Top Highlights

• It told me that in 1955 Trimble had become involved in something called the Research Institute for Advanced Studies, RIAS, a Martin spin-off organization whose brief was to “observe the phenomena of nature . . . to discover fundamental laws . . . and to evolve new technical concepts for the improvement and welfare of mankind.”
• Aside from the philanthropic tone, a couple of things struck me as fishy about the RIAS. First off, its name was as bland as the carefully chosen “Advanced Development Projects”—the official title of the Skunk Works. Second, was the nature and caliber of its recruits. These, according to the company history, were “world-class contributors in mathem...
• During a trawl of the Library of Congress in the summer of 1985, Dr. Paul LaViolette, a researcher badly bitten by the gravity bug, tripped over a reference in the card indexing system to a report called Electrogravitics Systems—An Examination of Electrostatic Motion, Dynamic Counterbary and Barycentric Control. The words immediately alerted LaViol...
• This notion of electrogravitic lift supposedly worked on the principle that a plate-like object charged positively on one side and negatively on the other would always exhibit thrust toward the positive pole, i.e. from negative to positive. If the plate is mounted horizontally and the positive pole is uppermost, the object will in effect lose weigh...
• Since it was known from the established physics of General Relativity that gravity, electromagnetism and space-time were interrelated phenomena, he said, it followed that any distortion of space-time might well yield an antigravity effect.