by Len Kasten
B-2 Spirit stealth bomber
A VERY EXPENSIVE PROTOTYPE
Congress initially allocated $22.4 billion in 1981 to have the Northrup Corporation develop and produce 132 stealth bombers. However, we are asked to believe that this entire amount was spent between 1982 and 1989 just to produce the one working prototype that was paraded before the public on November 22, 1988. At that time, Northrup submitted a new estimate of about $70 billion to complete the program, or $48 billion additional.
In 1989, the employees of Northrop Corporation, the prime contractor for the B-2 bomber, filed a class action suit against the company, charging fraudulent practices in the administration of three Air Force weapons programs. The company quickly acknowledged guilt on April 29, 1990, on thirty-four counts of fraud and misrepresentation involving the cruise and Harrier missile projects and agreed to pay $17 million in fines. As part of the settlement, the federal prosecutors agreed to drop 141 other charges, which included allegations that the company overcharged the Air Force on the stealth program. This settled the case, and all investigations against Northrop were dropped and “put to rest.” Furthermore, the agreements were sealed! Of this, U.S. Representative John D. Dingell, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Panel on Oversight and Investigations, asked, “What possible national security reason could they have had for sealing these agreements? This leaves the public and the Congress without the vaguest idea of the rascality Northrop was engaged in or its cost to the public.”
Because the case was settled so quickly and sealed, Northrop officials never had to answer the allegation that they overcharged on the stealth program, which was one of the 141 charges dropped in the plea bargain. Consequently, they never had to explain precisely how the $22.4 billion was spent—very fortunate, because who would believe that it was all spent on one prototype? Did Northrop perhaps cooperate in an Air Force ploy so that the money could go into a “black fund”?
DEEP-BLACK PROJECTS
The October 1989 issue of Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine contained an article titled “Secret Advanced Vehicles Demonstrate Technologies for Future Military Use.” The following statement in that article is very revealing: “Although facilities in remote areas of the Southwest have been home to classified vehicles for decades, the number and sophistication of new aircraft appear to have increased sharply over the last 10 years when substantial funding was made available for ‘deep black’ projects.” The term “deep black” refers to top-secret development projects funded by so-called black funds (i.e., money not coming from any publicly approved source), and therefore government officials do not have to be informed about these projects. Could some or all of this “substantial funding” be the missing Northrop $22.4 billion? Later in the same article, it says, “These primary types of ‘black’ aircraft appear to employ relatively conventional propulsion systems, although . . . there is substantial evidence that another family of craft exists that relies on exotic propulsion and aerodynamic schemes not fully understood at this time.”
If aircraft with exotic propulsion systems were being tested in the Southwest as early as 1980, using black funds, then Gonsalves’s contention becomes very credible. It suggests that by the time Northrop officials got the B-2 contract in 1981, they may have already had a working, flying stealth UFO model, possibly previously tested at Nellis Air Force Base in the Nevada desert, which is the top-secret government test site sometimes referred to as “Dreamland.” Then, with the injection of an additional $22.4 billion into the black fund in 1982, they could have actually begun to build them in numbers, using only a small portion of this money to create the public version (i.e., to add jet engines and adapt it for straight and level flight), anticipating that they wouldn’t have to account for the $22.4 billion. This explains how UFO B-2s could have been flown in the Hudson Valley as early as 1983 and 1984, as reported in Night Siege.
DON’T EVEN DREAM ABOUT IT
The B-2 development project was the most secret operation since the Manhattan Project. In 1982, after being awarded the stealth contract, Northrop converted an old Ford factory at Pico Rivera, in East Los Angeles, into a top-secret military plant. All four thousand workers at the Pico Rivera facility were given the ultimate civilian secrecy rating, Special Access Required. This means that no discussion whatsoever about their work is permitted outside of the facility. Employees were instructed to “not even dream about” what they do!
According to an article in the Washington Post in October 1989 titled “Unraveling Stealth’s ‘Black World,’” “At government insistence, minor subcontractors ship parts to phony front companies. From there, unmarked trucks carry the shipments to Pico Rivera at night. Military officers visiting ‘Peek’ wear civilian clothes, and VIP helicopters land at nearby locations to discourage unnecessary interest. Computers are in metal-lined rooms, and many computer cubicles are shrouded with curtains. Workers in sensitive areas have to lock everything in a safe before even going to the bathroom. Hundreds of workers were required to take polygraph tests to ferret out ‘spies and drug users.’”
COINCIDING SECRETS
According to Timothy Good in his book Above Top Secret, all UFO matters are classified two categories above Top Secret. On the other hand, the B-2 development project is classified as Special Access Required (SAR), which is the civilian equivalent to this classification. Is it possible that these two matters, both tightly controlled by the same agency, the U.S. Air Force, exist side by side with no connection? Intuition alone would suggest that there is a connection. However, more than intuition is necessary to validate Gonsalves’s claim. A retired Lockheed engineer reportedly said in a recent issue of an aeronautical magazine, “We have things that are so far beyond the comprehension of the average aviation authority as to be really alien to our way of thinking.” Or we can turn to an article that appeared in Gung-Ho magazine in February 1988. The article, “Stealth and Beyond” by Al Frickey, ends with the following statement: “Rumor has it that some of these systems involve force-field technology, gravity drive systems, and ‘flying saucer’ designs.” Statements such as these by knowledgeable people push the probability of a connection way beyond intuition.
Those who were watching TV the night the Gulf War broke out in 1990 will recall that the CNN reporters remarked about how silent it was overhead while the bombs exploded all over Baghdad. The droning noise usually associated with bombers was totally absent. And how did those bombers cross thousands of miles of Iraqi airspace without being detected, so that all the lights were on in Baghdad even as the bombs fell? Was this the first wartime adventure of America’s newest and most formidable weapon ever developed—an antigravity aircraft? Was this American UFO the final straw that ended the Cold War?
15
The Politics of Antigravity
We may learn to deprive large masses of their gravity, and give them absolute levity, for the sake of easy transport.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, 1780
NASA GETS ON BOARD
In 1996, officials at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, announced the commencement of a momentous and exciting initiative. They were going to “formulate a comprehensive strategy for advancing propulsion for the next 25 years and . . . to make this strategy more visionary than previous plans.” To be called the Advanced Space Transportation Program, the new program would encompass “the nearer-term technology improvements all the way through seeking the breakthroughs that could revolutionize space travel and enable interstellar voyages.” They would start the program by employing the talents of NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, headed up by Marc G. Millis. This group already had experience working with the very futuristic Vision-21 exercises. The Glenn group responded by establishing the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program to consider totally new ideas in physics theory that could result in “Buck Rogers” propulsion systems, which they called “technology to surpass the limits of existing methods.”
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sp; In their announcement, the Glenn group said, “Recent experiments and Quantum theory have revealed that space may contain enormous levels of vacuum electromagnetic energy. This has led to questioning if this vacuum energy can be used as an energy source or a propulsive reaction mass for space travel. Next, new theories suggest that gravity and inertia are electromagnetic effects related to this vacuum energy. It is known from observed phenomena and from the established physics of General Relativity that gravity, electromagnetism, and spacetime are inter-related phenomena. These ideas have led to questioning if gravitational or inertial forces can be created or modified using electromagnetism. Also, theories have emerged from General Relativity about the nature of spacetime that suggest that the light-speed barrier, described by Special Relativity might be circumvented by altering spacetime itself. These ‘wormhole’ and ‘warp drive’ theories have reawakened consideration that the light-speed limit of space travel may be circumvented. Today, it is still unknown whether these emerging theories are correct and, even if they are correct, if they can become viable candidates for creating propulsion breakthroughs.”
Such extravagant language by an official U.S. agency that has the clout, the money, and the resources to really make this happen should have been greeted by huzzahs from those in the “alternative science” community, who have been involved in research and investigation in these areas for many, many years. At long last, true space travel may be just over the horizon. Star Trek may become a reality after all. Instead, this announcement was greeted with great cynicism and the widely believed suspicion that NASA was literally forced to finally acknowledge “maverick” developments in this area, which by now form an overwhelming body of knowledge, some of it very scientifically respectable.
This, they say, is an old game—a reluctant official recognition by a prestigious organization of an underground movement that threatens to break through the surface and create a terrific embarrassment because they themselves apparently didn’t have the vision to get there first. Coming, as it does, fifty years after Roswell and after the government has “dissected” and reverse engineered perhaps dozens of alien interstellar craft, this announcement, promising such propulsion systems way off in 2025, is being viewed by many as simply a means of NASA gathering all relevant research and development results unto itself, from which vantage point they can decide, based perhaps on commercial or political considerations, what to develop and what not to. To have taken so long to finally acknowledge the limitations of rocketry seems almost incredible when it was long ago obvious, even to a child, that we could never get to the stars carrying tons of solid rocket propellant. That truly is not “rocket science.”
The cynical view is supported when one considers the almost casual way it came about that NASA took this initiative, as reported by Charles Platt in the March 1998 issue of Wired magazine. NASA administrator Dan Goldin was about to attend a Star Trek convention, where he was afraid that Trekkies might question him about antigravity craft because of an article that had appeared in the British Sunday Telegraph on September 1, 1996, about the work of Russian scientist Eugene Podkletnov. The first sentence read, “Scientists in Finland are about to reveal details of the world’s first antigravity device.” So according to Platt, Goldin asked his scientists about the state of the art, and they finally briefed him on related research. Whit Brantley, chief of the Advanced Concepts Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center, said, “He backed up a step or two, then said he thought NASA should spend a little money on work like this.” But perhaps most revealing of all was the strange remark made to Platt by Tony Robertson, a member of Brantley’s team, at the interview and seconded by Brantley. “The way I see it,” he said (presumably without levity), “NASA has a responsibility to overcome gravity.” This would translate to “We don’t want someone else to get there first.” So it appears that NASA had to get on the ship before it left port or risk being left in the backwash while, perhaps, foreign governments or private organizations started building warp drives.
If true, does this mean that NASA has known about such scientific advances for quite some time and has perhaps worked on these propulsion systems in secret? At least one researcher believes this to be the case. He is Michael McDonnough, also known as Michael Unum (a previously used nom de plume), from San Antonio, Texas. McDonnough has become well known in the underground movement primarily because of his self-published book, The U.F.O. Technology Hackers Manual, first released in 1997 and actively promoted at the author’s original website. McDonnough no longer has an active website; however, one used copy of his book is available on Amazon.com, as of this writing. Although it is not widely available now, the book did originally manage to intensify the debate about suppression of technology and therefore inevitably attracted all the relevant government agencies to his website, including NASA.
STAR TREK PATENTS
McDonnough’s interest in these subjects was probably influenced somewhat by his father, who was in Air Force intelligence and was privy to highly classified information, and also by exposure to Air Force life, since he lived at various air bases all over the country while growing up. But his serious interest was triggered by four dramatic sightings of UFOs over a period of several years. It puzzled him that there appeared to be no overt Air Force interest in these UFOs, when he knew that they had to be highly covetous of the fantastic technology displayed.
McDonnough believes that we could have been traveling to the stars many years ago if developments in propulsion technology had not been suppressed. In fact, he believes it to be entirely possible that such advanced spacecraft have indeed been produced in secret and are already being used for space travel. This is not just fanciful speculation. McDonnough has spent a great deal of time researching patents at the U.S. Patent Depository at the Dallas Public Library and has discovered that all the primary relevant patents necessary to develop and build futuristic spaceships are there, and have been for a long time. Of this discovery, he said in his book, “I could hardly contain my excitement. Here before me, were systems that could explain all of the basic science behind so called UFO’s, which in fact are Electromagnetic and Electromotive Spacecraft.”
McDonnough focuses on four patents in particular that, in his opinion, when put together, provide all the basic science necessary to develop the technology to build interstellar spacecraft. First and foremost is Patent 2,949,550, by the legendary father of antigravity technology, T. Townsend Brown. This now-famous patent, filed on July 3, 1957, was one of several by Brown, all demonstrating the antigravity action of highly charged transducers.
The second, Patent 4,663,932, was filed by James E. Cox of Los Angeles on July 26, 1982. Cox’s invention is called the Dipolar Force Field Propulsion System, a type of magnetohydrodynamic thruster. It is a propulsion engine based on electromagnetic energy, which the inventor claims is capable of producing one million pounds of thrust compared to twenty-nine thousand for a jet engine, for the same weight. Since the engine requires no fuel but rather uses “a propellant comprising neutral particles of matter having an electric dipole characteristic,” it not only can lift a payload off the planet using the earth’s atmosphere as a propellant, but can also operate in deep space. An added advantage of this drive system is the fact that it absorbs microwave energy and would therefore be totally invisible to radar. This engine appears to be of the type most closely related to those “blue light” thrusters used in the Star Wars movies.
The third invention also has a science-fiction affiliation. It is an engine that uses electromagnetic energy produced by supercooled, high-density electric power. Patent 5,197,279 was filed by James R. Taylor of Fultondale, Alabama, on March 6, 1992. McDonnough likens this propulsion system to the Star Trek impulse engine. According to McDonnough, it “creates ripples on the fabric of space-time on which to ride.” In his drawings accompanying the patent description, Taylor showed a domed, saucer-shaped craft as the optimal design for use with this engine. This bears an uncanny resem
blance to a UFO sketch by George Adamski in his classic 1957 book, Inside the Space Ships. A powerful slingshot effect is produced by creating two opposing, powerful electromagnetic fields and then suddenly shutting off one of the fields, which propels the craft in a direction opposite to that of the canceled field. Taylor estimated that, using existing or planned superconductors and power supplies, a spacecraft using this principle is capable of a speed of about thirty thousand kilometers per second, which is roughly 10 percent of light speed!
