Message posted by RoadKill on January 27, 2010 at 7:10:11 PST:

I had intended to steer clear of this one. But...

My father worked on the A-12/SR-71 at Groom and in Oakinawa. We knew he went away during the week (at first when he went to Burbank and then, I guess flew to groom) and later for weeks at a time. We NEVER knew where he was or what he was doing....other than that he worked for Lockheed. When the A-12 was releasable, he told of his invovlement.

When I first worked on the B-2, we were black...not grey. I couldn't tell anyone what I was doing. When we visited the plant in Pico Rivera, we had to use non-government, non-descript cars with civilian license plates (untraceable). We, of course, wore civilian clothes, stayed in different hotels each time, etc. Similar measures were used for visiting partner company sites. Real cloak and dagger stuff. That lasted until the bird flew to Edwards...

Now, there will always be speculators (like most of the folks on this site) who try to get ahead of the curve, but the people entrusted with guarding the secrets of our nation take their responsibility very seriously. Most would rather die than release the secrets that might harm our nation. Yet, there are always suppositions and suggestions at what is going on. We heard of the F-117 before it was released. Models of the B-2, although wholly inaccurate, were available on store shelves before the program really came out of the black world.

Politics is politics. If you have a problem with how many black programs there are, or the size of the black budget, write your elected officials. Just remember, there is a committee in Congress that reviews the black budget, and there have been cuts (and additions) to programs in the past...I believe the level of oversight is appropriate. Occasionally, there's a black program that just doesn't work out. Does that mean we wasted money? No. It means we're closeer to a solution by ruling out something that doesn't work. It's how things are made better. Would anyone, I mean anyone, have imagined an aircraft like the F-117? It was radical in many, mamy ways. Despite its relatively short life, we learned volumes on stealth. A very, very successful program who flew operationally - black - for a long time.

There are probably some programs that may have been in the black budget that shouldn't have, but I don't know what they are.

i hope we get away from the politics and get back to the core of what we do here. I think the politics deserves a spot right next to the UFO stuff. It just has no place on this website. Of course, it's not my site - but from what I've seen, that's the case.

Just MHO

In Reply to: Re: Patriotic duty posted by NoOne on January 27, 2010 at 1:48:54 PST:

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