White bird? Nope… it never happened. Fake Picture!
Using a law of thermodynamics, Ben Rich tried to convince Kelly Johnson to paint the A-12 Black. It was very rare for Kelly Johnson to admit he was wrong.
Overnight, however, he apparently had second thoughts, or did some textbook reading on his own, and at the next meeting, he turned to me as the first order of business. “On the black paint,” he said, “you were right about the advantages, and I was wrong.” He handed me a quarter.
It was a rare win. So Kelly approved my idea of painting the airplane black, and by the time our prototype rolled out, the airplane became known as the Blackbird.
Our supplier, Titanium Metals Corporation, had only limited reserves of the precious alloy, so the CIA conducted a worldwide search and, using third parties and dummy companies, managed to unobtrusively purchase the base metal from one of the world’s leading exporters—the Soviet Union. The Russians never had an inkling of how they were actually contributing to the creation of the airplane being rushed into construction to spy on their homeland.”
― Ben R. Rich, Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed