‘We had the specks lab tested, and they turned out to be organic material—insects that had been injected into the stratosphere,’ Norman Nelson CIA’s engineer inside the Skunk Works
In order to satisfy the nation’s demand for an extremely fast and high-flying reconnaissance aircraft capable of evading Soviet air defenses, the CIA created the highly classified A-12 OXCART as a successor to the U-2 espionage plane. The CIA awarded the OXCART contract to Lockheed (the builder of the U-2) in 1959.
Under the direction of renowned engineer Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, Lockheed overcame many technical obstacles to meet the A-12’s extreme speed and altitude requirements. These included innovations in titanium fabrication, lubricants, jet engines, fuel, navigation, flight control, electronic countermeasures, radar stealthiness, and pilot life-support systems.
The A-12 was deemed fully operational in 1965 following hundreds of hours of flight at high risk by an elite team of CIA and Lockheed test pilots. The aircraft had achieved the design goal of maintaining a sustained speed of Mach 3.2 at an altitude of 90,000 feet.
Following an A-12 flight, they discovered insect specks on the windshield. According to Ben Rich’s book “Skunk Works,” Norman Nelson recalls,
‘I was the CIA’s engineer inside the Skunk Works, the only government guy there, and Kelly gave me the run of the place. Kelly ran the Skunk Works as if it was his own aircraft company.
‘A weird thing was that after an (A-12) flight, the windshields often were pitted with tiny black dots, like burn specks. We couldn’t figure out what it was.
‘We had the specks lab tested, and they turned out to be organic material—insects that had been injected into the stratosphere and were circling in orbit around the earth with dust and debris at seventy-five thousand feet in the jet stream. How in hell did they get lifted up there?
‘We finally figured it out: they were hoisted aloft from the atomic test explosions in Russia and China.’
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Photo by Dru Blair via www.drublair.com
