Lockheed’s Advanced Development Programs division, founded in 1943 under Kelly Johnson to build a jet fighter in six months, and the organisation that produced the U-2, the SR-71, Have Blue and the F-117.
Why it is the reference case for concealment
Because it demonstrates, in the open and after the fact, that a large aircraft programme can be run to operational service without the public or most of the government knowing. The F-117 flew operationally from 1983 and was revealed in November 1988; the head of Air Force research and development was not cleared for a stealth programme run out of his own office. The Hunt for Zero Point builds its argument on that precedent: the claim that we would have heard carries almost no weight against a system built like this one.
The asymmetry that argument has to answer
Stealth eventually surfaced, on the news and in service, because it was useful. The antigravity claim requires a technology held for half a century and never once used, which is a different proposition. Ben Rich, the division’s second director, supplies the remark most often quoted in this literature, that anything you can imagine we already know how to do; it is a remark rather than a document, and it is the weakest kind of evidence a strong case can rest on.
Connections
Have Blue · Ben Rich · The Hunt for Zero Point · Nick Cook · Black Budget · Signature Management · Bakersfield F-117 Crash 1986 · Podesta Emails · Tom DeLonge · Legacy Program