Ben Rich’s Statements:

The Implications of Secret Technologies and Hidden Physics

by

Joseph P. Farrell

Copyright 2011 by Joseph P. Farrell

(I would like to thank my friend and colleague Michael Schratt for graciously allowing me to quote from an article of his, “Ben Rich and the Secret of the Skunk Works” that will appear in Open Minds magazine later this year. All quotations of Mr. Rich that appear here appear in Mr. Schratt’s article, and have also been cited in numerous articles by other researchers.)

A. Biographical Overview

Ben Rich, the well-known chief of Lockheed’s “skunk works,” the secret development facility responsible for, among other things, the development of stealth technology and America’s F-117 stealth fighter, was born in Manilla, the Philippines on June 18, 1925. Fascinated with aircraft and aircraft models from his youth, his family moved to the United States in May, 1941, in response to the gathering war clouds with the Japanese Empire that would burst with such sudden ferocity with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor later that year on December 7.

    Obtaining a Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical engineering from UCLA in 1950, Rich went to work for Lockheed’s Burbank facility as a specialist in thermodynamics, aerodynamics, propulsion, and design. By 1955, he had so distinguished himself he was moved to Lockheed’s Advanced Development Projects, the “skunk works,” then under the capable and brilliant direction of Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, the man he would eventually replace. There, Rich worked on the development of Top Secret advanced aircraft, the high altitude U-2 and even more exotic SR-71 Blackbird among them.  When Johnson retired in 1975, Ben Rich succeeded him as the director of Lockheed’s “skunk works,” a position he held until his retirement on Dec. 31, 1990. Ben Rich died on Jan. 5, 1995, but between the time of his retirement and his death, he made a number of astonishing public and private statements, the subject of our study here.

B. A Catalog of Ben Rich’s Astonishing Statements

For simplicity’s sake, we will catalog Rich’s statements, italicizing the statement itself, and then providing the context in which each was made.

1. “The Air Force has just given us a contract to take ET back home.” This statement was made by Rich during a slide presentation he was giving on September 22, 1992, at the United States Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio. It is worth mentioning - though most readers will probably already be aware of it, that Dayton, Ohio is home to Wright-Patterson Air Force base, reputedly the place where recovered and alleged extra-terrestrial craft, including the Roswell craft, and the Kecksburg craft, were initially taken for examination. Wright-Patterson based the Air Technical Intelligence Command, Project Bluebook, and a large contingent of Paperclip Nazis after World War Two.
2. “We now have the technology to take ET back home.” This nearly verbatim statement was made by Rich about half a year later, on March 23,1993, at a lecture using virtually the same presentation as he made to the US Air Force Museum the previous year. The presentation was made to the UCLA School of Engineering Alumni Association.
3. “We did the F-104, C-130, U-2, SR-71, F-117 and many other programs that I can’t talk about. We are still working very hard, I just can’t tell you what we are doing.” This statement was likewise made during Rich’ 1992 presentation to the US Air Force Museum.
4. “We already have the means to travel among the stars. But these technologies are so locked up in black programs, that it would take an act of God to ever get them out to benefit humanity.” This statement was made during Rich’ presentation in 1993 to the UCLA  School of Engineering Alumni Association.
5. “If you can imagine it, Lockheed Skunk Works has done it.” This statement was made by Rich to a small informal gathering at UCLA after his formal presentation.
6. “We have some new things. We are not stagnating. What we are doing is updating ourselves without advertising. There are some new programs, and there are certain things, some of them twenty or thirty years old that are still breakthroughs and appropriate to keep quiet about. Other people don’t have them yet.” This statement was made by Ben Rich to Popular Science magazine reporter Stuart F. Brown in the October 1994 issue.
7. “I wish I could tell you about the projects we are currently working on. They are both fascinating and fantastic. They call for technologies once only dreamed of by Science fiction writers.” Rich made this statement in  presentation to the AIAA (American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics) on September 7, 1988 in Atlanta, Georgia.
8. “We now know how to travel to the stars.” This statement, again, was made during his 1993 UCLA presentation.

And last, but not least, there was one final comment, and for our purposes as we shall see, it is the most significant one:

9. “There is an error in the equations, and we have figured it out, and now know how to travel to the stars, and it won’t take a lifetime to do it.” This statement immediately followed number 8 above, and was made at the 1993 UCLA presentation.

In addition to these comments by Ben Rich, it is also worth noting that others in the black projects industry made similar statements. Michael Schratt states in his article that an unnamed Lockheed retired engineer was quoted in the February 1988 issue of Gung-Ho magazine, in an arictle titled “Stealth and Beyond,” as saying “Let’s just put it this way... we have things flying in the Nevada desert that would make George Lucas drool.”

    Schratt goes on to state:

The same Gung-Ho article continues with an earth-shaking comment made by an Air Force officer who was involved in the development of the SR-71 (blackbird): “We are testing vehicles that defy description. To compare them conceptually to the SR-71 would be like comparing Leonardo da Vinci’s parachute design to the space shuttle.”  One retired Colonel chimed in with the following statement which also appeared in the same article: “We have things that are so far beyond the comprehension of the average aviation authority as to be really alien to our way of thinking.”

All of these quotations lead Schratt to ask a very logical question: are they “veiled confirmation of the so-called ‘secret space program’”?   

C. Interpretive Possibilities

    Before we proceed to answer that most important question - indeed, the central question posed by Rich’s remarks - we must examine the interpretive possibilities suggested by this catalog of remarks. Looking carefully at Rich’s statements, there are three broad classes into which they fall:

1. Statements implying the general nature of a fantastic though hidden and secret technology, with no indications of the capabilities or nature of that technology (statements 3,5-7);
2. Statements implying the general nature of a fantastic though hidden and secret technology, with the clear statement that this technology is capable of an interstellar capability (statements 1-2, 4, 8); and,
3. A single statement implying that the Lockheed scientists found an error “in the equations” that underwrites the fantastic technologies alluded to in all the other statements. Note that Rich is specific, and speaks of an error in the singular, though he does not:

1. Specify the nature of that error, if it lies in the general philosophical and physical assumptions or if it is of a more specific and formal mathematical nature;
2. Specify which kind of equations he is referring to: the field equations of electromagnetism, the tensor equations of relativity? We have no idea. Rich does provide a clue, however, in that he refers to a single error in equations, implying a set of equations describing a particular phenomenon.  This argues that the “singular error” may been of a generalized philosophical nature that crept into the formalization of an entire set of equations.

• We are now in a position to examine the interpretive possibilities that Rich’s statements give rise to.
•     We may begin our examination by a bit of a thought experiment. Imagine we are foreign agents infiltrated into each of Rich’s presentations to monitor them, analyze and assess them, and report back to our home country. The first and most obvious possibility that we must entertain is that Rich may be lying, that he is stating things as a part of a psychological operation to make America’ potential enemies think that the USA has technologies far in advance of anything in any terrestrial arsenal. But as with every disinformation operation, there must be a kernel of truth operating in order for the false perception to take hold and influence decision-making.
•    In this case, that kernel of truth is provided by Rich’s and Lockheed’s track record of accomplishing feats of aerodynamic engineering well in advance of the public technologies of any given period. Consider only the U-2, the SR-71 Blackbird, or the F-117 stealth fighter. The mere fact, in other words, that someone of Rich’s stature would make such statements means that they have to be taken seriously, and all possible interpretive paradigms and possibilities evaluated carefully. One must not, therefore, leap to the conclusion that he was telling the complete unvarnished truth, nor may one entirely dismiss them as being a complete pack of lies and total falsehoods.
• C. The Error in the Equations: A Hidden Physics and Secrets
•     It is in this context that our would-be agent and analyst will turn his attention to the one piece of internal evidence that Rich gave as support for all the other fantastic statements that he made, namely, that “There is an error (singular) in the equations (plural), and we have figured it out, and now know how to travel to the stars, and it won’t take a lifetime to do it.”  The context of Rich’ statement indicates that, whatever this error was, and if genuine, it prevented mankind from traveling to the stars, and that fixing it theoretically enabled that possibility. We may therefore rule out the possibility that the equations in question are those dealing with standard aerodynamic of lift, drag, and so on. Some other types of equations altogether are implied.
•     Thus the question becomes: are there areas in which there are indications of an error in the equations that would theoretically enable inter-stellar travel? In other words, can one argue a prima facie case that Rich was telling the truth here? And if he was telling the truth here, then are there indications that an actual technology is being developed from that basis?

As noted, Rich made his statement in the specific context of knowing “how to travel to the stars” and this means that the “error in the equations” cannot be in the form of an error in any of the conventional equations of aerodynamics, fluid flow and so on.

     In short, Rich's statements imply that one has to reverse-engineer an entire hidden history of physics and electrodynamics, for they clearly imply that there is such a history.

     This raises the whole point of secrecy and just how long advanced secrets may be closely held and hidden from public view. Within UFOlogy the argument is often made that secret human technology could not be that advanced from that in the public view, nor would it have remained classified for so long.  But the clear implication of Rich's statements is quite the opposite, for he not only clearly implies the existence of such technology but that it is so deeply secret that it has remained so for decades; he is also implying a hidden physics. The question is, when was “the error in the equations” known and why were the scientists looking for it?

1. 1. Maxwell's Equations

     As I have pointed out in many of my published books, the original form of James Clerk Maxwell's equations unifying electricity and magnetism were originally written in a geometric language known as quaternions. But additionally, when one turns to the literature of those physicists who are increasingly dissatisfied with the standard models, one finds other criticisms, even of their standard formulation in the partial derivative form learned by most students of physics, and as they were revised by Oliver Heaviside.  

     One of the most trenchant observations of such problems was noted by the physicist Thomas E. Phipps, Jr., in an excellent book entitled Old Physics for New, a highly mathematical work. There he notes two crucial things, namely, that Maxwell's own formulation of his theory does not adequately take into consideration sink motions, but only source motions, but more importantly, notes that induction is mathematically misrepresented by one form of equation (partial derivative form) when another form alone adequately accounts for the changing shape of circuit parameters that is being penetrated by a magnetic flux.^[1]  While all this may seem abstruse and incomprehensible, it basically boils down to the fact that in the quest for mathematical formalisms that are “beautiful,” physicists essentially abandoned observation for the pursuit of theoretical beauty.

     In the context of Rich's statements then, and their implication that there was an error in the equations, it is likely that the Lockheed engineers discovered this very simple mathematical change, one that, in effect, did away with the all important observer of the effect, in this case, the effect being the electromagnetic field itself.^[2] In this case, the circuit parameters, only fully describable by the change in notation from partial to full derivative form, function as the physical observer of the field effect; change the parameters of the circuit, and one changes what is observed. And that, of course, means that circuit parameters directly affect the local engineering or observation of space-time, exactly was was stated by the electrical engineer Gabriel Kron.^[3] Physics, in other words, went very early astray by means of this change.

          So from the standpoint of Rich's statements, two conceptual and philosophical errors were introduced because of this change of mathematical languages: (1) the change from quaternion geometry to linear algebra lost the idea of a non-translational stress in the physical medium, a stress that might conceivably be manipulated for an “antigravity” effect, and (2) the change from partial to full derivative form lost the observer – the circuit parameters – and the direct effect these had on the field to be observed.  

     In other words, even on this short and necessarily cursory examination, one need go no further than the parameterizations of Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism to discover two major changes in the mathematical formalisms of the theory that strongly support Rich's contention that “there was an error in the equations,” an error making possible a technology to take us to the stars.

    Those changes in the formalisms of the theory would, of course, lead to further theoretical developments, including, of course, Einstein's Special and General Relativity theories, and the subsequent attempts in the 1920s to formulate unified field theories between electromagnetism and gravity. But if the first foundations of electromagnetic theory were themselves vitiated by two seemingly minor changes in the mathematical formalism, then this would mean that many of the assumptions and parameters of the theoretical edifice built upon them also would have to be revisited and rethought from the ground up.  In future papers we will explore this topic of a hidden, off-the-books physics, and the history of the public consumption physics, further, but for the moment, it need only be noted that, given this analysis, it must be concluded that Rich was not simply stating something untrue, nor stating a piece of disinformation to mislead the public, other scientists, or engineers. His statements must be given great weight because the actual history itself says that such errors were made. The history is known and commented on by physicists willing to break with accepted dogmas and examine the history of the theoretical edifice (often at great cost to their own careers).

     This fact, plus the fact of the other statements Rich made, leads me to conclude that Lockheed's engineers not only discovered these and similar errors, but that they went on to work out a new, hidden, off-the-books theoretical structure of physics, and to begin the engineering of actual technologies based upon it. We are, in other words, looking at the possibility of an actual, practical, field propulsion technology, utilizing electromagnetism in a practical way to achieve antigravity effects, which we will examine in the next installment of this series of papers.

Joseph P Farrell, 2011