The next, on-paper incarnation of the F-117 Nighthawk began in 1974 and was called the Hopeless Diamond, so named because it resembled the Hope Diamond and because Lockheed engineers didn’t have much hope it would actually fly. After the Hopeless Diamond concept went through a series of redesigns it became a full-scale mock-up of an aircraft and was renamed Have Blue. T. D. Barnes was the man in charge of radar testing Lockheed’s proof-of-concept stealth bomber at Area 51. “Lockheed handed it over to us and we put it up on the pole,” Barnes says. “It was a very weird, very crude-looking thing that actually looked a lot like the ship from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Our job was to look at it from every angle using radar to see how it showed up on radar.” Radars had advanced considerably since the early days of the Cold War. “Initially, it was as visible as a big old barn,” says Barnes. So the Have Blue mock-up was sent back to the Skunk Works for more fine-tuning. Several months later, a new version of the mock-up arrived at Area 51. “Lockheed had changed the shape of the aircraft and a lot of the angles of the panels. Once we put the new mock-up on the pole it appeared to us as something around the size of a crow.” There was a final round of redesigns, then the airplane came back to Area 51 again. “We put it up on the pole and all we saw was the pole.” Now it was time for Lockheed to present the final rendition of the Have Blue to the Air Force, in hopes of landing the contract to build the nation’s first stealth bomber.
The director of science and engineering at Skunk Works, a man named Ed Martin, went to Lovick for some advice. “Ed Martin asked me how I thought the aircraft might appear on enemy radar. I explained that if the Oxcart showed up as being roughly equivalent to the size of a man, the Have Blue would appear to a radar like a seven-sixteenth-inch metal sphere—roughly the size of a ball bearing.” Ed Martin loved Lovick’s analogy. A ball bearing. That was something a person could relate to. Before Martin left for Washington, DC, Lovick went to the Lockheed tool shop and borrowed a bag of ball bearings. He wanted Ed Martin to have a visual reference to share with the Air Force officials there. “Later, I learned the ball-bearing illustration was so effective that the customers began rolling the little silvery spheres across the conference table. The analogy has become legendary, often still used to make an important visual point about the stealthy F-117 Nighthawk with its high-frequency radar signature that is as tiny as a ball bearing.” In 1976, Lockheed won the contract. Immediately, they began manufacturing two Have Blue aircraft in the legendary Skunk Works Building 82. The man in charge of engineering, fabrication, and assembly of the pair of stealth bombers was Bob Murphy, the same person who twenty-one years earlier had begun his career in a pair of overalls at Area 51, working for Kelly Johnson as chief mechanic on the U-2.
Testing a bomber plane would be a radically different process from testing a spy plane, and the F-117 was the first bomber to be flight-tested at Area 51. Most notably, the new bomber would require testing for accuracy in dropping bombs on targets. For nearly twenty-five years, the CIA and the Air Force had been flying spy planes and drones in the Box. But there was simply not enough flat square footage at Groom Lake to drop bombs. There was also the issue of sound. With multiple projects going on at Area 51, not everyone was cleared for the F-117.
A second site was needed, and for this, the Air Force turned to the Department of Energy, formerly the Atomic Energy Commission. A land-use deal was struck allowing the Air Force to use a preexisting, little-known bombing range that the Atomic Energy Commission had quietly been using for decades. It was deep in the desert, within the Connecticut-size Nevada Test and Training Range. Located seventy miles northwest of Area 51, the Tonopah Test Range was almost in Death Valley and had been in use as a bombing range and missile-launch facility for Sandia Laboratories since 1957. The Department of Energy had no trouble carving a top secret partition out of the 624-square-mile range for the Air Force’s new bomber project. To be kept entirely off the books, the secondary black site was named Area 52. Like Area 51, Area 52 has never been officially acknowledged.