"If you break cover on this," he said, "you'll blow everything. For yourself, I mean."
"Come on," I said, "it's a story. It may be an old story, but I'll apply the rules that I would on any other. If there's any truth in it, the answers will pop out. They usually do."
"That's so bloody naive. If there is any truth in it, which I doubt, they'll already know you're interested and that's not going to help you one little bit. They'll stand in your way, like they may have done already with this old man … Trimble? If there isn't any truth ink, then you're just going to look like a fucking idiot." "They, Lawrence? Who's they?" "The security people. The keepers of the secrets. The men-in-black.
You know who I mean." I didn't. To my ears, it sounded more than a little insane. "I'm going to bide my time," I said, returning to the reason for the call, "do this at my own pace. For the moment, there's no need for me to break cover. Right now, all I have to do is conduct some low-level research and keep my eyes and ears open when I'm out there in the field. No one has to know about any of this, Lawrence. All I'm asking for in the meantime is a little help. Some of your knowledge. A few facts."
"Listen," he said, "there are no facts in this field; the whole business, if you want to know, is riven with disinformation, much of it, in my opinion, deliberately orchestrated. Sooner or later, you're going to have to surface and when you do, some of that crazy UFO spin is going to rub off on you. That happens and you'll never eat lunch in this great industry of ours again. Do you understand what I'm saying?"
And then his tone softened. "I've got to go now, but if you really are hell-bent on taking this forward, you might want to try an outfit in Washington, D.C., called the Integrity Research Institute. They have a handle on some of this material. Just promise me you'll keep my name out of it, okay?" And with that, he hung up.
During a trawl of the Library of Congress in the summer of 1985, Dr. Paul LaViolette, a researcher badly bitten by the gravity bug, tripped over a reference in the card indexing system to a report called Electrogravitics Systems — An Examination of Electrostatic Motion, Dynamic Counterbary and Barycentric Control. The words immediately alerted LaViolette, because he knew they were synonyms for something that science said was impossible: antigravity. LaViolette had become interested in antigravity during his study for a Ph.D. in systems science from Portland State University. His curiosity was aroused further when he realized that the electrogravitics report was missing from its rightful place in the library's stacks—"like it had been lifted," he told me later.
When LaViolette asked the librarian if she could try to locate a copy elsewhere, what began as a simple checking procedure soon developed into a full-blown search of the interlibrary loan network, all to no avail.
Convinced he would never see a copy, LaViolette gave up, but weeks later the librarian called to tell him that she had managed to track one down. It had been buried in the technical library of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.
There were no other copies known to exist across the whole of America.
"Whatever's in it," she told LaViolette dryly, "it must be pretty exotic."
When LaViolette finally got the Air Force to release the report, exotic seemed about right. Electrogravitics Systems, drafted in February 1956, the same year Trimble and his colleagues began pronouncing publicly on antigravity, contained details of what appeared to be a Mach 3 antigravity aerospace vehicle designed as a fighter-interceptor for the U.S. Air Force.
The fact that the report had been located at the Air Force's premier research and development facility instantly made Electrogravitics Systems an intriguing piece of work. That the USAF also appeared to have sat on it for almost 40 years only served to underscore its importance, LaViolette and his associates felt.
I had managed to track LaViolette through the Integrity Research Institute. The institute sat on the edges of a sub-culture of researchers who relentlessly picked over the antigravity issue. Type "antigravity" into a Net search engine and an outpouring of conspiracy-based nonsense on the government suppression of antigravity technology usually popped up onscreen. In the sober world of defense journalism, I'd never remotely envisaged a day when I'd have to involve myself in such matters.
Now, recalling Cross' warnings about professional suicide, I was reluctant to take the plunge, but realized that I had no choice.
I spoke to a colleague of LaViolette's called Tom Valone who mercifully never pressed me on the reasons why I was so interested in the antigravity business. A few days later, a copy of Electrogravitics Systems duly arrived through the mail. Electrogravitics Systems had not been prepared by the Air Force, it turned out, but by an outfit called the Gravity Research Group, Special Weapons Study Unit, a subdivision of Aviation Studies (International) Limited, a British organization.
I did some checking. Aviation Studies had been a think tank run by Richard "Dicky" Worcester and John Longhurst, two talented young aerospace analysts who in the mid-1950s produced a cyclo-styled newsletter that had a reputation for close-to-the-knuckle, behind-thescenes reporting on the aerospace and defense industry.
From the start, the Electrogravitics Systems report adopted a lofty tone: "Aircraft design is still fundamentally as the Wrights adumbrated it, with wings, body, tails, moving or flapping controls, landing gear and so forth. The Wright biplane was a powered glider, and all subsequent aircraft, including supersonic jets of the 1950s are also powered gliders."
The writers went on to say that insufficient attention had been paid to gravity research and that the "rewards of success are too far-reaching to be overlooked."
But while it quickly became clear that the report was not authored by the USAF, or apparently even commissioned by it, it did appear to be remarkably well informed about the progress of gravity — and antigravity— research in the United States and elsewhere; something that LaViolette and Valone felt might have accounted for its burial for so long in the WrightPatterson technical library.
The word "antigravity" was not used in the report, presumably because this pop-scientific term was felt to be too lurid for the report's paying subscribers. To those less fussed, however, the term "electrogravitics" seemed pretty much synonymous with antigravity, even by Aviation Studies' own definition:
"Electrogravitics might be described as a synthesis of electrostatic energy used for propulsion — either vertical propulsion or horizontal or both — and gravitics, or dynamic counterbary, in which energy is also used to set up a local gravitational force independent ofthat of the earth."
Counterbary is subsequently defined as "the action of lévitation where gravity's force is more than overcome by electrostatic or other propulsion." Antigravity, then. The report echoed what had already been made clear in the Gladych and Interavia articles: that antigravity was of real interest to just about every U.S. aerospace company of the day.
"Douglas has now stated that it has counterbary on its work agenda, but does not expect results yet awhile. Hiller has referred to new forms of flying platform. Glenn Martin says gravity control could be achieved in six years, but they add it would entail a Manhattan Project type of effort to bring it about. Sikorsky, one of the pioneers, more or less agrees with the Douglas verdict … Clarke Electronics state they have a rig, and add that in their view the source of gravity's force will be understood sooner than some people think. General Electric is working on electronic rigs designed to make adjustments to gravity — this line of attack has the advantage of using rigs already in existence for other defense work. Bell also has an experimental rig intended, as the company puts it, to cancel out gravity, and Lawrence Bell has said that he is convinced practical hardware will emerge from current programs. Grover Leoning is certain that what he referred to as an electromagnetic contra-gravity mechanism will be developed for practical use. Convair is extensively committed to the work with several rigs. Lear Inc., autopilot and electronic engineers, have a division of the company working on gravity research and so also has the Sperry division of Sperry-Rand. This list embraces most of the U.S. aircraft industry. The remainder, Curtiss-Wright, Lockheed, Boeing and North American have not yet declared themselves, but all these four are known to be in various stages of study with and without rigs." Everybody, in other words, had had a finger in the pie. But where, I asked, was the evidence 40 years on? It wasn't simply that the results of all this activity had failed to yield hardware; no corporate history of any these companies that I'd ever read in all my years as a journalist in the industry even hinted that gravity, antigravity, electrogravitics, counterbary — call it what you will — had ever been of interest to any of them.