I'm John Batchler, continuing with the author Josh Dean, his new book, The Impossible Factory,

The Remarkable Story, True Story of Kelly Johnson and the Lockheed Corporation. We need that word

true because there are nothing but whoppers here. This is the man who designed the most

distinctive fighter of the Second War, the P-38, in order to meet the need of the gap between where the bombers

needed to go and where the escorts could take them. That gap was when the Germans attacked.

The P-38 answered that in the European Theater and the Pacific Theater. Then the first jet aircraft

for the U.S. Army Air Force, before the end of the Second War, though it never got into combat.

It did get into combat in Korea.

One man is designing all these aircrafts.

Then the first high-performance Mach 2 fighter, the F104, Josh is about to take us to a surprising place because in the course of

Kelly Johnson developing the skunk works that was where the design and the building,

often handmade building of these aircraft, successful aircraft come from, are the stories

of the UFO sightings of the 1940s and 50s, including

Kelly Johnson recording citing what appears to be a flying saucer that disappears faster than

anything that flies. Josh, when we come to this part of the story, there's no payoff.

There's just Kelly taking notes very carefully.

Did he talk about it throughout his life that moment when he recorded, when he saw what he saw?

He did.

He was interviewed by the Project Blue Book agents who were formed, you know, Project Blue Book was this Air Force FBI initiative to go and

investigate UFO sightings in the 1950s. And Kelly was interviewed because, yeah, he, according to

Kelly, and he took notes on this in his log, he on his ranch outside Santa Barbara, known as Star Lane, he saw these things in the air that he couldn't explain that, you know, he said flew faster and disappeared more quickly than anything that made sense to him, which is interesting because my theory is that most of the UFO sightings that spiked in the 1950s had to do with the planes that Kelly Johnson and Lockheed were building at the skunk works and testing at a place that became known as Area 51.

And so I tend to think that the alien panic was largely caused by spy planes that people had never seen before,

...