Ben Rich

“Ben Rich also, who is the, you know, Skunk Works guy, you know, in the 90s, president of Skunk Works, who is responsible for, you know, the SR-71 and, or sorry, he was responsible for modern stealth aircraft.”

“Rich, who died in 1995, had been notorious for dropping mischievous hints that the United States had achieved a huge technological breakthrough that was still being kept under wraps.”

“He befriended engineer Ben Rich, the former Director of US aerospace company Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works (the pseudonym for Lockheed Martin's secretive Advanced Developments Projects division, where many of America's most advanced aircraft have been designed).”

“'To quote Ben Rich in his last comment to me just before he died,' Goodall told me from San Francisco, '"Jim, we have things out in the desert that are 50 years beyond what you can comprehend. Not what you think we can make in 50 years but what you can comprehend. And if you've seen movies like Star Trek and Star Wars, we've been there, done that or decided it wasn't worth the effort".'”

“Goodall also recounts an address Ben Rich gave in March 1993 to a small group of alumni at the University of California Los Angeles engineering school.”

“Both engineer Jan Harzan and aerospace engineer T.L. Keller, who were among the group, attested that Rich admitted that the US had figured out how to do interstellar travel, and that, without explanation, he said, 'there was an error in the equations'.”

“Harzan described how when Ben Rich ended his talk, he showed a slide portraying a black disc zipping off into space”

“Rich's final words to the packed auditorium were, '"We've discovered what it is, and we now have the technology to travel to the stars" – to take ET home is what he actually said.”

“I asked him once or twice "How does it work?" and he didn't really want to go there.”

“And I said, "Hi, I'm Jan Harzan, I'm an alumni. I have a real fascination with what you're talking about, particularly the propulsion side of this". And I said, "Can you tell me how it works?" And he said, "Well, let me ask you. How does ESP work?" And I was like two steps back. I wasn't really expecting a question. I was looking for an answer. And I just quipped real quickly, "I don't know, all points in space and time are connected." And that's when he said, "That's how it works." And he turned and walked out of the room.”

“Perhaps believers in the extra-terrestrial explanation for UAPs were far too credulous in taking the former Skunk Works boss literally. America would certainly like its strategic rivals, Russia and China, to think it now has an edge with such sci-fi-like technology, so perhaps Rich was using the opportunity to sprinkle disinformation through a prominent aerospace journalist.”

“Ben Rich certainly enjoyed a joke; he dropped a similarly mischievous comment to another friend, the late Testor Corporation stealth aircraft model-kit designer John Andrews.”

“In July 1986, Andrews had written to Ben Rich asking him to clarify whether he believed in both man-made UFOs and extra-terrestrial UFOs.”

“Rich replied in his letter, 'Dear John, Yes, I'm a believer in both categories. I feel everything is possible. Many of our man-made UFOs are Un Funded Opportunities.' (Ben Rich's emphasis.)”

“He writes about an international corporate board of directors that deals with the UFO issue.”

“And so, and then you have Sekret Machines, the Maynard consortium, which is described very similarly to those two things.”

“Ben Rich was saying, well, he was saying at the end of his life, he was talking about UFOs and he was lamenting the fact that the UFO issue was governed by this international corporate board and was hoping that it would be taken under the kind of umbrella of, you know, American Intel and aerospace world more.”

“you hear a guy who's at the tip of the spear when it comes to building recon planes for the CIA and, you know, very advanced American defense tech”

“And he's saying that there's something international above him that governs the UFO issue.”