“We Have Antigravity UFOs!” (ft. Nick Cook)

Nick Cook, a respected aviation journalist for Jane’s Defence Weekly, stumbled onto one of the most tantalizing hidden stories in aerospace: that major US corporations and defense institutions pursued serious anti-gravity research in the 1950s—and may have achieved breakthroughs that were then buried in classified programs. His book The Hunt for Zero Point documents this journey, weaving together declassified documents, insider interviews, and investigative reporting to argue that some UFO sightings may be man-made craft built using suppressed physics.

• The spark: a mysterious 1956 article titled “The G Engines Are Coming” appeared on Cook’s desk, naming top aerospace firms—Lear, Convair, Bell, Martin Corporation—all expressing confidence they could develop anti-gravity aircraft within years. George S. Trimble, VP of Martin’s Research Institute for Advanced Study, claimed controlled gravity could be achieved in about the time it took to build the atom bomb. By the early 1960s, all public discussion had gone silent.

  • When Cook tried to interview Trimble through a Lockheed contact, Trimble refused abruptly and sounded scared—which only deepened Cook’s conviction that something real lay behind the silence.

• The physics trail: anti-gravity was briefly in the scientific mainstream in the 1950s. A gravity essay contest attracted top theoretical physicists; the Gravity Research Foundation funded serious work. Agnew Bahnson, an industrialist obsessed with anti-gravity, convened the famous 1957 Chapel Hill conference, bringing together John Wheeler, Richard Feynman, and Freeman Dyson—sponsored by Wright Air Field, which had its own theoretical physics anti-gravity division under Josh Goldberg.

  • Louis Witten worked simultaneously for George Trimble’s RAAS group at Martin Corporation and for Wright Air Field on gravity research.
  • A declassified 1971 Australian intelligence memo (from Harry Turner, head of Australia’s JIO Nuclear Division) confirmed that Martin, Lear, Convair, Bell, and physicists including Oppenheimer were deeply involved in anti-gravity research, coordinated through the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence. The memo concluded the US had a real, secret program—and that Project Blue Book was a public-facing distraction.

• Nazi origins: SS General Hans Kammler ran a secret weapons office (the Kammlerstab) overseeing breakthrough technologies including rockets, jets, and possibly disc-shaped craft. Kammler controlled programs in Czechoslovakia and Poland, recruiting inventors like Viktor Schauberger (whose “impeller engine” designs resembled flying saucers) and Rudolf Schriever (who claimed a disc craft reached 40,000 ft in 3 minutes in February 1945).

  • Kammler negotiated with the Western Allies before the war ended; there are six conflicting accounts of his death, fueling speculation he was captured and debriefed.
  • The “Die Glocke” (Bell) story, reported by Polish historian Igor Witkowski, describes a device allegedly producing time dilation and anti-gravitational effects, tested in a mine in Waldenburg, Poland. Cook visited the site and found evidence of massive electrical infrastructure, though he later concluded it was more likely related to advanced nuclear research.

• Thomas Townsend Brown: an inventor whose electrogravitics experiments (the Biefeld-Brown effect) showed that charged capacitors produce thrust toward the positive electrode. Brown met with Edward Teller in 1965; Teller reportedly told his wife, “I don’t know how this works.” Aerospace investor Floyd Odlum (majority owner of Northrop) funded Brown’s company, Guidance Technologies. Three months after Brown shut it down in 1967, Northrop published a paper on electrogravitics—using terminology exclusively associated with Brown’s work.

  • When the B-2 stealth bomber was revealed, Aviation Week described it using an electrokinetic effect in its wings consistent with the Biefeld-Brown effect. Respected Jane’s editor Bill Gunston claimed the B-2’s performance data “doesn’t add up” given its engine power, and hinted he knew why but feared repercussions. Brown’s wife received $2,500/month from Odlum for the rest of her life.
  • Brown was also linked to the Philadelphia Experiment lore; he was stationed at Norfolk in 1943 and told a friend the experiment happened but was exaggerated—likely involving a high-voltage envelope to scramble a ship’s magnetic signature to avoid mines.

• Ning Li: a Chinese-American physicist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, who claimed to achieve 0.5%–2.1% weight loss in objects suspended above spinning superconductors. Her results, if valid, would unify electromagnetism and gravity—something Einstein never achieved. Her department chair, Larry Smalley, was so convinced he left the university to join her company, AC Gravity LLC, which won a DoD contract. Li then went silent for roughly 20 years.

  • Cook interviewed her in 2003 at a gravitational wave conference; she spoke idealistically about the technology belonging to humanity. Within a year, she had disappeared from public life. In 2008, the CCP approached her to return to China; she refused and was banned from the country, even for her mother’s funeral. She suffered brain injuries after being hit by a car in 2014 (her husband died of a heart attack from the shock) and died in 2021.

• Boyd Bushman and John Hutchison: Bushman was a senior Lockheed Martin scientist at Fort Worth who told Cook anti-gravity research was real and pointed him to Canadian inventor John Hutchison. Hutchison’s apartment was filled with Van de Graaff generators, Tesla coils, and oscilloscopes; witnesses reported objects levitating and flying across rooms. The DoD funded his work through Colonel John Alexander (known in parapsychology circles). Under controlled lab conditions, nothing replicated—leading to the unresolved question of whether the effects came from the equipment or Hutchison’s mind.

• Ben Rich, the legendary director of Lockheed Skunk Works, made enigmatic public statements suggesting Lockheed had the technology to “take ET home.” At a UCLA speech, when asked how interstellar travel would work, he replied by asking how ESP worked—then walked away. On his deathbed, he reportedly told someone: “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.”

  • Rich described stealth technology as so challenging that the DoD considered burying the entire program and erasing all traces of radar-baffling research—a pattern Cook sees repeating with anti-gravity.
  • Rich’s successor at Skunk Works, Robert Weiss, later helped Tom DeLonge write UFO-related books, raising questions about whether aerospace’s interest in consciousness and parapsychology (like McDonnell Douglas’s internal UFO study program under James McDonald) reflects a genuine through-line.

• The Aurora mystery: Cook and colleague Bill Sweetman assembled circumstantial evidence for a Mach 5+ hypersonic replacement for the SR-71 Blackbird. Evidence included:

  • US Geological Survey seismic sensors in California tracking unexplained sonic booms moving toward Area 51 in the late 1980s (not the shuttle, not the SR-71).
  • A Royal Observer Corps spotter, Chris Gibson, sketching a dart-like black aircraft escorted by F-111s and refueled by a KC-135 over the North Sea.
  • The NASP/X-30 National Aerospace Plane program (Reagan’s “Orient Express”) channeling scramjet and advanced materials research into the white world before being canceled—with spin-offs likely going to a classified program.
  • A $2 billion line item in a 1986 budget that Ben Rich had to explain away.
  • UK Ministry of Defence documents from the early 1990s referencing US hypersonic craft with novel propulsion.
  • General George Muellner, the Air Force’s head of R&D, telling Cook on his retirement day in 1998 that Aurora was a “deployable prototype” built to fill a gap between the retiring SR-71 and the next generation of spy satellites—and that once the gap was filled, the program was shelved.

• Cook’s Skunk Works visit: while interviewing then-director Jack Gordon at the secret Palmdale facility, Cook noticed an org chart showing an aircraft called “Astra” above all acknowledged programs. When he asked what it was, he was immediately escorted out. Later, a Skunk Works boss told him Astra “hasn’t flown yet” and would “make an appearance soon”—but it never did. Cook later realized the visit was on April 1st (April Fools’ Day) and suspects the entire incident was a sanctioned disinformation operation designed to feed him a breadcrumb.

• Cook’s overarching conclusion: aerospace and defense companies explore “heretical” science—anti-gravity, parapsychology, consciousness—far more willingly than mainstream academia. Whether or not anti-gravity was mastered, the pattern of open research going silent, of credible witnesses and documents pointing to breakthroughs that then vanish into black programs, suggests that something real was found and classified. The technology is inherently dual-use (Brown’s work could theoretically turn a thermonuclear bomb into a “child’s firecracker”), which explains the secrecy. Cook remains agnostic on whether Area 51 achieved true anti-gravity but believes the question is far from settled—and that cracking gravity manipulation may be the key to interstellar travel, time manipulation, and accessing what physicists speculate could be other timelines or realities.