---
aliases:
  - Lockheed Skunk Works
  - Skunk Works
  - The Skunk Works
  - Skonk Works
  - Lockheed Advanced Development Projects
  - Advanced Development Projects
  - ADP
  - Lockheed Martin Skunk Works
  - Lockheed Martin Advanced Development Programs
  - Advanced Development Programs
category: "Private Organization"
tags:
  - Organization
  - Private
  - Aerospace
  - Lockheed
  - SkunkWorks
  - Area51
  - BlackProjects
  - UFO
  - Contractor
summary: "Lockheed's Burbank advanced development unit, begun in 1943 under Kelly Johnson, builder of the U-2, A-12 and F-117, and in some accounts a custodian of recovered craft, which the Pentagon denies."
location: "Burbank, California"
start: 1943
relations:
  - type: owned
    with: "[[Lockheed Aircraft Company]]"
    reverse: true
    start: 1943
    role: "advanced development division, formally Advanced Development Projects"
    fn: 1
  - type: head_of
    with: "[[Kelly Johnson]]"
    reverse: true
    start: 1943
    end: 1975
    role: "founding head of the unit and Lockheed chief engineer"
    fn: 1
  - type: contractor_to
    with: "[[Central Intelligence Agency]]"
    start: 1955
    role: "built the U-2 and the Groom Lake test site under Richard Bissell"
    fn: 2
  - type: subject_of
    with: "[[All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office]]"
    start: 2022
    role: "according to the Wall Street Journal, tested a purported Roswell metal fragment shortly before the Pentagon investigator asked six contractors in 2022 whether they held alien technology"
    fn: 9
created: 2026-10-03
updated: 2026-10-15
---

The Skunk Works is the nickname of [[Lockheed Aircraft Company]]'s Advanced Development Projects, later Advanced Development Programs of [[Lockheed Martin]]. The unit began in June 1943, when [[Washington, D.C.|Washington]] "anxiously watched [[Germany]] develop the world's first jet fighter" and turned to the 33-year-old chief engineer [[Kelly Johnson]], who was given British jet engines and 180 days and "readied 'Lulu Bell' in 143 days," the [[P-80 Shooting Star]]. By 1980 the unit had at any one time between 2,000 and 8,000 engineers, machinists and test pilots; its work "often involves building a plane here and transporting it by night in a cargo aircraft or truck to some testing strip in the [[Nevada]] desert"; Lockheed declined to answer questions about it; and margins on such work could reach 12 percent against about 6 percent on most military contracts, according to a securities analyst quoted by the [[The Wall Street Journal|Wall Street Journal]].[^1] The name came from [[Al Capp]]'s "[[Li'l Abner]]" comic strip, whose moonshine still was "the skonk works"; that an engineer named [[Irv Culver]] answered a telephone "Skonk Works" while the staff worked in a circus tent beside a plastics factory, and in 1960 Capp's publisher objected, so "we changed it to Skunk Works and registered the name and logo as trademarks," according to [[Ben Rich]], who headed the unit from January 17, 1975.[^2]

### The U-2 and Groom Lake

Rich wrote that the test pilot [[Tony LeVier]] found from the air and landed on the dry lake bed now called [[Groom Lake]], that Kelly Johnson flew back with LeVier and "a tall civilian introduced to him only as 'Mr. B.'" ([[Richard Bissell]]), who remarked "This will do nicely," and that Johnson's private log recorded flying "very illegally" over an atomic bomb on its tower about nine hours before detonation; Johnson proposed the name Paradise Ranch.[^2] The site's later history, including the CIA's 2013 acknowledgment, is on the page for [[Area 51]]. The unit built the [[U-2 Spy Plane]], the [[A-12]] and the [[SR-71]], and later the [[F-117 Nighthawk|F-117]]; [[EG&G]] tested the radar cross sections of its aircraft at the site beginning in 1959.[^2][^3]

The CIA's history of the U-2 and OXCART programs records that on April 12, 1955 Bissell and Colonel [[Osmund Ritland]] of the Air Force flew over Nevada with Johnson in a Beechcraft piloted by Lockheed's chief test pilot LeVier, saw an airstrip beside a salt flat known as Groom Lake near the northeast corner of the [[Atomic Energy Commission]]'s Nevada Proving Ground, and that Johnson called the site the Paradise Ranch.[^3] A military transport bound for Area 51 crashed on November 17, 1955 and killed fourteen people, among them personnel from Lockheed and Hycon.[^4] The same history states that Blue Book investigators "regularly called on the Agency's Project Staff in Washington to check reported UFO sightings against U-2 flight logs" and that "U-2 and later OXCART flights accounted for more than one-half of all UFO reports during the late 1950s and most of the 1960s."[^4]

The annual report of [[Lockheed Martin]] on Form 10-K405 for 1995 states that the [[Environmental Protection Agency]] and the [[United States Army]] Criminal Investigative Command were conducting a criminal investigation "to determine whether the Corporation improperly disposed of wastes from The Skunk Works at a government site in Nevada."[^5]

### Kelly Johnson's sightings and the Blue Book file

On December 16, 1953 a Lockheed WV-2 flight test crew of five, [[Roy E. Wimmer]], [[Rudy L. Thoren]], [[Philip A. Colman]], [[Charles Grugan]] and [[Joseph F. Ware Jr.]], and Johnson and his wife Althea at their ranch near [[Agoura, California|Agoura]], independently watched a black, sharp-edged object over the sea west of [[Los Angeles]] that dwindled and vanished. According to the study of the case by [[Martin Shough]] of the [[National Aviation Reporting Centre on Anomalous Phenomena]], on the next day Thoren mentioned the sighting in Johnson's office and Johnson described his own, whereupon the two groups found they had watched the same object; Johnson collected five reports "under special cover" and they were forwarded through Lieutenant General [[Donald L. Putt|D. L. Putt]] to the [[Air Technical Intelligence Center]] ([[Foreign Technology Division|ATIC]]) at [[Wright-Patterson Air Force Base]]. Putt's covering letter of February 15, 1954 to the ATIC commander, Colonel [[George L. Wertenbaker]], says the report "was handed to me by Lockheed personnel with the explanation that Mr. Johnson was most reluctant to write the report in the first place and then refused to forward it on to you because of his belief that those who profess to have seen flying saucers are not usually considered to be logical and practical hard-headed engineers." Johnson's own report of December 18, 1953 is addressed to the "Air Force Investigating Group on Flying Saucers." Shough records that Johnson stated, "in official confidence," that around Christmas 1951 he had seen a fast-moving "flame or emanation" of "beautiful light blue" colour near [[Brents Junction]] that he believed to be a "flying saucer," and that Ware's statement in the file describes a large circular object he watched from his own roof about Christmas 1951 and visits to "the group of people" at [[Giant Rock]] who "eat and sleep saucers." Shough found that the Blue Book file consists only of the reports as forwarded, with Ware's map missing and no recorded inquiry, and that the [[Project Blue Book]] record card gives the conclusion "OTHER - CLOUD lenticular cloud." Shough wrote that "The only conventional explanation having even a little plausibility is an unusually compact and well-defined lenticular wave cloud," but that "such a cloud seems unlikely."[^6]

The Kelly Johnson file among the papers of Ben Rich at the [[Huntington Library]] includes the document "Sighting of a flying saucer by certain Lockheed Aircraft Corporation personnel on 16 December 1953."[^7]

### Accounts of recovered material at the Skunk Works

The [[Wilson-Davis Memo|Wilson-Davis notes]] of October 16, 2002, attributed to [[Eric Davis]], quote Vice Admiral [[Thomas R. Wilson]] as saying that in June 1997 he found in a records group of the [[Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology]] a program run by "An aerospace technology contractor," "one of the top ones in US," "the best one of them," with intelligence "in their corporate portfolio," and declined to name it: "Core secret," "can't tell." The notes record Wilson describing a conference room "secure vault" meeting with a program director, a corporate attorney and a retired [[National Security Agency]] security director who called themselves "the watch committee," and an "intact craft" "not of this Earth."[^8] The contractor is not named in the notes. A letter of April 25, 2002 paper-clipped into them, from [[Will Miller]], offers "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" and "A list of civilian government contractors" likely to have "current involvement in and knowledge of USG work in alien-derived technologies."[^8] Wilson told the [[Sarasota Herald-Tribune]] reporter [[Billy Cox]] in 2020: "It's all fiction."[^8]

The Wall Street Journal reported on June 21, 2025 that Davis, "for years ... 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." The same account states that in 2022 [[Sean Kirkpatrick]], then the [[Pentagon]]'s UFO investigator, asked executives of the six largest defense contractors "Have any of your companies ever gained access to alien technology?"; that for Lockheed Martin "the answer was...complicated," because the Skunk Works "had, in fact, just tested, and attempted to replicate, a piece of metal that was said to have been gathered from a crashed UFO outside [[Roswell Incident|Roswell]]"; that [[To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science]] had bought the pieces of metal in 2019 for $35,000 from a UFO researcher, and that the fragments had reached the radio host [[Art Bell]] by mail in 1996 from a listener who wrote that a grandfather had collected them as part of a military crash-retrieval team at Roswell; that the [[United States Army|Army]] agreed to test the metal for antigravity and cloaking properties; and that Kirkpatrick's team obtained it and had [[Oak Ridge National Laboratory]] test it, finding that "the alloy isn't from outer space and doesn't have antigravity properties" and was probably from a [[World War II|Second World War]]-era manufacturing test of an aircraft part or an armament such as a shell casing. According to the Journal, "Lockheed declined to comment and referred questions to the Army."[^9]

In his written testimony of September 9, 2025 [[George Knapp]] wrote that "It has been widely reported over many years that aerospace titan Lockheed Martin is one of the defense contractors entrusted with mystery material and perhaps entire craft." He testified that he had "confirmed that Bigelow and a trusted colleague met with and negotiated with a senior executive at Lockheed and hammered out a deal wherein Bigelow's company, BAASS, would receive a quantity of unusual material that Lockheed was safeguarding at a facility in California," and that "The agreement was not completed."[^10] [[Keith Basterfield]] wrote on November 30, 2023 that [[David Grusch]], in an interview with Joe Rogan, had said that Senator [[Harry Reid]] sought under the contract of [[Robert Bigelow]]'s [[Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies]] to have retrieved material transferred from Lockheed Martin, quoting Grusch: "the other government customer which was the Central Intelligence Agency for that specific Lockheed material...from the 50's...bits and pieces of hull structures."[^11] At the House Oversight hearing of November 13, 2024 [[Luis Elizondo]] said that a document cleared by the Defense Department's Office of Prepublication and Security Review stated that "an aerospace contract company" had "requested to divest itself of the material" that "was collected in the 1950s," and agreed that the company was Bigelow Aerospace; when Representative [[Eric Burlison]] cited the journalist [[Christopher Sharp]] as reporting a transfer among Lockheed Martin, Bigelow Aerospace and the CIA that was blocked, Elizondo answered: "it was blocked. Why it was blocked, I can only surmise."[^12]

### Official statements

The July 26, 2023 hearing of a subcommittee of the [[House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform|House Oversight Committee]], at which [[David Grusch]] testified under oath to "a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program," names no company in its transcript: the words Lockheed, Skunk Works, EG&G and [[Battelle Memorial Institute|Battelle]] do not occur in it. Asked by Representative [[Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez]] about "the interactions between defense contractor companies and any UAP-related programs," Grusch answered "the contractors, you know, or the metal benders, so to speak, the ones actually doing specific performance on government contracts"; asked by Representative [[Eric Burlison]] whether there was evidence the recovered aircraft were produced by domestic military contractors, he said "Not to my knowledge. Plus, the recoveries predate a lot of our advanced programs" that he was "waiving off."[^13]

The [[Department of Defense]]'s [[All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office]] stated in February 2024 that it "found no empirical evidence for claims that the USG and private companies have been reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology"; that "The executives, scientists, and chief technology officers of the companies named by interviewees met with the Director of AARO and denied on the record that they have ever recovered, possessed, or engaged in reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial technology"; and, of a thirdhand account by one interviewee that an unnamed organization held twelve recovered craft and had a [[Central Intelligence Agency]] "partnership with the company that ended in 1989," that it "discovered no empirical evidence supporting these claims." The report also describes an interviewee's claim that an organization was in possession of off-world material in 2009 and 2010, and a separate interviewee's statement that he took part in negotiations to return the material to the government and that "a former named senior CIA official quashed the proposal to remove the material from the corporation." The report does not name the companies. It describes "Lockheed Martin's Advanced Development Program organization, also known as 'Skunk Works'" as the developer of the [[P-175 Polecat]] unmanned aircraft (first flight 2005, disclosed at the 2006 [[Farnborough Airshow]]) and the [[RQ-170 Sentinel]], and Lockheed Martin with [[Boeing]] and [[DARPA|DARPA]] as developers of the [[RQ-3 Dark Star]], which "Some observers asserted ... resembled a flying saucer with long narrow wings."[^14] A Pentagon spokeswoman, [[Sue Gough]], told the Wall Street Journal that the investigation "has not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently."[^9]

[[Ron Blackburn]], a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel then at the Skunk Works, helped [[John B. Alexander]] draw up the invitation list for the [[Advanced Theoretical Physics Working Group]] in 1984, according to Alexander (see those pages).

### Rich and the E.T. joke

Rich's lecture line from 1983 that the Skunk Works had a contract to take E.T. home, and the 1993 account of it by [[Jan Harzan]], are on the page for Ben Rich.[^15]

### Footnotes

[^1]: Roy J. Harris Jr., "The Skunk Works: Hush-Hush Projects Often Emerge There," The Wall Street Journal, October 13, 1980, CIA-RDP90-00806R000100660006-2, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp90-00806r000100660006-2
[^2]: Ben R. Rich and Leo Janos, Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed (Boston: Little, Brown, 1994), https://archive.org/details/skunk-works-apersonal-memoir-of-my-years-at-lockheed-ben-rrich (text lines 180 to 200, 1440 to 1456, 2937 to 2950, 3462 to 3480 and the footnote at 9208).
[^3]: Gregory W. Pedlow and Donald E. Welzenbach, The Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance: The U-2 and OXCART Programs, 1954-1974 (Washington: CIA History Staff, 1992; published in 1998 by the Center for the Study of Intelligence as The CIA and the U-2 Program, 1954-1974), chapter 2, pp. 56 to 57 (flight of April 12, 1955, Groom Lake and the Paradise Ranch), https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB434/docs/U2%20-%20Chapter%202.pdf ; chapter 6, p. 274 (EG&G radar test facility moved to Area 51, September 10, 1959), https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB434/docs/U2%20-%20Chapter%206.pdf
[^4]: Pedlow and Welzenbach, The Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance, chapter 2, pp. 72 to 73 ("U-2s, UFOs, and Operation BLUE BOOK") and p. 72 (the crash of November 17, 1955), https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB434/docs/U2%20-%20Chapter%202.pdf
[^5]: Lockheed Martin Corporation, Form 10-K405 for the fiscal year 1995, filed March 13, 1996, Item 3, Legal Proceedings, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/936468/0000950109-96-001535.txt
[^6]: Martin Shough, "A Study of the Lockheed Sightings," National Aviation Reporting Centre on Anomalous Phenomena, July 2014, summary, sections 1 and 7 and appendix (letters of Putt, February 15, 1954, and Johnson, January 23 and December 18, 1953; statements of Ware and others), https://mail.project1947.com/fig/Lockheed_Case_Dec_16_1953.pdf (scans at nicap.org/docs/lockufo3.pdf).
[^7]: Huntington Library, "Ben R. Rich papers, 1940-1995," Online Archive of California, https://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c86d5rqx/admin/
[^8]: "EWD NOTES 10/16/02, Eric Davis Meeting with Adm. Wilson," pp. 3 to 4 and 8 to 13, https://documents2.theblackvault.com/casefiles/wilsonleak.pdf ; Wilson's 2020 statement to Billy Cox as reproduced in The Black Vault, https://www.theblackvault.com/casefiles/the-admiral-wilson-leak-an-analysis/ . Provenance of the notes unverified; Davis has not commented.
[^9]: Joel Schectman and Aruna Viswanatha, "Was It Scrap Metal or an Alien Spacecraft? The Army Asked an Elite Defense Lab to Investigate," The Wall Street Journal, June 21, 2025 (print edition of June 23, 2025, as "A UFO Legend Lands Up at Elite Defense Lab"), read from an archived copy at https://gwern.net/doc/www/www.wsj.com/9c50364a40ee3cbeb3463a6068c4884ff0f637cc.html
[^10]: George Knapp, written testimony, House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, hearing "Restoring Public Trust Through UAP Transparency and Whistleblower Protection," Serial No. 119-44, September 9, 2025, https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/George-Knapp-Written-Testimony.pdf
[^11]: Keith Basterfield, "Lockheed Martin and BAASS," November 30, 2023, quoting Lacatski, Kelleher and Knapp, Inside the US Government Covert UFO Program: Initial Revelations (RTMA, 2023) and the Department of Homeland Security response to the Freedom of Information Act request of Marc Cecotti, https://ufos-scientificresearch.blogspot.com/2023/11/lockheed-martin-and-baass.html
[^12]: House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth," joint hearing, November 13, 2024, Serial No. 118-135, questions of Representatives Burlison and Mace, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-118hhrg57440/html/CHRG-118hhrg57440.htm
[^13]: House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs, hearing "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency," July 26, 2023, Serial No. 118-53, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-118hhrg53022/html/CHRG-118hhrg53022.htm (full text searched; no company named in the testimony of Grusch, Ryan Graves or David Fravor other than Graves's reference to Boeing contractors at Vandenberg).
[^14]: Department of Defense, All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, Volume I, February 2024, pp. 7 to 9, 28 to 29 and 44 to 45, https://media.defense.gov/2024/Mar/08/2003409233/-1/-1/0/DOPSR-CLEARED-508-COMPLIANT-HRRV1-08-MAR-2024-FINAL.PDF (read from the Wayback Machine raw copy).
[^15]: Peter W. Merlin, "Taking E.T. Home: Birth of a Modern Myth," SUNlite 5, no. 6 (2013), https://web.archive.org/web/20150321193509/home.comcast.net/~tprinty/UFO/SUNlite5_6.pdf