As regular readers here can probably tell, over the past week or so I've been blogging about strange technologies and strange science, and the psychological and metaphysical questions they pose. Well, we're not quite out of the woods yet, for anti-gravity is in the news again, and it appears that it is Nick Cook who has reported on this story.

Why is that significant? Well, for those who already know, forgive me while I pause to bring those who don't know up to speed. Mr. Cook is a British aerospace researcher and writer, and a regular contributor to the prestigious journal on all matters of defense, defense and military technology, Jane's Defence Weekly. Jane's has been around since technology began to play an important, and indeed, the crucial role, in military affairs with the advent of the all-big gun dreadnought battleship at the beginning of the last century, and has become "must reading" for anyone interested in the latest (publicly-known) technologies and their impact in tactical and strategic policy formation. Indeed, at one point every captain of a major warship in the world's major navies had a copy of the latest editions of Jane's "All the World's Warships" for recognition purposes, and to give him a quick reference of an opposing ship's armament, defense capabilities, and so on. Jane's was the "bible" of naval architecture, and as military technology has changed, Jane's has morphed with it. Such insight also means that Jane's has kept carefully cultivated relationships and contacts within all the world's major defense corporations and industries, from Armstrong, Vickers, Blohm und Voss, Krupp and Mistubishi, to Boeing, British Aerospace, Rolls Royce, Dassault and so on down to today.

So when Mr. Cook writes a book such as his now well-known and bestselling book The Hunt for Zero-Point, a book that first exposed the Nazi Bell project in detail to English speaking audiences, or when he writes articles about Boeing and antigravity, people should sit up and take notice:

Anti-gravity propulsion comes ‘out of the closet’

Now there are a number of things in this article I want to draw your attention to:

"As part of the effort, which is being run out of Boeing’s Phantom Works advanced research and development facility in Seattle, the company is trying to solicit the services of a Russian scientist who claims he has developed anti-gravity devices in Russia and Finland. The approach, however, has been thwarted by Russian officialdom. "The Boeing drive to develop a collaborative relationship with the scientist in question, Dr Evgeny Podkletnov, has its own internal project name: ‘GRASP’ — Gravity Research for Advanced Space Propulsion."

Now Dr. Evgeny Podkletnov's work has been known for quite some time, as have its anti-gravity implications. Indeed, Cook himself first wrote of this back in his turn-of-the-millennium bestselling book. Nor should it surprise us that Russia has thwarted efforts to allow Podkletnov to go to the West even if he were inclined to do so, for his work has obvious national security implications. Dr. Podkletnov has become a "resource." And that means of course that the Russians are working on it too. We'll get back to that in a moment.

Then there's this:

"But it is also apparent that Podkletnov’s work could be engineered into a radical new weapon. The GRASP paper focuses on Podkletnov’s claims that his high-power experiments, using a device called an ‘impulse gravity generator’, are capable of producing a beam of ‘gravity-like’ energy that can exert an instantaneous force of 1,000g on any object — enough, in principle, to vaporise it, especially if the object is moving at high speed. "Podkletnov maintains that a laboratory installation in Russia has already demonstrated the 4in (10cm) wide beam’s ability to repel objects a kilometre away and that it exhibits negligible power loss at distances of up to 200km. Such a device, observers say, could be adapted for use as an anti-satellite weapon or a ballistic missile shield. Podkletnov declared that any object placed above his rapidly spinning superconducting apparatus lost up to 2% of its weight. "Although he was vilified by traditionalists who claimed that gravity-shielding was impossible under the known laws of physics, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) attempted to replicate his work in the mid-1990s. Because NASA lacked Podkletnov’s unique formula for the work, the attempt failed. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama will shortly conduct a second set of experiments using apparatus built to Podkletnov’s specifications."

Now using high power gravity waves would be a handy thing to have around for a weapon, particularly if one wanted, say, to vaporize a threatening asteroid (think Mr. Dmitri Medvedev here folks). Now note that, according to Cook, Boeing has a paper that claims that Podkletnov (and therefore, the Russians) has a device called an "impulse gravity generator." capable of inducing 1000gs on any object and, in effect, crushing it to vapor. And that too is a handy thing to have around if one wants to build - as does Mr. Medvedev - a Russian asteroid space defense system. It's also a handy device to have around if one wants to blow up huge spaceships or the occasionally troublesome planet, a la George Lucas' Star Wars scenario, but that's a much older story that we don't have time to go into here.

Note however that Podkletnov is also maintaining that a Russian laboratory has some version of a device - perhaps his own - that exudes a beam that can repel an object at a kilometer's distance. This too, believe it or not, is nothing new. The idea has been around since the 1950s, and was, in fact, the object of a now declassified US program to use concentrated microwaves as a propulsion system, utilizing the repelling quality known as the microwave soliton effect, a project and effect recently documentaed by Dr. Paul LaViolette's excellent book Secrets of Antigravity Propulsion(the book is available on my website's webstore). What is comparatively new is Mr. Cook's statement in the article that the effect has been extended with negligible power loss to 200km. (A side note: readers of my book Covert Wars and Breakaway Civilizations will recall the US military project to base satellites in space and to beam microwave power back to the Earth for conversion to electricity. The result of that project, had it been implemented, would have been that the Earth-bound microwave receiving stations would have been so saturated with microwave radiation as to crisp the area for 145 km/sq around the site, and nothing could have lived or grown within that area. This suggests that similar effects might be evident in Russia, and that that country, with such vast amounts of wilderness, would be the ideal place to develop and test such a technology.)

What is really intriguing about the article - and Mr. Cook apparently missed this point - is the assertion that there are also materials that have "shielding" properties, and that these are unknown to current laws of physics. Perhaps...perhaps not, for again, readers of my books, and in particular The Philosophers' Stone, will recall that Dr. Nicolai Kozyrev's torsion experiments revealed that some materials shielded against torsion waves/effects more than others, and some metals, such as aluminum, shielded against it altogether. Torsion and gravity are connected, though in ways not yet adequately understood. But the bottom line here is what Mr. Cook's article suggests, and that is, that Russia, despite all public denials about pseudo-science and so on connected with Kozyrev's and his followers' work, is still conducting secret research into it, and if Podkletnov's assertions as revealed in this article are true, doing so on a large scale and developing first generation(or later) practical devices.

And finally, and most obviously, I hope you caught the subtle and implied message in the article: Russia is doing practical anti-gravity research, and they are ahead of us and we need to catch up fast....

Sound familiar?

See you on the flip side...