American Alchemy with Jesse Michels - Is Aerospace Hiding Antigravity From US? (ft. Nick Cook)

Episode Date: October 5, 2024

Our incredible guest today is Nick Cook. In the 1990s, Cook was the aviation editor of Jane's Defence Weekly, the UK based international defense journal. He was also an aerospace consultant and contributor to the journal from 2002 to 2008. He's won awards from the Royal Aeronautical Society in the Defense, Business, Technology, and Propulsion categories and is the last thing from a UFO nut. But in the early 90's he stumbled across an article about Antigravity that would change his life forever. This interview covers his decade long exploration into the most secretive compartments of aviation history -- the quest for antigravity. It takes him from Nazi Germany, to a forgotten American inventor named Thomas Townsend Brown until more contemporary gravity researchers today. Please enjoy this long form conversation with him! Cook's Substack And Most Recent Serialized Novel (Subscribe!!): https://nickcook.substack.com/p/introducing-the-light-beyond-the *** AMERICAN ALCHEMY is an original series hosted by Jesse Michels that explores the frontier of science and tech. Each week, we bring you exclusive interviews with some of the leading thinkers of our time. INSTAGRAM ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichels TWITTER ➤ https://twitter.com/AlchemyAmerican EMAIL/BOOKINGS ➤ [e-mail] SUBSCRIBE TO OUR CHANNEL: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7eOJzNRWY4l2UTDvIquxYg?app=desktop original music: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LlLRudDi60Uy4jcmOSEs1 Produced by: Jesse Michels and Bryan Felber Written by: Jesse Michels Additional Writing: Bryan Felber Edited by: Bryan Felber Music by: Jordyn Edmonds Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Not loving your AT&T or T Mobile Bill? Yeah, we've been hearing that a lot. Good news. Bring your AT&T or T Mobile Bill to Verizon and we'll give you a better deal. And we'll give you a better deal to Verizon and we'll give you a better deal on the best network. That's Verizon. Best Network based on root metrics, best overall mobile network performance U.S. second half 2025, all rights reserved. It must provide a recent consumer mobile bill in the name of the person who gave me the deal. Additional terms, conditions, and restrictions apply. USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day, like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance. With USAA, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a quote at usaa.com slash bundle. Restrictions apply. If I'm being shown this and I'm imagining that, what actually is out there that I'm not even beginning to imagine? The year is 1994. Nick Cook, the aviation editor for Jane's Defense Weekly, walks into his office.

and notices someone has placed a photocopy of a strange magazine article from 1956 on his desk. What it showed was a sort of looked like a UFO kind of with a ladder coming out of it over a dry lake bed and a pilot, an Air Force pilot, climbing out of this thing. It's titled The G Engines are Coming and it lists the top aerospace companies of the day. Lear, Convier, the Martin Corporation before its merger with Lockheed, all expressing extreme confidence in being able to develop anti-gravity aircraft within the next several years. One of the people quoted is George S. Trimble, the VP of Martin Corporation's Research Institute

for Advanced Study. He says that human control of gravity could be done in about the time it took to build the first atom bomb. But by the early 1960s, there were no G-engines, no weightless craft, or man-made UFOs. And the whole industry kind of went. silent on the subject. And I filed it away until I ran into a Lockheed PR exec, how I knew pretty well. And I said I'd like to interview George Trimble because it just sounded intriguing.

The old VP initially seemed open to the interview. But a few days later, Nick got a call from his Lockheed contact who relayed a message from Trimble. He doesn't want to speak to me and he doesn't want to speak to you. Not now, not ever. I don't mind telling you that he sounded scared, scared. It is that moment when you go, okay, well, if I wasn't interested before, I am now. Yeah. That's Nick Cook, and those were real-life moments from his incredible book, The Hunt for Zero Point.

The book is the most comprehensive documentation to date of aerospace's formerly unknown, yet very deep inquiries into the world of Antigraph. You're looking at something that is a complete quantum leap. You're making something that is an end, some sort of a gravity propulsion system and you've made a breakthrough. You're not going to put that on wire.com. Nick isn't a woo-woo you afone. He spent decades as a correspondent and then editor for the prestigious British military publication, Jane's Defense Weekly. Entrusted at the highest levels, he traveled the world and interviewed executives at Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop, Raytheon, and many others.

I had a pretty much unlimited kind of travel budget attached to me. It was a global brief. I could go anywhere. And in the 80s and 90s, Cook began hunting down what he wasn't being shown, classified stealth and supersonic aircraft in the black world that hadn't reached the public. He did this along with his colleague Bill Sweetman. Bill was a kind of Sherlock Holmes. He would piece together clues that the black world left or hadn't even intended to leave.

in public. Most notably, they've uncovered some pretty strong circumstantial evidence of the long-rumored Mach 5 Lockheed Aurora aircraft. But more on that later. I always felt like I'm just scratching the surface of what's really going on here. I can seriously say with a straight face that the hunt for zero point is one of my favorite books of all time, and one of the most important books in considering all of the possibilities of the UFO mystery, that some of these UFOs may actually be man-made. He ended his talk with a slide of a black disc zipping off in outer space, and he ended with these words.

We now have the technology to take E.T. H. H.T. home. In this exclusive interview, we retrace Nick's sensational journey in the hunt for zero point, from Skunk Works to Nazi Germany, which had its own reported anti-gravity programs under SS officer Hans Komler, programs that were scavenged for their most valuable technology by the Americans and the Russians at the end of World War II. There may have been stuff going on in World War II that we just don't know about to this day. And along the way, Cook chronicles the motley crew

of forgotten inventors and academics who reported anti-gravitational effects, Victor Schauberger, Thomas Townsend Brown, John Hutchinson, Eugene Peklechnov, and many others. Cook even interviewed Ning Lee, the mysterious Chinese-American physicist who was awarded a DOD grant for her anomalous anti-gravity research results at University of Alabama Huntsville.

And then I don't know sort of how soon after that it was that she sort of went off grid. It was certainly probably about within a year that she just disappeared and no one knew what had happened to. And if that's not crazy enough, Cook and I also explore aerospace's longstanding interest in mind over matter effects or the fringy field of parapsychology. Is there a through line with aerospace and like this, interest in mind over matter. These companies look at anything they can that can confer possible advantage. So without further ado, sit back, relax, and prepare to have your brain absolutely broken

by today's British alchemist, Nick Cook. I'm here with the author of one of my favorite books of all time, Nick Cook. We're here to talk about his book, The Hunt for Zero Point. I chose, as our background, by the way, an Averro car in 1961 and a NASA wind tunnel. And I know the Averro car kind of nominally at least went nowhere, but I did find it to be kind of an iconic, interesting photo. Yeah, it looks an awful lot sort of sexier there than actually the poor thing turned out to be. It really was a bit of a dog of a machine, but we can talk about that. Yeah, yeah, well, let's get into it.

So I want to get into, I think in some ways your autobiographical. story when it comes to this journey is really important for people to understand because you don't seem like one of these UFO nut cooks or even, you know, particularly into very out there stuff kind of a priori. And so you were an aviation journalist at Jane's Defense Weekly, right? And then what got you into aviation in the first place? That's a really good question. So I did a completely unrelated degree at university, which was Arabic and Islamic studies. But then I got to the end of university and I realized that the thing I was really interested in was aerospace and engineering. But I didn't want to go and do another three years of engineering. Plus, I wasn't particularly

great at maths. It was my dad, actually, who was an engineer, who said to me, why don't you write about it? Why don't you write about aerospace? That had never occurred to me until that moment. But actually, when he said that a sort of light bulb went on. And I knew that that was what I was going to do. So let's talk about your introduction into aerospace, inquiries into anti-gravity, because I find that story very interesting. There was an article that showed up on your desk.

Is that right? Yeah, there was an article that showed up on my desk. I mean, people would send stuff to us at Jane's. We had a central mail-opening facility. So I never knew who sent it to me. It might have been anonymously sent. And I was about to throw it in the trash. when I started to sort of read it.

And there were these company names that I recognized. You know, it was still familiar, like Conver, General Dynamics, Lockheed, Lear. And it said, you know, there's real activity going on. Lots of, you know, scientists are involved. And, you know, we anticipate a breakthrough by, you know, the early 1960s. You know, by which time we're all going to be flying around like the jet. And there's a George Trimble is the VP of Martin Corporation pre-Locky merger.

Their group called RIAS, which is studying anti-gravity at the time, says this could be done in about the amount of time it took to build the first atom bomb. And so you get this sort of like, you know, it's around the bend feel. Correct. And in my mind's eye, I had an image of the bomb program as a kind of progenitor for this. You know, this was the kind of timescales, probably the kind of money that was being going to be thrown at this and the architecture that would be employed, except that it was seemed, it was all, of course, being talking about, talked about openly then. And I filed it away,

intrigued, but, you know, I've got real stuff to be getting on with. Right. Until I ran into a Lockheed PR exec, how I knew pretty well. And I said I'd like to interview George Trimble, because it just sounded intriguing. And I think I'd found out that Trimble was still alive, or maybe I'd asked this person to find out if Trimble was still alive. Anyway, the answer came back that Trimble didn't want to speak to me. And he was really quite spooked at the idea of speaking to me. And I was politely sort of invited to drop this interest. But he seemed open to initially speaking to you. And then he goes back and he says, I don't know who this man is, but I won't speak to him now or ever, and I suggest you drop it, you know, something like that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so what caused this sort of 180 flip? What caused the 180 flip? I have, do you know, I have no idea. Like I say, it could have been, oh my God, there's something really secret there that I, I, George Trimble, you know, inadvertently stumbled. You know, I sort of re-stumbled over. because I was once told never to talk about it. Or it could have been the prosaic version,

which is, it's just, this is not something we talk about in polite company in the 1990s anymore. Okay, so the door gets shut in your face. And of course, as a journalist, that makes you more interested. Yeah, it is that moment when you go, okay, well, if I wasn't interested before I am now. Yeah. And then what did you encounter next in your anti-gravity journey?

Well, what I did was, I did that thing that you and Howell had that very interesting discussion with Eric Weinstein about, which was the physics piece. It would only be if it were the case that, in fact, we have mastered anti-gravity and they're being built by aerospace corporations, then new physics would have to be involved. I did look at the piece that Eric Weinstein reference, which was all the sort of physics that was going on at the time. And he did that brilliantly. My understanding is that there were really twin loci of activity. Babson contacted Lewis Whitten, who was coming out of Johns Hopkins. And then oddly, the similarly named individual named Bainson

reaches out to Bryce DeWitt and Sasson. whether he will found an institute at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. And then there's a famous gravity conference at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, that sort of kicks a lot of this off. It's a tremendous flurry of activity at a time when anti-gravity was trying to break into respectability. I couldn't get the trail that far, but I realized that there was, there was a big physics trail to this story. but I decided that I was going to pursue it sort of chronologically.

And of course, when you're talking about anti-gravity, you're talking about something that is a UFO that looks probably like a flying saucer. So I start to do my due diligence, which is I look at the first sightings of this kind of shape. The Tic Tac of today was the flying butane tank of the 1950s. And you can find declassified Air Force OSI reports that are publicly searchable right now.

Yeah. Talk about these like flying white butane tanks. Right. In 1947, General Nathan Twining, he's the head of the Air Material Command, responsible for all aircraft development in the Air Force, writes a famous memo called the Twining memo. UFO nuts love to talk about this memo because he says UFOs are not visionary or fictitious. I think the coolest update on the Twining memo comes from your book because you know. notice some things in the post-script of the memo that are perhaps even more intriguing than just

top Air Force brass conceding the reality of UFOs. Yeah, in the memo, twining states in his considered opinion quotes that the rash of UFO sightings in America during the summer of 1947, the first real wave, as it turned out, had been something real and not visionary or fictitious. He continued, there are objects approximating the shape of a disk of such appreciable size as to appear to be as large as a man-made aircraft. These discs exhibited a number of common characteristics amongst them a metallic or light-reflecting surface and absence of any jet trail and no propulsion sound. And he talks about some observables of UFOs in his day, you know, extreme rates of climb

maneuverability, no vapor trails, which would imply a novel form of propulsion. And then he says in the postscript, it is within our present knowledge to build. these sorts of crafts and then with a range that, you know, I think the U2 spy plane hadn't even come out yet. It was like, you know, seven years or something in the future, it would come out. And on its best day, I think a U2 couldn't meet the range of the aircraft that he described at subsonic speed. It's basically saying they're real, but we don't know how they're flying.

So coming out of World War II, there may have been. stuff going on in World War II that we just don't know about to this day. That's a perfect segue, because from 42 to 45, you have allied and Axis fighter pilots seeing these sort of seemingly controlled ball lightning things. They call them the foo fighters after the smoky stover comic strip. And then in 46, you also have Swedish ghost rockets. And I think it was so on the radar of top military personnel. in the U.S., that Eisenhower actually sends General James Doolittle to go out and investigate

these sort of seemingly, it looks like, modified versions of V2 rockets that are flying at, you know, speeds and with propulsion that we could, you know, never dream of. And so you then go into kind of investigate this kind of European, you know, possible origination of, you know, these saucers. Yeah. There are lots of references to foo fighters and technologies which are really advanced, you know, like there was one I seem to remember called, the German name was Vindhund, so wind dog. It was for sniffing the air streams behind, left behind bombers, in the trail of bombers, so that you could follow a bomber stream from detection of its, of their exhaust trail. And then, as I say, I think in the hunt, there are a bunch of technologies

that you could package together that could go into a foo fighter. But, you know, even doing that today would be challenging. I mean, really challenging, actually. But yet, you still have the sightings evidence from Allied pilots, you know, a lot, saying that they saw stuff. So how do you square that circle? Well, you can't. But you find a lot of interesting circumstantial evidence around the existence possibly of a secret weapons program under SS officer Hans Kamler called go to works. Yeah, I don't even think that's circumstantial. I think there's very good evidence

to show that his, what was called the Kamla, he called the Kamla Stubb, which was the Kamla staff. It was basically a special project office run by SS General Hans Kamler in the latter part of the war for secret projects. I mean, breakthrough technology. The V2 was put under his control. I think until the hunt, you know, very little was known about. him. So I thought that that was a trail worth following, and it took me to some quite interesting places. Hans Kamler was a high-ranking Nazi SS officer who oversaw the construction of several concentration camps, including the notorious Auschwitz-Birkenau. He was deeply committed to Nazi ideology and became one of Hitler's most trusted officers in the last years of the Third Reich.

That is, until Kamler turned on Hitler. By 1945, Comler, who was already in charge of the Nazi's most deadly suite of weapons, had a secret plan to assassinate the furor. Comler's colleague and fellow Nazi Albert Speer once said of him, I discovered him to be a cold, ruthless schemer, a fanatic in pursuit of a goal, and as carefully calculating as he was unscrupulous. As Cook writes, Comler and his staff presided over the blackest of black Nazi secret weapons projects in modern Czechoslovakia and Poland.

The rumors around Kamler's work take the concept of Wunderwaffe or Wonder Weapons to the next level. There are sort of six different accounts of his death, which is always suspicion. Yeah, right. There was quite a bit of evidence that Kamler had been in negotiations with the ally, the Western allies, before the end of the war. And of course, the deal was the obvious one, which is, you get all mine. files on all the technologies that I'd be in charge of, and you let me lift. Kamler oversaw V weapons, rockets, remote control aircraft, atomic energy, jet propulsion, and

other similar subjects. And there are many who believe that flying saucer-shaped craft were a part of his mandate as well. Kamler recruited Rudolf Schreiber, a German technician who claims to have worked on a disc-shaped craft in Prague that made its first test flight in February of 1945, climbing to 40,000 feet in three minutes. Comler also recruited Victor Schauberger. Schauberger was a naturalist in every sense. Not only was he a forester, but he held true to the maxim that science should comprehend and copy nature.

His ideas resemble what we now call free energy, or zero point energy, energy taken from the vacuum or ether. There's enough energy in the volume of a coffee cup to evaporate all the world's oceans if you could get it all of it. Schauberger had his own diagrams and designs for a flying saucer with what became known as an impeller engine. You know, there are some sort of pretty arcane stories

about things that Schaer had built that purportedly took off that, you know, he was running air through at very high rotation speeds. He was running water through at very high rotation speeds. After leaving his home in Austria abruptly in 1942, the year Kamler's secret purpose,

projects began. Schaubriger wrote to his son that he was in Yablonets in Czechoslovakia and that what I am doing is secret. I was able to go and visit the Schauburger family and they opened up their files, the family files. And in particular, they show me Victor's diary from that time. All the places he's going to on a trail he says he can't talk about are all places which I'd already mapped on the, in the Kamla King.

kingdom. These are secret laboratories and outposts and underground facilities that Kamler had built to develop his special weaponry. Finally, alongside them, you had the famed Richard Mita, who also had designs for a flying saucer. Mita worked in high voltage physics. As further evidence that Hans Kamler was working on building real flying saucers, John Warner IV has a story he likes to tell about his grandfather, Paul Mellon, one of the founders of the CIA. Mellin was in Czechoslovakia on a top secret trip at the end of World War II, along with his colleague who went on to become the third director of the CIA, Alan Dulles. And this is what he told his grandson. And my grandfather said, look, you know, we were in a facility, a hangar,

and we saw a German flying disc. And I said, you know, oh, is that the one that was cobbled together with six BMW jet engines? And he laughed and he said, no. Maybe the craziest rumor around Skoda Works is this idea of de Glocka, this sort of bell that at the time it was rumored to have a sort of torsion field and created kind of time dilation effects on the inside of the bell, and you'd put a human in there and be kind of as if time travel because time would slow on the inside, it would run a normal pace on the outside.

You'd walk out, you'd be a thousand years in the future. And you had reportedly, you know, Ernest Growitz, who's the head of the SS, medical division under which Joseph Mangola worked and a guy named Walter Gerlock who's you know a prominent German physicist who explored gravity a bit before you know working maybe on this this sort of exotic crazy project do you have any reason to believe that this existed well you have to hold my hands up and say that um the the bell or the dea blocker story wasn't really my story. You know, I have to hand, and I do hand in the book, credit for that to a guy called Igor Vittkowski, who is a Polish writer, a story in writes about German secret weapon stuff.

I get this connection with Igor Vikovsky, who tells me all about the Bell story, which is, you know, it's purportedly about this device that produces some kind of weird time dilation effect and an anti-gravatational effect, and I pay this very... Atmospheric visits with Igor to the site where supposedly it was installed, which was deep in a mine in a place called Valdenberg in what is now southern Poland. And there, of course, there was this thing that's sort of hexagonal thing that he said was evidence of a test rig for some kind of, you know, disc-shaped craft. When you go on the ground, you can see that this was.

was a very secret installation of some kind. You can still see evidence of very thick cabling, lots of electricity into this place. So, you know, what else could it be? I mean, over time, I have come to conclude that it was probably one of several sites that the Germans, the SS in particular, were using to look into nuclear weapon, nuclear technology, beyond the Heisenberg program, which was the one that everyone that stopped in, I think it was 42 or 43. One of your sources later in the Hudfro's Zero Point does say that, you know, there's some sort of, it was called Kronos or something. Was he referring to Deglocker or was it another program?

No, no, I think it was Vickowski himself. You said that it was called Kronos. And of course, that is the Greek for, what is the Greek god, Kronos. who ruled over time and in a sense over reality as well. So, you know, if that was its name, it could have been aptly named. Let's go back to that Michael Gladysch article. The G engines are coming. In it, he talks about G particles or gravity particles.

These gravitons would theoretically mediate the force of gravity, much like photons mediate electromagnetism. Gladditch cites Stanley Desser and Richard R. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and

conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th, the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th, and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at Yamavat Theater.com, only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. You in? Must be 21 to enter. Arnawitt at Princeton as being actively involved in this research. The pair wrote a paper about these theoretical gravitons in their 1954 winning essay for the Gravity Research Foundation.

Yes, there was a gravity essay contest involving the top theoretical physicists in the world at the time. This shows just how bizarrely invoked the study of gravity was in the 50s. As mathematician Lewis Witten would say, anti-gravity was in the wind. This could mean one of two things. Number one, that it was ubiquitous. It was in the zeitgeist and sort of everywhere. But the second possible meaning is that maybe it was still everywhere, but it was scattered and obfuscated and hard to detect at the same time.

In the Wind is a famous term used by spies and intelligence when they go off-grid. In fact, there's a 1971 Australian intelligence memo cited by David Grush and others that points to this deep yet hidden American interest in anti-gravity in the 50s. It was written by Harry Turner, the head of the Australian Joint Intelligence Organization's nuclear division. The Joint Intelligence Organization, JIO, was basically Australia's CIA. The Aussies had nuclear testing facilities run by Turner that had experienced some bizarre UFO encounters. And so they were starting to believe that American inquiries into UFOs in anti-gravity were, far deeper than the public-facing American programs, like Operation Blue Book,

that were systematically downplaying and marginalizing the topic. Project Blue Book was the best I could do at the time, because they felt they had a real project going on that was secret. Is that true? And the Air Force did. Oh, I didn't know that. This 1971 Australian intelligence memo makes some bombshell claims. It lists all of the same top aerospace companies in Gladyshire.

article that Cook found as being actively involved in gravity research, Martin Corporation, Lear, Conver, Bell. But it also lists top physicists you have all heard of, even Robert J. Oppenheimer as being actively and deeply involved in anti-gravity research. Finally, it lists six top academic institutions as being the center of gravity research in the U.S. Princeton, Institute for Advanced Study, and University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. all doing gravity research at the behest of the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence. Agdu Bonson was the patron of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill's anti-gravity outpost called the Institute for Field Physics.

He was an industrialist obsessed with anti-gravity, and in 1957, he held the Chapel Hill Conference to discuss gravity in the Einsteinian paradigm, kicking off an era from 1957 to 1970 in which general relativity moved from a non-Styliferation, novel curiosity to the centerpiece of modern physics. This era is now known as the Golden Age of Relativity. In this conference, Bonson convenes many of the top physicists in the world, John Wheeler, Richard Feynman, and Freeman Dyson. And the whole conference was sponsored by Wright Airfield,

the center of all UFO rumors, who had its own theoretical physics anti-gravity division under Syracuse Ph.D., Josh Goldberg. Lewis Witten was at the Chapel Hill Conference, too. And where was Lewis Whitten working on gravity? At none other than George Trimble's special research division at Martin Corporation, the Research Institute for Advanced Study. He also was studying anti-gravity for Wright Airfield. The reason there was a laboratory at Wright Field was to find out what we were doing and to help us do it.

And I got a contract for Brightfield to do it, to do gravity, which I did very happily. So with all of the money and resources funneling into gravity research in the 50s and all of the time that's elapsed since, are we really supposed to believe that we've made no progress on the topic? Maybe, who knows? But to frame things slightly differently, if we have made any progress on anti-gravity, but that progress got turned into special access programs or was militarized, it might look like we haven't made any progress. you'd never be able to tell the difference. Maybe a hint lies with Agnew Bonson of the Institute of Field Physics.

The anti-gravity-obsessed patron wrote a science fiction book before his untimely death in a plane crash. It was called The Stars Are Too High. And it involves a team of rogue Nazi scientists who were captured and moved to America after the war, culminating in a collaboration to build man-made flying saucers, utilizing anti-gravity. The makers of these saucers hatch up a plane,

to fake an alien invasion in order to quell tensions between the Russians and the United States. And then I go to, as you say, I go to Townsend Brown, who was, as you've ably covered in a previous film. An inventor, he had some connection to Lockheed. In one of my recent videos, the man who built UFOs for the CIA, we cover the life of the most interesting man you've probably never heard of. Thomas Townsend Brown. Brown was a mid-century engineer and inventor whose life is shrouded in mystery and rife with controversy. Some people believe he made vital discoveries in the world of anti-gravity, while others think he was an amateur quack. One piece of blowback I got after making

that documentary was the proposition that Brown's work could have made it into the B-2 stealth bomber. For a while, I looked at whether the B-2 bomber might have employed some kind of Townsend Brown type techniques to make it a little stealthier, make it a little less prone to drag. Those are both byproducts of electrostatics. You charge something electrostatically and you reduce its radar signature. That's useful for a stealth bomber. You charge it electrostatically and you might reduce its drag. There were papers written by the aerospace industry on that, you know, in the early 1960s by Northrop, I've seen to remember.

Papers that were pulled, that you had a source, an anonymous source out here that noticed that they were pulled from the AIA's records. As far as I know, at that time, they were. As I say in my video, I can't definitively say that Brown's work made it into the B2. But I'll just lay out the facts, and you decide. Townsend Brown met with Edward Teller in 1965, who by many accounts, including this 1971 Australian intelligence memo, was working on anti-gravity research since the 50s. At his Berkeley home, Teller is shown a demo by Brown of his fan precipitator.

This freaks tell her out so much that he turns to his wife and says, I don't know how this works. Townsend Brown's daughter, Linda, who is still alive, was present at that meeting and confirmed this account. And he looked at him, and finally, he said, I don't understand how it works.

A prominent aerospace investor and a lawyer named Floyd Odlem gets tipped off about teller's astonishment and decides to become the sole investor in Brown's Santa Monica-based company Guidance Technologies. Odlem also happens to be a majority owner of Northrop before its merger with Grumman. While at guidance technologies, Brown continues his anti-gravity work on electrostatics. While conducting this work, he's meeting with Bill Lear, former Air Force Chief of Staff, Curtis LeMay, the Rand Corporation, and other Titans' of aerospace. In the fall of 1967, Brown shuts the company down with no explanation, saying he

got no results. But in the winter of 1968, just three months after Brown shuts down guidance technologies, Northrop, who has the same investor as Brown, Floyd Odlem, happens to publish a paper on electro-aerodynamics and electrogravatics and its implications for aviation. Electrogravityics is only used to describe one thing at the time, and it sounds in Brown's work. Did Brown shut down guidance technologies just to have his IP covertly transferred to Northrop Grumman, his sole investor's biggest interest? Well, two decades later, when Northrop's B2 stealth bomber is revealed to the world, Aviation Weekly says it used an electrokinetic effect in its wings, producing a b-field brown effect. The B-2 surfs its own electrostatic wave, the negative cloud

chasing the positive wing. And not to mention, Brown's wife, Josephine, received checks from Odlem for the rest of her life. Mr. Odlem did force them to sign a contract with my dad that was open-ended. It was something like $2,500 a month. After Daddy died, it was what put my mother going at $2,500. Wow. Never quit. And I had to thank, I had to thank, I had to.

But there are other conventional, prominent journalists who believe that Brown's work made it into the B-2 stealth bomber. I do cite in the book Bill Gunston, who was another Jane's editor. And Bill Gunston was kind of like the doyen of aerospace, just a very dogged data guy. And he comes up with his story saying that the B-2's performance data data data does not add up. you know it given the power of its engines it shouldn't be able to take off yeah so what's going on and you know i thought you know a lot of us thought well for you to say that bill yeah that's weird that's odd that's and he adds this kind of epith like well you know i think i'm going to draw the line under this story because i don't want to end up in the tower of london that's right aka you know a a deep

dark prison yeah that once was and um he says i've long been familiar with the rudiments of towns and brown's work, but I don't want to reside in the Tower of London, so I will refrain from speaking about leading edges of millions of volts positive, followed by trailing edges of millions of volts negative, which is a description, of course, of Townsend Brown's kind of capacitor work. Some even think that B-2 was named after Byfield Brown. B-2, two Bs, B-Field-Brown. So what do you think? And why is this even important if it were true?

Because if Brown's work made it into the B2, then it means his work touched reality. That means some of his other more exotic anti-gravity experiments, which also involved many credible witnesses, all of whom I mentioned in my documentary, may have been valid too. It at least makes that more probable and quickly dispels the popular image of Townsend Brown that he was an amateur quack who never got anywhere. I always liked your book because it was kind of a, it was very skeptical. It was it was just hard-headed and it was so you had all this epistemic humility like you were a real journalist in a world of quacky woo-woo, you know, looking for meaning types of people and so I go I go in reading the book and I'm like you know to the Shotskin book and I'm like you know is there anything here and honestly the stuff that made me higher conviction in Brown it's not only these sort of threads we piece together in aerospace but it's like the way he communicated with his family about a lot of this stuff and

where it's like, I don't think he's sciopping them. You know, that just fascinated me. And it felt like it almost beget an expanded worldview. I mean, what is interesting about Brown, you know, is his involvement supposedly in the Philadelphia experiment, you know, about a disappearing warship and time travel and all of that? And you think, where did that come from? And why?

The Philadelphia experiment was a long rumored, supposed Navy experiment in 1943 that turned the USS Eldridge invisible and teleported it from Philadelphia to Norfolk, Virginia. It spawned a book, a movie, and all sorts of crazy time travel and teleportation mythology. I think the lore around this experiment is mostly total quackery and a bit insane. And the experiment likely just involved a high voltage envelope created around the ship in order to render it undetectable, scrambling its magnetic signature to avoid underwater mines, torpedoes, and radar. That account is also backed up by Edward Dudgeon, a Navy electrician that corresponded with legendary French UFO researcher Jacques Valais in the 90s.

But Townsend Brown likely was involved in the experiment. In fact, he was stationed at Norfolk, Virginia at the time. He also told his friend Josh Reynolds late in life that the Philadelphia experiment did happen, its events were just greatly exaggerated. This also explains the 1943 FBI file on Brown saying that he knew more about radar than anyone in the Navy at the time. As we all know, the best kind of disinformation always has a little bit of truth seated in there somewhere. So what on earth was going on there? You know, there could have been a breakthrough there.

Yeah. There could have been. Yeah. People say secrets don't keep that wrong. Well, you know, I've already talked about a couple I know of that kept for 35 to 40 years. The answer is they do keep for a long time. They can do. And particularly when you put in special measures,

you know, the disinfo stuff around them. From there, I went to some white world lab test experiments, which were going on in NASA at the time. NASA had exhibited weirdly an interest in anti-gravity in the sort of mid-1990s, following reports that a guy, he was a Russian called a Yevgeny Podkletnov, who'd been worried. working out of the University of Tampuri in Finland, had noticed a weight loss effect in objects suspended above very rapidly rotating superconductors.

So NASA wanted to replicate that, and to the best of my knowledge, they were never able to. And from there, it's just kind of snowballed. Yeah, yeah. The final thread here is this woman named Ning Lee, who is in Alabama, and she's working on anti-gravity experiments. And you actually interviewed her, right? She's been brought up, actually, in the context of, brought up by Joe Rogan and some other podcasters very recently

because she has this bizarre disappearance. Have you heard of that? There's a story about this Chinese scientist that was working on anti-gravity and then vanished. That's where it comes from a Marshall. Ning Li was a Chinese American physicist who was experiencing a resurgence of interest in the last few years.

Lee was born in China in 1943, and at the age of 40 in 1983, she moved to the aerospace mecca, Huntsville, Alabama, joining the University of Huntsville, Alabama's physics department. Along with her colleague, Douglas Torr, Lee developed a theory of gravity manipulation involving the alignment of the rotation of ions into a lattice called a Bose-Einstein condensate

that she thought could counteract gravity. Nobody found any mistake. Then she tested it, suspending a test mass above a spinning superconductor. And according to her, saw some pretty paradigm shifting results, publishing that the various masses she tested would lose between 0.5% and 2.1% of their weight across multiple trials. This is an absolutely insane claim, achieving weight loss or any gravity reduction on a suspended object through the simple input of alternating current electricity would break our conventional understanding of physics.

It would unify the field, finally reconciling electromagnetism and gravity, something Einstein could never do. After claiming to achieve these groundbreaking results, Ning Li then makes an interesting move. She leaves University of Huntsville, Alabama, to start her own company, AC Gravity LLC. In fact, Lee's physics chair at Huntsville, Larry Smalley,

was so convinced by the groundbreaking experimental results Lee had shown that he also left the University of Huntsville to join Lee at her company. When I heard this story at rang a bell, I had remembered that name, Larry Smalley. Where had I seen it? Well, he's the same guy on NASA patents filed in 2004 out of the Marshall Space Flight Center. The patent is for a novel barrel-shaped asymmetric capacitor. Again, capacitors are the core instrument in Townsend Brown's experiments. The fact that Smalley was on the patent got me thinking that maybe there's a possible lineage between Ning Lee and Townsend Brown.

After Lee forms her company with Smalley, AC Gravity LLC, they immediately win a DOD contract. Lee gets a security clearance, and she seems to go silent for 20 years. At the time of her winning that contract, her son George noted a stark change in Lee's cheery demeanor and an increased secretiveness and somberness around the house. In 2008, Lee was approached at her home by the CCP to continue her work in China. She refused, causing them to retaliate by banning her from the country even to attend her own mother's funeral. If this part of the story is true, Lee is an absolute American patriot. In 2014, Lee was tragic.

magically hit by a car, the shock of which gave her husband, who was walking with her, a lethal heart attack, and it gave Lee brain impairment until her recent death in 2021. What happened to Ning Lee? Yeah, I'll admit her, and I did sit down and I interviewed her, and this was at a conference in 2003, just outside of Washington, D.C., run by the, overseen by the MITA Corporation. and it was looking at, I think, high-frequency gravitational waves. And, you know, she was an interesting character because she had been involved in some of those NASA experiments

I mentioned earlier about rotating superconductors and weight loss experiments. And she chaired one of the sessions. I talked to her afterwards about it all. She had this view that this was science and technology that should be for the people. It should be very philanthropic in its nature and outcomes. And then I don't know how soon after that it was that she sort of went off grid. It was certainly probably about within a year that she just disappeared. And no one knew what happened to her.

There are rumors of this sort of tech being possibly of dual use. There's a quote from Paul Schatzkin's book actually that Brown. work could turn a thermonuclear bomb into a child's firecracker, sort of like this death ray that could end the world, which would obviously be, you know, you'd have to be very conscious about how you release something like that. Probably never want to release something like that, at least in our present state of consciousness as humanity. So. Indeed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. Yeah. Definitely a deal-use aspect to, I'm sure. So, yeah, we have to, sort.

get ourselves up to a point where we're responsible enough to use it responsibly. Cutting kind of later into the book, who is Boyd Bushman? Okay, so when I finished at Germany, that's to go the bit, I came back to the U.S. again and was introduced there and Lockheed Martin to a guy called Boyd Bushman, Dr. Boyd Bushman, who was a senior scientist at Lockheed Martin, Fort Worth. and I sit down an interview, Boyd, for a documentary I was making at the time called Bill Endora Secret. And he's the first person in the aerospace industry who talks to me about, you know, anti-gravity and it's not crazy. And he even gives me some pointers and says, you know, you should go and check this out and go and check that out.

And so I did. One of the pointers he gave me was to a guy called John Hutchison, who was a Canadian inventor in working out of Vancouver, who apparently had been funded, whose anti-gravatational experiments had been funded by the DOD. In fact, by the guy who headed that up was quite well known in sort of parapsychological circles, Colonel John Alexander.

And it involved a lot of kind of crazy equipment, which John had assembled and put together in one place, which I witnessed when I went to his home, it was stuff full of older scilloscopes and, you know, vandergraph generators called those what. I then spoke to John Alexander about it, who said, unfortunately, when they set up all the equipment under laboratory conditions, none of it worked.

Couldn't replicate anything. But off-camera and out of the laboratory, you know, people saw stuff fly across the room. And the big question for John and the team was, was this the equipment that was doing it? Or was it somehow John Hutchison doing it with his mind? And John always says it's the equipment. But, you know, there are others who became relatively convinced

that there was some psychokinetic kind of influence on it all. Ben Rich was a talented engineer, originally hired as a thermodynamicist for Lockheed Martin before moving over to its most secretive aircraft and weaponry division, Skunkworks. In 1975, he took over Skunkworks from the legendary Kelly Johnson and would go on to play a vital role in the development of American stealth planes, like the F-117. He did this by resuscitating the work of an obscure Russian mathematician in the 60s

named Ufimsev, who developed equations for predicting the reflection of electromagnetic waves. Sounds like a conventionally successful career in aerospace, right? Well, at a UCLA speech in the 90s towards the end of his life, Ben Rich, the former director of Skunkworks, made some very strange comments, alluding to Lockheed Skunk Works having the technology to, quote-unquote, take E.T home and travel across various star systems. When asked how exactly that would work, this is what he said.

He said, well, let me ask you a question. How does ESP work? And it just threw me back. I thought, oh my God, I wasn't expecting a question. I was expecting him to just say something. And he said, I said, I don't know, all points in space and time are connected. That's how it works. Turned around, walked away.

Later, Ben Rich apparently said this on his deathbed to John Andrews of Tester's Motor Corporation. We already have the means to travel among the stars. But these technologies are locked up in black projects. and it would take an act of God to ever get them out to benefit humanity. What did Rich mean? And why did Rich's successor, SkunkWorks director Robert Weiss, get involved in Tom DeLong's public-facing UFO organization to the Stars Academy? These are all good questions, very worthy of follow-up.

You know, I interviewed it. I interviewed Ben Rich a couple of times. He talked in parables. He talked in analogies. You know, when we were talking about stealth. And he said there was a time when stealth was deemed to be so challenging. You know, it wasn't an easy thing at all to get an algorithm, basically, a radar baffling algorithm to fly. He said, we considered actually burying the whole thing, I mean, before we even got started, and burying it so that no one else got the idea.

It was a little bit like bomb physics, you know. at the moment when Einstein wrote that letter to Roosevelt saying that a bomb is possible you then started to get all or a lot of traces of what then had been open discussion about the atom splitting the atom

all of that began to disappear and it was it was for a while contemplated by the DOD the few who knew about stealth and the skunk works they should do the same thing this thing was so challenging that they wouldn't go ahead with it they'd do something else. And meanwhile, they'd erase all trace of, you know, talk about radar baffling

algorithms and stuff. There was even a rift, right, between Kelly Johnson, Ben Rich's predecessor and Ben Rich. Ben Rich was very pro-stealth, but Kelly Johnson was kind of anti-stealth at the end of his career, right? I believe that to be the case. I mean, I'm citing Ben-Ritch's book. Yeah. Well, yes, I'm pretty sure that was the case. I mean, there were lots of sort of, there were lots of different camps for and against stealth, for sure. Sure. But in the, you know, and then as Ben Rich said to me, so in effect what we would have done, he said, we would have, you know, we would have boxed this thing up. We would have put a kind of date stamp on not to be opened until, you know, 2050 or whatever.

And we would have slid it into a warehouse that looked a metaphorical warehouse that would have looked or resembled that which you see at the end of Raiders of the Lost Art with the art. I have no idea what he meant by that. So I've sort of rather sort of ducked, ducked away from it. Yeah, well, then you have this bizarre resurgence of kind of skunk works, kind of public-facing propaganda around UFOs or anti-gravity in the form of To the Stars Academy. The question I've always had is like, you know, is there, Rob Weiss got very interested. He kind of helped Tom DeLong actually write a couple of books, Secret Machines, and then this other one with Peter Lovenda. And he gets interested in the whole topic when Tom DeLong and Peter Lovenda start talking about celestial assent practices and cabala.

And so is there anything there? Like, is there a through line with aerospace and like this interest in mind over matter? I mean, James McDonald is a famous patron. Obviously, he was very interested in parapsychology. as well at McDonnell Douglas. They had their own institute. He's very close with Bob John, who's running the Pear Lab at Princeton. So is there, is there like a reality to this, you know, this interest of aerospace and consciousness?

Well, I'm very aware of the McDonald one that you mentioned. And, you know, there are declassified papers to show McDonald instructing his company or members of his officials within his company to go study UFOs to see what you can learn from them, the idea being you transpose that knowledge into aerospace programs, presumably. I'm not aware of it at the skunk works. I'm not aware of it at anywhere else. The thing that I am aware of is that these companies look at anything they can, that, that, confer possible advantage, whatever that is. And I mean, the other thing that impressed itself upon me,

and has always impressed itself upon me, is how much further the aerospace and defense industry is prepared to go in terms of looking at what you might call heretical science than science itself is. And then, you know, you only have to go to something like remote, viewing the psychic spying program to know that agencies like the CIA definitely saw advantage in heretical science. I mean, there's nothing scientific to explain remote viewing, but still they went ahead

and did it anyway and funded it for 18 years or something. Yeah. You told me once that Ben Rich would refer to UFOs as unfunded opportunities. Well, as we've already discussed, you know, these. These organizations aren't past misleading you. I mean, and why not? I mean, I get it. I don't, I'm not aggrieved by the fact that I'm playing a game with them, or at least, you know, when I was doing this, I was playing a game with them.

I sort of, I knew that. It's the, it's a very fine line. It's a double-edged sword. You cannot be seen to be misleading the press. Or even more than that, don't get caught if you do do it. because that's self-limiting. You know, after a while, people then begin to question, you know, you, the ethics of your company, you know, what you're up to, etc. So whatever game is being played is incredibly subtle.

I mean, I think Ben Rich was subtle. I mean, he made some very enigmatic statements about these things, and particularly, you know, where they classified aircraft butted up against the whole UFO law. the unfunded opportunity thing I mean you can take that at face value which is that he really did see funding opportunities in everything or in a lot and you know part of the chart the charter of the skunk works

was to push technology in addition to responding to the pull of technology in other words requirements pulls from you know the DOD or or whoever um so you know they were always coming up with concepts for you know interesting weird flying craft there was this mythical aircraft out there called aurora and aurora was supposed to be a replacement for the SR 71 blackbird which remains to this day i think the fire a lot of this jet-powered airplane ever built, even though it retired in 1990.

And Bill again, he became convinced that there was, that this aircraft existed. Bill was a kind of Sherlock Holmes of our world. He would piece together clues that the black world left in public or hadn't even intended to leave in public and would follow these clues. and build them up. And so between us, we went on this kind of hunt for classified aircraft, of which there were a few in the 80s and 90s.

And so that's sort of, that was my grounding in the world of sort of, you know, secret stuff. Doesn't he, he kind of documents an oil rig engineer, right, in the North Sea, drawing up a little sketch of the Aurora, right? And then you have unattributable sonic booms in the desert of California that, you know, it's clearly not the space shuttle. It's not the SR 71. And so what's going on there? And then you had your own experience, right? At Skunkworks, do you want to talk about that? Yeah.

It's quite a bit to put together there. So, yes, there were sightings and there were soundings of this thing. purportedly. So the US geological survey had detected through its seismic sensors in California, which are there to, obviously, to monitor for earthquake activity. It had detected booms, sonic booms, coming in from the Pacific, heading towards Area 51 in Nevada, because you could, the sensors were positioned in such a way that you could track the progress of, you know, whatever seismic disturbance or sonic disturbance there was. And all of these booms were tracking towards Area 51 in Nevada.

It wasn't the space shuttle because the space shuttle wasn't flying that day. Other aircraft were deemed not to be responsible for it. So that was kind of one pointer towards a secret hypersonic aircraft that was under test. in at area 51 in the late 1980s. The oil rig sighting was interesting. So a guy called Chris Gibson who was working on an oil rig in the North Sea, somewhere between the UK and Germany, I guess, or Norway. He looks up and he sees this dart-like black arrow-shaped thing high.

escorted by what he took to be, I think it was three or four F-1-11s, which were swing-wing American aircraft, which were based in the UK at the time. And it was being tanked in mid-air by a Boeing tanker, a 135 tanker. You know, we used to get reports like this all the time into Jane's, you know, and I would or Bill would. But what made this one credible was that Chris Gibson was a Royal Observer Corps observer.

The Royal Observer Corps was set up as a sort of citizen monitoring service for the impending war, Second World War, and is incredibly disciplined in its approach to how it observes things. So Chris Gibson was no ordinary Plainspotter. He was a Royal Observer Corps, planespoter. and he drew a sketch of this thing immediately afterwards. And I think he sat on it for a while. But then eventually he sent it to Bill, Sweetman. And Bill ran then a story piecing together the evidence for Aurora with all the engineering evidence.

And there was a lot of engineering evidence too because there was a program running at the time through NASA and the DOD. called NASP, National Aerospace Plain, the X-30, set up by sort of started by Reagan, with lots of money behind it. Reagan called it the Orient Express in that this thing was due to fly from the US to somewhere in Singapore, China, Hong Kong, wherever in 45 minutes. And Bill became convinced that NASP was actually a cover program for Aurora in that. in that it sort of channeled through the white world, so through the non-classified world,

a bunch of technologies like scramjets, you know, supersonic combustion combustion ram jets, which is what you'd need for a very high-flying, sort of super cruising aircraft like Aurora. And also things like, new materials. I mean, materials in hypersonic program are key because, you know, basic metals had kind of reached the end of their useful life as an airframe material. You had to come up with new stuff like sort of pyrosuramic. And Bill had tracked a lot of this through NASP. NASP then died, went nowhere, supposedly. But it was felt. at least by Bill, and I tend to agree with him, that there were spin-offs from that program that went into a classified program.

So while Bill was off doing all of this stuff, I was interviewing various people about, yeah, it was mainly day-to-day bread and butter stuff. And one of the series that I wanted to run was about how the skunk works, which is the secret sort of development, very high-tech arm of Lockheed Martin, how techniques from these companies, which were then beginning to come out of the shadows just after the end of the Cold War, after the fall of the Berlin War, how they were spinning out their hard-earned business acumen and so how to build things quick and cheaply, because, of course, they'd done that in the black.

into the overall corporation. So there was a business story there. And I went to talk to the head of the skunk works guy, then head of the skunk works. I think he took over after maybe a couple after the famous Ben Rich, who I'd also interviewed. But Jack Gordon was then the head of the skunk work. So I went to interview him. And in a rare dispensation, they, in a rare dispensation, they, in invited me to go and interview him in the headquarters building, which is actually on the secret part of the skunk work site.

Normally, you'd interview somebody like that in what's kind of like a, the company of the skunk works had an airlock, which was a sanitized part of the, of the skunk works across the railway tracks in Palmdale where you would not encounter anything secret. But I was escorted onto the sort of secret part into the headquarters building, interviewed Jack Gawood. and who said a few weird things like I've been responsible for 15 real flying aircraft in my time but I can't sorry I can only talk about 12 of them so there were these missing three

which you know we chit-chatted about for a while but I didn't get very far and those aircraft have never to my knowledge those have never been revealed those missing three and so then when the interview finished I was being escorted back out of the building again to waiting car that would take me back to the sanitized part of skunk works when I'm passing

this org chart and it's a chart that depicts in graphical form aircraft from the skunk works beginnings which were in 1940s through to the then modern day which was as i say mid 90s so i think um the aircraft that should have been at the top of that list that was acknowledged It was either the prototype of the F-22, the YF-22, or it was Darkstar, which was a drone which got cancelled. I think it was Darkstar. That's what I should have seen. Instead, what I saw above it was something called Astra. And I turned to my escort and I said, oh, that's interesting.

What's Astra? And you've never seen anyone bundled out of a building so quickly as I was when I mentioned that plane. Now, a few posts, I talk about that in the Hub's Zero Point, as you say. There were a few postscripts to that, which came after I'd written The Hunt. One was that I ran into, just through the job, I ran into several bosses of the skunk works after Jack Gordon at various trade shows and what have you. One of them I sat down and talked to about that incident. I said, are you aware of, you know, that astro incident and what happened to me? And he said, oh, yeah.

He said, we're all aware of that incident. We, you know, there's no one in the skunkwarker who doesn't know what happened that day. Showing that there's something there. Well, maybe. Or so I go. It would be not memorable if there was nothing there. Yeah, because on the face of it, it was a major fuck up. I mean, it was a real goof.

And so I said, okay, well, let's talk about that. And I said, that's interesting. So, so what's happened to Astra then? He said, oh, it hasn't flown yet. I'm guessing this could be a decade after this incident happened. So I said, okay. I said, are you expecting it to fly anytime soon? And he said, yeah, it'll make an appearance sometime soon.

Okay. So, and I go, well, thank. I said, thanks. Okay. And he says something enigmatic. like keep watching the skies, you know. Anyway, it hasn't appeared. To the best of my knowledge, it has not appeared either.

Various drone programs have, but I don't think they really account for what I saw or the description of it. So I think that's the end of the story. And it was only relatively recently. I mean, like a few years back, I keep all my diaries, so I'm flicking back through my diaries. And I come across the day that I went to the Scant Works

and I saw Astra at the top of that chart. And I look at the day. and it's April the 1st, April Fool's Day. And that makes me think, okay, okay, I think I understand what was happening that day. Which was, yeah, I think. So why was I ushered into the headquarters building when no one else was? They knew I was going to be writing a story about this stuff. It was all sanctioned.

It was on the record. And conveniently, as I walk out of the building, I see the org chart, which actually I'm amazed I missed it on the way in. Maybe somebody put it up while I was doing the interview. Anyway, I see the org chart. And you could construe it this way, which is that I was meant to see it. And I was meant to write it. And, you know, there is no, there are all kinds of tricks and games and things, you know,

that, you know, wittingly, unwittingly, we, we get drawn into, you know, as journalists. And it wouldn't surprise me at all if, you know, you know, going back home and when I did write about it, and I did put a really big caveat into that story when I wrote about it, saying, I can't be sure that something like Astra exists. And I don't even know what it is or what it could be if it exists. It could be a stealth aircraft. It could be a reconnaissance aircraft. It could be a hypersonic plane.

But I think someone somewhere wanted me to write about it. Interesting. And so, you know, those are the sorts of kind of breadcrumbs that you get fed and And of course, you've got to try and keep a watchful eye out. This was after you had been digging up with Bill Sweetman, a lot of the kind of facts around the Aurora and you'd been on record. So that would make sense. We published a big story about Aurora in Jane's Defense Week.

Okay. Well, then they could have been trying to trick you. Could have been. Because, you know, if you're already on their radar, why have you in the, you know, next to the crown jewels at the, you know, the center of everything in Palmdale. That's interesting. But the Aurora, there's just some, I mean, there's the evidence we just discussed. And then there's also, you know, I think British Ministry of Defense documents from the early 90s talking about hypersonic craft with kind of novel propulsion from the U.S.

There's a 1968 or sorry, 1986 budget where it shows up as a line item for, I think, like, $2 billion or something. And Ben Rich has to kind of explain that away. Yeah. So do you, I mean, do you have like a base case of, you know, are these, are these? Are these crafts real or not? Or, you know, obviously you have to think probabilistically, but. Yeah. I mean, as you say, there are very good pointers to say it existed, not least of which was, it appeared,

a pretty firm conviction by the UK MOD that it existed. And that appearances of this aircraft over the UK, there were rumours it was based out of the UK for a while at a remote Scottish base called R.A.F. Macrohanish. So there was that side of things I've interviewed I mean I had a fascinating talk with an RIF pilot that I ran into once who said that he had talked to

pilots who had encountered the Aurora in the North Sea I mean over the North Sea and actually if that was the case a tornado R-A-F tornado with swing wings actually looks an awful lot like an F-1-11

and despite the skills of Chris Gibson he could have mistaken a swing-wing tornado for a swing-wing F-11. So I've had it, you know, I'm pretty good authority from people qualified R-A-F military pilots and sworn to secrecy as well on that that the thing was real.

But just on a sort of gut level sort of instinct thing, I think that the slam dunk dunk for me was an interview I did, which I also talk about in The Hunt for Zero Point, with a guy called General George Mulner, who was the US Air Force's head of research and development until his retirement in 1998. I was lucky in that I got to interview him on the day of his retirement. So I think it was in June or July 1998. And the subject was black programs. So that was the official on the record. That's what we were going to talk about discussion. And I filmed it for a documentary that I did at a time called Billion Dollar Secret. And I bring up all of these sightings, you know, with him of,

weird craft that have been spotted in Colorado and Nevada and I said, look, you know, some of these things are silent for heaven's sake. You know, they hover over witnesses. They make no noise. And I'm talking about some pretty grounded witnesses here. You know, there are ranches who they know the land. They might not know too much about aircraft, but they have a good sense of what's going on in there and over their territory. And And so we talked a little bit about that. And he was kind of joking about UFO sightings over, you know, Utah, Colorado and Nevada. And then we got on to the subject of Aurora. And I said, look, you know, you're retiring today. What can you say about the existence of this mythical Mark 5 hypersonic aircraft? And he said, well, I'll leave you with a sort of bit of a puzzle. And he said, we had, we had.

had a problem in the late 80s, early 90s, which was the SR-71 Blackbird was retiring. We had a generation of analog satellites, which was coming to an end and was being retired, phased out of service, de-orbited. And there was a new generation of these keyhole satellites. I think it was KH-11 keyhole satellites, which were digital satellites. which fed real-time imagery back to Earth. He said, but we had a gap between the two. We had no SR-71. We had no satellite coverage.

He said, what would you do? So, well, what I would do is pretty much what most people, Bill Sweetman included, kind of think Aurora was, which was a, what they call a deployable prototype. So you build a few. to test the concept, see if it works. You might send it on a few missions. You might even deploy it to somewhere like the UK for a bit. But, you know, this thing is expensive.

It drinks whatever fuel it uses. And whilst it has a utility, the utility of a thing like Aurora, even when you have spy satellites, is that you know when spy satellites are coming over. and you can scoot and hide from them. You don't know when a hypersonic aircraft is coming over, or you don't have much warning time.

So there was real utility in this thing, but if you take General Mulner's advice at face value, this thing just filled a gap. And when it had done its job of filling the gap, they went back to spy satellites. Interesting. That's an interesting theory. You know, the technology is one thing, but actually it's sort of really more a journey of the mind.

It's about the notion that, you know, there are some things that we might never ever know about. And we have to live with that. And that can be frustrating for people. I mean, it was frustrating for me at the time. And how do you shake out on all this? I know we're kind of wrapping up here, but how do you think that aerospace made real,

breakthroughs and anti-gravity? Do you think they didn't? Where are they now? Well, you know, I can't... Our interview sadly abruptly stopped recording here due to some mysterious AV difficulties at our studios, right at a pivotal time in which Nick Cook was answering maybe the most important question. But I think it's sort of fitting for this topic,

and it does justice to the healthy nuance of the hunt for zero point. If you take my friend and founder of Army Future, Command, Carl Nell's statements in the debrief to be true. Then we're in an arms race right now with the Russians and the Chinese to reverse-engineer UFOs. If that's the case, the U.S. government should be very worried. The American programs are balkanized, siloed in these old, stodgy corporations that hit their peaks in the 50s and 60s.

They're not hiring America's best and brightest because they don't want to risk losing their super secret IP. Isn't it in their best interests to just get immunity for themselves and try to refresh the talent pool. If these people are, you know, they're all old and it's completely compartmentalized and they haven't made, you know, in the Wilson memo. But they're completely arrogant. They're arrogant. But you can be sure that the Russians and Chinese, with their nationalized and centralized efforts, are recruiting their best scientists to work on these topics. They're not worried about losing profits. They're focused instead on national defense. I also think that as far

as pushing disclosure around the ontological truth behind a lot of the the secret science and the UFO question, the national security argument just seems to get lawmakers' attention much faster than anything else. Finally, I think that all technology is dual use, and academia has completely stagnated and is stuck in the wrong frameworks. So if we can funnel more money and resources into these heterodox science projects, we can make progress much faster. Personally, I'm far more interested in the potential for this technology to actually take us interstellar. And if we do live in a multiverse, as physicists and the public love to theorize these days, then cracking gravity might be the key to jumping timelines. In general relativity, gravity and time

are tightly coupled, so the only way to manipulate time would involve the manipulation of gravity. And all true interstellar travel would require time travel or spacetime metric engineering. In the 1950s, the future was an exciting thing. We weren't locked into this AI dystopian night we find ourselves in today. If we figure out the gravity question, maybe we can get back to the future or in the words of the great Donnie Darko, learn to travel in God's channel.

I hope you all enjoyed this and learned something. I want to thank Nick Cook for his time and his excellent book, The Hunt for Zero Point. Please go out and read it, along with his new, amazing, serialized book on Substack, The Light Beyond the Mountains, which I'm linking in the description. Until next time, I'm Jesse Michaels,

and this is a nice. American Alchemy. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.