ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

Chapter 11
If antigravity had been discovered in the white world, then someone,
somewhere had to be perfecting it—maybe even building real
hardware—in the black. The trouble was, I had no idea where to begin
looking for it. Contrary to the implicit promise of revelation contained in
Dr. Dan Marckus' hints by the estuary, neither Lyles nor Puthoff had
taken me any further in so far as hard-and-fast leads were concerned.
On my return, I tried to raise Marckus. I left several messages on his
answering machine. In the first of them I foolishly spelled out the fact
that I didn't know a whole lot more—beyond strict theory, at least—than
I had before my trip to the States.
During subsequent calls, as the answering machine clicked in, I just
knew that Marckus was there—listening in, but refusing to pick up. I was
beginning to get the measure of this relationship. Marckus gave a little
and I had to give something back. He now knew that I had returned from
the States with nothing, so he was punishing me for it. Well, I didn't need
to play psych games with some spook academic with a warped taste for
drama. I had enough on my plate already—a major feature article on
stealth technology to deliver. Antigravity, for the time being, was going
to have to go on the back burner and Marckus could stew with it.
As background, I reread an account of what is probably the most
definitive history of stealth to date: Skunk Works, the story of Lockheed
Martin's super-secretive special projects facility, as told by the guy who
had run it for 16 years, Ben Rich.
In the summer of 1976, America's leading radar expert, Professor
Lindsay Anderson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, arrived
at what was then the Lockheed Skunk Works in Burbank, California,
with a bag of ball bearings in his briefcase. The ball bearings ranged in
size from a golf ball to an eighth of an inch in diameter. Rich, a grizzled
veteran of Lockheed's secret projects department for more than 25 years,
led Anderson to a mocked-up design of a funny-looking diamond-shaped
aircraft, poised on a plinth in the middle of a blacked-out hangar.
Over the course of the day, Anderson repeatedly attached the ball
115