Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Ben Rich, Area 51 & Taking ET Home

In his autobiography, Skunk Works, Ben Rich wrote that while Lockheed was developing the stealth plane, 
Ben Rich

"Some of our senior engineers thought it might be easier to build a flying saucer. The problem was how to build one… We don't know how to do that. The Martians wouldn’t tell us.” 

Rich had a sense of humor, and he could engage in some boastful sensationalizing (BS for short) to improve a story.

It came from Area 51

The myth of the Skunk Works super technology is closely tied to the lore of UFOs. The stories told by Paul Bennewitz were repeated by John Lear, who grafted Area 51 onto the narrative. Shortly afterwards, Bob Lazar surfaced to spotlight Area 51, which soon gave rise to stories of the legendary Aurora.

The Area 51 "Interceptors," Jim Goodall and John Andrews were involved in pusrsuing this, as well as Andrews' friend Lee Graham, who got tangled in the MJ-12 document circus. Andrews and Goodall tried to coax Stealth secrets and UFO stories out of Ben Rich, but he mostly responded in friendly deflecting replies. If Ben Rich ever made extravagent statements about Lockheed spacecraft, there's no indication that it was anything more than words.

Kooks and Charlatans

On the forum Above Top Secret, ATSZOMBIE asked about the Skunk works legends,
Ben Rich, stated during a 1993, Alumni Speech at UCLA, 
A traceable context for the quote, if he actually did gave it? 

Peter Merlin

There were several floundering answers, but using the screen name Shadowhawk, aviation historian Peter Merlin joined the conversation:

Ben Rich is constantly misquoted as saying "We now have the technology to take E.T home." That is not what he said. 

At the end of his presentation he showed his final slide, a picture of a disk-shaped craft – the classic “flying saucer” – flying into a partly cloudy sky with a burst of sunlight in the background and he gave his standard tagline. It was a joke he had used in numerous presentations since 1983 when Steven Spielberg’s "E.T. the Extraterrestrial," a film about a young boy befriending a lost visitor from space and helping the alien get home, had become the highest-grossing film of all-time. Rich apparently decided to capitalize on this popularity. By the summer of 1983, he had added the flying saucer picture to the end of a set of between 12 and 25 slides that he showed with his lecture on the history of Lockheed's famed Skunk Works division. 






Merlin goes on to say in another comment:

The main point of my earlier posts was simply that Ben Rich did not say what some people claim he said. Most of his so-called quotes are not traceable back to a reliable source. The Keller/Harzan accounts of his 1993 UCLA speech are based solely on memory and were only reported years after the event. The overall description of Rich's presentation matches (for the most part) his standard script, though I'm not sure that I believe he ended that talk with a discussion of the F-117A. By 1993, he was ending with the YF-22 winning the Advanced Tactical Fighter fly-off competition, something the Skunk Works was justifiably proud of at the time. Perhaps he mentioned it earlier in his UCLA speech, or maybe Keller and Harzan simply forgot. It is not really important. I won't hold it against Keller and Harzan that they describe his UFO slide as a black disk flying into space, rather than as a metallic flying saucer in a cloudy sky with a sunburst. Their description is not bad for being based on memory, and I was just looking at a photocopy of the original slide last week. Quoting Rich as saying, "We have the technology to take E.T. home" is a close but memory-distorted version of what he actually said, as evidenced by his presentation scripts, which he followed closely. 


Merlin later greatly expanded the material, providing documentation in an excelent article for Tim Printy's SUNlite,
 "Taking ET Home: Birth of a Modern Myth." See pages 17-19 at


  1. I believe the truth always lies somewhere in between the two extreme sides of skepticism. While this article casts doubt on Ben Rich's comments regarding us having the technology to take ET home based on his eccentric personality, it has not successfully proven that his statements were all in fact hollow.
    The eccentric character reference in terms of Rich's tendency to exaggerate, cannot be applied to a few others of Rich's status who have expressed similar conclusions from the inside.
    In addition, it is difficult to believe that a man warning John Andrews about Kooks and Charlatans in a written reply letter to be such a hypocrite.
    I am one who personally do not believe that true objective skepticism exists as long as human beings are behind a badge. This refers to scientists as well who are only neutral when it comes to submitting the lab results.
    My point is that while one person leans towards defending a belief, the other person tends to do the same to move the line towards his/her disbelief.
    I will credit the blog/article in pointing out the distinction between having the technology to take ET home and having been successful in building a craft with that technology to achieve such task. From this conclusion, it is quite possible that certain exotic off-world components and abilities are not yet within human reach. For example, if one or more of such crafts require advanced psychic abilities to navigate them, it is reasonable to assume that we've not developed such inherent abilities to a level where navigating a space would be possible.

  2. It certainly appears Merlin has done all the requisite investigation, and demonstrated that statements attributed to Rich cannot be irrefutably credited to him. Ergo, they are very likely "after-the-fact" misinterpretations, misquotes, misattributions, and/or fabrications. Merlin's work is not skepticism. It's real research of the kind sorely lacking and usually rejected among UFO enthusiasts.

    1. I was delighted to have Peter Merlin document this. Before I was interested in the Cash-Landrum case, I'd been looking into the alleged aviation-military aircraft connections, and there's much overlap. If there's anything to it, it's a better kept secret than the suspected UFO cover-up.

      It could be that these fantastic things exist as blueprints, but there's just nothing beyond talk to show they were built and have flown.