Area 51_ An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base - Annie Jacobsen [65]
It was September of 1957, and Edward Lovick was standing on Lockheed’s antenna pattern range tinkering with echo returns when Kelly Johnson approached him for a chat. Lovick, then a thirty-eight-year-old physicist, was known among colleagues as Lockheed’s radar man. Radar was still a relatively new science but Lovick knew more about the subject than anyone else at Lockheed at the time.
“Would you like to come work on an interesting project?” the boss asked Lovick. In his eight-and-a-half-year tenure at the company, Lovick had never seen Kelly Johnson before. But standing beside Johnson were William Martin and L. D. MacDonald, two scientists Lovick considered to be brilliant. Martin was Lovick’s former boss, and the three men used to work together in the antenna lab. Martin and MacDonald had since disappeared to work on projects inside Building 82, a large, nondescript hangar at the north end of the facility where Lockheed’s black operations went on. As for the project that Kelly Johnson was asking Lovick to join, Johnson said it might finish in six weeks. Instead, it lasted thirty-two years. Although Lovick had no idea at the time, he was being invited into Lockheed’s classified group, officially called Advanced Development Projects but nicknamed the Skunk Works. In 1957, its primary customer was the CIA.
Lovick was granted his top secret security clearance and briefed on the U-2 aircraft. He learned about the death of test pilot Robert Sieker at Area 51, just four months before. “My first assignment at Lockheed came as a direct result of this tragedy,” Lovick recalls. Sieker’s death had inadvertently played a role in the invention of the most significant military application of the twentieth century, and it led Ed Lovick to become known as the grandfather of stealth. What the Boston Group at MIT had attempted to do—add stealth features via paint to an existing airplane—had proved futile. But what Lovick and his team would soon discover was that stealth could be achieved if it was designed as a feature in the early drawing boards.
“The purpose of stealth, or antiradar technology,” Lovick explains, “is to keep the enemy from sensing or detecting an aircraft, from tracking it, and therefore from shooting it down. The goal is to trick the enemy’s air defenses though camouflage or concealment.” Camouflage has been one of the most basic foundations of military strength since man first made spears. In ancient warfare, soldiers concealed themselves from the enemy using tree branches as disguise. Millennia later, American independence was gained partly because the British ignored this fundamental; their bright red coats made them easy targets for a band of revolutionaries in drab, ragtag dress. In the animal kingdom, all species depend on antipredator adaptation for survival, from the chameleon, which defines the idea, to the arctic fox, which turns from brown in summer months to white in winter. Lockheed’s U-2s were being tracked over the Soviet Union because they had no camouflage or antiradar technologies, so the Soviets could not only detect the U-2s but also accurately track the spy planes’ precise flight paths.
To stay ahead of the Russians, Richard Bissell envisioned a new spy plane that would outfox Soviet radar. The CIA wanted an airplane with a radar cross section so low it would be close to invisible, the theory being that the Russians couldn’t object to what they didn’t know was there.
The aircraft would be radically different, unlike anything the world had ever seen, or rather, not seen, before. It would beat Soviet advances in radar technology in three fields: height, speed, and stealth. The airplane needed to fly at ninety