SR-72 Darkstar, the fictional secret hypersonic jet from the hotly anticipated new Top Gun: Maverick film, might just be a whole lot more realistic than we previously thought. The chairman, president and CEO of Lockheed Martin Corporation, James Taiclet, has confirmed that the company’s legendary Skunk Works advanced projects division worked with the producers of the movie and helped create the fictional design.Taiclet said that members of the Skunk Works team had “partnered with Top Gun’s producers to bring cutting-edge, future forward technology to the big screen” before referencing “critical work in hypersonic flight.”That admission follows a previous Tweet by a Lockheed Martin executive, John Neilson, the Director of Communications, in which he pointed to rumors that the fictional jet could provide a “sneaky peak at what might be the Lockheed Martin SR-72.”the SR-72 concept proposes an unmanned reusable hypersonic military aircraft that would be capable of carrying out intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, as well as strike missions.Regardless, having Lockheed Martin involved in creating a fictional hypersonic aircraft concept shouldn’t be entirely surprising, if only from a public relations point of view. After all, despite the cloak of secrecy surrounding Skunk Works designs, the SR-72 concept has, in the past, been the subject of unusually public pitching by Lockheed and has fueled much speculation.The big question that we have is if there is something else going on here? The Skunk Works was very hard to pin down regarding its involvement in Darkstar and there are rumors floating around that this aircraft maybe a little less fictional than we are made to believe, at least at this very moment.