THE BOOK
Secrets of Antigravity Propulsion: Tesla, UFOs, and Classified Aerospace Technology, by Paul A. LaViolette, Bear & Company, Rochester, Vermont, 2008. Fourteen chapters and ten appendices, roughly 500 pages.
What the book is
Secrets of Antigravity Propulsion argues that gravity can be controlled electrically, and it prints some sixty pages of primary documents at the back so that a reader can check part of the case without taking the author’s word for it.
LaViolette’s claim is that gravity can be controlled electrically; that the effect was found and repeatedly measured by the American physicist Thomas Townsend Brown between the 1920s and the 1950s; that the United States military absorbed the discovery into classified programmes in the mid-1950s, and has been flying the resulting craft ever since, the B-2 stealth bomber among them; and that the continued secrecy withholds a propulsion and energy technology the world needs. The last chapter turns that into a political argument about who is entitled to make such a decision.
The book sits at an unusual angle to the rest of the UFO literature. It is not primarily about visitors. LaViolette treats sighting reports as engineering telemetry for a terrestrial technology, and explicitly rejects Bob Lazar’s element 115 and Gravity A and B as disinformation. What he is arguing for is a physics, and an institutional history of what happened to it.
This note treats the book the way the site treats any interpretive synthesis, evidence tier 4. The tier rates the route, not the author. Its documentary layer is real and checkable, sixty pages of it are reproduced in the appendices, and in two chapters the author runs his own experiments and publishes results that go against his own side. Its central historical inference and its modern claims are argument, and several of them rest on informants who cannot be identified. The sections below keep those layers apart.
Who wrote it
Paul A. LaViolette (8 November 1947 to 19 December 2022) held a bachelor’s degree in physics from Johns Hopkins, an MBA from Chicago and a doctorate in systems science from Portland State, and was president of the Starburst Foundation. He is best known outside this subject for two things: subquantum kinetics, a continuous-creation ether theory he developed as an alternative to big bang cosmology, and the galactic superwave hypothesis, a proposal that cosmic-ray bursts from the galactic centre periodically drive climate shifts on Earth. He published in peer-reviewed venues on the superwave work and on ancient astronomical encoding, and he claimed a series of confirmed predictions from subquantum kinetics, including several concerning pulsars and cosmological redshift.
That background matters to how the book reads. The theoretical chapters are worked derivations rather than gestures, and the author holds other experimenters to a standard he states plainly. It also means the book is unusually easy to argue with, because it commits to numbers.
Two books under one cover
The architecture is deliberate. Chapters 1 to 3 are archival biography of Brown. Chapter 4 stops the narrative to install the theory. Chapter 5 delivers the B-2 claim. Chapters 6 to 10 widen the survey to other proposed mechanisms: Eugene Podkletnov’s impulse gravity beams, a classified microwave programme, the UFO record, John Searl’s rotating magnet generator. Chapters 11 and 12 are the author’s own replication work. Chapter 13 is an institutional account of NASA. Chapter 14 is the argument for declassification. Then ten appendices, some sixty pages, carrying the primary documents.
Those appendices are why the book functions as two things at once. Appendix C reproduces in full the Gravity Research Group’s report of February 1956, “Electrogravitics Systems: An Examination of Electrostatic Motion, Dynamic Counterbary, and Barycentric Control”, published by the London intelligence service Aviation Studies (International) Ltd. Appendix A carries Brown’s 1968 and 1971 letters to the electrical engineer Tom Turman, including his admission that no device of his ever fully lifted from the ground. Appendix D is Brown’s own account of the Paris vacuum experiments. Appendix E is an informant’s 1974 interview notes on the microwave programme. Appendices G to J are LaViolette’s submissions to NASA and to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, with Admiral Gehman’s acknowledgment.
The method throughout the main text is triangulation across very different kinds of source: patents, corporate reports, trade-press items, private correspondence, government memoranda, the author’s own bench work, anonymous testimony and sighting reports. The reader is not always told which kind is carrying a given conclusion, which is the main reason a note like this one is worth writing.
The chain of the argument
The book advances a single chain with four links, and each link is doing work for the ones after it.
The experimental link. High-voltage asymmetric capacitors move. Brown found this as a schoolboy, noticing that a Coolidge X-ray tube shifted when energised, and traced the thrust to the voltage on the plates rather than to the X-rays. He built heavy capacitors he called gravitators, patented them in Britain in 1928 and in the United States in 1934, and by the early 1950s was flying tethered discs on a pivoting beam at up to twelve miles an hour on roughly fifty watts. LaViolette’s answer to the obvious objection, that this is ion wind, is the Paris work of 1955 and 1956, in which Brown, sponsored by the French government at the aeronautical firm Société Nationale de Constructions Aéronautiques du Sud-Ouest, is said to have flown saucer airfoils in a vacuum below a billionth of an atmosphere. From the reported figures he calculates thrust-to-power ratios of 2,000 to 2,200 newtons per kilowatt, and marks the point where the lift passed unity: “The lift isn’t just 1 percent any longer; the apparatus will now lift 110 percent of its own weight!” (p. 87).
The theoretical link. General relativity predicts no coupling between charge and gravitation, which on LaViolette’s reading is exactly why nobody looked. He recounts asking James Faller, the gravity specialist at the National Bureau of Standards, why there was no charge-to-gravity research, and being told there had been no interest. In place of relativity he offers subquantum kinetics: an open-system reaction-diffusion ether in which particles are self-organising standing waves, matter is created continuously, and “there should be two gravitational mass polarities, each correlated with a corresponding electric charge polarity” (p. 122), protons producing gravity wells and electrons gravity hills, with a small residual attraction left in neutral matter.
The historical link. A real, industry-wide antigravity effort existed in 1954 to 1956. The 1956 Gravity Research Group report names Martin, Bell, Convair, Lear, Sperry, Lockheed and much of the rest of the American aircraft industry, quotes George Trimble, Lawrence Bell, William Lear and Grover Loening on gravity control, and states that “there are far more definite indications that the incredible claims are realizable than there was, for instance, in supposing that uranium fission would result in a bomb” (p. 69). Air Force major general Vic Bertrandias forced his way into a Los Angeles demonstration on 21 March 1952 and telephoned Lieutenant General H. A. Craig the next morning: “the thing frightened me, for the fact that it is being held or conducted by a private group … if it ever gets away, I say it is in the stage in which the atomic development was in the early days” (p. 46). Then, around 1959 and 1960, the subject leaves the open literature.
The contemporary link. If the work continued, its products should be visible. The book’s flagship exhibit is a report in Aviation Week & Space Technology of 9 March 1992, sourced to unnamed West Coast scientists formerly attached to black projects, which LaViolette summarises as the “surprising disclosure that the B-2 electrostatically charges its exhaust stream and the leading edges of its winglike body” (p. 142). He reads that as an operational electrogravitic aircraft, proposing that the F-118 engines double as Brown-style flame-jet generators and that the aircraft’s reported restriction on flying in rain is about the hull shorting rather than its radar-absorbing coating, and concludes that “the designation ‘B-2’ might more appropriately stand for Biefeld-Brown effect” (p. 147). Around that he assembles Podkletnov’s superconducting impulse gravity generator, said to have deflected an 18.5-gram pendulum bob by fourteen centimetres at a range of 150 metres through a Faraday cage, steel and a brick wall; a classified microwave beam programme he calls Project Skyvault, reported to him at second and third hand; triangular craft sightings near Edwards; the injuries suffered by Betty Cash, Vickie Landrum and Colby near Huffman, Texas in December 1980, read as microwave exposure; and John Searl’s rotating permanent-magnet generator, with Vladimir Roshchin and Sergei Godin’s Russian converter presented as its independent replication.
The prediction the book makes testable
Inside all of this sits one quantitative claim that could be checked on a bench, and the book states it clearly. From subquantum kinetics LaViolette derives that electrogravitic thrust scales with the third derivative of electric potential: “the electrogravitic force should increase as the electric potential field across the capacitor becomes increasingly nonlinear; the more nonlinear the field, the greater the induced gravitational thrust” (p. 133). Field shape, on this account, matters more than field strength.
He connects that derivation to a private disclosure. In a letter of 1 November 1971, Brown told Turman that he used a one mil positive wire against a bluntly curved negative disc edge specifically to steepen the field, a point the book says he stressed in correspondence far more than in his patents. On LaViolette’s reading this explains why some replications work and others do not, why high-permittivity dielectrics such as barium titanate outperform, and why lightweight foil lifters behave differently from heavy high-K devices. It is the one place in the book where a reader with a high-voltage supply, a vacuum chamber and patience could return a result that the theory would have to accept.
The chapters where the author tests his own side
Chapters 11 and 12 are where LaViolette stops surveying and starts measuring, and they are the most unusual thing in the book.
Chapter 11 examines low-voltage gravity-shielding claims: the Athens electrical engineering professor Stavros Dimitriou, who inferred a 1.3 percent local reduction in gravitational acceleration from a radio-frequency driven wire antenna running on 2.5 watts, and Jean-Louis Naudin, who timed pendulum swings with a laser beam and reported reductions of seven and eleven percent. LaViolette objects first on method, that neither published standard deviations, and writes that “past reports of the existence of a g reduction effect may instead be misinterpreting statistical artifacts of the measurement process as evidence of a real effect” (p. 335). He then replicates the devices, in 2007, partly in Panagiotis Pappas’s laboratory in Athens, and reports nothing above measurement error. Of his own tensometer run he writes that “the null result, then, calls into question claims that low-voltage waveforms are able to induce gravitational thrusts on capacitors” (p. 344).
Chapter 12 goes to higher voltages, chiefly through Turman’s 1965 to 1972 experiments at Texas Tech with a homemade 300 kilovolt supply, and through Robert Talley’s work at Veritay Technology under a Small Business Innovation Research grant, Larry Deavenport’s carousel discs, Patrick Cornille’s charged pendulum and the amateur lifter community. Because Turman’s cylinders produced thrust with either polarity, LaViolette draws a conclusion that runs against most of the enthusiast literature and against part of his own case: “electrostatic ion-repulsion effects appear to dominate over electrogravitic effects in lightweight devices producing a nonlinear field. The same applies to the lifter experiments carried out by later researchers” (p. 352). His position is that the effect is real but needs far higher wave voltages than the ones being used.
Whatever a reader makes of the rest of the book, these two chapters are its clearest statement of what the author counts as evidence, and they are the standard he can be read against everywhere else.
1959, and what the book makes of the silence
The hinge of the whole argument is what happened at the end of the 1950s. On the record the book assembles, electrogravitics is discussed openly by named executives at named companies in 1955 and 1956, and then is essentially gone from the open literature by 1960. Chapter 3 tracks the closing: a public warning off the field from A. V. Cleaver of Rolls-Royce, the sudden silence at Glenn Martin, Agnew Bahnson’s death in a crash, secrecy at Electrokinetics Corporation, and Brown moving to petroelectricity research that LaViolette describes as a cover story. He also quotes a 1956 letter reporting that “electrogravitic research has been taken over in its entirety by a California corporation which has imposed secrecy, at least until their investigations are completed” (p. 111), and states that Admiral Hyman Rickover told Brown that year to drop the subject.
LaViolette reads the disappearance as classification. Everything in the second half of the book depends on that reading, and it is worth being precise about what the book does and does not do with it. It documents the disappearance thoroughly. It does not set the classification reading against the competing one, that an enthusiasm collapsed once careful measurement attributed the thrust to ion wind, and argue the two against each other. The competing reading is nevertheless present in the book’s own material: the Office of Naval Research investigator Will Cady logged Brown’s discs in June 1952 at 1.5 percent efficiency and eight grams of thrust and attributed the result to ion wind, and the author’s own chapter 12 conclusion is that ion repulsion dominates in lightweight devices. A reader deciding what the book establishes will probably spend most of their time here.
The same pattern of reading absence as evidence recurs elsewhere and the book states each instance: library copies of the 1956 report missing, Brown’s notebooks confiscated, the Aviation Studies volumes gone from the Library of Congress, a NASA evaluation database on Macintosh discs that nobody could produce, a DARPA page on metamaterial propulsion deleted between July 2006 and November 2007, and Searl’s generator seized in a 1982 raid on his home. One of those threads is checkable in principle and the book flags it: negative-index metamaterials really were predicted by Victor Veselago in 1967 and really were built by Richard Shelby and David Smith in 2001, which is the basis on which LaViolette argues that the materials in Brown’s 1965 patent were early metamaterials.
Where the book’s own evidence sits
The book presents most of its material at a similar level of confidence. Sorted instead by how far each layer can be checked from outside:
Primary and checkable. The 1956 Gravity Research Group report, the Aviation Report items, the Bertrandias telephone transcript of March 1952, Brown’s patents, his letters to Turman, the 1992 Aviation Week item, the Patent and Trademark Office memorandum of 15 January 2008 reminding examiners of the Sensitive Application Warning System, and the NASA Space Exploration Outreach Program submissions. These are documents, they are dated, and most are reproduced. They establish that an antigravity research effort was publicly discussed by the aerospace industry in the mid-1950s, that a serving major general reacted to Brown’s discs with alarm, and that institutional screening of anomalous inventions is a documented practice. They do not establish that gravity was controlled.
The author’s own bench work. Chapters 11 and 12, reported with method and with null results. This is the most self-contained material in the book and the least contested.
Published but unreplicated. Podkletnov’s impulse gravity generator, discussed in the aerospace trade press and of reported interest to Boeing Phantom Works, BAE Systems and Lockheed Martin, has not been independently replicated; the claims escalate across the chapter from sixty-four times the speed of light to thousands, and to dented steel and holed concrete. The Roshchin and Godin converter, reported as generating seven kilowatts while losing thirty-five percent of its weight at 595 rpm and cooling its surroundings, is a single result from two authors. The book accepts that these devices break the second law of thermodynamics and argues that “the violation of the second law is the expected norm whenever phase-conjugate resonance is occurring” (p. 324). No calorimetry, closed-loop demonstration or sustained self-powered run is presented for any device in the book.
Inference from a single reported detail. The B-2 chapter. The charging of exhaust and leading edges is a real reported detail; that charging constitutes gravity modification, that the rain restriction is about shorting, and that the engines are flame-jet generators are each proposed rather than shown. Electrostatic discharge management, boundary-layer control and plasma drag reduction are other reasons to put charge on an airframe, and the book does not weigh them. Ben Rich’s often-quoted “anything you can imagine, we already know how to do” (p. 164) is a remark, not a document.
Anonymous testimony. Project Skyvault occupies some twenty-five pages and rests on sources the book identifies only as Tom, Murray and Don, describing events of 1952 to 1957 as recalled in 1974. The classified ether physics in chapter 4 comes from an informant called Ray. The runaway-technology warnings in chapter 8 come from Greg. These are not colour; they carry four chapters, and they cannot be examined.
Contested or rejected elsewhere. The MJ-12 documents, whose authenticity has been disputed since the 1980s without that literature being engaged here. The chapter 13 excursion into Gary McKinnon’s claim of a “Non-Terrestrial Officers” database. And the Columbia passage, which states that “had Brown’s aerospace technology been implemented on the space shuttle, the Columbia disaster would never have happened” (p. 392), an assertion about an untested proposal and a failure mode initiated by foam striking the wing.
What it establishes, and what it leaves open
What the book establishes is a documentary episode. Between roughly 1952 and 1956 a serving Air Force general treated a private antigravity demonstration as comparable to early atomic development; a London intelligence service sold two reports on gravity control to the aerospace industry; named executives at named companies discussed the field publicly; and then the subject left the open literature. Sixty pages of appendices let a reader check that much without trusting the author. Alongside it the book establishes a second thing that does not depend on the physics at all: that a 1990 NASA solicitation to some 45,300 people passed only 215 of 1,697 responses onward, that its propulsion panel rejected close to thirty-nine percent of ideas for violating known physical laws and weighted feasibility five times more heavily than innovation, and that the Patent Office maintains a warning system that flags antigravity devices, over-unity generators and superluminal light on sight.
What it leaves open is the physics and everything downstream of it. Whether Brown’s thrust in vacuum is what the Paris figures describe, whether the third-derivative scaling law holds at kilovolt drive, whether the 1959 silence was classification or collapse, whether the B-2 does anything with charge beyond what its engineers have said, whether Podkletnov’s beam exists: none of these is settled inside the book, and for the anonymous material there is no route by which they could be. The strongest test the book itself proposes is the one it does not perform.
The last chapter asks a different kind of question, and it is the part that needs no physics to land. LaViolette reports his informant’s account of why the material stays closed: “According to Ray, the black-project scientist I had spoken to, the curators of this technology do not feel that society as a whole has matured emotionally to an extent that this knowledge could safely be made available to the public” (p. 401). He answers it with a comparison: “When the internal combustion engine was developed at the turn of the twentieth century, should it have been classified because of its military potential to create tanks and war vehicles?” (p. 401). He died in December 2022, fourteen years after the book appeared, with the question still open.
Read the book. Decide for yourself.
References and further reading
- Secrets of Antigravity Propulsion: Tesla, UFOs, and Classified Aerospace Technology, Paul A. LaViolette, Bear & Company, Rochester, Vermont, 2008
- Gravity Research Group, “Electrogravitics Systems: An Examination of Electrostatic Motion, Dynamic Counterbary, and Barycentric Control”, report GRG-013/56, Aviation Studies (International) Ltd., February 1956, reproduced as the book’s appendix C
- Aviation Studies (International) Ltd., “The Gravitics Situation”, December 1956
- Thomas Townsend Brown, British patent 300,311 (1928) and United States patents 1,974,483 (1934), 2,949,550 (1960), 3,022,430 (1962) and 3,187,206 (1965)
- Eugene Podkletnov and Giovanni Modanese, on the impulse gravity generator, and Nick Cook’s reporting of it in Jane’s Defence Weekly
- Vladimir Roshchin and Sergei Godin, on the magnetic energy converter, reported 2001
- Paul A. LaViolette, Subquantum Kinetics, for the theory the book applies
- United States Patent and Trademark Office, internal memorandum on the Sensitive Application Warning System, 15 January 2008
- Paul Hill, Unconventional Flying Objects, 1995, the analysis the book’s UFO chapter builds on
- The Starburst Foundation, for LaViolette’s own papers and the announcement of his death