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February 26, 2020 61 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

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, welcome

(00:25):
back to the show. My name is Matt, my name
is Noel. They call me Ben. We are joined as
always with our super producer Paul Mission Controlled deconds. Most importantly,
you are you, You are here, and that makes this
stuff they don't want you to know now. Honestly, it's
great to see you. Guys. Have no idea what time

(00:45):
it really is. I'm looking at uh clock here now
that says it's right around four pm or a little
bit before Eastern time, but who knows, Maybe it's not.
It's eight pm. G M. T Okay, there we go,
There we go, and body clockwise, it's I think fourteen

(01:06):
hours ahead for me. But I'm a little out of it.
But I think we're gonna have fun with with today's topic.
What's it like in the future, Ben, It's interesting. It's interesting. Um,
no flying cars yet. Velcro is making a comeback in
a big way for that. Every everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, and
a little weirded out by all the buttons around us

(01:29):
right now. But but yes, the show must go on, right. Uh,
today's episode is has nothing to do with the oscars.
There's not a good segue. Today's episode has nothing to
do with that. But could be uh, could be fertile
soil for a different episode in the future. Today we're

(01:51):
talking about something strange that's happening, uh, every single moment
of every single day here in the US and and abroad.
It's military research. And this is a very spooky boogeyman esque,
uh sort of phenomenon for a lot of us. You know,

(02:11):
some some folks like maybe like Matt, You and I
grew up on X Files. Right, I know, I know
you watch I don't know how into it you were medium.
I watched it typically with no lights on while listening
to the bare Naked Ladies on one week. So the
three of us then were very much into X files,

(02:33):
right and and X Files paints this picture of a vast,
uh interlocking conspiracy between corporations and governments right to to
advance suppressed technology to better the the the elites control
of the world as we know it. The thing is,
that's sort of true it's sort of true. You don't

(02:55):
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 psy ops, 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. It's a cool name, right, yeah, potentially pretty

(03:18):
uh smelly? 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 Luckheed Martin? You
sure you've surely heard of it before? There are buildings

(03:38):
here around Atlanta with the names plastered across the top
of them. Um, this 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

(04:00):
the phrase skunk works really does come from this single company,
Lockheed Martin Corporation. And to really learn about you have
to go all the way back to nineteen forty three. Uh,
and there you find the United States Armies Air Tactical
Service Command or ATSK or a T s C. Because
you see, the A T s C had a bit

(04:20):
of an issue. They were worried about German rockets science, uh,
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. Right, yeah,

(04:41):
Nazis are the reason the US got to the moon?
Right did I said that? Right? Yeah? I think I
left the end out of the van, but you got
what I was getting. So so, Uh, the officials there
from the A T s C 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 uh make some of our

(05:03):
own revolutionary rocketry happen here. Yeah, and they also said,
let's do it quickly, yesterday. All right, let's do it yesterday.
About a month after this meeting, in ninety three, it
was a team led by an engineer named Clarence L.
Johnson playing O'Kelly to his friends. They came back to
a T s C. And they said, Okay, we're gonna

(05:25):
build a jet for you. Uh, the XP eight Shooting
Star jet fighter. Uncle Sam gave it the green light.
Locky began developing the first US fighter jet in June
of this is we should know 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

(05:48):
little bit earlier in the late thirties. But this is
like if you ask someone at Lockeed what happened what
skunk Works? This is the official answer, and that jet fighter,
the XP E D Shooting Star is the birth of
what today is known as skunk Works. And Lockheed was
surprisingly is surprisingly transparent about the origins of this of

(06:11):
this organization. Uh. It emphasizes that it was a pretty
informal um and urgent need that created this collaboration. The
formal contract for the xp AD did not arrive at
Lockheed until October sixteenth, which was four months after work
had already begun. UM and this would prove to be
kind of a common theme within the skunk Work story.

(06:34):
Many times a customer would come to Skunk Works with
a request, and on a handshake, the project would begin.
That's crazy to me, given the amount of money some
of the project must have costs. Uh, No contracts in place,
no official submission process at all. Right, yeah, just some
make it happens in some handshakes Johnson and his team. Eventually,

(06:55):
they didn't just design the xp E D. They built
one in less than a hundred and fifty days and
only a hundred and forty three days. Uh. Their deadline
was a hundred and fifty This was only possible, 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 lockeed and government contracts

(07:19):
was all the red tape. All the bureaucracy 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, UH,
the first of which is the manager of skunk Works
must have complete control over everything in his program and

(07:42):
should not have to answer to 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 in direct contrast to a lot
of the normal UH standard operating procedures, Kelly wanted a

(08:02):
minimum number of people involved, and he was brutal about it. 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 compared to the so called normal systems. And he
also said, less reports. Yes, we we wanna look, we'll, we'll,

(08:26):
we'll show our work, but we don't want to have
to check in with you. This guy, I get the
feeling this guy hated meetings. Yeah. And also less inspections
or at least you use subcontractors and vendors 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. And don't let people outside skunk

(08:49):
works get in. It's kind of fight clubbish, you know,
it is the first rule of skunk works. Anyhow, we
have to 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

(09:11):
call it skunk works for a while, so we have
to ask ourselves how did it get its name? 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 for Johnson's effort. Johnson's organization operated out

(09:34):
of a rented circus tent next to a manufacturing plan
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 eight
he had to be carried out in strict secrecy. No

(09:55):
one was discussed the project outside the small organization, 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 Mattoudris place deep

(10:16):
in the forest called the skunk Works s k O
n k um. There there was a strong beverage being
brewed from skunks, old shoes, and other odd ingredients. Yeah. Yeah,
So one day this guy IRV gets a phone call
and he answers it and kind of a glib manner

(10:36):
and and goes skunk Works inside man Colvera speaking and
people loved it. There's 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.

(11:02):
It may be surprising to find that they weren't secretly
working on some kind of weaponized odor. This was just
this was just actually a neat little office job joke.
Well it's not even an office job as a circus tent.
It's a rented circus tent outside of plastics facility in
the whole place reeks, and they're in there like doing
really important technological work and engineering work. It's so weird

(11:25):
to me, it's so weirdly a punk rock and kind
of like d I Y when you think of government work,
you think of everything being all buttoned up in these
like airtight labs, like clean rooms and all that stuff,
And this was not that, Yeah, exactly that. It's strange too,
because skunk Works is often brought up as an example

(11:46):
of old school conspiratorial corporate warmongering. You know, it's part
of the war machine, the stuff Eisenhower warned us about,
and rightly so. But if you learn about skunk Works today,
it's actually a registered trademark of Lockeed. That's a far
cry from any off the books operation. Their official name

(12:09):
is not skunk Works, that's just the name everybody likes.
Their official name is like he 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 and
shout it to the rooftops. I don't know. Advanced Development
program also sounds pretty dope, like advanced Idea mechanics. The

(12:31):
Marvel fans out there and the elite squad of scientists
operating at skunk Works, well, not affectionately, as that's Matt Bis.
And now let's look let's look at skunk Works today.
So skunk Works still conducts a ton of classified research.
We actually do not know how much it. We don't

(12:52):
know what it's doing. Really, we know a little bit. UH.
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 UH that that was focused on
kind of selling it to the public and then selling

(13:13):
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 um, 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 build these
prototypes and we give the savings to you uncle Sam

(13:35):
and UH. Today the primary site is out there in Palmdale, California.
It's the middle of nowhere. Why would you drive their
desert about sixty miles from l A. Yeah, and that's
almost directly north across the mountain range there to UH
to get their near Lancaster. Really, Uh, I don't know it.

(13:55):
It's isolated, but it really is close to Los Angeles. Yeah,
sixty miles is not that far. It's just up the
way from the Antelope Valley Mall and in l A traffic,
it probably only take you about three days to get there,
unless you had an experimental skunk Works helicopter or hypersonic vehicle.
Uh there. This place is huge. There are a hundred buildings,

(14:17):
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
peek behind the curtains. So this is all on the
up and up right. This is not just this is
no longer a secret lab something that we think of
an association with DARPA. This is actually a government contractor

(14:41):
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
question skunk Works has played a huge role in military innovation,
especially in the field of spy, aircraft, material tech things that.

(15:01):
But the question for today is what else are they
cooking up in there and what's coming out in the future,
And we're going to get to that at least well
we've been able to find. After a quick word from
our sponsor. Here's where it gets crazy, all right, So

(15:25):
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 every school in America. This is a huge problem,
and people don't think about it as often as they should.

(15:46):
Ben and that children's book, I mean, he really just
boils down to one age old added, which is secret
secrets are now fun, Secret secrets hurt someone. Where's that from?
You know? Children? Really? Yeah? But but also secret secrets
protect the nation from security threats determined to be well,

(16:09):
there's no judgment in Brainstorm, and 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

(16:32):
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

(16:55):
write it. Wrap my head around that 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 democracy. Yeah,
we'll see how long the fag goes. But right now
it's about as successful as say, beanie babies in the nineties.

(17:17):
Hacky Sacks perhaps, Hacky Sacks. Perhaps. Yeah. If you're one
of those governments, you also need at least the illusion
of transparence. 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
and what their government does totally. You have to at

(17:39):
least make them feel like that as an option, even
when and especially when it's not, especially when you consider
that old Eisenhower quote. Every gun ship that is made.
Every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense,
a theft from those who hunger and are not fed,

(17:59):
theos who are cold and are not clothed. 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
as a dollar that goes away from the people of
a country. Eisenhower is right about this. We can argue

(18:24):
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 amounts of cash, blood, and treasure on their militaries
while their people literally starve. We're not being hyperbolic, while

(18:46):
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, speculate Asian 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 a performance piece. What's

(19:07):
the building in there? You guys know that one. I'm
unfamiliar with this. Yeah, I don't know that one either. Man.
It's uber creepy. It's like peaked Tom Waits creeping around
going what's 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

(19:27):
to a thing in a tremendous trust fall. We're asking this,
uh Leviathan, this gigantic mechanism to make our lives better
or two, 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 lockeed building in there?

(19:48):
And is it worth the expense? That's the question. And
it's tough to answer because we know some stuff about
skunk Works, But how much do we actually know? 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.

(20:09):
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? Well, some
of us starved, That's really what we're saying here, So
let's think about it. Here's the first one, Lockheed y
O three. No, what is that? Well, I'm glad you asked, Matt.

(20:29):
The y O three A, as it were, was designed
to a US Army spec from the nineteen sixties nineteen
sixty eight to be precise, which called for an observation
aircraft a spy plane, right, that would be acoustically undetectable
from the ground when flying in an outsitude of twelve
hundred feet at night. Uh. Nine of the eleven y

(20:53):
O three a's produced operated in South Vietnam at night
from nineteen seventy and nineteen seventy one, only fourteen months
and never took a single round. Uh. Absolutely were never
shot down. Right, These are a fascinating aircraft. Ben, I
was wondering if you've ever talked about these on car
stuff for any of the other shows. No, No, this

(21:14):
is this is I think the first time any of
us have mentioned this on 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 a ton of the

(21:35):
stuff that makes it to a prototype never never gets
beyond where the what the Horton h O two was, Yes,
exactly right, But but this was just to stay on
here just for a second. It was a smaller aircraft.
You can find pictures of the y O Dash three
online and if you look at the pilot, it's like
the pilot looks pretty big in the photos because the
plane is relatively small. It's got a tiny little propeller upfront,

(21:59):
single peller wings that are not large in width, and
just to fly around 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, Yeah, it was helpful for the military.
You could also argue that it saved the lives of

(22:22):
US forces through its surveillance capabilities. One that one craft
that might be more familiar to some of us would
be the Lockheed U two. In nine, skunk Works got
this contract from the CIA to build a spy plane
known as the U two later. You know, this one
was so popular that a certain Irish band named themselves

(22:46):
after it, that are you in the numeral two? Yes
and uh yeah. They were right on the edge with
that one. And the idea for the You two was
the 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

(23:07):
Day on July four n But the You two stopped
flying when a guy named Francis Gary Powers was shot
down over Russia. So the You two was not as
successful as the YO three A. I should call the
y O three A, but I like YO though it
did operate for a much longer time it did. It

(23:29):
did operate for a much much longer time. And then
we also know about the Lockheed A twelve, which which
was a logical successor to the U two because when
skunk Works was a lot of people don't know this.
When Skunk Works was building the U two, they baked

(23:49):
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 Micrana song.
You know, why would they build a plane that was
designed to blow up in their faces? That doesn't seem
very effective. So okay, let's just talk about this really quickly.

(24:10):
So the YouTube plane, the lockeed version of You two
was a really cool spy plane. It was huge, like
really really large, and um generally the ones that I've
seen at least in um in museums and a couple
of the places were planing were painted this like um
gun metal black or like a dark gray, you know

(24:32):
that color. They were to operate in the sky to
be you know, almost undetectable and just 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. This thing looks out of this world, yes, big,

(24:59):
just it looks like a fully different kind of aircraft
if you look at a picture, I see what you're saying.
So like the design that release 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 are invisible. Well, well yeah,
because they had a specific thing they were trying to

(25:19):
do with this plane, right, Yeah. They wanted it to
be invisible essentially, and it is the anti sdent of
the much more famous s R seventy one Blackbird. The
interesting thing about A twelve is that they it was
already in the works when the YouTube was rolling out

(25:40):
because they predicted that correctly, as it turns out that
USSR detection technology would catch up with the evasive capability
of the YouTube. And then the A twelve was strange
because it required some help from the CIA. No, you
might be saying, guys, the CIA are not exactly experts

(26:02):
and engineering, nor the experts and aviation. 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.

(26:27):
They they they had like ninety plus percent of 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 CIA said, yeah,
we're all about that. We know, we heard about that
in a very recent episode. Didn't exactly, So the CIA

(26:49):
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 piste off would
you be if you were the U S s R.
Where it turned out, you know, when you found out
that like, uh, you know, Socialist Titanium Consortium of Eastern

(27:10):
Turkey was actually the agency and you sold them the
stuff they needed to build the spy planes that were
flying over you right now, right, Ah, dirty deeds done
quite expensively. Yes, well said, let's let's pause for a
second for a word from our sponsor, and then we'll

(27:31):
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 skunk Works, the Lockheed
s R seventy one Blackbird. Uh. And I don't want

(27:52):
to get into deep with the Marvel fans, but I
think didn't the uh didn't the X men have a Blackbird?
At some point me and they're they're they're plane. It
looks kind of like that did Are you talking 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 Yet Yeah,

(28:12):
there you go. 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. No, No,
it's the X Men Blackbird X jet what it was

(28:35):
straight of a blackbird. The Blackbird, also nicknamed ex Jet,
is a fictional aircraft appearing in American comic books published
by Marvel Comics. Nailed It, Ben, 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 in the films. And I think you're right

(28:57):
now all that it does have that vertical takeoff and
landing capability, which the real blackbirds can't. Okay, the wings
are very different and they are excess, but but it's
a it's a it's a blackbird. It looks like a blackbird.
But the real blackbird's cool too. It's not comic book
level cool, but it is cool, dude. When I was

(29:17):
in middle school, yeah, this was the coolest thing that
it ever existed. Did you were you one of those
guys out a poster of it? Did you build a model?
I did, and I went and checked it out at
the museum that they have their water Robbins, and uh,
this I wanted to pilot one of these things. It
was my biggest dream, that's true. I don't know if

(29:39):
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.
So so, but no, I think a lot of maybe
you listening out there, like saw a picture of this thing.

(30:00):
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
that was going on with the metals that were involved. Um,
it felt it just felt like it was out of
this world, like it was alien technology or something that

(30:21):
we had captured. Um. You combine that with the whole
X Files enthusiast thing. I mean, come on, it also
seems like it was really difficult to fly. Oh, I'm
sure you know. That's a that's a problem with a
lot of spy planes is that they're they're terrible to
They're terrible on the ground. They're terrible to take off,
they're terrible to land because they're just designed to float

(30:45):
high altitude, so you have to get up there first.
It's kind of like, um, you know birds that there's
so many birds that are terrible on land but amazing
in the air, like the Great frigate bird. It looks
like a nincompoop when it's trying to walk around because
it's it's not made for the ground. It's made for
this guy, Ben, you missed a really great voicemail we

(31:05):
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. Um And
that really triggered me the whole the thought of that,
the image of that. In just a minute, when you're saying,

(31:26):
you know, some birds are terrible, I was really hoping
you would just stop short and just say birds are terrible. Um,
I'm just I'm gonna give this to you. It's a
it's an evil gift. And I'm sure you're already aware of. Uh.
Duck penises screwed being right there, there are many. Did
you bring me one from? Never? I don't want to.
I don't want to scoop. No, no, no, I did

(31:48):
uh I uh duck penises are lovecraft, yet it's probably
the best way to do. Don't pay like hook in,
won't let go? Yeah I did. They're evil because ducks
rep us non consensually. That is the most diplomatic say it.
So the spy planes just I have to talk about

(32:12):
this a little more so. The previous model, the A twelve.
You can only have one pilot in there. It's just
you by your loans. I'm 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 can have to one pilot

(32:32):
co pilot in their helpful in case one one operator
loses consciousness because you are traveling 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

(32:55):
until nine. That's when it was in service. Like they
didn't even like massively updated, they would have had to
give it a new model name. Right, it was just
awesome and it stayed awesome, and it was expensive, so
it's okay to do. You know, they're they're still researching
the next step or the evolution, but they have to
be very sure that it's worth sinking billions of dollars

(33:19):
into a new design to the R and D alone.
I mentioned the manufacturing, right, Um, quick question for my
own edification. What what do these things actually do? Like,
I mean I know that I know they're spy planes
and they're surveilling, but like, is it with radar, is
it taking aerial photography? Is are there are listening devices?
I just wonder, like what the implementation of this absurdly

(33:42):
expensive technology is and how does it benefit us? Well, yeah,
I mean it looks cool and it's just nice to
kind of have a flex. Uh yeah, it's it's uh,
it's 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

(34:08):
gathering systems. They have counter 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,
one of the to your point, mat about why there
was only one person in the in the predecessor, in

(34:30):
the A twelve, and while there were two in the Blackbird.
For that second person to be able to fit in
the Blackbird, the designers had to remove the principal sensor
which was on the A twelve, which was this huge, large,
focal length optical camera. So they were flying over and

(34:50):
taking pictures more or less, and they weren't you know,
they weren't dropping bombs on 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

(35:11):
mandated drug use because it's the only way that pilots
could remain alert while they were on these missions. Uh. This,
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. Uh. There's one, a brand name, uh, dexadrine,

(35:31):
which is the brand name for dextro amphetamine. This was
given to pilots to keep them alert during flights longer
than eight hours. Like Benny's was another one, right, like
popping Benny's the housewife pill of the nine twenties and thirties,
I guess, um, And then didn't the Nazis take some
form of this as well? Or that was more of

(35:52):
an empheta their emphetamines, It's all right, yeah, Blitzkrieg Blitzkrieg
operatives took them. Hitler loved them. Uh uh. And emphetamines
were I mean very common in war because they work.
And now we give them to our children, help them
pay better attention. That's adder all right, which essentially, I mean,
studies have shown they act very similar to emphetamines. Yeah.

(36:15):
So we know that the technology Locky was capable of
creating was years and years ahead of what the public
would be aware of. And we also know that the innovation,
that the pace of innovation there was much more precipitous
than the public might have thought. We also know that
skunk Works projects were not confined to the air. Please

(36:39):
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. Yeah,
talking about the sea Shadow here as one example. Again,
like Lockheed's got this look now at this point, once

(37:00):
we once we enter the eighties, it's now four. They're
using that gun metal black coded looking crazy awesome stuff.
Cybertruck didn't come from. It's exactly right now. They're developed
or they developed in four. It started working in being
deployed in five a stealth boat essentially or transport vehicle. Um,

(37:24):
and it looks crazy a k a. The duck penis.
That was they changed the name to the show Up. Yeah,
that was that was just the working title when they
were keeping under wraps and Skunkwork and the family. Yeah,
and it's it's either called the nine dash five to

(37:45):
nine or I X dash five to nine. Um, 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. It doesn't look seaworthy, no, 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 sizes are just diagonal.

(38:08):
How far down do they go? Wait? What is this
raised part or people inside that thing? 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, it'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

(38:29):
antenna of some sort. But yeah, it's got like a
weird little windshield, like four kind of little um 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 like a
chrono plan. You guys remember those? I don't. That chrono

(38:52):
plan is somewhere between a ship and uh an aircraft.
It uses the ground force effect to hover over the water.
They're so cool. E k r a n oh plan? Oh?
Would that be what I would maybe have always heard
of as just a hovercraft. They're different from a different
don't have the thing, they don't have anything like bladder. Interesting,

(39:16):
they look like this. Uh, they're so cool. So they
used propulsion to literally hover above the surface of the
water with like fans or something like that. That's interesting.
I always wanted to ride one, but a lot of
them are either decommissioned or in countries that are difficult
to get to. Interesting. Well, what's going on with the
c shadow Because I'm with you, guys, I'm like, how well,

(39:36):
how is this thing functioning? It was an experimental ocean
surveillance vessel. It was built way back in four which
is crazy. The idea is that it's reducing its footprint
it's radar profile, so that's part of why it's floating
like that with this hydrofoil on board, so it has

(40:01):
two separate holes 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 so for almost a
decade this thing existed off the grid and was not

(40:24):
universally acknowledged. People are saying, hey, I saw some weird
stuff out there in the ocean, and people were saying,
whoa Donnie slowed down on your whatever their version of
adderall was at the time. And this was also one
of the first test of automation to reduce the number

(40:44):
of actual people on the vessel. And now this has
this one has an ignominious end because in two thousand
and six the U. S. Navy gave up on the
Sea Shadow and they tried, they literally tried to sell
it at an auction and nobody would buy it. And
so then they said, okay, we're just gonna sell it

(41:05):
two for dismantling. You can dismantle it and 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 too. You have to scrap it.
And they sold it in two thousand twelve when it
was dismantled, but it lives on because there are ships
like the Impeccable and the Victorious that have still have

(41:29):
the same kind of structure. I mean, just show you, guys,
this is an actual ship. It's working now. They took
that weird missing missing piece of the whole or that
center cut out, and they kept the twin hole design,
but they made it much biggerating and there's a lot
of money there. So these are these are things that

(41:49):
have all happened in the past. We know currently that
lockeeds 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 of us listening. The first is
the Locky Martin s R. Seventy two takes sense right, Wait,

(42:12):
oh wait, we do one thing before we hit the
seventy two totally, because it's 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 seventeen Nighthawk, which is
I think that's what it called was it called uh,
it's Lockeed, it is Skunk Quirks, it is Skunk Works,

(42:34):
and it's the Nighthawk. It's the stealth fighter jet looking
thing that looks kind of like a hawk or an
owl or a bird of prey or something um similar
to all the other designs we've been talking about. Oh yes, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah,
it's the one that that I remember seeing when I
think it was desert storm was occurring in the nineties.

(42:54):
The thing was built in the eighties, around the same
time that they were building the what were we just
talking about, the Sea the Sea Shadow, And it wasn't
publicly acknowledged until five years later, and then it didn't
actually make an appearance anywhere operationally until a desert storm.
But it's just another one of those iconic planes that

(43:16):
was used for a lot of different things in secret
for a long time, and then eventually it was made public.
So what what what it was 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. Well, here's here's the way

(43:36):
I think it goes down. It appears in an operational
capacity somewhere in another country, probably where there is you know, um,
a conflict occurring that one of these things gets used
and um either it gets shot down, one of them
gets shot down, or one is caught you operating, and

(43:57):
then the United States military has to Okay, yeah, kind
of like the stealth helicopters. Right. Yeah, the Nighthawk was
publicly revealed or I would even say publicly acknowledged, and uh,

(44:17):
people still didn't really didn't really clock it until, as
you said, Matt, in the Gulf War. It's weird to
call it a stealth fighter because as stealth fighter capabilities,
but it's mainly a ground attack aircraft dropping dropping bombs
like hot mix tapes. So that yes, So that's amazing.

(44:41):
That's one of the posters I had. Yes, you know,
because it's just so iconic. I apologize that I jumped
back to that. Ben. We have to. So let's let's go.
Let's I'm gonna take you back now to the what
the big brother of the lockeed Martin SR sevente, SR
seventy two. Oh yeah, this one is still in the works,

(45:05):
of course, still in the skunk works. According to Lockheed,
it's going to replace the seventy one. It's gonna have
uh a middleman role between surveillance satellites, manned aircraft and
unmanned aerial vehicles u A vs. 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

(45:28):
the idea here is that the s R seventy two
is going to be able to leverage all this communicative
ability and it's high speed to get in and out
of protected airspace and sneak pictures, sneak surveillance, or blow
up a target before people can detect it at all,

(45:49):
much less intercepted. This is dangerous stuff, and it's you know,
if you're gonna be alive for the next few years,
you're gonna you're gonna see it in action or you're
gonna hear about it. A last thing, this blew me away.
I don't know. I don't know what you guys think
about this. Paul and I were talking about this earlier.
The last thing that Loki Martin has confirmed that they

(46:10):
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. This can exist
in a very inefficient way to a compact fusion reactor.
So have you ever been walking around with your backpack

(46:32):
and you're like, Man, this laptops 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.
We just talked about this with Chris Cogswell as like
the Pine the Sky thing and how he said it
would never happen. Yeah, ewen. Thanks to everybody who wrote
in to let us know about that interview. We've got

(46:54):
some great feedback from that. I'm really looking forward to
listening to it. I had to miss that one. This
is easy. I'm just reading about this right now for
the first time. Ben what what skunk Works is officially
building a fusion reactor. They're actually as a twenty nineteen
they were on the fifth iteration of it, known as

(47:17):
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 put it all together and
make it work without tearying itself apart or you know,
exploding and reigning death down upon us. I'm gonna go
ahead and call bs on this whole thing. I am

(47:39):
reading about this online right now in talking about how
this was unveiled in and Ben. If this was actually
a program they were doing that skunk Works was working on,
it would never be revealed until, as we've seen with

(48:00):
other example here, like five ten years later. Um, this
is this. I'm just calling it right here, and this
is my opinion. But this is Skunkworks and Lockheed like
putting up a smoke a smoke grenade just to be like, hey,
look over here, guys, us put all your money Russia
and China and other large state actors into this technology

(48:23):
that you'll never be able to do. Um, that's what
I'm saying. 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,

(48:46):
that's one of the movie that's a huge expense in
war if that one of the most egregious expenses. But yeah,
a compact fusion reactor? What yeah, how compact are we
talking here, guys? I mean, it's not a backpack again,
but if you if you look at some of the articles,
you can see, uh, let me, bigger than like a generator.

(49:07):
You might buy it home depot. Dude, 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 works,
from the drive dot com. And it looks like a
big pr photo of a bunch of engineers touching one

(49:28):
individual piece of this compact reactor. Dude, this is this
is not real, man. That's probably just that's probably a
vacuum chamber. It's probably an image of a vacuum chamber
that they're just messing with. It looks like one of
those tanks you'd see at a beer brewery. Sure, Mike,
when I said that, um, but really, I mean it's
it's it's it's it's an industrial piece of industrial equipment.

(49:51):
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 in
the whole nine and all that stuff. Um, I say
that's not the actual reactor, but fascinating, No that I mean,
I think it is. You know, this this is self contained.
I just mean, like a nuclear power plant, the reactor
is not the cooling the big thing that you cooling. Yeah,

(50:12):
that's a separate and people have them some some people
mistakenly believe that that is the reactor. Yes, it's a
good point. 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

(50:32):
thinking about you know, I was thinking about conversation we
had a while ago. Man, I just want to double
check your parents actually do use a bread box? Yes,
so weird. They also keep their eggs out at room temperature?
Do they turn their own butter? Never room temperature? That's
a thing, you know, I know, yeah, because of the
good the gunk that's on the eggs. When you know,

(50:55):
that's that's the reason grocery store eggs have to be refrigerated.
The gunk is washed off of them. That's when the
otic fluid. Uh No, it's like, well, it's like a
protective Uh, it's like a protective thing that keeps bacteria
from coming in and rotting eggs, so you don't have
to refrigerate eggs if you buy them from a farmer's
market or if you just get them from a chicken,

(51:16):
if that's where you're at the gunk got it. Yeah,
it's technical term. I'm sure it's an acronym. Well, guys,
we're we're approaching, uh, we're approaching the end of this episode,
but we've got a few, uh, kind of housekeeping issues
to take care of. What else I mean. Given's long history,
skunk Works is often a kind of go to for
a lot of fringe researchers who believe the government maybe

(51:38):
developing or hiding advanced suppressed technology, which they almost certainly,
that's what I'm saying. That means they still are. We
just don't know. We won't know about it for another
ten twenty however many years. It's kind of like it's
kind of like saying, is mel Gibson gonna say something
anti semitic? Well, you got a track record, you know

(51:59):
what I mean? Maybe maybe it's hey, but people can change,
government agencies can now anyway, it's a 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 various, shrouded kind of activity. Just because we
don't know about it doesn't mean it's you know, bad
for us. In fact, us not knowing about it, it's

(52:21):
kind of important. That's sort of part 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 a muck now I
I do I do object to calling this housekeeping, I
would see the most important part of this episode is
this The concern of active secret research and suppressed technology

(52:45):
in Lockheed's case, does not come from just some rabbit
hole or some sort of creepy copy pasta, or nor
does it come from the dilemma of state secrecy. In
June of two thousand 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

(53:08):
something we just don't know what it was. The reason
or the reasons behind this hiring spree are still not clear.
They increase 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 their doing. They are these

(53:29):
pretty I wouldn't say necessarily, I wouldn't say super specific,
but they have these categories. There are things like next
gen fighters, quieter supersonic planes, and then they have stuff
that's pretty vague, like revolutionary technologies. What is that? Maybe anything?
It's technology that promotes revolution, right, And that's where we

(53:51):
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 projects, most likely more,
and it's it's in a range of stuff. Now do

(54:13):
you think it's public information now? I don't. I can't
imagine it would be. As to who these people are
that work for them, are their high level positions that
are public facing and skunk works that we can know
about and talk to sure. Yeah, there are pr folks.
They are admin folks. The engineers are pretty locked down
with the d A S and and we've got some
engineers in the audience today. Uh, if you're bound by

(54:37):
an n DA, don't let us be the reason you
break it. We don't want your jail time on our
conscience or your your fines. But if you can talk
about it, we would love to hear your insight on
what's going on here. But like Lockheed itself and and
especially skunk Works, it's so government adjacent that it's essentially

(54:58):
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 that I feel
like it's almost inseparable. I don't know, maybe that maybe
I'm reaching there. What do you what do you guys think? 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,

(55:19):
it's money changing hands to get to the experts. But
what if they wanted to do a business with China Lockheed, yeah, um,
I 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 other countries. Well, just speaking

(55:39):
of China is simultaneously trying to produce a reactor based
off of Lockeed Martin's reactor. Yep. And also we know
that the government, where the U. S. Government, has to
approve certain sales, and they can they can do this
through a through a carrot or a stick approach, so
they can sanction certain sales, meaning they will disallow them,

(56:03):
and then they can incentivize other ones through through a
number of different ways. It's it's strange because everybody's trying
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 hedgemon, to have the
severenity and control of a given technology or domain. And

(56:24):
that's why places like that's why Boeing, even if it
goes bankrupt, something like that will rise up in its stead,
because the state needs to have manufacturing capabilities like this.
And that's why we know that the people at Lockeed
and other associated things like North Grumman will be working
around the clock for the foreseeable future. The stuff we

(56:47):
named is already crazy, but that's just the stuff we
know about. So what do you think, folks, Has skunk
Works moved more or less completely into the public eye
or like Matt, just argue, 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? Thirty Probably I'm telling

(57:11):
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. And now
we've you know, we spent eight percent in this episode
just talking about the different spy planes. Who knows else
knows what they're working on there, like ice cream that

(57:33):
that doesn't need to be cold to be good, or
like Dorrito flavored ice cream, or yeah, I'm just spitballing here.
I'm not a member of skunk Works, but 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

(57:54):
lot of the reporting on these sorts of things can
be alarmist at times when it doesn't have to be.
But you should. If you were 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

(58:16):
you deserve and how much secrecy does your government need?
Let us know. You can find us on Facebook. You
can find us on Instagram. We're all over the internet.
Uh 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. You can follow me exclusively on Instagram at

(58:38):
how Now Noel Brown. I try to get verified but
they rejected me. Um, but you can. You can still
find me there. Just I promise I'm me. It's true.
It's true. You could find me too. I'm Matt Frederick
Underscore I heart. I think are you verified? They verify you, Matt?
They don't. I just the whole idea of verification is

(58:59):
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. Would you
have to send them like a birth certificate. You gott
to send him a copy of your photo. I d
We'll do that. I tried, like, got rejected. I'm not
I'm not a public figure enough, I guess for Instagram
rigorous standards understood. You can also find me on Twitter

(59:22):
where I'm at Ben Bowling hs W. You can find
me on Instagram where I am in a burst of
creativity at Ben Bulling. Thanks so much for tuning in,
thanks to our super producer Paul Mission controlled decond And
if you are the kind of person who says I
love this show, I love you guys. I hate social media.

(59:43):
I heard your Facebook episode and I don't understand how
you guys are still on that thing. How else can
I contact you? Boy? Do we have good news for you?
You can call us. Our number is one eight three
three st d W y t K. Leave a message.
We'll hear it. It goes well, you'll hear it first
and foremost. For the first line of defense, it rings

(01:00:07):
with the stuff that I wants 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. I get a call back
personally from him, and that's right. He's been known to
do that. Uh. Dan, if you're still listening to this show,
I would love to get a message from you. I

(01:00:27):
think that would be hilarious out there. I'd love to
play it on the air. That will be fun. At least,
it'll make it worthy because we just freaked you out
while you're in traffic. Nobody listens this far into the episode.
I'm telling you this. Nobody is listening to me. Yeah,
we've seen the statistics. All right, Well, goodnight everyone. Email us.

(01:00:50):
We are conspiracy and I heart radio dot com. Y

(01:01:12):
Stuff they Don't Want You to Know is a production
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