Space cadets

Call it intuition, call it a creeping suspicion - Nick Cave

A bit of an update of this post from last March, thanks to this thread on the RI discussion board.

An article last week in The Scotsman claimed an "extrordinary 'hyperspace' engine that could make interstellar space travel a reality by flying into other dimensions is being investigated by the United States government." The theory is to create an intense magnetic field that would provide gravitational thrust:

Also, if a large enough magnetic field was created, the craft would slip into a different dimension, where the speed of light is faster, allowing incredible speeds to be reached. Switching off the magnetic field would result in the engine reappearing in our current dimension.

The US air force has expressed an interest in the idea and scientists working for the American Department of Energy - which has a device known as the Z Machine that could generate the kind of magnetic fields required to drive the engine - say they may carry out a test if the theory withstands further scrutiny.

Professor Jochem Hauser, one of the scientists who put forward the idea, told The Scotsman that if everything went well a working engine could be tested in about five years.

Such an article can't help but make me think of Nick Cook's The Hunt for Zero Point. Cook's odyssey began at Jane's Aviation Weekly, when someone anonymously dropped a 1956 clipping on his desk with the headline "The G-Engines Are Coming." In many respects, the 50-year old article was not unlike that in last week's Scotsman: "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."

The article from '56 states the research is supported by the Glenn L Martin Aircraft Company, Bell Aircraft, Lear and several other US firms. It quotes Lawrence Bell as saying they are "already working" on cancelling out gravity. The head of Advanced Programs and VP in charge of the "G-Project" at Martin Aircraft, George S Trimble, adds that manufacturing a gravitational field drive "could be done in about the time it took to build the first atom bomb."

Cook almost tossed it in the waste basket, because almost as soon as such reports appeared in the mid-sixties it seemed as though they'd never existed. The research either never happened, was discontinued, or went deep black.

Cook, picking up the thread of a possibly deeply-guarded military-industrial secret, began by tracking down Trimble. He asked his media contact friend at Lockheed Martin, Daniella Abelman, to see if Trimble was still alive, and ask him if he'd be interested in an interview. Cook didn't tell Abelman why he wanted to talk. She called back soon after, and said that Trimble was alive and retired in Arizona. "Sounds hard as nails, but an amazing guy. 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," Cook said.

Abelman called back a few days later. "Separated by an ocean and five time zones," Cook writes, "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."

The familiar name of Hal Puthoff, formerly of Naval Intelligence and the NSA and then director of Stanford Research Institute's Remote Viewing program on behalf of the CIA and DIA, turns up midway through The Hunt for Zero Point. Puthoff has been doing theoretical work for NASA on the zero-point energy field since the early 1970s. (Before meeting, Cook had doubts he was acting wisely. "Did I really want to declare my interest in antigravity to a man who had clear connections to the intelligence community?") Cook probed him gingerly: Did Puthoff know of forms of aerospace travel, perhaps in the "black" world, whose principals contravened the laws of physics or our understanding of aerodynamics?

He sucked the top of his pen, giving the question a lot of thought before responding. "I've certainly talked to people who claim that something is going on," he said, pausing to add: "I would say the evidence is pretty solid."

When asked to choose which of five avenues proposed by NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics program stood the greatest chance of success, Puthoff selected without hesitation the perturbation of space-time through antigravity.

Cook left the interview with the impression that Puthoff meant to indirectly communicate that tangible results had already been achieved. There is much more direct evidence in The Hunt for Zero Point to support such an assumption. And as Cook suggests, "if antigravity had been discovered in the white world, then someone, somewhere had to be perfecting it - maybe even building real hardware - in the black."

Was there an antigravity Manhattan Project about which now the general public is finally being fed the theory? I think it would be more astonishing if there wasn't. For one thing, there have been too many reliable sightings of discoid craft being piloted or repaired by seemingly ordinary men in military uniforms and even baseball caps. (Though as I've made clear in other posts, I don't believe the relatively prosaic explanation of nuts and bolts black budget craft can account for the genuine UFO phenomenon. If humans can already build craft capable of slipping into other dimensions, then the veil is exceedingly thin, and presumably may be crossed in the opposite direction.) And for another, it makes an awful sense. I suggested last March that our "Immortals" have been preparing - covertly, and for a long time - for a post-carbon world. One that may not include most of Earth's population.

If the G-Engines are coming, they've probably already arrived. And they're not meant for the likes of us.