Lockheed Skunk Works

The Skunk Works is the nickname of Lockheed Aircraft Company's Advanced Development Projects, later Advanced Development Programs of Lockheed Martin. The unit began in June 1943, when Washington "anxiously watched Germany develop the world's first jet fighter" and turned to the 33-year-old chief engineer Kelly Johnson, who was given British jet engines and 180 days and "readied 'Lulu Bell' in 143 days," the P-80 Shooting Star. By 1980 the unit had at any one time between 2,000 and 8,000 engineers, machinists and test pilots; its work "often involves building a plane here and transporting it by night in a cargo aircraft or truck to some testing strip in the Nevada desert"; Lockheed declined to answer questions about it; and margins on such work could reach 12 percent against about 6 percent on most military contracts, according to a securities analyst quoted by the Wall Street Journal.¹ The name came from Al Capp's "Li'l Abner" comic strip, whose moonshine still was "the skonk works"; that an engineer named Irv Culver answered a telephone "Skonk Works" while the staff worked in a circus tent beside a plastics factory, and in 1960 Capp's publisher objected, so "we changed it to Skunk Works and registered the name and logo as trademarks," according to Ben Rich, who headed the unit from January 17, 1975.²

The U-2 and Groom Lake

Rich wrote that the test pilot Tony LeVier found from the air and landed on the dry lake bed now called Groom Lake, that Kelly Johnson flew back with LeVier and "a tall civilian introduced to him only as 'Mr. B.'" (Richard Bissell), who remarked "This will do nicely," and that Johnson's private log recorded flying "very illegally" over an atomic bomb on its tower about nine hours before detonation; Johnson proposed the name Paradise Ranch.² The site's later history, including the CIA's 2013 acknowledgment, is on the page for Area 51. The unit built the U-2 Spy Plane, the A-12 and the SR-71, and later the F-117; EG&G tested the radar cross sections of its aircraft at the site beginning in 1959.²³

Kelly Johnson's sightings and the Blue Book file

On December 16, 1953 a Lockheed WV-2 flight test crew of five, Roy E. Wimmer, Rudy L. Thoren, Philip A. Colman, Charles Grugan and Joseph F. Ware Jr., and Johnson and his wife Althea at their ranch near Agoura, independently watched a black, sharp-edged object over the sea west of Los Angeles that dwindled and vanished. According to the study of the case by Martin Shough of the National Aviation Reporting Centre on Anomalous Phenomena, on the next day Thoren mentioned the sighting in Johnson's office and Johnson described his own, whereupon the two groups found they had watched the same object; Johnson collected five reports "under special cover" and they were forwarded through Lieutenant General D. L. Putt to the Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Putt's covering letter of February 15, 1954 to the ATIC commander, Colonel George L. Wertenbaker, says the report "was handed to me by Lockheed personnel with the explanation that Mr. Johnson was most reluctant to write the report in the first place and then refused to forward it on to you because of his belief that those who profess to have seen flying saucers are not usually considered to be logical and practical hard-headed engineers." Johnson's own report of December 18, 1953 is addressed to the "Air Force Investigating Group on Flying Saucers." Shough records that Johnson stated, "in official confidence," that around Christmas 1951 he had seen a fast-moving "flame or emanation" of "beautiful light blue" colour near Brents Junction that he believed to be a "flying saucer," and that Ware's statement in the file describes a large circular object he watched from his own roof about Christmas 1951 and visits to "the group of people" at Giant Rock who "eat and sleep saucers." Shough found that the Blue Book file consists only of the reports as forwarded, with Ware's map missing and no recorded inquiry, and that the Project Blue Book record card gives the conclusion "OTHER - CLOUD lenticular cloud." Shough wrote that "The only conventional explanation having even a little plausibility is an unusually compact and well-defined lenticular wave cloud," but that "such a cloud seems unlikely."⁴

The Kelly Johnson file among the papers of Ben Rich at the Huntington Library includes the document "Sighting of a flying saucer by certain Lockheed Aircraft Corporation personnel on 16 December 1953."⁵

Accounts of recovered material at the Skunk Works

The Wilson-Davis notes of October 16, 2002, attributed to Eric Davis, quote Vice Admiral Thomas R. Wilson as saying that in June 1997 he found in a records group of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology a program run by "An aerospace technology contractor," "one of the top ones in US," "the best one of them," with intelligence "in their corporate portfolio," and declined to name it: "Core secret," "can't tell." The notes record Wilson describing a conference room "secure vault" meeting with a program director, a corporate attorney and a retired National Security Agency security director who called themselves "the watch committee," and an "intact craft" "not of this Earth."⁶ The contractor is not named in the notes. A letter of April 25, 2002 paper-clipped into them, from Will Miller, offers "Particulars on a 'special team' involved (as a secondary mission) with recovering crashed 'craft' including, but not limited to, the previously classified F-117 Stealth Fighter" and "A list of civilian government contractors" likely to have "current involvement in and knowledge of USG work in alien-derived technologies."⁶ Wilson told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reporter Billy Cox in 2020: "It's all fiction."⁶

The Wall Street Journal reported on June 21, 2025 that Davis, "for years ... was part of a small group of defense experts who had claimed to know about a top-secret program at Lockheed's Skunk Works to hoard extraterrestrial technology." The same account states that in 2022 Sean Kirkpatrick, then the Pentagon's UFO investigator, asked executives of the six largest defense contractors "Have any of your companies ever gained access to alien technology?"; that for Lockheed Martin "the answer was...complicated," because the Skunk Works "had, in fact, just tested, and attempted to replicate, a piece of metal that was said to have been gathered from a crashed UFO outside Roswell"; that To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science had bought the pieces of metal in 2019 for $35,000 from a UFO researcher, and that the fragments had reached the radio host Art Bell by mail in 1996 from a listener who wrote that a grandfather had collected them as part of a military crash-retrieval team at Roswell; that the Army agreed to test the metal for antigravity and cloaking properties; and that Kirkpatrick's team obtained it and had Oak Ridge National Laboratory test it, finding that "the alloy isn't from outer space and doesn't have antigravity properties" and was probably from a Second World War-era manufacturing test of an aircraft part or an armament such as a shell casing. According to the Journal, "Lockheed declined to comment and referred questions to the Army."⁷

Official statements

The July 26, 2023 hearing of a subcommittee of the House Oversight Committee, at which David Grusch testified under oath to "a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program," names no company in its transcript: the words Lockheed, Skunk Works, EG&G and Battelle do not occur in it. Asked by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez about "the interactions between defense contractor companies and any UAP-related programs," Grusch answered "the contractors, you know, or the metal benders, so to speak, the ones actually doing specific performance on government contracts"; asked by Representative Eric Burlison whether there was evidence the recovered aircraft were produced by domestic military contractors, he said "Not to my knowledge. Plus, the recoveries predate a lot of our advanced programs" that he was "waiving off."⁸

The Department of Defense's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office stated in February 2024 that it "found no empirical evidence for claims that the USG and private companies have been reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology"; that "The executives, scientists, and chief technology officers of the companies named by interviewees met with the Director of AARO and denied on the record that they have ever recovered, possessed, or engaged in reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial technology"; and, of a thirdhand account by one interviewee that an unnamed organization held twelve recovered craft and had a Central Intelligence Agency "partnership with the company that ended in 1989," that it "discovered no empirical evidence supporting these claims." The report does not name the companies. It describes "Lockheed Martin's Advanced Development Program organization, also known as 'Skunk Works'" as the developer of the P-175 Polecat unmanned aircraft (first flight 2005, disclosed at the 2006 Farnborough Airshow) and the RQ-170 Sentinel, and Lockheed Martin with Boeing and DARPA as developers of the RQ-3 Dark Star, which "Some observers asserted ... resembled a flying saucer with long narrow wings."⁹ A Pentagon spokeswoman, Sue Gough, told the Wall Street Journal that the investigation "has not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently."⁷

Ron Blackburn, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel then at the Skunk Works, helped John B. Alexander draw up the invitation list for the Advanced Theoretical Physics Working Group in 1984, according to Alexander (see those pages).

Rich and the E.T. joke

Rich's lecture line from 1983 that the Skunk Works had a contract to take E.T. home, and the 1993 account of it by Jan Harzan, are on the page for Ben Rich.¹⁰