THE PLANE THAT CAUSED THE UFO PANIC

In the early 1950s, the CIA and U.S. Air Force needed a way to see deep inside the Soviet Union without starting a war to get the pictures. Existing aircraft and rockets couldn't do it — anything that flew low enough to photograph anything useful could be tracked and shot down. Lockheed's answer came from Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, the engineer who had already built the P-38 Lightning and the P-80, America's first operational jet fighter, in just 143 days.

Johnson ran his projects out of a small, isolated unit at Lockheed's Burbank plant, officially named Advanced Development Programs. Almost nobody called it that. Legend holds a nearby employee answered the phone “Skonk Works” — a nod to a moonshine still in the comic strip Li'l Abner — and the nickname stuck, spelled “Skunk Works” after a trademark dispute. The unit operated under Johnson's now-famous rules: small teams, minimal paperwork, total autonomy from the rest of the company, and absolute secrecy, even from most of Lockheed itself.

Because the earliest U-2 overflights of the Soviet Union were intelligence-gathering missions, not acts of war under any military rulebook Washington wanted to acknowledge, the program was run by the CIA rather than the Air Force. Its first pilots were serving Air Force officers who resigned their commissions and became civilian employees of the CIA under contract — a process pilots at the time referred to as being “sheep-dipped.” They flew under false identities and cover stories, sometimes for Lockheed itself, with their real service records sealed. If they were captured or killed, the U.S. government had built itself just enough distance to deny the whole thing.

At altitude, pilots wear a full-pressure suit nearly identical in concept to the suits NASA would soon build for Mercury astronauts — for the same reason. Above roughly 63,000 feet, the air is thin enough that unprotected blood boils at body temperature, a threshold physiologists call the Armstrong Limit. The suit is pressurized, supplies breathing oxygen, and is the only thing standing between a pilot and that limit for a mission that can last nine hours or more, largely alone, strapped into a seat the size of a phone booth.

Francis Gary Powers was a CIA contract pilot, one of the “sheep-dipped” former Air Force officers flying under civilian cover. On the morning of May 1, 1960, he took off from Peshawar, Pakistan, in a U-2 the program logged as Article 360, on a mission codenamed Operation Grand Slam — a nearly 3,000-mile overflight of the Soviet Union, planned to end in Bodø, Norway, after photographing missile and nuclear facilities along the way.

Near Sverdlovsk in the Ural Mountains, a Soviet SA-2 surface-to-air missile battery fired a salvo at his aircraft. One missile detonated close enough to disable the U-2; Powers ejected and parachuted to the ground, where he was captured almost immediately. He did not activate the aircraft's self-destruct charge, and he did not use the poison-tipped pin concealed in a silver dollar he'd been issued. He chose to live.

On February 10, 1962, Powers was exchanged on the Glienicke Bridge — a crossing point between West Berlin and Potsdam that would later earn the nickname “Bridge of Spies” — for Soviet intelligence officer Colonel Rudolf Abel, who had been convicted of espionage in the United States. The swap took place in near-total secrecy, before sunrise, each side walking its man across the span from opposite ends at a prearranged signal.

Powers came home to a country that wasn't sure how to feel about him. Instead of a hero's welcome, he faced pointed public and congressional questioning over why he hadn't destroyed the aircraft or used the suicide device — questions that shadowed him for years, even after a Senate committee and the CIA itself concluded he had followed his orders and conducted himself appropriately in captivity. He spent much of the rest of his life quietly working to clear his name.