Ben Rich

Benjamin Robert Rich was born Ben Reich in Manila on June 18, 1925, came to the United States in May 1941 with his family and changed his surname to Rich when he was naturalized in 1947.¹ He took a B.S. in mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley in 1949 and an M.S. at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1950, and joined Lockheed Aircraft Company in 1950 as a design specialist in thermodynamics, aerodynamics and propulsion, working on the F-94, F-90, C-130 and F-104. He moved to Lockheed's Advanced Development Projects, the Lockheed Skunk Works, in 1955; the aeronautical historian Peter Merlin wrote in 2013 that he joined "in 1954 as a thermodynamicist on the XF-104 project."¹⁴ In his memoir Rich wrote that Kelly Johnson had phoned Lockheed's heat transfer specialist Bernie Messinger "asking him to borrow a competent thermodynamicist for an undisclosed Skunk Works project," and that "Bernie tapped me."²

Career at the Skunk Works

As a senior design specialist Rich worked on the U-2 Spy Plane, helped design from 1956 to 1958 the CL-400, a liquid hydrogen reconnaissance aircraft for the Air Force's Project Suntan, and worked on the engine inlets of the SR-71.¹ He wrote that on January 17, 1975 he parked "for the first time in the boss's slot" in front of the unmarked Skunk Works building at the Burbank airport, that the formal name was "Lockheed's Advanced Development Projects," and that he was fifty years old.² A Wall Street Journal article of October 13, 1980, preserved in the CIA's reading room, describes the unit as then "headed by longtime Johnson associate Ben R. Rich" and quotes former employees on its habit of building aircraft in Burbank and moving them "by night" to "some testing strip in the Nevada desert."⁵ Rich's own account of the first Have Blue flight at the Nevada range on December 1, 1977 describes it as taking place "at this very same highly secret sand pile" where the U-2 first flew, a site "we built for the CIA" which Johnson had named "Paradise Ranch"; he wrote that the Air Force chief of staff then classified Have Blue "Top Secret, Special Access Required," a category the memoir compares to the Manhattan Project.² He wrote that the stealth story began in July 1975 with a Pentagon briefing on Soviet air defenses, after which his mathematician Denys Overholser found, in a Moscow paper of nine years earlier by the radar scientist Pyotr Ufimtsev, chief scientist at the Moscow Institute of Radio Engineering, titled "Method of Edge Waves in the Physical Theory of Diffraction," a method of calculating radar cross sections; he wrote that the paper "had only recently been translated by the Air Force Foreign Technology Division from the original Russian language," and that Ufimtsev "had provided us with an 'industrial-strength' theory." He recounts that aerodynamicists including Dick Cantrell "seriously thought that maybe we would do better trying to build an actual flying saucer," whose shape "was the ultimate in low observability," and adds: "The problem was finding ways to make a saucer fly ... But how? The Martians wouldn't tell us."² He wrote that the Air Force's F-117 Nighthawk squadron, which "finally moved into Tonopah in 1984" (an airstrip on the Nellis Air Force Range about 140 miles from Las Vegas, "originally used by the Sandia National Laboratories for nuclear warhead testing"), flew A-7 attack fighters as its cover and that "The word was purposely leaked that our A-7 fighters were carrying supersecret atomic antiradar devices that would render the airplane invisible to enemy defenses"; he described the devices as old napalm canisters painted black with a radiation tag reading "Reactor Cooling Fill Port," and wrote that Air Police closed a base in South Korea and had runway crews face away when the aircraft taxied.²

Rich retired on December 31, 1990; Kelly Johnson died on December 22, 1990. He published Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed with Leo Janos in 1994, thanking among others the retired colonel Barry Hennessey and "Don Welzenbach of the CIA," and died of cancer on January 5, 1995.¹² The National Academy of Engineering's memorial tributes carry a chapter on him.³

Anecdotes in the memoir

The memoir records other encounters with the subject. Rich wrote that for the Blackbird flights "We had to clear FAA controllers along the flight paths, otherwise they'd think they were seeing flying saucers at Mach 3 plus on their radar screens," and told of a U-2 pilot from Taiwan, among pilots he said he briefed on the aircraft's propulsion system at Burbank in the summer of 1959, who flamed out on a training flight from the Nevada base and glided into a Cortez, Colorado airport at dusk, where the airport manager "almost fainted" at the sight of an aircraft "long and sleek with enormous wings" and "an alien in a space suit" shouting "Quick. Get gun. Guard plane. Very, very secret."²

The E.T. line

Merlin documented that Rich used a closing line, which Merlin calls a joke, in his lectures from the spring of 1983, after the release of the film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. At a Defense Week symposium in Washington on September 20, 1983 Rich said: "The Skunk Works has been assigned the task of getting E.T. back home." Merlin dates earlier uses to a presentation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in April 1983, and later ones to the United States Naval Academy on September 6, 1984, the Beverly Hills chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution on May 23, 1990 ("last week we received a contract to take E.T. back home"), and a 1993 speech at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base ("The Air Force has just given us a contract to take E.T. back home"), each time with a slide of a flying saucer. Merlin cites the personal papers of Rich at the Huntington Library for the speeches.⁴

Jan Harzan, later executive director of the Mutual UFO Network, told a radio network in January 2012 and Alejandro Rojas of Open Minds in July 2013 that he attended a March 1993 alumni lecture by Rich at UCLA with Tom Keller, whose account of the lecture appeared in the May 2010 issue of the MUFON UFO Journal. Harzan said Rich showed about two dozen slides, ended with one of a disk-shaped craft, and concluded: "We now have the technology to take E.T. home." Harzan said that after the lecture Rich told one engineer, "We now know how to travel to the stars. We found an error in the equations and it won't take a lifetime to do it," and, when Harzan pressed him on interstellar propulsion, asked "how does ESP work?" and answered Harzan's reply with "That's how it works." Merlin wrote in 2013 that the sentence Keller and Harzan heard was the standard tag line "carefully honed over the span of a decade," that two circulating quotations ("We already have the means to travel among the stars ..." and "we have to find out where Einstein went wrong") have no source, and that Rich told Popular Science in 1994: "There are some new programs, and there are certain things, some of them 20 or 30 years old, that are still breakthroughs and appropriate to keep quiet about [because] other people don't have them yet." Merlin also quotes a letter of July 1986 from Rich to the Testor Corporation model designer John Andrews, who had asked what he thought of manmade or extraterrestrial UFOs: "I'm a believer in both categories. I feel everything is possible. ... In both categories, there are a lot of kooks and charlatans, be cautious."⁴

The Kelly Johnson file among Rich's papers at the Huntington Library includes the document "Sighting of a flying saucer by certain Lockheed Aircraft Corporation personnel on 16 December 1953," the report forwarded to the Air Technical Intelligence Center in 1954 (see Lockheed Skunk Works).¹

Accounts placing the F-117 and the Skunk Works in crash-retrieval stories

Notes attributed to the physicist Eric Davis include a letter dated April 25, 2002 from a "Will Miller" of Belleair Bluffs, Florida, offering Davis and Hal Puthoff help with "UFO crash retrievals," and listing as the first item "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."⁶ The Department of Defense's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office wrote in 2024 that one interviewee claimed that circa 1999 a former senior military officer told him that he had touched the surface of an extraterrestrial spacecraft, that about 150 individuals worked on the program, and that it was kept "outside of government" so the technology could remain proprietary; in a separate passage the report states that an interviewee's claim that a named former officer described physically touching an extraterrestrial spacecraft was "denied on the record by the named former officer who recounted a story of when he touched an F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter."⁷ The Wall Street Journal reported on June 21, 2025 that Davis "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."⁸