THE BOOK
The Hunt for Zero Point: Inside the Classified World of Antigravity Technology, by Nick Cook, Broadway Books, New York, hardcover 2002, first trade paperback 2003, the edition read for this review. A prologue, twenty-six numbered chapters with no titles, and an epilogue, covering roughly a decade of reporting by the then aviation editor of Jane’s Defence Weekly.
The most useful thing in this book is not the Nazi bell. It is a bibliography. In 1956, in print, under their own names, senior American aerospace executives described gravity control as a near-term engineering programme. Lawrence Bell, founder of the company that broke the sound barrier: “We’re already working on nuclear fuels and equipment to cancel out gravity.” George S. Trimble, head of Advanced Programs at Martin Aircraft, saying the conquest of gravity “could be done in about the time it took to build the first atom bomb.” A May 1956 Interavia feature naming Sperry-Rand and General Electric. A February 1956 British study, Electrogravitics Systems, cataloguing nearly the entire United States aircraft industry as engaged in the work, its sole surviving American copy later found in the technical library at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. By 1960 all of it had stopped, so completely that raising the subject marked you as a crank. And when Cook, forty years on, arranged an interview with the retired Trimble through Lockheed Martin’s own press office, the old man first agreed and then refused, and the intermediary reported back: “he sounded scared and I don’t like to hear old men scared. It makes me scared.” That is the anomaly the whole book is built on, and it is real. You can check every document in it.
Who is doing the telling matters more here than in any other book this site has covered, because the genre is a swamp and the author’s footing is what keeps him out of it. Cook was not a UFO writer who acquired defence contacts. He was a defence trade journalist, aviation editor of Jane’s Defence Weekly, who acquired a question his own trade refused to touch, and he says plainly, more than once, that getting it wrong would end his career. The access is real and on the record: the Pentagon’s outgoing chief of Air Force acquisition, the president of the Skunk Works, Convair’s chief engineer, NASA’s advanced propulsion managers, the mathematician who ran British Aerospace’s own antigravity department, and Boyd Bushman, the Lockheed Martin scientist the company’s own press office suggested, interviewed with three minders in the room, whom Cook names in the epilogue as the man who told him which data to follow. The counterweight, and it is a heavy one, is that the book’s two most load-bearing sources are pseudonyms. “Dan Marckus,” the British physicist who supplies almost all of the interpretation, and “Lawrence Cross,” the ex-colleague who frames the Nazi material, cannot be checked by any reader. The book’s facts are documented. Its meaning arrives through a man with no name.
What earns the book its hearing is that it keeps killing its own best stories. The postwar legend of Schriever, Habermohl, Miethe and Belluzzo building flying discs at Prague and Breslau gets two chapters of construction and two of demolition, ending in Cross’s verdict, which Cook accepts: “there isn’t a shred of evidence in any archive, no official word, no plans, nothing.” The claim that the B-2 flies on an antigravity drive is taken seriously, tested against engineering and against pilots, and dismantled; what survives is Townsend Brown-derived electrostatic charging for radar signature, drag and lift, which is genuinely interesting and genuinely not antigravity. The golden orb Cook finally sees rise over Groom Lake leaves him, in his own words, strangely unmoved. And in the epilogue he does the thing almost no author in this territory can manage: he states that his data support conclusions about antigravity research and do not support conclusions about UFOs, and leaves the biggest prize on the table. A book in this genre that discards this much attractive material has earned some credit for what it keeps.
The argument it keeps is an argument about silence, and it rests on two precedents. The first is fission: openly published conjecture in 1939, voluntarily vanished from the literature by late 1941, once a chain reaction started to look real. Silence, in other words, is a known behaviour of successful physics, not only of failed physics. The second is stealth, and the stealth chapters are the most rigorous part of the book. The F-117 flew operationally from 1983 and was revealed in November 1988; when one crashed near Bakersfield in 1986, the recovery team sieved the dirt for a thousand yards and salted the site with debris from a 1960s Voodoo; the head of Air Force research and development was not cleared for a stealth programme run out of his own office. Our own Stealth Bench prices what that concealed technology actually does, and none of it is magic, but the concealment itself was total. Cook’s point is that “we would have heard” carries almost no weight against a system built like that. The honest reader should also notice what Cook does not quite concede: stealth eventually surfaced, on the news, in service, because it was useful. Antigravity, on his account, has been held for half a century and never once used. That asymmetry is the strongest quiet argument against his thesis, and it runs under the whole book.
The turn that made the book famous comes two thirds in, when Cook decides he has been searching the wrong institution. Project Lusty, the American exploitation of Luftwaffe secret technology, contains a September 1945 memorandum closing the foo-fighter enquiry “with negative result,” sitting beside files documenting real German work on engine-interference weapons and antiaircraft rays. But by war’s end the Luftwaffe no longer owned the Reich’s exotic programmes. The SS did, under Hans Kammler, the engineer of the camps who by February 1945 controlled every German aerospace weapon of consequence and who vanished without trace after April 17. Inside the Skoda Works, on the account its director general Wilhelm Voss gave the journalist Tom Agoston in 1949, Kammler ran a sealed research organisation that Speer and Goering did not know existed, and American counter-intelligence, when Voss told them about it, ordered him never to speak of it again. This section is competent, well-sourced military history, and it contains the book’s moral centre: the chapter walked through the Nordhausen tunnels, where the V-2 was built and twenty thousand prisoners died building it, and where on one day in March 1945 the guards hanged fifty-two people from an electric crane in Gallery 41. Cook refuses to let the technology hunt anaesthetise that, and the refusal is worth more than most of the evidence.
Then there is the Bell, and here the review has to change tone, because this is the passage the book is remembered for and it is the passage where the book’s own standards fail. In a mine near Ludwigsdorf in Lower Silesia, the story goes, the SS tested Die Glocke: two contra-rotating cylinders filled with a violet mercury-like compound code-named Xerum 525, run a minute at a time under code names Laternentrager and Chronos, lethal to nearby tissue, doused in brine by camp prisoners between tests, and evacuated at war’s end, after which the sixty-two scientists who had worked on it were shot. Weigh the chain of custody. The testimony is an SS police general’s, given in secret in Polish custody while on trial for his life, about physics he had no training in. The documents were shown to one researcher, Igor Witkowski, by an unnamed official, on condition he copy them by hand. Cook never saw them. Nobody has seen them since. Cook is honest about most of this, and his best argument is the one he draws from the killing: nobody shoots sixty-two people over a failure. But an inference from a murder is not a machine, and the climactic reading, in which the pseudonymous Marckus deduces from the code name Chronos that the SS “were trying to build a fucking time machine,” is a great scene and the least defensible sentence in the book. The reader is entitled to ask why the Wenceslas Mine testimony passes an evidentiary test that Prague and Breslau failed, and the only honest answer is that it arrived later in the book, after the scepticism had been spent.
The modern half stands on firmer and stranger ground. The Schauberger family archive at Bad Ischl, which Cook handled personally, is the book’s best primary material: diaries, contracts and drawings establishing that Viktor Schauberger’s “implosion” machines were funded by the SS, built with Mauthausen prison labour, that one prototype tore loose and smashed into a hangar roof, and that the old man was debriefed by American intelligence for nine months in 1945 and, in Texas in 1958, signed away everything he owned and died five days after coming home. What the machines actually did remains open; that they existed, and that someone powerful cared, is on paper. Around this Cook assembles the respectable modern fringe: Evgeny Podkletnov, whose spinning superconductors allegedly shielded a column of weight by one to two percent, a figure Cook elsewhere in the same book puts as high as five, and whose career was destroyed by a newspaper’s use of the word antigravity rather than by any examination of his data, and whose claimed effect, it should be said plainly, has never been independently confirmed in the quarter century since. John Hutchison, whose Vancouver apparatus levitated hardware in front of an Army intelligence evaluation team on wall-socket power, on whose file the responsible colonel’s summary was that “four out of five of us came away believing,” and whose Los Alamos report was classified, downgraded and routinely destroyed. And Ning Li, whose AC Gravity work at Huntsville Popular Mechanics reported in October 2000 as close to an operational machine, and who left the university that year and has been quiet since. And, quietly, the institutions: BAE’s Project Greenglow, NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Physics contracts, a NATO study, a USAF study. The book’s most durable contribution is exactly this demonstration, that the taboo is a property of the word and not of the funding. NASA, NATO, the USAF and British Aerospace were all funding work on the problem in the same years that saying so in print would have ended a career. It is also the one strand of the argument that does not run through Marckus, needing documents rather than an interpreter, which is why it has outlived the parts that do.
So the complaints, because a signed review owes them. The interpretive spine is anonymous, and everything that makes the book a thesis rather than a chronicle passes through Marckus. Absence of evidence is made to do the work of evidence far too often: a vanished Northrop paper, a missing Navy evaluation, an empty Kammler file at the National Archives, each individually suggestive, cumulatively treated as a finding, with ordinary archival loss barely argued against. Follow the money, Cook’s own stated test, is applied selectively, since his own pages record Himmler funding fuel from fir-tree roots and oil from geraniums, which makes SS enthusiasm weak proof of scientific substance. The bridge from the Bell to Podkletnov is a shared vocabulary of rotation and vortices plus one physicist’s willingness to connect them, and the neat closing revelation, that Podkletnov’s father owned Schauberger’s papers, is a claim made in conversation by the person it most flatters. And Kammler in America, the destination the last chapters lean toward, is conceded by Cook himself to be supported by no hard evidence at all. The last page is the clearest instance: Cook closes on the Motionless Magnetic Generator, a claimed free-energy device whose March 2002 patent he reads as de facto acceptance that something is there. A patent is not a validation of physics, and it is the one place where the discipline the rest of the book shows simply stops. Two books are stapled together here: an excellent piece of defence journalism about how a secret would be kept, and a much weaker book about what the secret is.
Why it belongs on this site is that this station has already spent a year pricing the components Cook could only report. Townsend Brown’s discs have a bench here, and the arithmetic finds ion wind where the legend finds gravity. The one Podkletnov impulse claim that survives into the literature has a bench, built from the papers rather than the press cuttings. The Avrocar, the declassified end of the Silverbug story Cook tells through John Frost, has a bench, and its fitted cushion constant explains why the saucer could not leave its own ground cushion. The zero-point energy at the bottom of the title has a bench, which measures the real Casimir force and prices the coffee-cup rhetoric against it. On every bench where this book’s subject matter can be made to produce a number, the number comes back ordinary. That is not a refutation of Cook, who claims the extraordinary results live where no journalist can follow, and it is not a vindication either, because an unfalsifiable residue is exactly what his own disinformation chapters teach you to expect from both a real secret and an empty one. Read it for the 1956 paper trail, the stealth chapters, the Schauberger archive and the Nordhausen tunnels, which no other book in this literature would have had the discipline to write. Hold the Bell at arm’s length, where Cook, at his best, taught you to hold everything else. It is the best-reported book on its subject, and it does not prove its thesis, and it survives being wrong because its author mostly knows the difference.
Related wiki entries
The wiki entries below cover the book’s author, its wartime chain of custody and the programmes its argument rests on, published as a batch with this review.
- The Hunt for Zero Point
- Nick Cook
- 1956 Antigravity Press Window
- Nazi Flying Disc Legend
- Hans Kammler
- Kammlerstab
- Wilhelm Voss
- Mittelbau-Dora
- Die Glocke
- Jakob Sporrenberg
- Igor Witkowski
- Wenceslas Mine
- Xerum 525
- Viktor Schauberger
- Implosion Technology
- Have Blue
- Black Budget
- Operation Paperclip
- Project Lusty
- Project Greenglow
- Breakthrough Propulsion Physics
- John Hutchison
- Hutchison Effect
- Boyd Bushman
- Motionless Magnetic Generator
- George S. Trimble
- Lawrence D. Bell
- Renato Vesco
- Rudolf Lusar
- AGARD Gyroscope Study 1990
References and further reading
- The Hunt for Zero Point: Inside the Classified World of Antigravity Technology, Nick Cook, Broadway Books, New York, hardcover 2002, trade paperback 2003, the edition read here
- Michael Gladych, “The G-Engines Are Coming!” (1956), and “Without Stress or Strain … or Weight,” Interavia Aerospace Review, May 1956, the two articles that open the trail
- Electrogravitics Systems: An Examination of Electrostatic Motion, Dynamic Counterbary and Barycentric Control, Gravity Research Group, Aviation Studies (International) Ltd, February 1956, the industry survey recovered from Wright-Patterson
- Tom Agoston, Blunder! How the U.S. Gave Away Nazi Supersecrets to Russia (1985), the sole source chain for the Kammlerstab, from Wilhelm Voss’s 1949 interviews
- Igor Witkowski, Prawda o Wunderwaffe (2000; in English as The Truth About The Wunderwaffe), the origin of the Bell account Cook carried into English
- Christopher Simpson, Blowback (1988), and Tom Bower, The Paperclip Conspiracy (1987), the recruitment record behind the book’s transfer thesis
- Ben Rich with Leo Janos, Skunk Works (1994), the stealth history Cook builds his concealment argument on
- On this site: the Electrogravitics bench, the Podkletnov Impulse bench, the Avrocar bench, the Stealth Bench and the Casimir bench, where this book’s components are priced; the source note on LaViolette’s Secrets of Antigravity Propulsion, the literature that grew where Cook stopped; and the review of Closer Encounters, which takes the Bell the rest of the way into myth