From Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed (Ben Rich)…

President Johnson first announced in 1964 the existence of the RS-71, the Air Force two-seater Blackbird. That’s right, RS-71 was its official designation, but Johnson accidentally turned it around and called it the “SR-71.” Instead of putting out a brief correction, the Air Force decided not to call attention to a very minor mistake by the commander in chief and ordered us to change about twenty-nine thousand blueprints and drawings at a cost of thousands of dollars so that they would read “SR-71” and not “RS-71.”

(This happened at Disney when a cousin was working on the film that ultimately became Emperor’s New Groove. The working title, given the Inca theme, was Empire of the Sun. Michael Eisner, the CEO, referred to the movie as “Empire in the Sun” and the sycophants surrounding him were too afraid to correct him. The underlings simply ordered that the working title be changed to conform to the CEO’s misconception.)

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