Dad talked of standing around a campfire with the crew of Apollo 12 during training and hearing Pete Conrad talk about getting ready to fly some new plane and having the base locked down while something that we didn’t build sat on the end of the runway.
I was working in Huntsville at the NASA facility on Skylab in 1973 when the The Pascagoula Abduction case was announced. Everyone there with the exception of us new guys had been directly involved with the Saturn V project. They took the announcement very seriously, and discussed it at length. Work virtually stopped for three days. That was when I became aware of the Roswell crash and other things, well before the disclosures of the early 1980s.
That was 50 years ago. So why don't we have an entire Air Force of these 'secret' planes?