by Phil Patton
It planned the first ICBMs and designed sensors for Robert McNamara’s line, the high-tech barrier planned for Vietnam’s Demilitarized Zone. It developed the autonomous land vehicle, a huge walking tank, like something out of the Imperial army in The Empire Strikes Back. DARPA created improved integrated circuits, sensors, and actuators, the sinews and joints of modern weaponry. But most important, DARPA’s funds had built up the computer industry in the 1960s and would give us the computer mouse and the Internet—initially called ARPANET.
To come up with a means of eluding the new, powerful radars, DARPA created a project called Harvey, after Jimmy Stewart’s invisible bunny pal, to look into making an airplane invisible to radar, or at least harder to see. It signed up four leading airplane builders and gave them four million dollars apiece to solve the problem. Lockheed was at first not among the four. The irony was that the Skunk Works achievements in reducing radar cross section on the Blackbirds, including the stealthy D-21 drone, had been so secret that no one in the Pentagon knew of them; thus when the discussion turned to stealth, no one thought of Lockheed. To get the company included in DARPA’s stealth studies, along with Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, and Northrop, Rich had to do some fast talking to DARPA’s George Heilmeier.
The Skunk Works was not in good odor. Kelly Johnson was seen as arrogant and difficult, living in the days of its past glories. To inform the DARPA scientists of the work the Skunk Works had done nearly a decade before, Rich had to persuade the CIA to release information on the stealthy technology of the A-12 and the D-21. With that information in hand he persuaded DARPA to let Lockheed participate.
One day in April 1975, just as he had settled down to a cup of instant decaffeinated coffee, Ben Rich had a visitor. He had taken over as boss of the Skunk Works in January and was looking for projects. Now a young man named Denys Overholser sat down and began to tell Rich about a footnote in a nine-year-old Russian technical paper that had only recently been translated by the Air Force Foreign Technology Division. Bearing the engaging title “Method of Edge Waves in the Physical Theory of Diffraction,” the article was the work of Pyotr Ufimtsev, chief scientist of the Moscow Institute of Radio Engineering. It was about radar-evading, “low observable” shapes, what would soon be known as “stealth.”1
Overholser explained to Rich that Ufimtsev had updated the equations of Hertz and Hermann Helmholtz so that one could for the first time calculate the radar reflection of a two-dimensional shape, such as the surface of an airplane. With that knowledge, you could design an airplane so that it would reflect radar waves away, off into space, instead of back to the receiver. And you could do this regardless of the size of the shape—in other words, a huge shape could be made to look small, almost invisible, on radar.
Overholser, a chunky mountain biker who had shaped radomes for the Skunk Works, was now assigned by Rich to turn the equations into a computer program and the program into the shape of a new airplane.
In five weeks, he and Bill Schroeder, the longtime Skunk Works radar and math whiz who had come out of retirement, wrote a program called Echo to do the calculations of an optimum shape for scattering radar beams. They took the numbers to a junior designer, Dick Sherrer, and by May 5 were back in Rich’s office with the results: drawings of an arrowhead-shaped airplane they called Hopeless Diamond.
“So would this one,” Rich asked, suggesting for comparison radar signatures given in terms of aircraft or bird types, “be the size of a Cessna or what, a condor, an eagle?”
“Ben,” Overholser said. “An eagle’s eyeball.”
Thereafter, Rich got hold of a number of ball bearings the approximate size of an eagle’s eyeball, and took them on his trips to the Pentagon, rolling them across generals’ desks and saying, “There’s your airplane!”
A few months later, someone on Rich’s staff gave him a bowling ball painted TOP SECRET: It was the radar signature of the whole Pentagon after it had been subjected to the Skunk Works stealth treatment.
When Johnson saw the sketch of the Hopeless Diamond, he literally kicked Ben Rich in the ass. “It’ll never get off the ground,” he predicted. Johnson had always said that if an aircraft looked beautiful, it would fly well. It was the classic premise of the great clipper-ship designers and race-car engineers. But this plane was ugly. Rich would write, “No one would dare to claim that the Hopeless Diamond would be a beautiful airplane. As a flying machine it looked alien.”
Johnson also loathed electronics, and this was an airplane designed for its electronics, by electricians. “If Kelly could find a hydraulic radio, he would use that,” went an old chestnut around the Skunk Works. He was famous for winning his quarter bets on this or that issue of technology; his penny-pinching ways were legendary at the Skunk Works, tokens of his hardscrabble upbringing. Now Rich bet him that the Hopeless Diamond would have a lower radar cross section than the fifteen-year-old D-21. (The calculations suggested it would be a thousand times less visible on radar.) On September 14, 1975, they took the two wooden models of the two aircraft into an electromagnetic chamber. The results were clear, and Johnson handed over the quarter, mumbling, “Don’t spend it until you see the thing fly.”
In October, they took the model to Gray Butte, the radar cross-section test site that belonged to McDonnell Douglas. On one occasion when the model was on the test pole, there was a sudden blossom of reflection. Uh-oh, the guys in the test center thought, was there some angle they had not considered? Then someone looked out at the model; on its pole in the middle of the concrete, they noticed that a large blackbird had landed on it. Even the droppings from birds could add to the radar reflection—a decibel and a half, as these things were measured, to a total reflection of three decibels.
Then in March 1976 they trucked the black-painted wooden model all the way to the Ratscat—the “radar scatter” facility at White Sands, New Mexico—for a “fly-off” with Northrop’s stealth model. The results were so overwhelmingly in favor of the Lockheed model that Northrop radar expert John Cashen was dismayed. The Hopeless Diamond was revolutionary—if it could actually fly. Nor was it clear that Kelly Johnson would be wrong about that. Making this shape fly depended on computers, as the airplane would be too unstable for a mere human pilot alone.
Although Johnson was appalled by it, the Stealth’s shape provided the very embodiment of the Skunk Works doctrine of simplicity. “It looked totally alien,” Ben Rich had said, because it was radically simple. It was a sculpture on the theme of the cutting away of excess, an airplane that flew no better than it had to so that it could not be seen.
Born inside a computer, it resembled what programmers call a wireframe drawing, making the most of limited processing power. In fact, it resembled the angular tanks and obstacles and flying saucers in the early video game called Battlezone. These shapes would eventually show up in a new kind of aerial combat that itself resembled a computer game.
With the machinists union on strike, Skunk Works managers did much of the work on the prototype. The engines were ground-tested at night in a rigged-up barrier composed of two tractor trailers. Then, on December 1, 1977, Bill Park, having demanded and received a twenty-five-thousand-dollar bonus to fly the ugliest airplane he had ever seen—especially after seeing the cockpit, which offered very little space from which to escape—lifted off the runway at Groom in what was now called the XST—experimental stealth testbed—or Have Blue.
Now the Skunk Works had to prove that the real airplane was as stealthy as the wooden model on the pole. Park and other pilots began testing it against real radars, the bad-guy radars, surreptitiously obtained, like the Red Hat squadron’s MiGs, and as carefully hidden in the remote corners of the Tonopah Test Range adjoining Dreamland.
During one test, Have Blue showed up as a bright blip on the screen. The engineers couldn’t understand what was wrong. Then someone noticed that three screws had not been driven flat. The heads sticking up just a fraction of an inch triggered a huge radar return.
It was soon cle
ar to William Perry, who had become Stealth’s champion at the Pentagon, that his scientists were looking at something as groundbreaking for warfare as the jet engine had been, or the machine gun, perhaps even as revolutionary as gunpowder or the crossbow. Keeping this shape hidden was vital. More than any airplane before, perhaps, the form signaled function. You got the idea just by seeing it.
In the late seventies, most of the world thought stealth meant paints or panels that absorbed radar, not the faceting of this airplane. Keeping Have Blue invisible became a top priority.
By day, the strange shape, only three fifths the size of the “real plane,” with a cramped cockpit and crude systems, could attract attention. At first the model was disguised in a mottled camou, browns and grays and light blue, but this did not seem to work very well, so it was repainted a light gray. It was never brought outside unless uncleared personnel had been exiled to the windowless mess hall or to quarters, and when Soviet satellites were scheduled to pass overhead it was left in the hangar or under the shelters, called “scoot and hide,” beside the taxiway.
In June 1977 a small unmarked passenger plane landed on the runway at Groom Lake and from it emerged President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. He met Rich and walked around Have Blue sitting in its hangar, and was briefed in a secure room. By the end of the month, Carter had canceled the B-1 bomber and put his faith in the “Advanced Technology Bomber,” the B-2 flying wing.
By the autumn of 1978 Have Blue had proved itself well enough that the Pentagon gave Lockheed a contract to build a fighter version. It was to be ready to fly by July 1980. That fighter, despite Kelly Johnson’s revulsion, would come to possess a kind of beauty that seemed at first far from conventional standards. It was a model of Dreamland itself: hard, angular, unabsorbing, unforgiving.
In reality, of course, the shape of the Stealth fighter reflected the state of the computer art at the time it was designed (applying Ufimtsev’s equations even on a big computer could yield only facet shapes). The calculation of radar reflectance from curves was a more complicated task and showed up in the B-2 bomber and the TR3A Black Manta, or “baby B-2.”
By 1980 the word stealth had begun to creep into media reports. CBS News television correspondent David Martin filed one pointed piece. It was unclear whether leaks in an election year were a matter of politics, but in August 1980, with candidate Ronald Reagan hitting Jimmy Carter hard on defense issues, Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, with Bill Perry standing beside him, talked about stealth as a breakthrough. Most people then thought in terms of bombers, since the revelation helped cover President Carter’s flank, exposed by the cancellation of the B-1. But there was a backlash, too, to the revelations, which the Republicans exploited: Carter should not have revealed such deep secrets.
The formal first flight came in April 1982, but it was another six years before the taxpayer would get a good look at the airplane. With generals and dignitaries lined up along the runway, the airplane began to taxi forward, with Bob Riedenauer at the controls. It slowly lifted off, but only a few feet above the runway it began to veer to one side. The shocked crowd watched as it flipped onto its back and fell onto the lake bed in a huge dust cloud. The rescue trucks rushed up and cut Riedenauer out as he hung upside down. He never flew again.
Mechanics had miswired a new control unit, switching the controls for yaw with those for pitch, so that when Riedenauer had attempted to pull up on the stick he actually sent the plane heeling to the right. Skunkers noted that this was a near duplicate of an accident in which Mele Vojvodich had almost died, in a Blackbird, on the same runway. But the crash was also a reminder that this unnatural shape depended as much on software as on hardware to fly. Its workings were no longer visible, in the manner of mechanical things, but hidden in computer code.
The shape of the craft itself, however, was an immediate signal as to its secret. And that shape would be hidden away in a new secret base north of Dreamland near the town of Tonopah.
I drove up to Tonopah one fall day, heading around the nuclear test site and the Nellis range. Las Vegas brags that it is “the city that never sleeps,” but I passed acres of new condos west of town, bedroom communities. Can a city that never sleeps dream? Or is its whole waking life a dream, the way the gambler’s is—the dream of the long shot?
At the entrance to the Paiute Indian reservation a billboard read CHEAP CIGARETTES. Farther up the road was Indian Springs, the old World War II air base where B-29s took off to drop bombs at the test site, where the Thunderbirds practice—and where Lazar said he was “debriefed.”
It looked much as it did twenty or even fifty years before—much as Groom Lake must have looked in the days of the U-2, I thought. But there was a recent addition—strange new inflatable buildings beside the flight line—and everything was surprisingly spruced up, as if the base had been restored for a film. (In one version of the Roswell story, Indian Springs had been the site of the first secret saucer storage facility, and perhaps for the storage of alien bodies as well.)
After Indian Springs the four-lane ran out. The sign MERCURY—NO SERVICES introduced the town that had grown from the base camp of the test site. Another sign announced that the fronting stretch of highway had been adopted by NEVADANS FOR PEACE. At first exhilarating, the distance soon became nauseating. I wondered if there could be such a thing as distance sickness, like altitude sickness, the lack of detail and purchase for the eye corresponding to a lack of oxygen.
GATEWAY TO DEATH VALLEY, a sign greeted cheerfully at Beatty. EST. 1903. RIO RANCHO RV PARK. BURRO INN: FULL HOOKUPS. Another pointed to Parumph, twenty-seven miles away, HEART OF THE OLD NEW WEST. And home, I knew, of the Art Bell Dreamland radio show, where conspiracy theorists talked to sleepless callers late at night.
Farther up the road, some of the towns seemed barely worth the trouble of designating them. It was as if the mapmakers had been desperate to work in a couple of dots in the white space so they would not be suspected of slacking off. The signs for the towns told of elevation rather than population, the former being a far more impressive figure.
The mountains now seemed to grow more angular, with pyramidal tops and neatly sliced sides. I had the odd thought that the landscape had crept in as a stylistic influence on the shape of the Stealth fighter, as critic John Ruskin, citing chalets in the Alps, had credited local landscape with influencing architecture.
By the time I got to Tonopah I was in a virtual blizzard. A huge American flag driven by the wind was noisily beating its heart out against a pole in front of the Forest Service office south of town. ELEVATION 6030. HOME OF THE STEALTH.
I stopped at the Forest Service office to get out of the weather and idly looked for maps. A heavy woman behind the counter chatted away. “My husband works out there at the site. Sometimes I go to pick him up, and he warned me that if I ever broke down to just stay in the car. ‘Don’t get out,’ he told me. They don’t like people poking around.”
At the local historical museum, the exhibits consisted mostly of odd pieces of equipment from the mines, chunks of silver ore, and pieces of crashed airplanes. An aerial photo showed a Stealth fighter flying above the old mining towers and piles of tailings. “Tonopah” means “land of little wood and water” in Paiute, but its mellifluous syllables had become magic to the stealth-chasers.
Tonopah was built on booms, interrupted by busts: the silver boom, then the big booms at the nuclear test site, and finally the sonic booms of secret planes. In 1900, silver was found in the Silver Bow mine, and saloons and casinos and whorehouses were thrown up overnight. In 1922 came the Big Casino, which touted itself as “the Monte Carlo of the desert.”
In October 1940 the government turned over some five thousand square miles of public land to the military for training. Government silver certificates replaced the paycheck of the silver miners. A base was in operation at Tonopah by July 1942, and would-be fighter pilots came to the area to learn to fly BT-13 trainers and the
P-39 fighter, so dangerous in its handling that both the American Army Air Corps and the RAF had rejected it.
Chuck Yeager was one of the first to train there. He lived in a tar-paper shack heated by an oil stove and recalled that the wind never seemed to stop blowing. “On paydays,” he would write, “we crowded around the blackjack tables of the Tonopah Club, drank ourselves blind on fifths of rotgut rye and bourbon, then staggered over to the local cathouse. Miss Taxine, the madam, tried to keep a fresh supply of gals so we wouldn’t get bored and become customers of Lucky Strike, a cathouse in Mina, about thirty miles down the road. But we went to Mina anyway, wrecked the place, and the sheriff ran us out of town. The next morning, a P-39 strafed Mina’s water tower.”
In the fifties, the opening of the test site to the south brought jobs for the miners and other hands. The skills of the miner, by happy coincidence, were in demand at the test site after the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty was signed in 1962. Testing went underground, and long tunnels had to be built to hold test equipment to record radiation and heat and blast.
Tonopah enjoyed a brief flurry of notoriety in 1957, when Howard Hughes married his longtime companion Jean Peters at the Mizpah Hotel. Hughes picked the Mizpah because he had business in the area to transact. His father had prospected here, and Hughes was betting that the silver veins were not quite tapped out. In a few months, he bought up some 710 claims, covering most of Tonopah along with some 14,200 acres of Nye and areas in other counties, for $10.5 million.
At just about the same time, the nuclear weapons designers at Sandia Labs in Albuquerque cast greedy eyes on the empty areas of the Nellis range south of the old Tonopah base and north of the test site. By 1958, they had set up the Tonopah Test and Training Range, dropping bombs to test fuses and cases and parachutes. The Interceptors would become intrigued by other sectors inside Tonopah’s ranges, such as the Tolicha Peak Electronic Warfare facility, Base Camp, to the north of Highway 6 near Warm Springs, and Site IV, where foreign radars are tested, the name an odd shadow of Bob Lazar’s mystery site, S-4, at Papoose Lake.