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The original was posted on /r/ufos by /u/Mysterious-Emu-8423 on 2026-07-24 21:09:17+00:00.

I have just received a copy of the "autobiography" (apparently "as told to" his daughter Linda Marie Sheffield) of the late Colonel Richard E. "Butch" Sheffield, one of the SR-71 pilots. The title is "Ohio to Supersonic: Flying the SR-71 Blackbird to the Secret World of the Skunk Works." (London: Helion and Company, 2026)

The book is almost like a "stream of consciousness" type of writing, anecdotally driven.

After Sheffield left active service in the USAF, he worked with Lockheed-Martin, and knew Ben Rich really well. This was from 1985 onwards.

One of the entries in the book says the following:

"Tasked to Look into UFOs

On one of my earlier trips to Burbank and the Skunk Works, Ben called me into his office, closed the door, and asked me to look into the possibility of unidentified flying objects. He said, a group of people in the industry had formed a unit to look for and find parts of UFOs to be reverse-engineered.

At first, I thought it was a joke, but he kept on talking and said that because of all my clearances, I could find out if the government really had something on UFOs. He went on to say all he wanted was a piece of one UFO. He then told me that Kelly [Johnson] had seen two UFOs when he was flying near his ranch, so Kelly believed.

I located a man who worked the 'blue book' at the Defense Intelligence Agency. He along with a Lockheed employee at the Space Division in Sunnyvale helped me with Ben's task.

I visited the UFO group in St. Louis at McDonnell Douglas Aircraft Company.m They claimed the extraterrestrials were operating covertly out of six locations here on Earth. Two that I remember were flying in and out of a mountain in Alaska and in Spain.

They wanted funds to set up monitoring stations around those sites. They would have people with radar, listening devices. I was very skeptical about the whole thing. First off, if these UFOs could do what they say, how would you ever detect them? Also, what proof was there that they are here on Earth?

I checked out the UFO thing through my security contracts and found nothing. I then advised Ben that I did not think it would be good for the SW [Skunk Works] image to sign up to this thing; it looked like a 'crackpot' idea to me. He agreed. However, looking into UFOs was quite an education for me...."

I wonder if this is the alleged "Yankee Blue" fake Special Access Program mentioned previously...

Otherwise, this is a pretty wild story....

FYI to all you UFO reddit readers...

What do you think? Is this new information helpful in bringing into focus some older information that has been around awhile?