-Caveat Lector- http://mostlyfiction.com/excerpts/zeropoint.htm
The Hunt for Zero Point By Nick Cook Published by Broadway Books August 2002; 0767906276; 256 pages Read Book Synopsis Author /Bibliography Read Excerpt Chapter 1 >From the heavy-handed style of the prose and the faint handwritten "1956" scrawled in pencil along the top of the first page, the photocopied pages had obviously come from some long-forgotten schlock popular science journal. I had stepped away from my desk only for a few moments and somehow in the interim the article had appeared. The headline ran: "The G-Engines Are Coming!" I glanced around the office, wondering who had put it there and if this was someone's idea of a joke. The copier had cut off the top of the first page and the title of the publication with it, but it was the drawing above the headline that was the giveaway. It depicted an aircraft, if you could call it that, hovering a few feet above a dry lakebed, a ladder extending from the fuselage and a crewmember making his way down the steps dressed in a U.S.-style flight suit and flying helmet--standard garb for that era. The aircraft had no wings and no visible means of propulsion. I gave the office another quick scan. The magazine's operations were set on the first floor. The whole building was open-plan. To my left, the business editor was head-down over a proof-page checking copy. To her right was the naval editor, a guy who was good for a windup, but who was currently deep into a phone conversation and looked like he had been for hours. I was reminded of a technology piece I'd penned a couple of years earlier about the search for scientific breakthroughs in U.S. aerospace and defense research. In a journal not noted for its exploration of the fringes of paranormality, nor for its humor, I'd inserted a tongue-in-cheek reference to gravity--or rather to antigravity, a subject beloved of science-fiction writers. "For some U.S. aerospace engineers," I'd said, "an antigravity propulsion system remains the ultimate quantum leap in aircraft design." The implication was that antigravity was the aerospace equivalent of the holy grail: something longed for, dreamed about, but beyond reach--and likely always to remain so. Somehow the reference had escaped the sub-editors and, as a result, amongst my peers, other aerospace and defense writers on the circuit, I'd taken some flak for it. For Jane's, the publishing empire founded on one man's obsession with the detailed specifications of ships and aircraft almost a century earlier, technology wasn't something you joked about. The magazine I wrote--and still write--for, Jane's Defense Weekly, documented the day-to-day dealings of the multibillion-dollar defense business. JDW, as we called it, is but one of a portfolio of products detailing the ins and outs of the global aerospace and defense industry. If you want to know about the thrust-to-weight ratio of a Chinese combat aircraft engine or the pulse repetition frequency of a particular radar system, somewhere in the Jane's portfolio of products there is a publication that has the answers. In short, Jane's was, and always has been, about facts. Its motto is: Authoritative, Accurate, Impartial. It was a huge commercial intelligence-gathering operation; and provided they had the money, anyone could buy into its vast knowledge base. I cast a glance at the bank of sub-editors' workstations over in the far corner of the office, but nobody appeared remotely interested in what was happening at my desk. If the subs had nothing to do with it, and usually they were the first to know about a piece of piss-taking that was going down in the office, I figured whoever had put it there was from one of the dozens of other departments in the building and on a different floor. Perhaps my anonymous benefactor had felt embarrassed about passing it on to me? I studied the piece again. The strapline below the headline proclaimed: "By far the most potent source of energy is gravity. Using it as power, future aircraft will attain the speed of light." It was written by one Michael Gladych and began: "Nuclear-powered aircraft are yet to be built, but there are research projects already under way that will make the super-planes obsolete before they are test-flown. For in the United States and Canada, research centers, scientists, designers and engineers are perfecting a way to control gravity--a force infinitely more powerful than the mighty atom. The result of their labors will be antigravity engines working without fuel--weightless airliners and space ships able to travel at 170,000 miles per second." On any other day, that would have been the moment I'd have consigned it for recycling. But something in the following paragraph caught my eye. The gravity research, it said, had been supported by the Glenn L. Martin Aircraft Company, Bell Aircraft, Lear "and several other American aircraft manufacturers who would not spend millions of dollars on science fiction." It quoted Lawrence D. Bell, the founder of the plane-maker that was first to beat the sound barrier. "We're already working on nuclear fuels and equipment to cancel out gravity." George S. Trimble, head of Advanced Programs and "Vice President in charge of the G-Project at Martin Aircraft," added that the conquest of gravity "could be done in about the time it took to build the first atom bomb." A little further on, it quoted "William P. Lear, the chairman of Lear Inc., makers of autopilots and other electronic controls." It would be another decade before Bill Lear went on to design and build the first of the sleek business jets that still carry his name. But in 1956, according to Gladych, Lear had his mind on other things. "All matter within the ship would be influenced by the ship's gravitation only," Lear apparently said of the wondrous G-craft. "This way, no matter how fast you accelerated or changed course, your body would not feel it any more than it now feels the tremendous speed and acceleration of the earth." The G-ship, Gladych explained, could take off like a cannon shell, come to a stop with equal abruptness and the passengers wouldn't even need seat belts. This ability to accelerate rapidly, the author continued, would make it ideal as a space vehicle capable of acceleration to a speed approaching that of light. There were some oblique references to Einstein, some highly dubious "facts" about the nature of subatomic physics and some speculation about how various kinds of "antigravity engines" might work. But the one thing I kept returning to were those quotes. Had Gladych made them up or had Lawrence Bell, George S. Trimble and William "Bill" Lear really said what he had quoted them as saying? Outside, the rain beat against the double-glazed windows, drowning the sound of the traffic that crawled along the London to Brighton road and the unrelenting hum of the air conditioning that regulated the temperature inside. The office was located in the last suburb of the Greater London metropolis; next stop the congested joys of the M25 ring road and the M23 to Gatwick Airport. The building was a vast redbrick two-story bunker amid between-the-wars gray brickwork and pebbledash. The rain acted like a muslin filter, washing out what little ambient color Coulsdon possessed. In the rain, it was easy to imagine that nothing much had changed here for decades. As aviation editor of JDW, my beat was global and it was pretty much unstructured. If I needed to cover the latest air-to-surface weapons developments in the U.S.A., I could do it, with relatively few questions asked. My editor, an old pro, with a history as long as your arm in publishing, gave each of us, the so-called "specialists" (the aviation, naval and land systems editors), plenty of rope. His only proviso was that we filed our expenses within two of weeks of travel and that we gave him good, exclusive stories. If I wanted to cover an aerospace and defense exhibition in Moscow, Singapore or Dubai, the funds to do so were almost always there. As for the job itself, it was a mixture of hard-edged reporting and basic provision of information. We reported on the defense industry, but we were part of it, too--the vast majority of the company's revenue coming from the same people we wrote about. Kowtowing was a no-no, but so was kicking down doors. If you knew the rules and played by them you could access almost any part of the global defense-industrial complex. In the course of a decade, I'd visited secret Russian defense facilities and ultrasensitive U.S. government labs. If you liked technology, a bit of skulduggery and people, it was a career made in heaven. At least 60 percent of the time I was on the road. The bit I liked least was office downtime. Again, I looked around for signs that I was being set up. Then, satisfied that I wasn't, but feeling self-conscious nonetheless, I tucked the Gladych article into a drawer and got on with the business of the day. Another aerospace and defense company had fallen prey to post-Cold War economics. It was 24 hours before the paper closed for press and the news editor was yelling for copy. Two days later, in a much quieter moment, I visited the Jane's library. It was empty but for the librarian, a nice man way past retirement age who used to listen to the BBC's radio lunchtime news while gazing out over the building's bleak rear lot. In the days before the Internet revolution, the library was an invaluable resource. Fred T. Jane published his first yearbook, Jane's Fighting Ships, in 1898; and in 1909 the second, Jane's All The World's Aircraft, quickly built on the reputation of the former as a reference work par excellence for any and all information on aeronautical developments. Nigh on a century later, the library held just about every book and magazine ever put out by the company and a pile of other reference works besides. I scanned the shelves till I found what I was looking for. The Jane's All The World's Aircraft yearbook for 1956 carried no mention of antigravity experiments, nor did successive volumes, but that came as no great surprise. The yearbooks are the aerospace equivalent of Burke's Peerage or the Guinness Book of Records: every word pored over, analyzed and double-checked for accuracy. They'd have given antigravity a very wide berth. For a story like this, what I was looking for was a news publication. I looked along the shelves again. Jane's had gotten into the magazine publishing business relatively recently and the company's copies of Flight International and Aviation Week ran back only a few years. But it did have bound volumes of Interavia Aerospace Review from before the Second World War. And it was on page 373 in the May 1956 edition of this well-respected publication, in amongst advertisements for Constellation airliners, chunky-looking bits of radar equipment and (curiously for an aviation journal) huge "portable" Olivetti typewriters, that I found a feature bylined "Intel, Washington, D.C." with the headline: "Without Stress or Strain...or Weight." Beneath it ran the strapline: "The following article is by an American journalist who has long taken a keen interest in questions of theoretical physics and has been recommended to the Editors as having close connections with scientific circles in the United States. The subject is one of immediate interest, and Interavia would welcome further comment from knowledgeable sources." The article referred to something called "electro-gravitics" research, whose aim was to "seek the source of gravity and its control." This research, "Intel" stated, had "reached a stage where profound implications for the entire human race are beginning to emerge." I read on, amused by the tone and wondering how on earth the article had come to be accepted in a mainstream aerospace journal. "In the still short life of the turbojet airplane [by then, 1956, little more than a decade], man has had to increase power in the form of brute thrust some twenty times in order to achieve just twice the speed. The cost in money in reaching this point has been prodigious. The cost in highly specialized man-hours is even greater. By his present methods man actually fights in direct combat the forces that resist his efforts. In conquering gravity he would be putting one of his most competent adversaries to work for him. Antigravitics is the method of the picklock rather than the sledgehammer." Not only that, the article stated, but antigravity could be put to work in other fields beyond aerospace. "In road cars, trains and boats the headaches of transmission of power from the engine to wheels or propellers would simply cease to exist. Construction of bridges and big buildings would be greatly simplified by temporary induced weightlessness etc. Other facets of work now under way indicate the possibility of close controls over the growth of plant life; new therapeutic techniques, permanent fuelless heating units for homes and industrial establishments; new sources of industrial power; new manufacturing techniques; a whole field of new chemistry. The list is endless ...and growing." It was also sheer fantasy. Yet, for the second time in a week I had found an article--this time certainly in a publication with a solid reputation--that stated that U.S. aerospace companies were engaged in the study of this "science." It cited the same firms mentioned by Gladych and some new ones as well: Sperry-Rand and General Electric among them. Within these institutions, we were supposed to believe, people were working on theories that could not only make materials weightless, but could actually give them "negative weight"--a repulsive force that would allow them to loft away "contra-gravitationally." The article went further. It claimed that in experimentation conducted by a certain "Townsend T. Brown" weights of some materials had already been cut by as much as 30 percent by "energizing" them and that model "disc airfoils" utilizing this technology had been run in a wind tunnel under a charge of a hundred and fifty kilovolts "with results so impressive as to be highly classified." I gazed out over the slate rooftops. For Interavia to have written about antigravity, there had to have been something in it. The trouble was, it was history. My bread-and-butter beat was the aerospace industry of the 1990s, not this distant cozy world of the fifties with its heady whiff of jet-engine spirit and the developing Cold War. I replaced the volume and returned to my desk. It should have been easy to let go, but it wasn't. If people of the caliber quoted by Gladych and Interavia had started talking about antigravity anytime in the past ten years I would have reported it--however skeptical I might be on a personal level. Why had these people said the things they had with such conviction? One of them, George S. Trimble, had gone so far as to predict that a breakthrough would occur in around the same time it took to develop the atomic bomb--roughly five years. Yet, it had never happened. And even if the results of "Townsend T. Brown's" experiments had been "so impressive as to be highly classified," they had clearly come to naught; otherwise, by the 60s or 70s the industry would have been overtaken by fuelless propulsion technology. I rang a public relations contact at Lockheed Martin, the U.S. aerospace and defense giant, to see if I could get anything on the individuals Gladych had quoted. I knew that Lawrence Bell and Bill Lear were both dead. But what about George S. Trimble? If Trimble was alive--and it was a long shot, since he would have to be in his 80s--he would undoubtedly confirm what I felt I knew to be true; that he had been heavily misquoted or that antigravity had been the industry's silly-season story of 1956. A simple phone call would do the trick. Daniella "Dani" Abelman was an old media contact within Lockheed Martin's public affairs organization. Solid, reliable and likable, she'd grown up in the industry alongside me, only on the other side of the divide. Our relationship with the information managers of the aerospace and defense world was as double-edged as the PR/reporter interface in any other industry. Our job was to get the lowdown on the inside track and, more often than not, it was bad news that sold. But unlike our national newspaper counterparts, trade press hacks have to work within the industry, not outside it. This always added an extra twist to our quest for information. The industry comprised hundreds of thousands of people, but despite its size, it was surprisingly intimate and incestuous enough for everyone to know everyone else. If you pissed off a PR manager in one company, even if it was on the other side of the globe, you wouldn't last long, because word would quickly get around and the flow of information would dry up. But with Abelman, it was easy. I liked her. We got on. I told her I needed some background on an individual in one of Lockheed Martin's "heritage" companies, a euphemism for a firm it had long since swallowed whole. The Glenn L. Martin Company became the Martin Company in 1957. In 1961, it merged with the American-Marietta Company, becoming Martin-Marietta, a huge force in the Cold War U.S. defense electronics industry. In 1994, Martin-Marietta merged again, this time with Lockheed to form Lockheed Martin. The first of the global mega-merged defense behemoths, it built everything from stealth fighters and their guided weapons to space launchers and satellites. Abelman was naturally suspicious when I told her I needed to trace an ex-company employee, but relaxed when I said that the person I was interested in had been doing his thing more than 40 years ago and was quite likely dead by now. I was circumspect about the reasons for the approach, knowing full well if I told her the real story, she'd think I'd taken leave of my senses. But I had a bona fide reason for calling her--and one that legitimately, if at a stretch, involved Trimble: I was preparing a piece on the emergence of the U.S. aerospace industry's "special projects" facilities in the aftermath of the Cold War. Most large aerospace and defense companies had a special projects unit; a clandestine adjunct to their main business lines where classified activities could take place. The shining example was the Lockheed Martin "Skunk Works," a near-legendary aircraft-manufacturing facility on the edge of the California high desert. For 50 years, the Skunk Works had sifted Lockheed for its most highly skilled engineers, putting them to work on top secret aircraft projects. Using this approach it had delivered some of the biggest military breakthroughs of the 20th century, among them the world's first Mach 3 spyplane and stealth, the art of making aircraft "invisible" to radar and other enemy sensor systems. But now the Skunk Works was coming out of the shadows and, in the process, giving something back to its parent organization. Special projects units were renowned for bringing in complex, high-risk defense programs on time and to cost, a skill that had become highly sought after by the main body of the company in the austere budget environment of the 1990s. Trimble, I suggested, might be able to provide me with historical context and "color" in an otherwise dry business story. "Advanced Programs," the outfit he was supposed to have worked for, sounded a lot like Martin's version of the Skunk Works. Abelman said she'd see what she could do, but I wasn't to expect any short-order miracles. She wasn't the company historian, she said dryly, but she'd make a few inquiries and get back to me. I was surprised when she phoned me a few hours later. Company records, to her surprise--and mine--said that Trimble was alive and enjoying retirement in Arizona. "Sounds hard as nails, but an amazing guy by all accounts," she breezed. "He's kinda mystified why you want to talk to him after all this time, but seems okay with it. Like you said, it's historical, right?" "Right," I said. I asked Abelman, while she was at it, for all the background she had on the man. History or not, I said, trying to keep it light, I liked to be thorough. She was professional enough to sound less than convinced by my newfound interest in the past, but promised she'd do her best. I thanked her, then hung up, feeling happy that I'd done something about it. A few weeks, a month at the outside, the mystery would be resolved and I could go back to my regular beat, case closed. Outside, another bank of gray storm clouds was rolling in above rooftops that were still slick from the last passing shower. I picked up my coat and headed for the train station, knowing that somewhere between the office and my flat in central London I was going to get soaked right through. The initial information came a week later from a search through some old files that I'd buried in a collection of boxes in my basement: a company history of Martin Marietta I'd barely remembered I'd acquired. It told me that in 1955 Trimble had become involved in something called the Research Institute for Advanced Studies, RIAS, a Martin spin-off organization whose brief was to "observe the phenomena of nature...to discover fundamental laws...and to evolve new technical concepts for the improvement and welfare of mankind." Aside from the philanthropic tone, a couple of things struck me as fishy about the RIAS. First off, its name was as bland as the carefully chosen "Advanced Development Projects"--the official title of the Skunk Works. Second, was the nature and caliber of its recruits. These, according to the company history, were "world-class contributors in mathematics, physics, biology and materials science." Soon afterward, I received a package of requested information from Lockheed Martin in the mail. RIAS no longer existed, having been subsumed by other parts of the Lockheed Martin empire. But through an old RIAS history, a brochure published in 1980 to celebrate the organization's "first 25 years," I was able to glean a little more about Trimble and the outfit he'd inspired. It described him as "one of the most creative and imaginative people that ever worked for the Company." I read on. >From a nucleus of people that in 1955 met in a conference room at the Martin Company's Middle River plant in Maryland, RIAS soon developed a need for its own space. In 1957, with a staff of about 25 people, it moved to Baltimore City. The initial research program, the brochure said, was focused on NASA and the agency's stated goal of putting a man on the moon. But that wasn't until 1961. One obvious question was, what had RIAS been doing in the interim? Mainly math, by the look of it. Its principal academic was described as an expert in "topology and nonlinear differential equations." I hadn't the least idea what that meant. In 1957, the outfit moved again, this time to a large mansion on the edge of Baltimore, a place chosen for its "campus-like" atmosphere. Offices were quickly carved from bedrooms and workshops from garages. It reminded me of accounts I'd read of the shirtsleeves atmosphere of the early days of the Manhattan Project when Oppenheimer and his team of atom scientists had crunched through the physics of the bomb. And that was the very same analogy Trimble had used. The conquest of gravity, he'd said, would come in the time it took to build the bomb. I called a few contacts on the science and engineering side of Lockheed Martin, asking them, in a roundabout kind of way, whether there was, or ever had been, any part of the corporation involved in gravity or "counter-gravitational" research. After some initial questions on their part as to why I should be interested, which I just about managed to palm off, the answer that came back was a uniform "no." Well, almost. There was a guy, one contact told me, a scientist who worked in the combat aircraft division in Fort Worth who would talk eloquently about the mysteries of Nature and the universe to anyone who would listen. He'd also levitate paper clips on his desk. Great character, but a bit of a maverick. "Paper clips?" I'd asked. "A maverick scientist levitating paper clips on his desk? At Lockheed Martin? Come on." My source laughed. If he hadn't known better, he'd have said I was working up a story on antigravity. I made my excuses and signed off. It was crazy, possibly dangerous stuff, but it continued to have me intrigued. I called an old friend who'd gained a degree in applied mathematics. Tentatively, I asked whether topology and nondifferential linear equations had any application to the study of gravity. Of course, he replied. Topology--the study of shape in physics--and nonlinear equations were the standard methods for calculating gravitational attraction. I sat back and pieced together what I had. It didn't amount to much, but did it amount to something? In 1957, George S. Trimble, one of the leading aerospace engineers in the U.S. at that time, a man, it could safely be said, with a background in highly advanced concepts and classified activity, had put together what looked like a special projects team; one with a curious task. This, just a year after he started talking about the Golden Age of Antigravity that would sweep through the industry starting in the 1960s. So, what went wrong? In its current literature, the stuff pumped out in press releases all the time, the U.S. Air Force constantly talked up the "vision": where it was going to be in 25 years, how it was going to wage and win future wars and how technology was key. In 1956, it would have been as curious as I was about the notion of a fuelless propulsion source, one that could deliver phenomenal performance gains over a jet; perhaps including the ability to accelerate rapidly, to pull hairpin turns without crushing the pilot and to achieve speeds that defied the imagination. In short, it would have given them something that resembled a UFO. I rubbed my eyes. The dim pool of light that had illuminated the Lockheed-supplied material on Trimble and RIAS had brought on a nagging pain in the back of my head. The evidence was suggesting that in the mid-50s there had been some kind of breakthrough in the antigravity field and for a small window in time people had talked about it freely and openly, believing they were witnessing the dawn of a new era, one that would benefit the whole of mankind. Then, in 1957, everyone had stopped talking about it. Had the military woken up to what was happening, bringing the clamps down? Those in the know, outfits like Trimble's that had been at the forefront of the breakthrough, would probably have continued their research, assembling their development teams behind closed doors, ready for the day they could build real hardware. But of course, it never happened. It never happened because soon after Trimble, Bell and Lear made their statements, sanity prevailed. By 1960, it was like the whole episode never took place. Aerospace development continued along its structured, ordered pathway and antigravity became one of those taboo subjects that people like me never, ever talked about. Satisified that everything was back in its place and as it should be, I went to bed. Somewhere in my head I was still tracking the shrill, faraway sounds of the city when the phone rang. I could tell instantly it was Abelman. Separated by an ocean and five time zones, I heard the catch in her breathing. "It's Trimble," she said. "The guy just got off the phone to me. Remember how he was fine to do the interview? Well, something's happened. I don't know who this old man is or what he once was, but he told me in no uncertain terms to get off his case. He doesn't want to speak to me and he doesn't want to speak to you, not now, not ever. I don't mind telling you that he sounded scared and I don't like to hear old men scared. It makes me scared. I don't know what you were really working on when you came to me with this, Nick, but let me give you some advice. Stick to what you know about; stick to the damned present. It's better that way for all of us." ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- Excerpted from The Hunt for Zero Point by Nick Cook Copyright 2002 by Nick Cook. Excerpted by permission of Broadway, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. http://mailbox.univie.ac.at/~muehleb9/antigrav.html Inside the Secret World of Anti-Gravity Technology "Just imagine a machine that is constructed such a way, that it does not operate by steam or electricity, but by those waves that man generates in his tone, in his speech. Just imagine such a motor that one may operate by those waves or perhaps by the generation of his spiritual life. It was still an ideal. Thank god that it was an ideal at that time, because what would have become of this war when this Keely-ideal had become a reality in those days!" --Rudolf Steiner, lecture held in Berlin, June 20, 1916 Published August 2002, "The Hunt for Zero Point" by Nick Cook is for the majority devoted to claims that Viktor Schauberger build the first anti gravity powered flying device for the Nazi's and that the foo fighters reported at the end of WWII where in fact Nazi-UFO's. In reality the August 2002, "The Hunt for Zero Point" belongs to a tradition of books made popular by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier's sensational account of Nazi occultism, Le matin des magiciens (1960) that sold more then a million copies. The roots of Nazi UFO mythology lie in the closely related Hitler survival myth. Early myths of German revanche were linked with the idea that Adolf Hitler had escaped from the Berlin bunker during the closing days of the war and made his way to safety abroad. Conflicting accounts of events in the Bunker, circumstantial evidence, and early Soviet suggestions that Hitler was alive created widespread speculation regarding his fate. 4 Stories of Hitler's last-minute marriage to Eva Braun and their flight to a new life began to circulate in the international press during the summer of 1945. On 16 July a sensational article in the Chicago Times had Hitler and Eva Braun landing in Argentina and living on a German-owned estate in Patagonia. The story was reprinted by every major American and European paper, including the New York Times, the Baltimore Sun, The Times of London, and Le Monde. The story was most likely prompted by the late surrender in early July of the German U530 submarine at the Argentine port of Mar del Plata. Several Buenos Aires papers reported earlier clandestine landings by rubber boats along the coast. However, on 17 July the newspaper Critica stated that the Fiffirer and Eva Braun had landed from the U-530 in Antarctica, noting that the possible place of disembarkation was Queen Maud Land, the destination of a German Antarctic expedition in 1938-39. The late surrender of German submarines in Argentina during the summer of 1945 played a key role in focusing press interest on Hitler's escape to the Southern Hemisphere. The U-530 had given itself up at Mar del Plata on 10 July with an excessively large crew of fifty-four men, considerable stocks of food and an odd cargo-more than five hundred large drums containing cigarettes. On 17 August 1945 three months after the capitulation of the Third Reich, another German submarine, U-977, surrendered at Mar del Plata. Captain Heinz Schdffer had only thirty-two men under his command on board. The logs of both submarines showed that both had left Kristiansund, Norway, on 2 May 1945. As in the case of the U-530, the crew were all exceptionally young and unmarried men. A third submarine had meanwhile surrendered at Leixoes on the coast of Portugal on 5 June. The mystery of the submarines' long voyages, young crews, exceptional supplies and unknown whereabouts during the intervening months before their surrender fed speculation that the submarines had been involved in a "phantom convoy" bringing Hitler and other top Nazis with auxiliary forces to a secret hideout in Antarctica. Admiral Richard E. Byrd's massive international mission to Antarctica in 1946-47 offered another suggestive piece of evidence for the Allies' apparent concern with a postwar Nazi military presence in Antarctica. On 2 December 1946 a United States fleet of thirteen ships, equipped with four thousand navy troops, amphibious tanks, helicopters and two hundred airplanes, sailed from Norfolk, Virginia, to join up with Anglo-Norwegian and Soviet task forces to monitor Antarctica, ostensibly for the purposes of scientific research and to establish territorial claims. On arriving in Antarctica, the expedition quickly ran into difficulties. Byrd lost four airplanes and hastily withdrew, abandoning the whole operation. A Chilean journalist, Lee Van Atta, quoted Byrd to the effect that he was concerned about the threat to US security from unidentified enemies in the polar region who could fly from one pole to the other! Between 1951 to 1955 Erich Halik published his articles in the Austrian esoteric magazine "Mensch und Schicksal" where he claimed that postwar sightings of flying saucers related to German craft. He devoted careful analysis to George Adamski's account of a cigar-shaped mother ship, from which a saucer flew forth in November 1952. Halik argued that the naive American, Adamski, could neither interpret the "Black Sun" insignia nor recognize the swastikas in an "alien" inscription. Halik concluded that German flying saucers were operating from secret polar bases in the Arctic and that the flying disks were an important part of a German plan to create an extraterritorial state prior to a renewed attack on the Allied enemies after 1945. In 1960 Michael X. Barton published in Los Angeles "We Want You: Is Hitler Alive?" based on the U-530 and U-977 stories in the Police Gazette articles of the early 1950s. Barton claimed that Hitler was in Argentina, where UFOs were being developed in secret underground installations by German scientists, and he also alluded to the existence of neo-Nazis in West Germany and Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party in the United States. Both Erich Halik and Michael X.Barton claimed the same beginnings of Nazi-UFO's/foo fighters, as Nick Cook in his August 2002 book, the silent "electro-magnetic/zero point energy" bellshaped flying saucers built of copper at Vienna by Viktor Schauberger, in 1940... Le matin des magicians" (1960 ) by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, quote as their primary source of information Willy Ley's article published in the USA of a "Vril Society" in Berlin. Although Willy Ley (and therefore also "Le matin des magicians") did not report this properly, such a group did indeed exist but under a different name. The "society" Willy Ley was referring to in fact was called "Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft 'Das Kommende Deutschland" and published a short brochure Vril: Die kosmische Urkraft (1930), referring to the teachings of Rudolf Steiner that described the Atlanteans as possessors of a spiritual "dynamo-technology," superior to the mechanistic notions of modern science. It promoted Keely's discoveries that Steiner in the above lecture quote was referring to, and experimented with in his first Goetheanum. Keely's theories as is known were based on theories of sound and the figure eight. Steiner built his first Goetheanum from the same kind of wood violins were built of and in the form of a figure eight, it's center to be used in the hunt for Zero Point! Comments to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.salon.com/books/review/2002/08/05/zero_gravity/print.html "The Hunt for Zero Point" by Nick Cook An editor for the esteemed Jane's Defense Weekly says the U.S. government has been working on Nazi anti-gravity technology in secret for 50 years. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Kurt Kleiner Aug. 5, 2002 | The U.S. government confiscated secret Nazi anti-gravity technology at the end of World War II, and later may have tested it in aircraft that account for the rash of post-War UFO sightings. Some of that technology has probably made its way into the B2 stealth bomber. Some of it is probably so dangerous that it's buried away in secret government vaults. In the post-X-Files age, this sort of conspiracy theory won't raise any eyebrows. What makes the allegations interesting is that they appear in "The Hunt for Zero Point," which is written by Nick Cook, for 10 years the aviation editor at Jane's Defense Weekly. Jane's is the bible of the defense establishment, known for its no-nonsense, nuts-and-bolts reporting. A former Jane's editor tackling this topic is enough to make you take a second look. Although anti-gravity research ranks right up there with perpetual motion on the crank-o-meter, the idea of anti-gravity can't be completely dismissed. As recently as 1996 a Finnish scientist announced he could partially "shield" objects from gravity using spinning superconductors. Although most scientists are skeptical, NASA is interested enough that it's trying to replicate the results. And certainly Nazi Germany was working on a lot of advanced technology by the end of the war, including rockets, jet fighters and nuclear power. The U.S. recruited some German scientists to continue their work in the U.S., most notably Wernher von Braun, the V-2 rocket scientist who later helped make the moon landings possible. It's also clear that the U.S. military works on secret technology all the time -- about $11 billion worth every year in "deep black" programs that aren't even acknowledged to exist. The stealth fighter and B2 bomber were black programs for years. So even if Nazi flying saucers sound nutty on the face of it, there's nothing crazy about Cook asking the questions he does. You might even call it courageous. It's the conclusions he reaches that are the problem. Cook's search begins one day when a photocopy of a 1956 magazine article mysteriously lands on his desk. It's called "The G-Engines Are Coming!" and is illustrated with a drawing of a U.S. airman descending the steps of a floating, wingless aircraft. Cook thinks it's a joke, but gets interested when he sees aerospace industry leaders of the day quoted as saying anti-gravity could be the next big breakthrough. He decides to call one of them, a now-retired engineer named George S. Trimble. A Lockheed Martin P.R. person, "Daniella Abelman," sets up an interview, then calls back and says Trimble has cancelled. "I don't mind telling you that he sounded scared and I don't like to hear old men scared. It makes me scared," she tells Cook. "Let me give you some advice. Stick to what you know about; stick to the damned present. It's better that way for all of us.'" (Cook has changed "Abelman's" name, so there's no way to call her and see if she really talks like a character in a Tom Clancy novel.) Of course Cook's curiosity is inflamed, and he tracks down Trimble in a retirement community in Arizona and -- oh, wait a minute. That's what you expect him to do. But here's what he says. "My great regret was that I couldn't contact George S. Trimble directly. Had I done so, I knew that Abelman would have gone ballistic. She'd told me to stay away from him and she had the power to ensure that I became an outcast if I didn't." Unwilling to face the wrath of the flack, he retreats to the Internet where "in the silence of the night, I could roam ... and remain anonymous." He finds the story of Thomas Townsend Brown, a former Navy engineer who believed he could negate gravity using electricity and who by 1956 was demonstrating small, electrically charged flying disks. The military was briefly interested, but in the end issued a report that said there was no usable technology there. But Cook notices something in a 1947 Army Air Force memo (famous among UFO buffs), in which Lt. Gen. Nathan Twining concludes that UFOs are real. Twining adds that it is "within the present U.S. knowledge" to construct similar aircraft, given enough money. Cook concludes that by 1947 the U.S. must already have had a key component of UFO technology -- anti-gravity. That's why they weren't interested in Brown's technology years later. He suspects the technology came from Nazi Germany, and recounts allegations of German flying saucer programs from a few dubious books, as well as information he admits seems to have "magically appeared out of thin air ... passed down from one researcher to the next, without attribution." He gets off of the Internet and starts searching through military archives for clues. He finds a few hints in old Army Air Force records on Luftwaffe technology, but nothing substantial. Then he reads that the SS was in charge of the most secret German technology. "I felt a constriction in my throat. I was so keyed, my breath was coming in short, sharp gasps." Don't worry, he's not having a heart attack. He just realizes he's been looking in the wrong place. He starts reading about the SS. Soon we're off to Poland. A "researcher" named Igor Witkowski shows Cook an old mine, where he claims SS scientists worked on a machine called the Bell, a glowing, rotating contraption that used up a lot of electricity. "Word had it that the tests sought to investigate some kind of antigravitational effect, Witkowski said." Somebody else thinks it might have been a time machine. Then Cook finds yet another SS anti-gravity program, a flying saucer called the "Repulsine." Cook concludes that an SS official named Hans Kammler had all of this technology boxed up and flown to a safe place, later trading it to the U.S. military for his freedom. The U.S. government kept it all under wraps for years, but probably implemented some of it in the B2 bomber. Why didn't the U.S. make more widespread use of this technology? Partly because it would have disrupted the existing aerospace industry, with its expertise in winged aircraft. Partly because anti-gravity might tap into energies just too destructive to tamper with. And "... in the 1940s and 1950s, it wasn't as if the world really needed it." It's a story that strains credulity. But unless we're after cheap laughs, our hope when we pick up a book like this is that the author will, against the odds, build a careful, reasonable and convincing case. Cook isn't that author. The first problem is that Cook is no help sorting out the physics he's writing about. His explanation of "zero point energy" (a quantum effect caused by virtual particles winking in and out of existence) is acceptable. But he's also capable of explaining that the Repulsine made air molecules "pack so tightly together that their molecular and nuclear binding energies were affected in a way that triggered the anti-gravity effect." Both explanations sound equally weird to the layman. But the first is recognized science, the second pseudo-science. OK, so physics is hard, and Cook is a journalist. But we should at least expect him to bring a journalist's care to the sources he uses and the conclusions he draws. Instead, we're bombarded with a hodgepodge of information trawled up from the Internet, other books and UFO and anti-gravity enthusiasts, along with some firsthand reporting. Although he makes a show of weighing this information with the critical eye of a trained aerospace expert, he doesn't prove worthy of much confidence. A perfect example is his reliance on Witkowski, the Polish researcher, whose information is key to Cook's conclusions. Where did the information come from? Witkowski says a Polish government official (whom he refuses to name) allowed him to see some documents, but not make copies of them. Why does Cook believe Witkowski? "Witkowski had been recommended to me by Polish sources through my work at Jane's as someone who was both highly knowledgeable and reliable ... Had Witkowski been in any way a lightweight, I would have turned around and got on the first plane home. But when I saw him, I knew he was OK." Just as shaky are most of Cook's conclusions. For instance, the old Army Air Force memo in which Twining says UFO-type aircraft are "within the present U.S. knowledge" runs like a mantra through the book. Cook thinks it means that even in 1947 the U.S. could have built an aircraft capable of tremendous acceleration and instantaneous changes of direction, a craft that would require anti-gravity to work. Twining actually says, "It is possible within the present U.S. knowledge ... to construct a piloted aircraft which has the general description of the object in subparagraph (e) above." What's that description? Metallic, saucer-shaped, quiet, no trail, capable of flying in formation, with a cruising speed of 300 knots. Right or wrong, Twining's not talking about the same astonishing capabilities as Cook is. Or look at his conclusions about Kammler, the SS official Cook thinks traded the anti-gravity technology to the U.S. By the end of the war Kammler was the administrator in charge of most advanced research programs, including the V-2 rocket factories. But where's the evidence he traded any technology -- much less anti-gravity technology -- to the U.S.? Well, a lot of Germans with technological knowledge tried to cut deals with the U.S. Kammler's movements at the end of the war are mysterious, and there are contradictory reports about his death. Besides, Cook thinks it's the kind of thing Kammler would do. "My feeling was Kammler would offer them something so spectacular they'd have no choice but to enter into negotiations with him." In fact, a lot of the evidence here is based on Cook's feelings. A minor but typical example is a feeling he gets while reading a "recovered transcript," supposedly of a phone call between two Air Force officers discussing Brown's work. Gen. Victor E. Bertrandias is the chatty one; a general named Craig doesn't say much -- only "No" and later "I see." It's Craig who catches Cook's interest. "The man's urbane delivery earmarked him, to me at least, as someone big in Air Force intelligence." All that from, "I see." What is instructive about the book is the insight we get into how conspiracy theories seduce otherwise reasonable people. Like all of us, Cook knows that real conspiracies exist. No one questions, for instance, that military technologies are being developed in secret, and that the government "conspires" to keep details from the public. But what do you look for when you think direct evidence has been withheld or suppressed? Before searching some old records, Cook realizes "it was inconceivable that the ... intelligence teams would have documented the discovery [of German flying saucers] for the world to read about ... I wasn't searching for the obvious, because the obvious would have been picked up by the censors." So Cook is reduced to ferreting out minor inconsistencies and odd, ambiguous details which he tries to puff up into proof. Likewise, information that is available has to be suspected as possible government disinformation. Perhaps the military has encouraged UFO reports to disguise its own flying saucer tests. Maybe the mythical Philadelphia Experiment (in which a Navy ship was supposedly sent into another dimension) was really just a story designed to discredit Brown. But, since the best disinformation always contains a grain of truth, maybe there really is a connection between anti-gravity and other dimensions. Using this reasoning, all bets are soon off, and almost anything you turn up -- lack of evidence, official denials, unsubstantiated rumors, wild conjecture -- becomes evidence for what you're trying to prove. In the end, Cook's argument boils down to the old proverb he invokes several times -- Where there's smoke there must be fire. But sometimes, someone's just blowing smoke. About the writer Kurt Kleiner is a writer living in Toronto. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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