The aircraft is the TIFS (Total In Flight Simulator). The aircraft is equipped with a large bank of computer in the fuselage (originally they took up the whole fuselage) that allowed the aircraft to "act" like something else. They used it to test the handling of proposed and prototype aircraft in the era before sophisticated computer modeling allowed for high fidelity computer flight simulators to be created prior to the flight testing of the aircraft.
In recent years, they used the aircraft to test proposed new control systems (the nose installed is designed to be easily modified with new display systems to mimic various aircraft) to see how the aircraft would handle with the new system compared to the old system inflight instantaneously.
The CalSpan website still has the TIFS page up, so you can read some more on it there -
http://www.calspan.com/airborne.htm
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