Lockheed A-12

It was a little super Connor supersonic reconnaissance drone.

It was going to be launched from a variant of the A-12, which was the predecessor to the SR-71.

That, what they have here, looks kind of similar in... to how the d21 would have uh basically yeah you put it on the bottom of a bomber and you bring it way up high and then it launches from there

yeah

There was a program in the 1970s, late 60s actually, which used the YF-12 prototypes.

Now this was Originally, they built the A-12 for the CIA.

That was a single-seat version.

Then they built the two-seater version for the Air Force, the reconnaissance version, the SR-71.

If you didn't have the special fuel, apparently it still works at Mach 1.5 because you can't manage the level of heat rejection.

But why? One of the things I've always wanted to talk about is how did...

the SR-71 and the A-12, all these aircraft with these magnificent J-58 engines, how did they actually get to that speed? And the engine is not a complicated engine in many ways.

It is actually just a single spool turbojet at its core.

There was an attempt to make the U-2 stealthy by adding some things to it.

And even the SR-71 Blackbird and its predecessor, the A-12, there were some pioneering engineering efforts done on those programs to reduce the radar signature of those aircraft, not enough to make them truly stealthy.

So it isn't until after that Yom Kippur War in 73 really kind of lets a lot of Air Force leaders know that, that electronic warfare is not going to be enough on its own to get through these systems.

We need some other way to kind of make ourselves invisible to radar.

It's amazing.

We had him on, Dr. Robarge, talking about the CIA's A-12 Oxcart program.

Talk a little bit about that, because we knew, I knew many of these pilots my- myself.

They became personal friends.

The answer was to fly so much faster and higher that the problem of being hit simply ceased to exist.

The Central Intelligence Agency had already been developing that answer with the A-12 Oxcart, a Skunk Works aircraft that flew reconnaissance missions at speeds and altitudes no Soviet interceptor could match.

The SR-71 was the Air Force's evolution of that concept, refined and pushed further.

The two Pratt & Whitney J58 engines that powered it weren't conventional jet engines in the usual sense.

I mean, parts of it, I would say it's probably the most futuristic thing ever built.

I mean, the F-117 maybe, but even today, what becomes known as the Blackbird, which is the A-12 is the first version for the CIA, the SR-71 is a successor version for the Air Force, is a Mach 3.2 surveillance plane that can fly at 85,000 feet.

And It was not just an evolutionary leap.

It was like leaps and bounds in the future from the U-2.

It does not perform more unlike.

So U-2, high and pretty slow.

SR, well, A-12, high and very fast.

So it's still today, in 2026, the fastest air-breathing aircraft ever made.

From the declassified mission logs, we know that pilots such as Gary Powers and Rudolf Anderson performed daring sorties that, if misinterpreted by untrained observers, could look like UFOs in both radar charts and eyewitness statements, an early seed for the association between Area 51 and unidentified objects.

The next generation of aircraft that roamed these skies was Lockheed's twin-engine A-12 Oxcart, which first took to the air on April 25, 1962, and entered the top-secret fleet before the SR-71 Blackbird had even left the drawing board.

It was designed as a reconnaissance platform that could outrun any interceptor by virtue of its Mach 3 speed and high altitude.

And because both the A-12 and its sibling, the SR-71, were painted in matte black to reduce infrared visibility, their silhouettes on radar or optical sensors were often reduced to fleeting blips, a fact that gave early reports of ghost aircraft a technical explanation that matched no known conventional fighter.

The Air Force's official narrative has always been that the site is an open training range for experimental planes, a stance repeated through every declassified briefing.

When the CIA stepped in and began testing the A-12 Oxcart around 1962, the secrecy level went up a notch.

The A-12 was not only faster, capable of Mach three-plus speeds, but also had stealth features that were cutting edge for the era.

Because the plane operated at night and over hostile airspace, the public never saw it, which added fuel to the UFO myths that began circulating on late-night talk shows.

In 1960, an anecdotal sighting near Los Angeles described a silver disc gliding silently.

By coincidence, the A-12 program was still under wraps.

While eyewitness accounts of odd aircraft were plentiful, no reliable documentation tied those sightings to a known test flight.

Officially, the Air Force has denied any alien presence for decades, a stance that has kept speculation alive.