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Title: THE DARK SECRET OF THE SKUNK WORKS. Author(s):Nick Cook. Source:The Mail on Sunday (London, England) (August 19, 2001)(1962 words) Document Type:Newspaper Bookmark:Bookmark this Document Library Links: * Full Text :COPYRIGHT 2001 Solo Syndication Limited Byline: NICK COOK One of the world's foremost aviation and aerospace scientists once told me about a place - a 'virtual warehouse' - where ideas that were too dangerous to develop into hardware were locked away for ever, like the Ark of the Covenant in the Harrison Ford film Raiders Of The Lost Ark. At the time, I dismissed it as one of the more fanciful chapters from the wilder shores of science fiction. Not any more. I am now convinced, after ten years of research, that one of these discoveries, locked away for half a century, is the biggest secret since the invention of the atomic bomb. A source of energy so great that it offers the world a limitless supply of power: antigravity. So great that, in the wrong hands, it could destroy the world. Occasionally, the hardware emerges from the layers of security designed to keep these secrets from public scrutiny. Take, for example, the strange craft spotted from the mid-Eighties onwards in a triangle bordered by New Mexico to the south, California to the west and Nevada to the north-east. Nearby, on the edge of the desert, is Palmdale, home of the Skunk Works, a legendary aircraft-manufacturing facility. So-called because, in the Forties, foul-smelling chemicals emanated from its secret facilities on the edge of the main Lockheed aircraft plant. Other factory workers, not knowing what was going on there, joked that it was being used to make moonshine, or 'skunk juice' as it was referred to in the L'il Abner cartoon strip of the day. Skunk Works employees work on top-secret projects and are highly skilled engineers. They are recruited from the works' parent company, Lockheed, which today builds everything from Stealth fighters to space launchers and satellites. Could a team from its 4,000 … [PEHI note: some text appears to be missing here]… Did they make a plane that flies at 5,300mph? The dark secret employees have had something to do with the 'airquakes' reported by the US Geological Survey as having been caused by an unknown craft as it flew over California? If antigravity was real, where better to look for it than in the Skunk Works, ostensibly hugely profitable and crammed with workers, but with little to show the public for its efforts. What technologies were being pursued there? The Skunk Works was founded in 1943 in response to an urgent US requirement for a jet fighter to counter the threat of the Messerschmitt 262, a revolutionary twinjet fighter-bomber being developed by the German Luft-waffe. The result, the XP-80, built in great secrecy, under budget and on time in just 143 days, became an aviation classic. It set the standard for everything that followed. Ten years later, when the CIA demanded a spyplane to overfly the Soviet Union, the Skunk Works delivered the answer - the graceful Mach 3 A-12 Blackbird. It developed into the fastest operational aircraft in the world until its retirement in 1990. But what else had been happening at the Skunk Works? Because of its track record in developing top-secret aircraft projects such as the U-2 spyplane and the F-117A Stealth fighter, it was my belief that this was the logical place to look for antigravity development in the United States. My request for an interview with Jack Gordon, the head of the Skunk Works, was eventually granted. It took place in his office at the heart of his empire - a hangar which dominated the desert for miles. In his 23 years with the company, he said, he had worked on 15 'real flying aircraft' - but significantly, he could only talk about 12 of them. I asked how many of the remaining three had anything to do with antigravity? Gordon was admitting nothing, but there was informed speculation within the industry that one was Aurora, the 'fast mover' people said they had seen as a pulsating light flying over the south-western United States. Aurora was also linked to a dark, triangular shape that had been spotted over the North Sea by trained observers in 1989. Since the late Eighties, there had been talk of a secret replacement for the revolutionary Blackbird: a mythical plane that supposedly flew twice as fast and on the edges of space. The prognosis was that it was a massive leap forward in aerospace terms, powered by a new form of engine that gave it a cruising speed of anything up to Mach 8 - that is 5,300 mph. There were also rumours that the Reagan administration had embarked on a massive programme of aerospace and defence research. If you know how to interpret the Pentagon's annual defence budget, and calculate the difference between unclassified expenditure for the three armed services and the grand total, you can work out what is allocated to the so-called 'black budget'. In 1988, the sum was worked out to be $30 billion for research, development and secret weapons programmes - more than Britain's entire defence budget. If Aurora existed - or research into antigravity was taking place - this is where the funding came from. A lot of the expertise on antigravity dated from decades earlier, and Nazi Germany in particular. Much of what formed the basis of the Skunk Works' projects came from the German technology and expertise plundered by the Allies at the end of the Second World War. Germany was a treasure trove of desirable technology, covering everything from weaponry and electronics to textiles and medicine. It was a magnet for the Allies, including the British. Ian Fleming, who was later to write the James Bond novels, set up what was virtually a private army tasked with 'tech-plunder'. But the British were ill-prepared to take advantage of the opportunities which faced them. Not so the Americans. They simply removed the paperwork for hundreds of thousands of patents and shipped them home. According to the US Office of Technical Services - the body set up to ensure that German technology was moved rapidly into American industry - the documents contained a wealth of material which 'very likely contained practically all the scientific, industrial and military secrets of Nazi Germany'. I became convinced that hidden away among the tens of thousands the revolutionary antigravity experiments of Viktor Schauberger, an Austrian inventor enlisted by the Nazis at gunpoint. He actually produced an antigravity machine which flew - and I tracked down his grandson, Jeorg, who has devoted much of his life to researching his grandfather's work. Viktor Schauberger, said Jeorg, was a forester and engineer who had been working on an energy device. As the war drew to a close, the Nazis chanced upon his secrets and ordered him to devote himself to the German war effort, on pain of death. What appealed to them was a machine of his that had a dual purpose - it could be both an energy generator and a power plant for an aerospace vehicle of saucer-like appearance. One of Schauberger's colleagues later said that the first time they tried to run the machine - which had a diameter of 5ft and weighed 300lb - 'the flying saucer rose unexpectedly to the ceiling and then was wrecked. It rose upwards, trailing a blue-green and then silver-coloured glow.' It was a process Schauberger called 'implosion' - at its simplest, a three-dimensional energy pattern channelled inwards, not outwards - which generated phenomenal force levels. His grandson Jeorg showed me the… [PEHI note: again, text is missing]… They stole all the Nazis' discoveries and told me more about what had happened in those fateful days when Germany was collapsing. One of the five machines Schauberger was engineering was dubbed the 'flying saucer'. And it was this which the Americans seized upon when the war ended. They seemed to know what they were looking for - a radical form of aeroengine which sucked rather than pushed its way through the atmosphere. Had Schauberger created an 'antigravity' device? And had the Americans got wind of it? The conquering Americans held Schauberger under house arrest and debriefed him thoroughly. Now the Americans, in 1946, had the rudiments of an entirely new propulsion medium: one which 18 months later would have Nathan Twining, a US Air Force general in charge of technology secrets, saying that the US had the knowledge and the ability to construct a piloted aircraft with the operating characteristics of a UFO within the foreseeable future. A craft that seemingly defied the laws of physics. But what happened to this knowledge? Why, nowadays, do we not travel in aircraft capable of phenomenal speeds and no longer dependent on jet engines? American scientists were predicting a golden age of antigravity for the Sixties. A fuelless propulsion source was on the horizon. But it didn't happen. Why? For the most simple and deadliest of reasons: the fear that antigravity could not only be used to revolutionise the world of aerospace, but could also become a destructive force so powerful that it had the potential to destroy the world. Their discoveries struck terror into the hearts of the keepers of the secrets of antigravity. They realised that if you fiddled with the building blocks of nature in a way that they could not fully understand, then you might set off a chain reaction like a nuclear explosion, but hundreds of times more severe. And worse, if America could do it, then so could any rogue state. It simply wasn't a risk worth taking. No wonder that someone, somewhere, took the view that antigravity should be kept a secret for a very long time. * Extract from The Hunt For Zero Point: One Man's Journey To Discover The Biggest Secret Since The Invention Of The Atom Bomb, by Nick Cook, to be published by Century on September 16 at [pound]17.99. To order a copy for [pound]16.99 (free p&p), telephone 01206 255800. happened when machines was was upon to a which [PEHI note: Text missing] Why flying saucers The idea of antigravity is the holy grail of aviation. It is based on quantum physicists' belief that gravity is actually created by little-known forces working at a subatomic level all around us. The theory is that if these minute forces can be manipulated, antigravity could be created to make an object 'lose' its weight. One idea for how this could be done is 'electrogravitics'. At its most simple level, the theory is based on magnetism: if a metal plate is given a positive electric charge on one side and a negative charge on the other, goes the theory, it will 'exhibit thrust' towards the positive pole. If it is horizontal, the plate will lose weight because it will rise as the negative underside pushes up towards the positive top side. But, say believers, it's more than just pushing up and down: charging different parts of the plate will make it move in any direction. Because the power of gravity is so great, using it in this way would mean the object could move at incredible speeds. If this idea works, there is one shape of aircraft ideal for using the electrogravitics force: a flying saucer. The rounded top and bottom would make the most of the lifting force while the… [PEHI note: Text missing]… are round circular shape would be ideal for moving in any direction at the flick of a switch. Nazi researchers are said to have believed the round shape was ideal for carrying a jet engine to generate the electricity needed to charge the flying saucer. The danger in creating antigravity is that any method used has to tap into the infinite power of subatomic particles. This power could be deliberately or accidentally released in an uncontainable subatomic reaction that could create an explosion big enough to destroy half of Europe. This may only be a theory - but so was the atomic bomb just a few years before one was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

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