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
This is a.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
Huge problem, and people don't think about it as often
as they should.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
Well, Ben and that children's book. I mean it really
just boils down to one age old added, which is
secret secrets are now fun. Secret secrets hurt someone.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
Where's that from?
Speaker 2 (17:16):
You know? Children? Really? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (17:18):
But also secret secrets protect the nation from security threats
to society.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Well, there's no judgment in brainstorming. We're spitball in here,
you know, I like where I think we're going in
the right direction. It's true, though, it's a huge problem.
If you're a government, you have to have secrecy because
you want to keep your rivals from stealing your technology
or getting a jump on your research. That's a huge deal. Now,
like the primary intelligence operations of the Chinese government are
(17:54):
almost entirely corporate and military espionage, and if you don't
have operational security, you could find yourself in a situation
where facilities are bombed and people genuinely die. That old
saying loose lips sink ships is meant to be taken literally,
got the right idea, been there like that, I didn't
(18:16):
write it one. But here's the other side of the problem.
If you are a government, especially if you're the kind
of government that allows citizens to vote, which has been
you know, enjoying a brief moment in the sun. We'll
see how long. Yeah, we'll see how long the fag goes.
But right now it's about as successful as say, beanie
(18:37):
babies in the nineties. Hacky Sacks perhaps, Hacky Sacks. Perhaps. Yeah.
If you're one of those governments, you also need at
least the illusion of transparency. You need, at at the
very minimum, you need performative transparency, meaning that people want
to know where their tax dollars are going totally, they
want to say in what their government does totally. You
(18:59):
have to at least make them feel like that is
an option, even when and especially when it's not, especially
when you consider that old Eisenhower quote.
Speaker 3 (19:09):
Every gunship that is made, every warship launched, every rocket
fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those
who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold
and are not clothed.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
And it's true, right, if voters don't know what is
being built, they cannot reasonably determine whether that money was
well spent, right, especially when you consider every dollar that
goes to a battle is a dollar that goes away
from the people of a country. Eisenhower is right about this.
(19:44):
We can argue that this trade off is worthwhile if
we know what's happening we as voters. This leads us
to an important, heartbreaking problem. There are no shortages of
countries that spend tremendous some amounts of cash, blood, and
treasure on their militaries while they are people literally starve.
(20:05):
We're not being hyperbolic while they die of starvation, dysentery,
things like that. But you know, the rockets keep firing.
We need gas, we need bullets, we need more radar capability,
and so in the absence of transparency, speculation thrives. Like
I always think of that creepy Tom Waits thing. I
don't even know if it's a song, Maybe it's more
(20:27):
a performance piece. What's the building in there? You guys
know that one.
Speaker 3 (20:30):
I'm unfamiliar with this.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
Yeah, I don't know that one either, man. It's uber creepy.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
It's like peak Tom Waits creeping around going want in
building in there? And it's a good question, right, because
we are we are giving our if we're voters, we
are we are giving a portion of our income to
a thing in a tremendous trust fall. We're asking this leviathan,
this gigantic mechanism, to make our lives better or to
(20:58):
at the very least maintain a standard of living to
which we're accustomed. And now we're throwing money in a
black box. So what is Lockheed building in there? And
is it worth the expense? That's the question. And it's
tough to answer because we know some stuff about skunk Works,
(21:19):
But how much do we actually know?
Speaker 3 (21:21):
Well, let's we know some from the past, we know
some from the present, and all of it from the
future because we've been consulting with an oracle. No, I'm
just kidding. We don't know anything about the future. But
let's talk about the past. Stuff that we can talk about,
and hey, let's make a determination. Was this worth it
while some of us starved? That's really what we're saying here,
(21:42):
So let's think about it. Here's the first one, Lockheed
Yo three, No.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
What is that well, I'm glad you asked, Matt. The
Yo three A, as it were, was designed to a
US Army speck from the nineteen sixties nineteen sixty eight
to be precise, which called for an observation aircraft a spyplane, right,
that would be acoustically undetectable from the ground when flying
(22:08):
in an oultitude of twelve one hundred feet at night.
Nine of the eleven Yo three a's produced operated in
South Vietnam at night from nineteen seventy to nineteen seventy one,
only fourteen months and never took a single round. Absolutely,
we're never shot down, right, These.
Speaker 3 (22:28):
Are a fascinating aircraft. Ben, I was wondering if you've
ever talked about these on car stuff for any of
the other shows.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
No, no, this is this is I think the first
time any of us have mentioned this on Okay, Yeah,
this is a pretty this is a pretty neat one.
It's now at the box thing. And you know, whenever
we talk about research in these sorts of fields, we're
looking at a huge attrition rate. A ton of stuff
never makes it off the blueprint stage, you know, and
(22:56):
a ton of the stuff that makes it to a
prototype never never gets beyond where the what the Horton
HO twenty two was, Yes, exactly right, But this.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
Was just to stay on here just for a second.
It was a smaller aircraft. You can find pictures of
the Yo Dash three online and if you look at
the pilot, it's like, the pilot looks pretty big in
the photo is because the plane is relatively small. It's
got a tiny little propeller upfront, single propeller wings that
are not large in width, and just to fly around
(23:26):
at night being quiet, observing troops. It did its purpose
and like Noel said, it didn't get shot down, so
you know, it was certainly helpful for the military, right.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
Yeah, it was helpful for the military. You could also
argue that it saved the lives of US forces there
you go through its surveillance capabilities. One that one craft
that might be more familiar to some of us would
be the Lockheed U two. In nineteen fifty five, Skunkwork's
got this contract from the CIA to build a spyplane
(23:59):
known as as the U two. Later, you know, this
one was so popular that a certain Irish band named
themselves after it.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Are you and the numeral two? Yes?
Speaker 1 (24:10):
And yeah? They were right on the edge with that one,
and the ideal for the U two was to fly
over the USSR and try to photograph sites that they
couldn't see using other methods. They operated for a number
of years. The first flight happened on Independence Day on
July fourth, nineteen fifty six. But the U two stopped
(24:33):
flying when a guy named Francis Gary Powers was shot
down over Russia. So the U two was not as
successful as the U three A. I should call it
the YO three A.
Speaker 3 (24:45):
But I like you though it did operate for a
much longer time it did.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
It did operate for a much much longer time. And
then we also know about the Lockheed A twelve, which
which was a a logical successor to the U two
because when skunk Works was a lot of people don't
know this.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
When Skunk Works was building the U.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
Two, they baked into their predictions that this would have
a short shelf life. They said, look, this is gonna
work really well for a second, and then it's it's
gonna blow up in our faces like the Spice Girls
or the Macarena song.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
You know, why would they build a plane that was
designed to blow up in their faces? That doesn't seem
very effective.
Speaker 3 (25:28):
So okay, let's just talk about this really quickly. So
the You two plane, the lockyed version of You two
was a really cool spy plane. It was huge, like
really really large, and generally the ones that I've seen
at least in in museums and a couple of other
places were playing it. We're painted this like gun metal
(25:51):
black or like a dark gray, you know that color
they order to operate in the sky to be you know,
almost undetectable and flying over those places. Right, But it
looks kind of like a jet that you if you
think about a jet the way a jet plane looks,
it kind of looks like that. The one that we're
talking about now, the what is it, the A twelve.
(26:14):
This thing looks out of this world really yes, big,
just it looks like a fully different kind of aircraft.
If you look at a picture.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
I see what you're saying. So, like, the designs were
really's next level stuff, sort of like those crazy that
the design started to get a little more angular and crazy,
like with those stealth bombers that Donald Trump really thinks
they're invisible.
Speaker 3 (26:37):
Well, well yeah, because they had a specific thing they
were trying to do with this plane, right.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
Yeah, they wanted it to be invisible essentially, and it
is the ante seton of the much more famous SR
seventy one Blackbird. The interesting thing about A twelve is
that they it was already in the works when the
utwo was rolling out because they predicted that correctly. As
(27:03):
it turns out that USSR detection technology would catch up
with the evasive capability of the U two. And then
the A twelve was strange because it required some help
from the CIA. Now you might be saying, guys, the CIA,
they're not exactly experts in engineering, nor the experts in aviation.
(27:26):
That's correct, but the problem here's where they came in.
So skunk Works had to build five of these A
twelve aircraft. They wanted it to go mock three plus,
and they wanted to build it out of titanium. It
was very tough because in the Cold War, the USSR
controlled the titanium game. They they had like ninety plus
(27:52):
percent of the titanium trade. So these folks went to
the CIA and they said, hey, we know one thing
you're good at setting up front companies. And the CIO said, yeah,
we're all about that.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
Oh, we know, we heard about that in the very
recent episode, didn't we about the NGOs exactly?
Speaker 1 (28:09):
So the CIA set up a dummy corporation entirely to
acquire titanium for the A twelve. That was very stuff
they don't want you to know, and it worked. How
pissed off would you be if you were the USSR
where it turned out, you know, when you found out that,
like you know, Socialist Titanium Consortium of Eastern Turkey was
(28:32):
actually the agency and you sold them the stuff they
needed to build the spy planes that were flying over
you right now.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
WHOA right, dirty deed's done quite expensively.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
Yes, Sarah Well said, Let's let's pause for a second
for a word from our sponsor, and then we'll dive
into some more examples and we're back now. We mentioned
this earlier. This is one of the more famous US
spy planes, also built by Skunkworks, the Lockheed s R
(29:10):
seventy one Blackbird. And I don't want to get in
too deep with the Marvel fans, but I think didn't
the didn't the X men have a Blackbird at some point?
Speaker 2 (29:21):
Me And there's their plane.
Speaker 3 (29:23):
Yeah, it looks kind of like that you're talking.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
About the one that would take off from the ground,
you know, and then it would zoom off. It was
called the X something it was. It was definitely called
the jet. Yeah, probably there you go.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
I don't I think it looks like a blackbird. Well
that's the thing, the one we talked about before the
break there. The A twelve and the SR seventy one
look very very similar, just slightly different shape of the
nose basically is what you look at when you're looking
at it. It looks very very similar.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
No, No, it's the X men Blackbird X jet.
Speaker 3 (29:55):
What it was, straight up a blackbird.
Speaker 2 (29:57):
The Blackbird, also nicknamed X, is a fictional aircraft appearing
in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. Nailed it, man,
What does it look like? It's the one you know
from the movies. It's real narrow, tapers off like it's
got the wings are in the back, and then the
body is real skinny and kind of goes goes forward.
At least that's how they depicted it in the films.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
And I think you're right, Noel, that it does have
that vertical takeoff and landing capability which the real blackbirds
can't right, Okay.
Speaker 3 (30:25):
Okay, the wings are very different and they are.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
Axes, but but.
Speaker 3 (30:30):
It's a blackbird. It looks like a blackbird.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
But the real blackbird's cool too. It's not comic book
level cool, but it is.
Speaker 3 (30:37):
Cool, dude. When I was in middle school, yeah, this
was the coolest thing that it ever existed.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
Did you were you one of those guys at a
poster of it?
Speaker 3 (30:46):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (30:46):
Did you build a model?
Speaker 3 (30:47):
I did, and I went and checked it out at
the museum that they have their warder robins and this
I wanted to pilot one of these things. It was
my biggest dream, that's true.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
I don't know if a lot of people are aware
of this, but Matt, you grew up relatively close to
an actual skunk works facility. I did, right, yep, Okay,
well we'll move on then, yep.
Speaker 3 (31:13):
So so, but no, I think a lot of maybe
you listening out there, like, saw a picture of this thing.
It just looked so futuristic and unreal, and when you
started to learn about the physics of it, how it
actually expanded a little bit when it got up to
the speeds that it could reach because of the heat
(31:33):
that was going on with the metals that were involved.
It felt it just felt like it was out of
this world, like and it was alien technology or something
that we had captured. You combine that with the whole
X Files enthusiast thing.
Speaker 1 (31:47):
I mean, come on, it also seems like it was
really difficult to fly.
Speaker 3 (31:51):
Oh, I'm sure you know.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
Well, that's a that's a problem with a lot of
spy planes is that they're they're terrible to their terrible
on the ground. They're terrible to take off. They're terrible
to land because they're just designed to float a high altitude,
so you have to get up there first. It's kind
of like, you know birds that there are so many
(32:13):
birds that are terrible on land but amazing the air.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Like the Great frigate bird.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
It looks like a nincompoop when it's trying to walk
around because it's not made for the ground.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
It's made for this guy, Ben, you missed a really
great voicemail we had on the Listener Mail episode where
someone proposed a conspiracy theory that ducks are in fact
not floating on the surface of the water, but that
they have weird, gangly legs that extend all the way
down to the bottom of the lake or what have you.
And that really triggered me the whole the thought of that, Yeah,
(32:45):
the image of that. In just a minute when you
were saying, you know, some birds are terrible, I was
really hoping you would just stop short and just say
birds terrible.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
Yeah, I'm just I'm going to give this to you.
It's an evil gift. And I'm sure you're already aware
of duck penises. They're screwed right, there are many.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
Did you bring me one from? Never mind? Don't want.
I don't want to scoop you.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
No, no, no, I did I. Duck penises are Lovecraftian.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
It is probably the best way to do, don't. They
like hook in and won't let go.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
They're evil because ducks reproduce non consensually. That is the
most diplomatic that you say it.
Speaker 3 (33:25):
So the uh, that's.
Speaker 2 (33:31):
My planes.
Speaker 3 (33:33):
I have to talk about this a little more interesting.
So the previous model, the A twelve, you can only
have one pilot in there. It's just you, by your
loansome flying around up pretty dang high and going ridiculously fast.
So you're maneuvering away from people being able to shoot
you down. At least hopefully, this SR seventy one. You
could have two one pilot copilot in there, helpful in
(33:56):
case one one operator loses consciousness because you are travel
so fast. And the other thing is that this thing
operated for longer than anything that Lockheed was producing before.
Then when it comes to these advanced programs, it went
from nineteen sixty six, This thing, this futuristic thing, went
from nineteen sixty six until nineteen ninety eight. That's when
(34:19):
it was in service.
Speaker 2 (34:20):
Like they didn't even like massively updated or they would
have had to give it a new model name.
Speaker 3 (34:24):
Right, it was just awesome and it stayed awesome.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
And it was expensive, so it's okay to do. You know,
they're still researching the next step of the evolution, but
they have to be very sure that it's worth sinking
billions of dollars into a new design.
Speaker 2 (34:41):
Into the R and D alone I mentioned the manufacturing right.
Quick question for my own edification here, what do these
things actually do? Like, I mean, I know they are
spy planes and they're surveilling, but like, is it with radar?
Is it taking aerial photography? Is are there their listening devices?
Just wonder like what the implementation of this absurdly expensive
(35:04):
technology is and how does it benefit us?
Speaker 1 (35:06):
Well, I mean it looks cool and it's just nice
to kind of have a flex Okay.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
Yeah, it's.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
What's called a long range strategic reconnaissance craft. Essentially, they
have a bunch of eyes in the sky. They have
infrared imagery, they have radar, airborne radar, electronic intelligence gathering systems.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
They have.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
Counter missile systems, right, so they can avoid both ground
launched missiles and other birds in the air. And they
have these huge cameras. One thing to your point, Matt,
about why there was only one person in the in
the predecessor, in the A twelve, and while there were
two in the Blackbird. For that second person to be
(35:57):
able to fit in the Blackbird, the designers had to
remove the principal censor which was on the A twelve,
which was this huge, large, focal length optical camera. So
they were flying over and taking pictures more or less,
and they weren't, you know, they weren't dropping bombs on
(36:17):
civilians or freedom fighters, got it. So another thing that's
interesting here is this spy plane. These these spy planes
specifically saw the rise of government mandated drug use because
It's the only way that pilots could remain alert while
(36:38):
they were on these missions. This has been confirmed. It
used to be considered a secret, but even up to
the up into the Gulf War, pilots were taking amphetamines.
There's one brand name, dexadrine, which is the brand name
for dextro amphetamine. This was given to pilots to keep
(36:58):
them alert during flight's law longer than eight.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
Hours like Benny's was another one, right, like Poppin' Benni's
the housewife pill of the nineteen twenties and thirties, I guess.
And then didn't the Nazis take some form of this
as well? Or that was more of an they're amphetamines,
it's all.
Speaker 1 (37:15):
Right, yeah, blitzkrieg Blitzgreeg operatives took them.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
Hitler loved them.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
And amphetamines were I mean very common in war because
they work.
Speaker 2 (37:25):
Yeah, and now we give them to our children to
help them pay better attention.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
That's adderall right, which.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
Essentially, I mean, studies have shown they act very similar
to amphetamines.
Speaker 3 (37:34):
Yay.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
So we know that the technology Lacky was capable of
creating was years and years ahead of what the public
would be aware of and we also know that the innovation,
the pace of innovation there was much more precipitous than
the public might have thought. We also know that skunk
(37:56):
Works projects were not confined to the air Please don't
think that all skunk Works does is work on aircraft.
It's just that we know the most about the aircraft.
They also made things that worked on the water.
Speaker 3 (38:12):
Yeah, talking about the Sea Shadow here as one example. Again,
like Lockheed's got this look now at this point, once
we enter the eighties, it's now nineteen eighty four. They're
using that gun metal, black coated looking crazy awesome stuff.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
Cyber truck didn't come from nowhere.
Speaker 3 (38:32):
Exactly right now. Their developer or they developed in nineteen
eighty four. It started working being deployed in nineteen eighty five.
A stealth boat essentially our transport vehicle. And it looks
crazy aka the duck penis.
Speaker 2 (38:50):
No, that was.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
They changed the name to the Sea Shadow when they
rolled it out.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
Oh yeah, and that was just the working title whenever,
keeping on or aps and skunk Work in the family,
you know.
Speaker 3 (39:02):
Yeah, And it's it's either called the nine dash five
two nine or I X dash five to nine. This
thing it looks crazy. If you you know, you can
just google sea Shadow, maybe blockheed. That's probably the best
way to find it.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
It doesn't look seaworthy.
Speaker 3 (39:20):
No, it doesn't. And it's hard to understand what you're
actually seeing. It's like, oh, wait, is that a submarine?
But wait, those sides are just diagonal? How far down
do they go? Wait? What is this raised part or
people inside that thing?
Speaker 2 (39:34):
It's like Darth Vader's helmet or something like the top
of a Darth Vader helmet, or like that weird dude
in the first Star Wars movie you had just kind
of the dome thing on his head, and you know, oh, sure,
he's kind of like that, and there's people standing on
top of it in this image that I'm looking at,
and there's an antenna of some sort. But yeah, it's
got like a weird little windshield, like four kind of
(39:55):
little trapezoidal interlocking windshields. And then there's open space underneath it,
which is the part that really throws you off. It's
like it's above the water, but there's this like it's
almost like a moving tunnel kind of it looks.
Speaker 1 (40:09):
Like a chronoplan You guys, remember those chronoplan is somewhere
between a ship and an aircraft. It uses the ground
force effect to hover over the water.
Speaker 2 (40:23):
They're so cool. E k R A n O plan.
Oh would that be what I would maybe have always
heard of as just a hovercraft.
Speaker 1 (40:30):
They're different from a hovercraft, different.
Speaker 2 (40:32):
Don't They don't have anything interesting? They look like this.
They're so cool. So they use propulsion to literally hover
above the surface of the water with like fans or
something like that. That's interesting.
Speaker 1 (40:45):
I always wanted to ride one, but a lot of
them are either decommissioned or in countries that are difficult
to get to.
Speaker 2 (40:52):
Interesting what's going on with the sea Shadow? Because I'm
with you, guys, I'm like, how how is this thing functioning?
Speaker 1 (40:58):
It was an experimental ocean surveillance vessel and was built
way back in nineteen eighty four, which is crazy. The
idea is that it's reducing its footprint its radar profile,
so that's part of why it's floating like that with
this hydrofoil on board. So it has two separate holes
(41:25):
and they're connected by struts, so the holes that you
see are underwater. So there is more to it than
just a flat plane. And the ship was used in
secret experimentally until nineteen ninety three. So for almost a
decade this thing existed off the grid and was not
(41:45):
universally acknowledged. People are saying, hey, I saw some weird
stuff out there in the ocean, and people were saying, whoa, Donnie,
slow down on your whatever their version of Adderall.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
Was at the time.
Speaker 1 (41:58):
And this was also one of the first tests of
automation to reduce the number of actual people on the vessel. Interesting,
and now this one has an ignomonious end because in
two thousand and six the US Navy gave up on
the Sea Shadow and they tried, they literally tried to
(42:20):
sell it at an auction and nobody would buy it.
And so then they said, okay, we're just going to
sell it for dismantling. You can dismantle it and can
take away the parts. We get rid of the secret stuff.
And they said, look, if you buy this, there are
two conditions. One you cannot sell it to you have
to scrap it. And they sold it in twenty twelve
(42:41):
when it was dismantled. But it lives on because there
are ships like the Impeccable and the Victorious that have
still have the same kind of structure. I mean, just
show you, guys, this is an actual ship. It's working now.
Who they took that weird missing missing piece of the
whole or the center cut out, and they kept the
(43:03):
twin hole design, but they made.
Speaker 2 (43:05):
It much bigger. Man.
Speaker 3 (43:06):
That's fascinating and there's a.
Speaker 1 (43:08):
Lot of money there. So these are things that have
all happened in the past. We know currently that Lockheed's
doing a couple of pretty fascinating things. One of them,
one of them makes sense, and one of them is
an out of nowhere thing that I guarantee will sound
like sci fi to ninety five percent of us listening.
(43:28):
The first is the Lockheed Martin SR seventy two. That
makes sense, right, Wait, oh wait.
Speaker 3 (43:34):
Can we do one thing before we hit the seventy
two totally because it's something that Noel brought up that
I have another picture of my mind that I'm assuming
other people do too. Yeah, And it's the I think
it's the F one to seventeen Nighthawk, which is I
think that's.
Speaker 2 (43:47):
What it called.
Speaker 3 (43:48):
Was it called uh, it's lockeyed, it is skunkworks. It
is Skunkworks, and it's the Nighthawk. It's the stealth fighter
jet looking thing that looks kind of like like a
hawk or an owl or a bird of prey or
something similar to all the other designs we've been talking about.
Speaker 2 (44:06):
Oh yes, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's.
Speaker 3 (44:08):
The one that I remember seeing when I think it
was desert storm was occurring in the nineties. The thing
was built in the eighties, around the same time that
they were building the what were we just talking about,
the Sea Sea Shadow, The Sea Shadow, and it wasn't
publicly acknowledged until five years later, and then it didn't
(44:28):
actually make an appearance anywhere operationally until a desert storm.
But it's just another one of those iconic planes that
was used for a lot of different things in secret
for a long time, and then eventually it was made published.
Speaker 2 (44:43):
So what it was just like a big unveiling when
they decided to make these public? Is it only when
they decommissioned them? Like, what when is the moment the
public gets to know about these cool, you know sci
fi looking spy planes.
Speaker 3 (44:56):
Well, here's here's the way. I think it goes down
years in an operational capacity somewhere in another country, probably
where there is you know, a conflict occurring. Sure that
one of these things gets used and either it gets
shot down, one of them gets shot down, or one
is caught, you know, operating, and then the United States
(45:20):
military has to kind of.
Speaker 1 (45:21):
Just yeah, kind of like the stealth helicopters win right. Yeah.
The Nighthawk was publicly revealed or I would even say
publicly acknowledged in nineteen eighty eight.
Speaker 3 (45:36):
Okay, yeah, and.
Speaker 1 (45:38):
People still didn't really didn't really clock it until, as
you said, Matt, in the Gulf War in nineteen ninety one.
It's weird to call it a stealth fighter because as
stealth fighter capabilities, but it's mainly a ground attack aircraft. Yeah,
dropping dropping bombs like hot mixtapes. So that yes, So
(46:01):
that's amazing. That's one of the posters I had. Yes,
you know, because it's just so iconic.
Speaker 3 (46:08):
I apologize that I jumped back to that. Ben.
Speaker 2 (46:11):
We have to.
Speaker 3 (46:12):
So let's let's go. Let's I'm going to take you
back now to the what the big brother of the
Lockheed Martin SR seventy one, the SR seventy two.
Speaker 1 (46:22):
Oh yeah, this one is still in the works, still
in the skunk works. According to Lockheed, it's going to
replace the seventy one.
Speaker 2 (46:32):
It's going to have.
Speaker 1 (46:34):
A middleman role between surveillance satellites, manned aircraft and unmanned.
Speaker 2 (46:41):
Aerial vehicles UAVs.
Speaker 1 (46:42):
Those creepy blimps, they're so far up in the sky
you can't see them. I think I'm supposed to call
them airships now. So the idea here is that the
SR seventy two is going to be able to leverage
all this communicative ability and its high speed to get
in and out of protected airspace and sneak pictures, sneak surveillance,
(47:06):
or blow up a target before people can detect it
at all, much less intercept it. This is dangerous stuff
and it's you know, if you're going to be alive
for the next few years, you're gonna you're gonna see
it in action or you're gonna hear about it. The
last thing that this blew me away, I don't know.
I don't know what you guys think about this. Paul
(47:26):
and I were talking about this earlier. The last thing
that Lakie Martin has confirmed that they are working on
is a compact fusion reactor. Yeah, fusion fusion, the thing
that we can't really do efficiently. They're jumping the gun
from a fusion reactor. Those can exist in a very
(47:47):
inefficient way to a compact fusion reactor. So if you
ever been walking around with your backpack and you're like, man,
this laptop's okay, and I like my notebook, but I
sure wish I had a fusion reactor, Well it's not
that compact, but it's on the way.
Speaker 3 (48:03):
We just talked about this with Chris Cogswell as like
the Pine in the sky thing.
Speaker 1 (48:08):
And how he said it would never happen. Yeah, yeah, Olwen.
Thanks to everybody who wrote in to let us know
about that interview. We got some great feedback from that.
Speaker 2 (48:16):
I'm really looking forward to listening to it. I had
to miss that one.
Speaker 3 (48:20):
This is crazy. I'm just reading about this right now
for the first time. Ben I what yep?
Speaker 1 (48:27):
What skunk Works is officially building a fusion reactor. They're
actually as of twenty nineteen, they were on the fifth
iteration of it, known as T five. It's a huge
engineering challenge because they have some stuff that they have
to keep very very cold and some stuff that they
have to keep very very hot, and they have to
(48:49):
put it all together and make it work without tearing
itself apart or you know, exploding and raining death down
upon us.
Speaker 3 (48:56):
I'm gonna go ahead and call bs on this whole thing.
I am reading about this online right now in twenty
twenty talking about how this was unveiled in twenty fifteen,
and Ben, if this was actually a program they were
doing that Skunkworks was working on, it would never be
(49:18):
revealed until, as we've seen with each other example here
like five ten years later. This is this. I'm just
calling it right here, and this is my opinion. But
this is Skunkworks in Lockheed like putting up a smoke
a smoke grenade just to be like, hey, look over here, guys,
put all your money Russia and China and other large
(49:41):
state actors into this technology that you'll never be able
to do. That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (49:48):
Wow, Okay, I see what you're saying. That's crazy, because
the official line from Lockheed is that the US military
wants to create something that can be a portable generator.
Of course they do, because think of the supply chain
for you know, diesel or gas powered vehicles. Right, that's
one of the move that's a huge expense in war,
(50:10):
if not one of the most egregious expenses. But yeah,
a compact fusion reactor.
Speaker 2 (50:15):
What Yeah, a compact are we're talking here, guys.
Speaker 1 (50:19):
I mean, it's not a backpack again, but if you
if you look at some of the articles, you can see, let.
Speaker 2 (50:27):
Me, bigger than like a generator. You might buy it
on depot.
Speaker 3 (50:31):
Dude. Yeah, dude, there's a picture on this. Uh there's
a picture I'm assuming that they're saying is from this
thing in the skunk quorks from the drive dot com.
And it looks like a big pr photo of a
bunch of engineers touching one individual piece of this compact reactor. Dude,
(50:54):
this is this is not real, man, that's probably just
that's probably a vacuum chamber.
Speaker 2 (51:00):
Yeah, it looks like it's probably.
Speaker 3 (51:01):
An image of a vacuum chamber that they're just messing with.
Speaker 2 (51:03):
It looks like one of those tanks. You'd see it
a beer brewer, Mike when I say that, but really,
I mean it's it's so it's it's it's an industrial
piece of industrial equipment. You know, it's not when they
say compact, I mean it's smaller than like a you know,
a reactor. You'd see it with one of those cool
cooling towers and the whole nine and all that stuff.
Obviously that's not the actual reactor, but uh, fascinating.
Speaker 3 (51:23):
No, that I mean, I think it is.
Speaker 2 (51:26):
You know, this is self contained. That it's mean like
a nuclear power plant. The reactor is not the cooling,
the big thing that you cooling. Yeah, that's a separate
and people have some some people mistakenly believe that that
is the reactor. Ah, yes, it's a good point.
Speaker 1 (51:40):
So the predecessor of this current, when this T five
was only one meter in diameter and two meters long,
which is big. You know, again, it's bigger than a
backpack or a bread box. I was just thinking about,
you know, I was thinking about a conversation we had
a while ago. Man, I just wanted to double check
your pay parents actually do use a bread box?
Speaker 3 (52:02):
Yes, weird?
Speaker 2 (52:03):
Do they also keep their eggs out at room temperature?
Do they churn their own butter?
Speaker 3 (52:08):
Never room temperature?
Speaker 2 (52:10):
That's a thing though, you know.
Speaker 1 (52:10):
I know, yeah, because of the goop, the gunk that's
on the eggs. When you know, that's that's the reason
grocery store eggs have to be refrigerated. The gunk is
washed off of them that's fluid. Uh No, it's like, well,
it's like a protective it's like a protective thing that
keeps bacteria from coming into rotting eggs, so you don't
(52:31):
have to refrigerate eggs if you buy them from a
farmer's market, or if you just get them from a chicken,
if that's where you're at.
Speaker 2 (52:38):
Yeah, the gunk I got it. Yeah, technical term. I'm
sure it's an acronym. Well, guys, we're approaching. We're approaching
the end of this episode, but we got a few
kind of housekeeping issues take care of what else? I mean.
Given's long histories, kunk Works is often a kind of
go to for a lot of fringe researchers who believe
the government may be develop, uping, or hiding advance suppress technology,
(53:03):
which they almost certainly are.
Speaker 3 (53:05):
They were, they have been their whole career.
Speaker 2 (53:07):
That's what I'm saying. So that means they still are.
We just don't know. We won't know about it for
another ten twenty, however many years.
Speaker 1 (53:13):
It's kind of like it's kind of like saying, is
mel Gibson gonna say something anti semitic? Well, he's got
a track record, you know, what I mean, maybe maybe it's.
Speaker 2 (53:22):
Hey, hey, but people can change ben sure, government agencies
can know anyway, But who's done to do this? And honestly,
this isn't an inherently like negative thing. It doesn't have
to be seen as some kind of nefarious, shrouded kind
of activity. Just because we don't know about it doesn't
mean it's bad for us. In fact, us not knowing
about it is kind of important. That's sort of part
(53:43):
of the deal, right, But gone unchecked and we can't
follow the paper trail of the funding and all that stuff.
I mean, you know there certainly can can run amock.
Speaker 1 (53:54):
Now I do I do object to calling this housekeeping
because I would say the most important part of this
episode is this. The concern of active secret research and
suppressed technology in Lockeed's case, does not come from just
some rabbit hole or some sort of creepy copy pasta,
(54:15):
nor does it come from the dilemma of state secrecy.
In June of two thousand and eight, Skunk Works went
on an unprecedented, unexplained hiring binge. And they didn't fire
a bunch of people either. They hired a bunch of
people to do something. We just don't know what it was.
The reason or the reasons behind this hiring spree are
(54:36):
still not clear. They increased their size by a third,
by thirty three percent. That's a crazy amount of people
to hire, and we don't know. Again, we don't know
what they were doing. We know what they acknowledge they're doing.
They're these pretty I wouldn't say necessarily, I wouldn't say
super specific, but they have these categories. There are things
(54:57):
like next gen fighters, quieter supersonic planes, and then they
have stuff that's pretty vague, like revolutionary technologies.
Speaker 2 (55:05):
What is that that would be anything? It's technology that
promotes revolution, I would assume.
Speaker 1 (55:11):
Right, And that's where we are today. You know, today's
skunk works employees three thousand, seven hundred people and these
are facilities in Palmdale, California, that's the big one, also
Fort Worth, Texas, also in Georgia. They're working on at
least five hundred projects, most likely more, and it's in
(55:32):
a range of stuff.
Speaker 2 (55:34):
Now, do you think it's public information? No, I can't
imagine it would be. As to who these people are
that work for them. Are there high level positions that
are public facing and skunk Works that we can know
about and talk to.
Speaker 1 (55:45):
Sure, Yeah, there are pr folks, they are admin folks.
The engineers are pretty locked down with the DAS, and
we've got some engineers in the audience today. If you're
bound by an NDA, don't let us be the reason
you break it. We don't want your jail time on
our conscience or your fines. But if you can talk
(56:08):
about it, we would love to hear your insight on
what's going on here.
Speaker 2 (56:12):
But like Lockheed itself and especially skunk Works, it's so
government adjacent that it's essentially like an extension of the
government in some small way. I mean, it's a private industry,
but there's so much back and forth between the two
that I feel like it's almost inseparable. I don't know,
maybe i'm reaching there. What do you guys think?
Speaker 3 (56:34):
No, yeah, I mean to me, it's very similar. I mean,
it is just a contractor and that's just the way
it is, right. It's money changing hands to get to
the experts.
Speaker 2 (56:43):
But what if they wanted to do business with China?
Speaker 3 (56:48):
Lockheed, Yeah, I.
Speaker 2 (56:50):
Mean we export things to China all the time. You know,
if they're a private industry, why can't they sell these
planes to other countries.
Speaker 3 (56:59):
Well, just speaking of China is simultaneously trying to produce
a reactor based off of Lockheed Martin's reactor yep.
Speaker 1 (57:08):
And also we know that the government or the US
government has to approve certain sales and they can they
can do this through a through a Carritoris stick approach,
so they can sanction certain sales, meaning they will disallow them,
and then they can incentivize other ones through through a
number of different ways. It's it's strange because everybody's trying
(57:31):
to learn the same thing. They're trying to apply it
in one way or another. The ultimate the ultimate goal,
of course, is to be the hedgemond, to have the
sovereignty and control of a given technology or domain. And
that's why places like that's why Boeing, even if it
goes bankrupt, something like that will rise up in its stead,
(57:53):
because the state needs to have manufacturing capabilities like this.
And that's why we know the people at Lockheed and
other associated things like North Grumman will be working around
the clock for the foreseeable future. The stuff we named
is already crazy, but that's just the stuff we know about.
So what do you think, folks has skunk works moved
(58:15):
more or less completely into the public eye, or, like
Matt just argued, are there still secret unacknowledged projects at play.
If so, what are they and what are they going
to do? And when will we find out about them
twenty years afterwards?
Speaker 3 (58:31):
Yeah, thirty probably. I'm telling you that SR seventy two
is out there right now. It's been spotted. It's the
reason for numerous UFO sightings over the past ten years.
I guarantee it.
Speaker 1 (58:44):
And now we've you know, we spent eighty percent in
this episode just talking about the different spy planes. Who
else knows what they're working on there, like ice cream
that doesn't need to be cold to be good, or
like Dorito fla ice cream or yeah, I'm just spitballing here.
I'm not a member of skunk Works. Oh God, But
(59:07):
we want to hear from you. We hope you enjoyed
this episode. And again, if you're an engineer in the audience,
we would love to hear your take on this because
a lot of the reporting on these sorts of things
can be alarmist at times when it doesn't.
Speaker 2 (59:19):
Have to be.
Speaker 1 (59:20):
But you should if you are lucky enough to live
in a country where you can vote. You should pay
attention to where your tax dollars are going, and you
should have a conversation with yourself and your friends about
the dilemma between secrecy and transparency. How much transparency do
you deserve and how much secrecy does your government need?
Speaker 2 (59:41):
Let us know.
Speaker 1 (59:41):
You can find us on Facebook. You can find us
on Instagram, where we're all over the internet. Say hello
to our favorite part of the show, your fellow listeners
on our Facebook page. Here's where it gets crazy. But wait,
you can also follow us as individuals online.
Speaker 2 (59:57):
You can follow me exclusively on Instagram at how Now
Noel Brown. I try to get verified, but they rejected me.
But you can still find me there. Just I promise
I'm me.
Speaker 3 (01:00:07):
It's true, It's true. You could find me too. I'm
Matt Frederick underscore iHeart. I think.
Speaker 2 (01:00:14):
Are you verified? Do they verify you? Matt? No, they don't.
I just the whole idea of verification is really trippy
to me because it's sort of like, I can't prove
that I am myself if I don't have that blue
check mark next to my name.
Speaker 3 (01:00:27):
Would you have to send them like a birth certificate?
Speaker 2 (01:00:29):
You got to send them a copy of your photo ID.
Speaker 3 (01:00:32):
Oh, we'll do that.
Speaker 2 (01:00:32):
I tried, like I rejected. I'm not a public figure enough,
I guess for Instagram nir rigorous standards understood.
Speaker 1 (01:00:41):
You can also find me on Twitter where I'm at
ben Bolland HSW. You can find me on Instagram where
I am inn a burst of creativity at Ben Bollan
I thanks so much for tuning in, thanks to our
super producer Paul Mission controlled decand. And if you are
the kind of person who says I love this show,
(01:01:02):
I love you guys. I hate social media. I heard
your Facebook episode and I don't understand how you guys
are still on that thing. How else can I contact you?
Speaker 2 (01:01:11):
Boy? Do we have good news for you?
Speaker 3 (01:01:13):
You can call us. Our number is one eight three
three std WYTK. Leave a message.
Speaker 2 (01:01:22):
We'll hear it, because you'll hear it first and foremost,
you're the first line of defense. It rings with the
stuff that I want you to know. Beat the unquantized
beat theme quite loudly. Every time you call right into
Matt's sleeping ears and he wakes up and deals with
it post haste. Yeah, I get a call back personally
from him. In fact, that's right, He's been known to
do that.
Speaker 3 (01:01:43):
Dan, if you're still listening to this show, I would
love to get a message from you. I think that
would be hilarious. That would put it out there. Yeah,
I'd love to play it on the air. That would
be fun.
Speaker 1 (01:01:54):
At least it'll make it worth it because we just
freaked you out while you're in traffic.
Speaker 3 (01:02:00):
Escially, nobody listens this far into the episode. I'm telling
you this. Nobody is listening to me.
Speaker 2 (01:02:06):
Yeah, we've seen the statistics.
Speaker 3 (01:02:08):
All right, Well, goodnight everyone. Email us.
Speaker 5 (01:02:11):
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (01:02:33):
Stuff they don't want you to know is a production
of Iheartradios How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
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Noel Brown
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