"I can't talk to all the theoreticians," he'd told me, "because there don't exist theories where I am."
For the past ten years, I had been following data and the data had shown me the existence of something real. And yet some of the brightest minds on the planet were struggling to produce theory to underpin it. How could there be no theory for effects that were genuinely manifesting themselves in the environment?
What Nature tells us is what must be honored. It has been talking to us on many domains. And we'd only understood a fraction of what it had been saying. If we verbalize it, we 're probably approximating, but not telling the truth. And then it hit me. That's all theory was or ever had been — an approximation of the truth. Sometimes that approximation worked out and held fast, becoming scientific currency; other times it didn't and was superseded by another theory.
In this case, there were so many holes in our knowledge, it had allowed for people like Podkletnov and Schauberger to fall through the gaps, to show us things that science couldn't account for. Because science theory hadn't mapped them yet. Not outside Nazi Germany, at any rate.
Einstein had followed Newton and data had verified them both. But in this field, as with other fields of scientific endeavor, the data was still coming in.
It rendered NASA's theory, in this particular area, at least, quite meaningless.
I flipped another piece of paper in Bushman's file and saw a man with a mop of unkempt hair staring at me from a grainy photostat. He was standing in the same garage I'd witnessed in the film Bushman had shown me at Plant 4.
A note told me his name and that he lived in Vancouver — a place, if Bushman was right, that one way or another looked like being where the road ran out.
Chapter 25
George Hathaway, a science and engineering Ph.D. who ran a consulting firm on "nonconventional propulsion technology" in Ontario, Canada, offered a suitable staging post between the reality of sorts that exists in London and the world inhabited by the man in the photostat that Bushman had shown me: self-trained scientist and inventor, John Hutchison.
I met Hathaway in the coffee shop of my Toronto hotel and was gratified to note that there was nothing remotely flaky about him. Hathaway, whom I guessed to be in his early 50s, looked like most people's idea of a slightly unconventional nine-to-five scientist: a tall man, dressed in jeans and a tartan shirt, with wire-framed glasses, Bill Hickok mustache and hair over the collar. The briefcase gave him a suitably businesslike air as well; he was someone you could talk turkey with. Hearing him talk, I began to feel a lot better. I was booked on a flight that afternoon to Vancouver, but had been filled with doubts about the whole trip ever since my arrival in Canada. It was three weeks after my visit to Fort Worth and I had flown halfway around the world on my own ticket to meet a man who claimed to be able to levitate objects with equipment he'd salvaged from electrical shops and thrift stores.
I had managed to grab myself two days off work. Two days to get to Vancouver and back via Toronto. The ticket had cost me a small fortune.
Faced with a sizable hole in my finances, the whole thing suddenly seemed to stretch credulity, even if it had come with an endorsement from Bushman. Worse, I'd been unable to make any kind of contact with Marckus. As was his wont, he had vanished off the face of the planet. I'd called, left messages, sent emails, but he wasn't answering. In the end, I had been unable to put off the opportunity to travel any longer.
Hathaway's ability, therefore, to converse in hard-and-fast science and engineering terms about Hutchison came as an enormous relief. The key point was that he and a colleague, a South African called Alexis Pezarro, had believed in Hutchison sufficiently to back him financially for a con siderable chunk of the 1980s. And even though they weren't linked in any business sense anymore, Hathaway still professed to be a fan of his work.
"There are three kinds of people involved in the advanced propulsion field in my experience," Hathaway had told me over the phone a few weeks earlier. "There are the professionals, people like Marc Millis at NASA."
Millis. The guy who ran the space agency's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics program out of a lonely office at the Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. I cast my mind back. It seemed like a lifetime ago.
"Then there are the Tesla types who have an intuitive grasp of electromagnetics who come in from the ground up," Hathaway continued. "And then there's John Hutchison who doesn't fit into either category." Hutchison, it was more accurate to say, fitted into no real category at all. He had been born in 1945 in North Vancouver and had grown up an only child, surrounding himself with the only things that he seemed to show any real empathy for — machines. Reading between the lines, it was clear that he had not fitted in as a kid. He'd dropped out of school at Grade 10 and had gone on to complete an education of sorts with the aid of a private tutor (mirroring, I recalled, the schooling regime that Thomas Townsend Brown had endured 40 years earlier).
Amassing a large collection of machine tools, steam engines, old guns, chemical equipment and electromagnetic gear, Hutchison became infatuated from a young age with the theories of Einstein and Faraday, even though he was not remotely academic. His interest in them stemmed from his intuitive grasp of science in general and of electromagnetism in particular. His great hero was the turn-of-the-century electrical engineering pioneer, Nikola Tesla.
I had done my homework on Tesla, because Bushman's papers had been peppered with references to him.
Tesla was a Serb engineering graduate from Prague University who in 1884 at the age of 28 emigrated to America in the hope of finding work in the then fledgling electricity industry. With nothing more to his name when he arrived in New York than a letter of introduction to the man widely regarded as the father of the electricity industry, Thomas Edison, Tesla rapidly established himself in Edison's eyes as an engineer of great skill.
But while Edison used him primarily as a glorified Mr. Fixit to repair and refine his power generators, which were by then beginning to proliferate across the eastern seaboard, Tesla had set his mind on introducing an electricity supply system that was infinitely better than Edison's. If Edison would only use his, Tesla's, method of alternating or AC current instead of direct or DC current, which was notorious for its inability to travel over long distances, Tesla knew he could deliver a system that was far more efficient.
Yet, by the mid-1880s, Edison's entire infrastructure — indeed, his entire business base — revolved around the supply of DC power, whatever its manifest deficiencies. As a result, Tesla left the Edison Electric Company to set up on his own.
From then on, his career was dogged by a series of business disasters, but as an inventor — and the man who gave the world AC current into the bargain — Tesla was without parallel. In 1891, he developed the Tesla Coil, a remarkable invention that remains the basis for radios, televisions and other means of wireless communication.
But it was the wireless transmission of energy that became his great goal and for most of his professional life Tesla dedicated himself to the pursuit of a system that promised to give the world a free supply of energy. It hardly seemed to enter his head that big business, which by the early 20th century was starting to make handsome profits out of electricity, would be resolutely opposed to the idea.