The
Unspeakable Lightness of Boeing
Maverick
theoreticians claim black-budget
aircraft such as the
B-2 bomber
may be capable of solid-state
gravity propulsion.
On the
twisted trail of "an urban myth."
BY
TERRY HANSEN
Last summer,
while walking near the
My rational mind soon kicked in to
identify the vehicle as Northrop's B-2 bomber, large portions of which
were
built by Boeing as explained on the company's Web page (see sidebar).
At nearly
$2 billion per copy, depending on how you do the accounting, the B-2 is
by far
the most expensive aircraft yet revealed to the American public. Like
many
advanced military projects undertaken since World War II, the aircraft
was
designed and produced under extremely tight secrecy, right under the
noses of
our supposedly vigilant mass media which didn't even get a look at the
plane
until it was complete on Nov. 22, 1988.
"When the B-2 rolled out, it was the first
time that the aircraft, or any one of its major components, had been
seen by
anyone who had not been sworn to secrecy, under penalty of
incarceration,"
wrote Minneapolis-based aviation writer Bill Sweetman in his book about
the
B-2.
The second time I saw the B-2 in flight
was during last summer's annual Seafair festivities over
To a small group of maverick researchers,
however, the B-2 and related stealth aircraft embody secrets as yet
unguessed
by most Americans, secrets gleaned from clandestine government research
into
UFOs, antigravity, and recovered extraterrestrial technology. From this
decidedly unconventional perspective, the world of black-budget
research holds
technological tricks that, if made public, would forever alter the
nature of
commercial aviation and might even open the door to interstellar space
travel.
One might conclude, based on common sense,
that such ideas are hardly worth taking seriously. But history
testifies that
common sense has a poor record of success in the technology-forecasting
field.
With much of the Northwest economy dependent on Boeing and the aviation
business in general, ferreting out any kernels of truth from amid the
many wild
rumors that have been circulating now for several years seemed like a
worthy,
if challenging, journalistic exercise.
Getting
at the truth of the matter is less
easy than conventional wisdom might suggest. Risk of incarceration
keeps many
engineers and scientists from disclosing classified information, and
the very
existence and scope of classified programs often is known only to a
mere
handful of trusted people, a practice known as "compartmentalization."
On top
of this, military authorities and their contractors routinely mislead
the press
and public in order to protect advanced weapons research and other
secret
operations.
Faced with this epistemological minefield,
most journalists simply throw up their hands and unquestioningly repeat
the
contents of official press releases as "the facts." After all,
publishers
rarely allow them the budget and time to do much else, and reporters
know they
don't win points with their valued sources by antagonizing them with
difficult
or embarrassing questions.
Unreliable
Sources
Daniel Ellsberg, famous for leaking the
Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War era, expressed sadness and
disappointment at what he saw as the astonishing gullibility of the
American
press in the face of deceptive official pronouncements. "I have never
met in 12
years a newspaperman . . . who could imagine how often and how easily
he was
lied to by my bosses [at the Pentagon]," Ellsberg told a joint meeting
of the
U.S. Senate's Committees on the Judiciary and Government Operations in
1973.
Ellsberg disputed the widely held notion,
often amplified by journalists themselves, that the
Sometimes it's the New York Times itself that
helps keep government secrets under
wraps, as reporter Tim Weiner explained in the
According to former CIA official Victor
Marchetti, CIA manipulation of news content is commonly accomplished
through
such "friendly persuasion." But if this doesn't work, he wrote, the
Agency can
always call upon its network of "assets" who work in deep cover in
major
Winston Churchill once commented that, "In
wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a
bodyguard
of lies." So it is with black-budget aircraft.
Some years ago, two pilots of the SR-71
supersonic spy plane (a version of which is on display in the
John Pike, of the Federation of American
Scientists, a private government watchdog organization located in
Having calibrated our minds against the
known standard of history, we're now better equipped to plunge ahead
into the
shadowy world of black-budget aviation mysteries.
Leaks &
Lies
Just where did the rumors about the B-2's
antigravity potential start? Using the World Wide Web as a research
tool, I
concluded that rumors about the B-2's exotic capabilities actually
began about
six years ago with unnamed engineers and scientists working in the
world of
black-budget research and development. Claims that the B-2 employed
exotic
electrostatic technologies for reducing the aircraft's radar
visibility, heat
signature, and possibly for enhancing its propulsion or reducing
aerodynamic
drag were reported in the
An independent researcher interested in
esoteric propulsion technologies picked up on these clues and noted
many
similarities between the B-2's purported capabilities and pioneering
antigravity research underway in the 1950s. The researcher, Dr. Paul
LaViolette, then wrote a paper arguing that the B-2 employs an obscure
technology called "electrogravitics" as a supplemental propulsion
system to the
B-2's more conventional turbojet engines. He summarized his ideas in a
paper
called "The U.S. Antigravity Squadron."
According to LaViolette, the advantage of
using electrogravitics is that such a propulsion system would produce
no
contrail or heat signature, thus making the aircraft far more difficult
to
detect in the visual and infrared spectrums. It would also extend the
range and
speed of the airplane, since the craft would effectively be surfing
along on a
gravity wave of its own making.
As I began to evaluate this intriguing
idea, a key question seemed to be whether the B-2 actually did employ
electrostatic charges on the leading edge of its wing, as Aviation
Week had suggested, since this technology would indeed be
new to the civilian aviation world, regardless of whether it had
anything to do
with antigravity.
Although I talked with numerous experts
familiar with black-budget aircraft, I was never able to decide whether
these assertions
were major security leaks, as the magazine had suggested, or were
simply part
of some elaborate disinformation campaign. Most experts I talked with
seemed to
think there was no solid evidence the B-2 had a capability for
generating an
electrostatic charge along its wing. If true, then the claimed
similarities
between the B-2 and earlier antigravity research weren't real and the
whole
theory falls apart.
"That doesn't mean it doesn't exist,"
cautioned aviation writer Jim Goodall, who said he'd been told by the
late Ben
Rich, who succeeded Clarence Kelly Johnson as director of the legendary
Lockheed Skunk Works aircraft-design bureau, that black-budget
researchers are
sitting on some genuinely astonishing technologies.
"To quote Ben Rich . . . in a conversation
I had with him just prior to his death -- I knew Ben for 25 years -- he
said, 'We have worked with technologies in all disciplines that are
beyond the
comprehension of you or anybody you know,' and he's referring to me --
and I
have a pretty vivid imagination! [Rich] said, 'We are dealing with some
technologies that are 40 to 50 years beyond what you can comprehend.'
So is
there a possibility that there is a kernel of truth in this? I would
have to
say yes, based on what I've seen so far in the last 30 years that I've
been
doing research."
Goodall holds the unique distinction of
having acquired an A-12 'Blackbird' spy plane from the Air Force. He
then
restored it for a museum display.
John Pike, of the Federation of American Scientists,
is far more skeptical -- even cynical -- when it comes to claims about
mind-blowing technology in government hands. "Rich also says things
that are
patently false," Pike said, laughing. "If you go back and look at the
stuff
that he's written, he has written things that he must have known at the
time
were falsifications."
Pike contends that the purpose of secrecy
is less to hide genuinely surprising secrets than to make working on
military
projects easier and more lucrative for those engaged in them. "It's
more fun
that way," he said. "It's just a lot more fun working for a highly
classified
program than flipping 'burgers. You don't have to explain where the
money
[went]."
Whatever the case, the assertion that the
B-2 uses electrostatic charges in some fashion was seized upon by a
growing
subculture of technology theorists as evidence that the B-2 had links
to
antigravity research and UFO technology. Here things start to get even
more
interesting.
Gravity
Research
In its 1992 article about the B-2, Aviation Week
also reported that the
group of black-world engineers and scientists who spoke to the magazine
claimed
they were being severely harassed by security goons. "In voicing their
views,
this small group of scientific professionals dared to break a code of
silence
that rivals the Mafia's, and several individuals claim to have suffered
accordingly," reporter William B. Scott wrote. "Two said they can prove
their
civil rights were blatantly abused -- always in the name of security --
either
to keep them quiet or to prevent them from leaving the loosely
structured, yet
highly controlled intelligence R&D community."
The article also darkly hinted at other "very black"
technologies related to "aircraft control and propulsion" which one
scientist reportedly said were so complex that "very few people would
understand them anyway."
Students of "electrogravitics," pioneered
by physicist and space-flight researcher Thomas Townsend Brown in the
1950s,
emphasize the parallels between the B-2's claimed electrostatic
capabilities
and Brown's experimental apparatus. Brown had developed and patented
experimental devices that appeared to generate an anomalous
gravitational force
by means of an electrostatic charge placed across an insulating medium.
(Motion
pictures of Brown's levitating devices in operation still exist and a
site on
the World Wide Web contains photos of Brown's saucer-like
electrogravitic
devices.)
A 1956 British technical report obtained
by LaViollete via interlibrary loan from Wright-Patterson Air Force
Base in
Students of the UFO controversy know that
the Foreign Technology Division of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is
the
oft-mentioned destination for alien technology which witnesses and
government
documents indicate was recovered in
Air Force Secretary Sheila Widnall, asked
in 1996 by the television program Inside
Edition whether the
Whatever the case, the British electrogravitics
report by an organization called the Gravity Research Group of Aviation
Studies
(International) Ltd. made a number of astonishing statements. It
indicated that
electrogravitics technology had been demonstrated in laboratory tests
and that
electrostatic energy could, in theory, produce a "Mach 3 fighter" in
the shape
of a disk, assuming adequate resources were devoted to the task. The
report
says the Glenn Martin company (later Martin Marietta, now Lockheed
Martin)
indicated that gravity control "could be achieved in six years, but
they add
that it would entail a Manhattan District type of effort to bring it
about." In
short, the report suggested that manned antigravity disks could be
flying by
the mid-1960s.
The 1956 report also said that future
developments in gravity-propulsion research would soon need to become
classified. "Though gravity research, such as there has been of it, has
been
unclassified, new principles and information gained from the nuclear
research
facilities that have a vehicle application is expected to be
withheld," the
report said. In other words, electrogravitics was about to disappear
into the
expanding black-budget R&D world.
The report compared the accomplishments of
Townsend Brown to those of Frank Whittle, the British pioneer of
gas-turbine
engine technology that is now the primary propulsion source for
military and
civil aviation. Whittle's revolutionary ideas were rejected for years
but later
were embraced by the aviation industry.
Unlike Whittle, however, Townsend Brown's
ideas seem to have faded into obscurity. Most aviation experts I talked
with
said they knew little or nothing about either Brown or his
electrogravitics
technology. It's just not in the textbooks.
Although he said he wasn't familiar with
Townsend Brown, John Pike of the Federation of American scientists was
one
source who was aware such exotic research took place. But Pike said he
thought
nothing useful had come of it. "Particularly in the late 1950s and
early 1960s,
people were definitely thinking about this sort of thing to try to get
an idea
of what was physically possible," Pike said. "Interest in it went away
in the
early 1960s when they concluded it was not possible."
Brown, UFOs,
and the CIA
Townsend Brown was very interested in UFO
reports because of their evident bearing on his antigravity research.
In 1956
he founded the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomenon
(NICAP)
as an intelligence-gathering network. NICAP soon grew to become large
and
influential. It also came to the attention of many high-ranking CIA
officers,
including Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the CIA's original director (from
1947-50), who
joined NICAP's Board of Governors in 1957, and another NICAP board
member, Col.
Joseph Bryan III, who, from 1947-53 had been the founder and original
chief of
the CIA's Psychological Warfare Staff.
This obvious interest among high-level CIA
officers in NICAP's activities has prompted much speculation over the
years.
Some observers suspect the CIA sabotaged NICAP from within to prevent
it from
learning more about potentially useful UFO technology, while others
think the
CIA was merely using NICAP as an intelligence-gathering resource.
Perhaps it
was a little of both. In any case, as a long-time military R&D
consultant,
Brown's interests in UFO technology seem unlikely to have been
independent from
those of the CIA.
Secret aircraft technology and UFOs became
more firmly linked in the public consciousness in August of 1997 when
the CIA
released a report claiming that "over half of all UFO reports from the
late
1950's through the 1960's were accounted for by manned reconnaissance
flights"
of the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes. This, the CIA claimed, caused the Air
Force to
make "misleading and deceptive statements" to calm the public's fears
and
protect these sensitive national-security projects.
While the CIA report was printed without
question by most major newspapers (including the Aug. 3, 1997, New York Times) the claim that the Air
Force had been lying to the public about UFOs to protect the CIA's spy
plane
technology reportedly came as a big surprise to Lt. Col. (Ret.) Robert
Friend,
head of the Air Force's Project Blue Book from about 1958 to 1963.
(Blue Book
was an Air Force public-relations program that fielded many thousands
of UFO
reports from the public.)
Mark Rodeghier, a sociologist and
scientific director for the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies in
This, along with the extremely poor
correlation between the reported behavior of UFOs and that of U.S. spy
planes,
strongly suggests the recent CIA report was yet another in a long
series of
media deceptions designed to suggest increasing openness about the UFO
issue,
while continuing to keep the public confused about its true knowledge
of, and
involvement with, UFOs. In intelligence circles, this technique is
referred to
as "a limited hangout."
Perhaps this was an attempt to defuse
mounting political pressure from the American public which, according
to a Time magazine/CNN poll released a few months
earlier, had indicated that fully 80 percent of Americans thought the
U.S.
government was lying about its knowledge of the existence of aliens.
Clearly
the
Historically, the CIA has been extremely
evasive about its interest in UFOs, often denying any interest at all.
However,
numerous Freedom of Information Act lawsuits have demonstrated a
longstanding
interest in the topic by CIA personnel, an interest that extended
beyond the
life of Project Blue Book. But determining just what the CIA's interest
is can
be compared to peeling off layers of an onion. Beneath each layer of
deception
lies yet another layer.
A Cover Story?
The most commonly expressed view that
electrogravitics technology reached an abrupt dead end after so
promising a
start conflicts dramatically with the conclusions of the British
"Gravity
Research Group" report obtained from Wright-Patterson. The 1956 report
strongly
suggests that aerospace firms and the Pentagon had become believers in
the
value of this technology and were preparing to take the research black.
So a
reasonable alternative hypothesis is that the technology not only
worked, just
as Townsend Brown claimed, but went on to become the basis of a
completely new but
highly classified propulsion system, a technology that remains secret
even
today. It's this possibility that forms the basis for the claim by some
investigators that electrogravitics is alive and well and operating in
the B-2
bomber or other, still unannounced black-world craft.
I asked two physicists involved in gravity
research whether this might, in fact, be the case. One was Dr. Hal
Puthoff of
the Institute for Advanced Studies at
Puthoff, responding via E-mail, also
indicated he thought electrogravitics was a dead-end. But he also
indicated, in
response to my questions, that it was conceivable that two entirely
independent
physics-research communities had evolved during the Cold War.
"At this point I do not think T.T. Brown's
results were a demonstration of anomalous gravity effects," he wrote.
"Talking
to him just before he died, he did not encourage me to follow up on
this, as
the effect was so weak...."
Puthoff, who is probably best known for
his pioneering, CIA-sponsored research into the technique of "remote
viewing,"
went on to describe two attempts to replicate Townsend Brown's
research, one of
which he had conducted. Both were unsuccessful, he said.
"The only remaining possibility is that in
our various replication attempts none of us have gone as high in
voltage as
Brown did, so there is a small possibility of non-linear effects at
higher
voltages," Puthoff wrote. "It's a judgment call."
Puthoff also said he was skeptical the B-2
employs electrogravitics propulsion but admitted it was quite possible
that
well-funded black-budget researchers might have pushed back the
frontiers of
physics in ways as yet unknown to mainstream science.
"As to the possibility of two independent
physics communities, academic science and classified science, there are
certainly precedents (stealth technology being one)," Puthoff
responded. "As to
whether this is the case with gravity research, it's hard to say. I
have not
seen direct evidence of this myself, and I have looked, but that
doesn't mean
much; it would depend on how close-held it was."
To supporters of electrogravitics this is
a key point. All one needs to assume is that the black world really is
sitting
on some very big technological secrets and most of the pieces fall
neatly into
place. Thomas Valone, a patent examiner at the U.S. Patent and
Trademark Office
in Washington, D.C., has concluded electrogravitics is a real
technology. He
edited a published collection of relevant papers, reports, and patents
called Electrogravitics Systems: Reports on a New
Propulsion Methodology.
Valone says it's naive to argue that
electrogravitics technology doesn't exist because most of the evidence
for it
isn't in the public domain. The whole point of secret R&D is to
keep things
under wraps for as long as necessary. He cited the government's
continuing
denial of the Roswell UFO crash as another example of official
stonewalling in
the face of a long series of damaging leaks and discoveries.
"It's interesting that most people who
have been in the aerospace industry survey the situation over the
decades [and
conclude] that, since there has been no outward display of these craft,
that
somehow the research didn't go anywhere," Valone said. He pointed out
that the
B-2's prime contractor, Northrop Corporation, admitted as early as 1968
that it
was investigating the use of high-voltage charges on the leading edges
of
aircraft bodies (as reported in the Jan. 22 issue of Aviation
Week).
As far as the failures to replicate
Brown's research, Valone contends this is because such attempts did not
follow
Brown's precise technique. And indeed, the British electrogravitics
report
indicates that higher voltages are required before the anomalous
gravity effect
manifests.
Valone also cited a recent book by
Eisenhower-era National Security Council staffer Col. Philip J. Corso (The Day After Roswell) in which Corso
describes the clandestine seeding of recovered alien technology into
major U.S.
corporations, and specifically mentions (on pages 110-111) the
antigravity
flight technology research of Townsend Brown.
Corso's book, largely ignored by the
mainstream media, has proven controversial, even among longstanding UFO
investigators. On the one hand, Corso's credentials are completely real
and
verifiable. And on the other hand again, the book contains some major
flaws.
Even so, Corso isn't the first high-level government insider to claim
UFO
research has been under way for many decades.
In 1983, accomplished Washington Institute
of Technology physicist Robert Sarbacher acknowledged (in writing) to
researcher William Steinman, that top Manhattan Project scientists had
been
involved in analyzing recovered UFO hardware. Steinman had queried
Sarbacher
about his knowledge of a declassified Canadian government document
indicating
that U.S. authorities knew "flying saucers exist" and that the
subject, which
was being investigated by "a small group headed by Dr. Vannevar Bush,"
was "the
most highly classified subject in the United States Government." This
information had been supplied to Dr. Wilbert Smith of the Canadian
Department
of Transport following "discreet inquiries through the Canadian Embassy
staff
in Washington."
"John von Neuman was definitely involved"
in analyzing recovered saucer technology, Dr. Sarbacher wrote. "Dr.
Vannevar
Bush was definitely involved, and I think Dr. Robert Oppenheimer also."
He went on to say that "certain materials
reported to have come from flying saucer crashes were extremely light
and very
tough. I am sure our laboratories analyzed them very carefully."
Sarbacher also
expressed puzzlement over the reasons the U.S. government continues to
deny the
existence of these devices.
Solid evidence that some U.S. scientists
understand a surprising amount about the physics and control of
antigravity
vehicles appeared in 1995 when a manuscript written by Paul Hill, a
Chief
Scientist-Manager at NASA's Langley Research Center, finally found its
way into
print after being completed twenty years earlier (Unconventional
Flying Objects: A Scientific Analysis). The book's
introduction was written by Dr. Robert M. Wood, Research and
Development
Manager for McDonnell Douglas Corp. (now merged with Boeing). Published
posthumously and based on once-classified research conducted over a
period of
decades, Hill's book makes it clear that, if we knew how to generate
antigravity, we also could control the motion of such a vehicle.
Gravity theorist Hal Puthoff, who last
August (1997) delivered a paper before NASA's "Breakthrough Physics
Workshop"
contending that gravity control may be just a matter of engineering
(albeit
very difficult engineering), reviewed Hill's book positively in the
Winter 1996
issue of the Journal of Scientific
Exploration. "In the final analysis," Puthoff wrote, "one must
conclude
that Hill has assembled as good a case as can be made on the basis of
presently
available data that the observation of some 'unconventional flying
objects' is
compatible with the presence of engineering platforms weighing in at
something
around 30 tons, which are capable of 100-g accelerations and 9,000-mph
speeds
in the atmosphere."
Puthoff also told me via E-mail that it
was unnecessary to understand the theory behind gravity in order to
control it,
since many existing technologies -- aspirin was cited as an example --
have no
theoretical explanation.
Not Invented
Here
This still didn't answer my original
question about the B-2's secret capabilities but it showed that
antigravity
propulsion technology had become much more than just science fiction.
But there
was one more lead I wanted to pursue.
Recent wire-service stories suggesting
that Apollo 14 Astronaut Edgar Mitchell might know something about the
B-2 and
electrogravitics. Mitchell has made public comments indicating he took
seriously claims about reverse-engineered flying-saucer hardware. On
top of
this, Mitchell holds a doctorate in aeronautics and astronautics from
MIT, and
is one of only twelve people to have walked on the Moon. He clearly was
knowledgeable and well-connected, if only he could be reached.
In
recent years Mitchell has turned his attention from the exploration of
physical
space to the exploration of metaphysical space. I contacted his
Institute for
Noetic Sciences, a nonprofit organization he founded to explore the
nature of
human consciousness using rigorous scientific techniques. I was told to
write
to him and, if Mitchell felt it was worthwhile, he might just respond.
On Nov. 25 I sent off a letter detailing
my interests and credentials. On Dec. 19, my telephone rang. "This is
Ed Mitchell,"
a voice on the other end said. Mitchell confided he gets about four
interview
requests per day and can only respond
to the more serious inquiries. He said he was too busy to give formal
interviews but did take the time to discuss the B-2, UFOs, and related
matters.
He said that, after reviewing the evidence, he'd concluded that, as he
casually
put it, "the ETs are here."
Emphasizing that he'd not had any direct
experience with UFOs or alien technology, Mitchell went on to summarize
what he
had learned from a wide range of sources who he described as
"high-powered
people" and "well-placed people." While not providing names, he said
these were
people he had concluded were "in a position to know" and "are credible."
According to Mitchell, these sources
confirm the U.S. government does have extraterrestrial-derived
technology and
that some of these vehicles are now operational. The highly secret
organization
that develops and operates these craft is only loosely affiliated with
the U.S.
military, he said, and the technology has not yet entered the military
arsenal.
Mitchell also commented that Col. Corso's book had been "compromised"
on the
way to press and should have gone through a more careful proofreading
process
first.
Alas, Mitchell knew of no reason to
believe the B-2 incorporated alien technology in its propulsion
system (his emphasis), which he said was entirely
conventional so far as he knew.
The former Moon-walker described
alien-derived technology as "a secret hidden in plain sight." The U.S.
government simply refuses to acknowledge what is by now pretty much
common
knowledge. But he said he hoped the government would now enter what he
called "a new era of openness" with regard to the ET situation.
An 'X-Files'
World
Anyone who expects the U.S. government to
open its classified scientific files might be in for a long wait.
Herbert
Foerstel of University of Maryland libraries, author of
Secret Science: Federal Control of American Science and Technology,
reports that the U.S. government is sitting on well over one trillion
classified documents, and the amount is "growing out of control"
according to
experts. Some classified documents date back to World War I.
The pervasiveness and impact of classified
scientific data was brought home to me some ten years ago while touring
a
National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) research
ship on
Seattle's Lake Union. While passing through the map room, I noted that
certain
wall maps had been covered over with tarps. When asked about this, the
NOAA
officer who was my guide explained that detailed maps of the Pacific
Ocean
floor were classified. In other words, academic oceanographers lacking
a
security clearance would be ignorant of ocean floor topography, at
least below
a certain scale.
This has become an all-too-common
situation, though many academics seem unaware of it. The upshot of all
this
secret knowledge is that the university authorities we often turn to
for
scientific answers are in fact quite naive about the true state of
knowledge in
their fields. Or, if they've become privy to these secrets, it's only
on
condition that they agree not to tell anyone.
It was beginning to look like the
Manhattan Project that spawned such facilities as the Hanford
Reservation and
the Nevada Test Site never really ended, it simply acquired a new set
of goals
that were being pursued quietly all around me, often in places I'd
never
thought to look.
As I told John Pike of the Federation of
American Scientists, an organization working to reform classification
procedures, "If, back in 1944, you'd claimed that there was a secret
facility
out in the Washington state desert that was part of a massive program
involving
hundreds of thousands of people to develop a device that could destroy
a city
in a single blinding flash, you might have been dismissed by the media
as a
paranoid conspiracy buff."
"No, you'd have probably gotten a visit
from someone in the government," Pike laughed.
"Exactly!" I said. "And that's just what
those guys quoted in Aviation Week
said happened to them."
Since even U.S. senators and congressmen
have said they haven't been able to get satisfactory answers to their
questions
about such secret research, I asked physicist Hal Puthoff whether it
wasn't
dangerous to give the military near total control over advanced
research into
gravity. Should there be more public oversight of such highly advanced
technologies, assuming they exist or are being developed?
"A difficult question," Puthoff admitted. "Obviously during the
Cold War one could argue that advanced forms of
technological development perhaps should stay with the military. These
days it
is not so clear-cut. There are additional factors such as potential
destabilization of economies by leapfrogging technologies in energy and
transportation. In these days of increased terrorism, rogue states,
etc., how
it should be handled requires a lot of consideration. Anarchy we don't
want,
but neither do we want a police state. Tough decisions."
The problem of economic destabilization is
certainly one that would have to be on the minds of aerospace
executives at
companies such as Boeing. If the U.S. government were to announce that,
yes,
all the rumors about antigravity propulsion technology were true, and
that such
systems would soon be released into the commercial sector, countless
billions
of dollars in existing capital equipment would become about as valuable
as
sailing ships in the age of steam. Think about it: all those shiny new
commercial
jet aircraft, sprawling final-assembly plants, massive terminal
facilities,
air-traffic control networks, and god knows how many millions of jobs
would
disappear, not overnight perhaps, but far too fast for economic and
psychological comfort.
So if anyone at Boeing knows about this
stuff (and there are reasons to suspect they do) then they'd have a
very
powerful incentive to convince government policymakers not to let this
particular technological cat out of the bag just yet. After all, the
existing
air-transportation system is highly profitable and still growing
rapidly. Why
mess with a good thing?
As to whether the B-2 uses antigravity
propulsion, the evidence is rational but difficult to evaluate, so I
wouldn't
bet my life on it. On the other hand, so much about both gravity and
the B-2 is
poorly understood that I wouldn't bet my life that it doesn't use
exotic
technologies, either. And maybe that's just how the
military/intelligence
community likes to have it.
Even if the B-2 doesn't employ any amazing
technological tricks, the myth that it does helps explain its
eye-popping price
tag. Taxpayers no doubt would find it reassuring to believe that all
those
billions didn't disappear just to create another gold-plated Cold War
boondoggle, as critics such as John Pike suggest.
But if the B-2 antigravity propulsion
system is, as Pike and others insist, merely an urban myth, it's
certainly a
much higher class of urban myth than, say, the story of the old lady
who tried
to dry her poodle in the microwave, or the guy who became airborne by
tying
helium balloons to his lawn chair. Antigravity technology clearly is no
longer
a wacky idea and serious people have been working on it for decades.
Philosophers say scientific knowledge is
different from other kinds of knowledge because it is, as they put it,
"intersubjectively testable." In other words, you can check it out for
yourself. But this neat concept breaks down in the case of the B-2 and
other
classified technologies. Then there's the vexing problem of calculated
disinformation. Scientists and government officials who are in a
position to
know about such things are required by law to lie to us about what
they're
doing, or even about what is possible. They're the new priesthood;
we're just
the serfs.
As for electrogravitics, it may not be one
of those things a basement scientist can test out using wires, aluminum
foil,
car batteries, and a few overpriced parts from Radio Shack. It's
perfectly
plausible that turning Townsend Brown's discoveries into a working
vehicle
might require many years, billions of dollars, the best research
facilities,
and a team of top scientific experts--and perhaps a few inadvertent
clues from
the aliens.
A Historical
Postscript
In January 1906, more than two years after
a pair of obscure bicycle mechanics conducted the first manned,
heavier-than-air powered flight, major U.S. magazines and newspapers
were still
scoffing openly at the Wright brothers' unbelievable claims, often
justifying
their journalistic skepticism on grounds that top scientific
authorities
insisted such an achievement was simply a violation of the known laws
of
physics. Scientific American (which,
by an odd coincidence, published a skeptical piece in its Dec. 1997
issue about
Hal Puthoff's zero-point energy research) had this to say:
The Wrights,
who had
pursued their research in the absence of a complete theory of
aerodynamics,
struggled on for several more years to convince a doubting world of the
reality
of their achievement. Although hundreds of people told editors they had
witnessed their machine in flight, local newspapers refused to check
out their
stories. Photographs of the aircraft in flight were dismissed as hoaxes.
It was not until a special demonstration,
organized by President Teddy Roosevelt in 1908, that the scientific and
popular
press finally conceded that the Wright's "impossible" technology did,
in fact,
work as claimed.
(Terry Hansen
is an
independent investigative journalist with a special interest in
technology and
scientific controversies. He is author of The Missing Times.)
-------------------------------------------
Further
Books
Alternative
Science: Challenging the Myths of the Scientific Establishment, by
Richard
Milton. (Rochester: Park Street Press, 1996.) Lots of good historical
reasons
not to trust established scientific experts.
Area
51: The Dreamland Chronicles, by David Darlington. (New York: Henry
Holt
and Co., 1997). A readable account of secret-aircraft development at
the
officially non-existent
The
Day After
Electrogravitics
Systems: Reports on a New Propulsion Methodology, Thomas Valone,
ed.
(Washington, D.C.: Integrity Research Institute, 1995.) A collection of
documents, patents, and other speculations about electrogravitics.
Northrop
B-2 Stealth Bomber, by Bill Sweetman. (Osceola: Motorbooks
International,
1992.) A good general-interest description of what has been released
about the
B-2.
Secret
Science: Federal Control of American Science and Technology, by
Herbert N.
Foerstel. (Westport: Praeger, 1993.) An account of how scientists
abandoned
their traditional goals to serve the clandestine national-security
state.
The UFO
Files: The Canadian Connection Exposed, by Palmiro Campagna.
(Toronto:
Stoddard Publishing, 1997.) Includes an up-to-date account of the
Wilbert
Smith/Robert Sarbacher affair.
Unconventional
Flying Objects, by Paul R. Hill. (Charlottesville: Hampton Roads
Publishing
Co., 1995) A good theoretical explanation of how antigravity disks
could be
controlled, assuming they existed.
Articles
"'Black World' Engineers Encourage Using
Highly Classified Technology for Civil Applications" Aviation
Week and Space Technology, Mar. 9, 1992, pp. 66-67. Leaks
or disinformation? Where the B-2 antigravity mythology seems to have
started.
"Beyond E=mc\2" B. Haisch, A. Rueda, H.
Puthoff. The Sciences, Vol. 34, No.
6, Nov./Dec. 1994, pp. 26-31. A non-technical explanation of why
gravity and
inertia may be controllable.
"Inertia: Does Empty Space Put Up the
Resistance?" Science, Vol. 263, pp.
612-613 (1994). Ditto the above, but by an independent reporter.
Journals
Antigravity
News,
The
Journal of Scientific Exploration. Society for Scientific
Exploration,
The
International UFO Reporter. J.
Web Sites
Antigravity News
http://www.padrak.com/agn
Boeing's B-2 bomber:
http://www.boeing.com/defense-space/military/b2bomber/
Electrogravitics:
http://www.newphys.se/elektromagnum
The Society for Scientific Exploration:
http://www.jse.com
The Parallel Universe of T. Townsend Brown:
http://www.ttbrown.com
In 2002, The Missing Times was awarded "Best Book In a UFO Subject" by Britain's UFO Magazine.