John Frost, the man who headed up Avro's Special Projects Group, takes its secrets to his grave and George Trimble, many years into his retirement, gets spooked by a seemingly mundane journalistic inquiry 40 years on from these events.
I returned to that central question. What was it about these comple mentary technologies — the saucer airframe and antigravity propulsion— that had caused such extreme and violent reactions in people directly linked to them?
For the next three decades, no one in scientific circles would have dared discuss these twin strands of development for fear of the ridicule it would have brought upon them. The cult of the UFO — a phenomenon that has clearly been "spun" by the military-intelligence community from time to time — simply made this worse. It was only in the 1990s, as NASA and other scientists began to strive for propulsion methods that far outstrip today's state of the art, that the whole antigravity business started to gain currency again outside the black world. But even then, you had to proceed with caution.
But the real mystery was this. If the principles of antigravity tech nology had been available since the war — earlier, perhaps, if T.T. Brown's contribution should be given credit — then why were some of the best math and science brains on the planet still struggling to develop the theory underpinning it?
It was this question, I knew, that would take me back to the States one last time.
Shortly before I boarded my flight at Munich, I checked my cell phone for messages. There were four and Dan Marckus had left three of them. Whatever was on his mind, I knew I was on to something, because, for once, Marckus was chasing me.
With one eye on the departure gate and another on the clock, I called him back.
Even over the bustle of movement in the departure hall and the static of a bad line, I could tell something was definitely up.
"You need to get yourself to Sheffield the middle of next week," Marckus said, his voice scarcely audible. "Podkletnov's come out of hiding. He's going to be talking about his gravity-shielding experiments to a small group of invitees at the university there — aerospace industry and defense ministry types mainly. It isn't a closed session, so you should be able to get yourself on the list. Go talk to him. Something tells me he knows a lot more than he's letting on."
An airline official at the desk was looking at her watch and beckoning for my ticket. I was about to sign off, when Marckus stopped me. "There's something else," he said. I showed the girl my ticket and passport and carried on talking while I proceeded to the aircraft. Marckus started to talk about the experiment down the mine. He'd got my email and now he wanted to talk physics. "Dan, I'm about to get on the bloody airplane. This can wait, can't it?" "I know what they were trying to do," he said simply. I stopped a few paces short of the door of the aircraft. "I know what the Bell was really about," he repeated. My tone softened. "OK, go ahead. I'm listening." I was staring out of a small window at the end of the jetway. The rain was beating down on the wings of the aircraft. I could see passengers settling into their newspapers through the fuselage windows. "They were trying to generate a torsion field." "What is a torsion field?" "Laternentrager means 'lantern holder.' But it's the second code name that's the giveaway. Chronos. You know what it means, don't you?" "Yes, Dan. I know what it means. What is a torsion field? What does it do?" "If you generate a torsion field of sufficient magnitude the theory says you can bend the four dimensions of space around the generator. The more torsion you generate, the more space you perturb." He paused momentarily, long enough for me to make the connection. "When you bend space, you also bend time." Chronos. The third experiment in NASA's BPP study and the one that Puthoff had predicted would be the first to yield a result. ''''Now, do you understand what they were trying to do?" I said nothing. It was Marckus who closed the loop. "They were trying to build a fucking time machine," he said.
Chapter 23
Viewed from the back of the lecture theater, Dr. Evgeny Podkletnov, the man who claimed to have nullified gravity, cut a slight, shy figure as he gazed up at his audience, a mixed gathering of academics and defense industry types.
Wearing my Jane's hat, I had managed to get myself invited to the Russian's presentation by Dr. Ron Evans of BAE Systems, formerly British Aerospace or plain "BAe." It was Evans who single-handedly ran the giant aerospace and defense company's antigravity effort, Project Greenglow. BAE, I was given to understand, had sponsored Podkletnov's trip to the U.K.
Evans' name was one of the two I'd scribbled down in my notes after Professor Brian Young's lecture, "Antigravity: The End of Aerodynamics?" in London in 1991. The other name, of course, had been that of Dr. Dan Marckus.
Though Podkletnov's English was immaculate, he talked so softly that I found myself leaning right forward to catch his words, which were marked by a strong accent. He didn't look like anyone's idea of a rebel.
He was, I supposed, in his mid-to-late 40s and thin of stature. His dark eyes, which had an intensely haunted look about them, radiated seriousness and conviction. I knew the day his lab assistant's pipe smoke had hit the wall of the gravity shield he claimed to have created, he had found himself locked on a course against the science mainstream. Its reaction had been so vehement and overwhelming that he had gone into exile for the best part of four years to recover from the shock of it — and, word had it, to refine his experiments.
For a heretic, Podkletnov had acquired for himself a nice, quiet audience in this, his first appearance since the personal trauma of that time. Aside from a handful of graduates and undergraduates from Sheffield University's Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, the small group of invitees included observers from the U.K. Ministry of Defense, Rolls-Royce aero-engines and BAE Systems.
I let my mind wander back to the day I'd ambled, innocent of all knowledge on the subject, into the marbled hallway of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in the center of London eight years earlier to hear Professor Young's lecture. Some of the faces in the audience today looked familiar from that evening, though I couldn't exactly say who or why. If I'd known then what I knew now, I wondered if I'd have ended up where I was sitting today. It had been a long haul.
Podkletnov started by recapping the events that had shaped his life and work over the past decade.
By using rotating magnets to spin up his superconducting doughnut shaped discs to speeds of around 5,000 rpm, he had found that any object placed in the area of influence above them was losing a part of its weight.
Weight reductions of between 0.3 and 2 percent were found to be easily repeatable, he claimed. Five percent reductions had been recorded, although not with the same repeatability. "For a physicist, this is an enormous weight loss, for a practical engineer it is not," he noted. I thought of the NASA engineers at Huntsville struggling to reduce the cost of space access. For every hundred kilos of rocket, Podkletnov was offering them a launch weight reduction of two kilos.
He was right. It wasn't a whole lot. But then again, gravity shields weren't supposed to exist.
I jotted everything down as best I could, knowing that the better my notes, the better Marckus' efforts at interpreting them for me in plaintalk later. He was reluctant for us both to show in the same place, especially with so many members of the establishment present. Once again, I was acting as his eyes and ears.
The Russian peppered his talk with references to General Relativity and Quantum Theory, the unique properties of superconducting materials and his admiration for other pioneers in his field, among them Hal Puthoff, whose idea that gravity might be a "zero-point fluctuation force" Podkletnov professed, with characteristic Russian understatement, to find "rather interesting."