The effort to develop stealth technology by Lockheed and Northrup in the 1970s and 1980s was one of the government's most tightly guarded secrets. Nevertheless, enough stray details leaked out to fuel the imaginations of investigative reporters, UFO buffs, and conspiracy theorists, who sometimes got the information wrong in a way that only heightened the mystery. (According to aviation historian Robert Dorr, the very term "stealth," for example, came from press reports that garbled the word "survivable" in a top-secret project name.) In 1981, a Lockheed test pilot flew an early version of what became the F-117A at the Air Force test facility in Groom Lake, Nev., a remote site with such tight security that any civilian pilot who strayed too close risked being shot down by anti-aircraft missiles. For the next few years, the research and development continued, initially at Groom Lake and later at the Tonopah Test Range northwest of Las Vegas, a place so shrouded in secrecy that workers were housed 200 miles away, and a palm print was required for admittance to the facility's inner grounds.

In creating a radar-proof aircraft, designers found they had to make compromises. The F-117A was slower than other aircraft with similarly sized engines because of its less aerodynamic shape, and was less stable (hence its nickname, the "Wobblin' Goblin"). The aircraft couldn't use radar, lest it give signals that would betray its identity, and it couldn't carry any bombs or missiles attached to its underside, because that would have created a large radar signature. But American scientists and engineers developed other technological advances, such as lightweight carbon-based materials to keep the oddly-shaped aircraft from being too heavy, and infrared instruments that allowed it to operate in darkness.

Pentagon leaders decided not to use the F-117A against Libya in 1986, in part because they were reluctant to reveal its existence to the world. The government unveiled the aircraft in 1988, and two years later, it was used in the invasion of Panama.

It was not until the 1991 Gulf War, however, that the F-117A flew an extensive number of missions. As designers had hoped, the stealth fighter-bomber slipped through radar like Gene Kelly dancing through raindrops, so bewildering Iraqi anti-aircraft units that they resorted to simply firing wildly into the sky. Not a single aircraft was lost.

In 1999, F-117As were used again in Yugoslavia, as part of NATO's military effort to compel the regime of Slobodan Milosevic to cease its war in Kosovo and allow international peacekeepers and hundreds of thousands of refugees to return to the embattled region. One aircraft was shot down by the Serbians — apparently by sheer luck, rather than the use of radar —but the American pilot was rescued.