UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

By William Hamilton III

The alleged recovery of a flying disk near Roswell,New Mexico in July 1947 has sparked discussions, opinions, and reports that the U.S. Army and Air Force studied the remnants of the disk, especially the methods and modes of its propulsion with the intent of “reverse engineering” the advanced technology found in the alien craft. Is it even possible to comprehend such advanced technology much less attempt to duplicate its function? We will examine these possibilities in this article and try to sum up what has been
learned to date.

Alien astronautics is a subject predicated on the existence of intelligent alien life forms whose evolution occurred on an extraterrestrial world and who developed means to travel from their world to other worlds in spacecraft. Reverse engineering is predicated on the fact that we have acquired alien hardware through flight systems failure of an alien spacecraft or through communication and negotiation. Reverse engineering of mechanical parts requires extraction of information about an instance of a particular part sufficient to replicate the part using appropriate fabrication techniques.

A human-fabricated spacecraft consists of many sub-systems integrated through various operational parameters. Our first search in the case of an alien spacecraft would be for recognizable systems and parts; foremost among these would be some sort of propulsion system.

The most prominent UFO crash-retrieval case, of course, is the Roswell case, but other UFO crash events have been reported, and a few investigated to lend support to the idea that some UFOs have malfunctioned and crash-landed on earth despite advanced technology. Some of our most advanced aircraft, including the F-117A stealth fighter, have malfunctioned and crashed. Sensitive electronic systems when exposed to sources of electromagnetic radiation have been known to fail or receive anomalous signals that caused the system to malfunction. It is not inconceivable that alien technology could have vulnerable sensitive systems, especially when operating in foreign environments.

The first objective in the military recovery of foreign vehicles is to examine the vehicle for new and advanced technology with a view toward reproducing that technology through devising methods of fabrication and manufacturing. If this technology comes from another off-world culture, the objective has an even higher priority as such a culture has demonstrated a feat beyond the capability of our own technology. The military thinking on this is to treat such incursions by alien technology as possibly hostile and a threat to our national and global security. We must act to even the odds as soon as possible to develop counter-measures to a possible military threat to our systems of defense. This is why reverse engineering becomes imperative.

Some of the systems that would be studied include:

The energy or fuel the spacecraft uses for power
The propulsion system
The navigation system
The information system(s)
The life-support systems
The communication systems
The weapon systems

In addition to these systems, the actual material structure of the spacecraft would be studied. If the aliens were found wearing flight suits, a study would be made of the material and methods of fabrication. If the spacecraft were
able to defend itself through high-speed aerobatic maneuvering or using defensive shields or counter-measures, an assessment of these capabilities would be of prime importance. The study would have to eventually extend into other scientific fields to obtain a broader picture of the alien’s origin and mission,which would include autopsies of alien bodies and a profiling of the alien psychology and motivation. In fact, every clever way that you could think of would be used to study the alien and the technology. And all of this would have to be conducted in utmost secrecy so as to maintain a decided advantage in the scheme of things in the global political arena.

Reverse Engineering is the process of figuring out how a system was made without having instructions or diagrams.
Unless the system is very complex, it is often possible to do this without actually having a sample of the system. Some of the engineering disciplines that exist today that would engagein reverse engineering are culled from a list:

Bioengineering

Biomedical Engineering

Chemical Engineering

Biotechnology

Computer Technology

Adaptive Systems and Artificial

Life – Artificial Intelligence -

Computer Mediated Communication and Control Systems

Computing – Alien – Computer

Interaction – Image Processing -

Information Retrieval and

Categorization

Real time Systems – Robotics -

Design Methodologies

Electrical Engineering

Electronics Engineering

Materials Science

Materials Engineering

Mechanical Engineering

Computational Mechanics - Nanotechnology – Robotics Aerospace Engineering

Additionally, unknown systems that may enhance alien psionic interfaces or alien teleportation systems may not even be conceived of within our own technological framework.
Some of these systems may be less amenable to reverse engineering until the time we make appropriate scientific discoveries. First, a word about reverse engineering and then we will examine some of the claims that have been made and what we can infer about the evolution of our own technology based on testimony given by a number of sources some of which still prefer to remain anonymous. We must also understand how secret projects are classified
and conducted in the Black World.

What distinguishes ‘reverse engineering’ from forward engineering? In a sense most engineering starts as reverse engineering as inventors puzzled out how to imitate nature.
Some of the first designs for flying machines imitated the flapping wings of birds to obtain lift. Nature is a large inspiration to engineers and inventors. Science may try to wrest the secrets of nature, but it is engineering that attempts to imitate or even surpass the works of nature. We mustn’t forget that termites and moles have constructed underground structures and beavers
have built dams. Certain fish propel themselves through water using jet propulsion. As soon as science uncovers more secrets, engineers attempt to put them to use. Forward engineering proceeds from there and attempts to improve on the original inspired work.

In a sense, the arguments against reverse engineering alien technology are similar to the arguments against ancient astronauts engineering ancient buildings. Essentially that argument is that humans are and were smart enough to conceive, design, and build all the technological wonders that we enjoy. While this may be true we must bear in mind my former statement that much of what man has built is inspired by his observations of nature. We are not discrediting man’s accomplishments by saying that certain technological developments may have been inspired by other preceding technological developments, whether human or alien.

The tales of reverse engineering alien technology are based on the reports of UFO crashes and military recovery efforts. Here is a partial list of UFO crashes that have been uncovered from the years 1947 through 1953:

1941 Cape Girardeau, Missouri

1947 May – Spitzbergen, Norway

1947 May 31- Socorro, NM

1947 July 4 Roswell, NM

1947 July 5 – Plains of San Augustin, NM

1947 July 31 - Maury Island, Tacoma

1947 August 13 – New Mexico Desert

1947 October - Paradise Valley, AZ

1948 February 13 – Aztec, NM

1948 April – 12 mi. outside Aztec, NM

1948 March 25 – White Sands, NM

1948 7/8 July – Laredo/30mi inside Mexico

1948 August - Laredo, Texas

1949 - Roswell, NM

1950 January - Mojave Desert, Ca

1950 Dec 6 – El Indio/Guerrero area, Tex/Mex border

1952 June - Spitzbergen, Norway

1953 - Brady, Montana

1953 20/21^st May – Kingman, AZ A friend of mine met Charlie in a photocopy shop in the summer of 94. Charlie was contacting OMNI magazine about their article on the UFO cover up. I met Charlie later after writing a letter to him that he never received. Instead, I received a reply from a veteran’s organization that warned me not to contact Charlie anymore. According to the letter of reply the subject of UFOs was classified permanently.

It also stated that UFOs and aliens should be the responsibility of the military and that civilians had no business delving into military secrets. Nevertheless, Charlie contacted me later through our local MUFON group.

Charlie had been in the Marines and aboard the U.S.S. Oriskany aircraft carrier in 1958 during the early Vietnam era. His father was a commander in the navy and was stationed with the Pentagon’s Research and Development Board. His father had been with President Eisenhower at Edwards AFB in 1954 when an extraterrestrial spacecraft had landed. The base had already been renamed Edwards at the time of the occurrence and was no longer known as Muroc (Corum spelled backwards after one of the early families who settled in the Mojave Desert). Charlie said the aliens at Edwards were human types with flaxen hair and pale blue eyes. Charlie’s first experience occurred when he was assigned to a special operations team that retrieved a crashed disk in

Vietnam and stowed aboard the aircraft carrier. According to Charlie, this disk was 10 meters in diameter and lighter than a Volkswagen. It had a crew of two aliens. The recovery team transported the disc back to the Oriskany where it was stored on the flight deck between mattresses that were used to cushion the craft on deck. A tarpaulin was thrown over the disc and when the Oriskany put into port in

San Francisco, the cover story told by the Captain was that a special water tank was being brought in for maintenance and the tarpaulin was used to protect it from storms at sea. Charlie referred to this disc as the IRC-10. IRC is an abbreviation for Instellar Reconnaissance Craft. Charlie refers to the Sports Model as an IRC-16 because it is 16 meters in diameter. It is not known whether these metrics are exact.

Charlie explains that not all UFOs or discs are from another planet. Some are from a parallel world. These parallel worlds exist in another time dimension. It’s as if our universe runs on the beat on one clock and another on the beat of another clock. Normally, the two are out of phase and there is no interaction between universes, but, occasionally, there are locations where the two universes synchro-phase and a portal opens up between the two allowing passage from one to another. Many discs originate from another dimension and use a transpatial field resonator to bridge the gap between their universe and ours.

The aliens project their thoughts into a thought amplifier plate that carries signals to the avionics controls via optical fibers. Another saucer scientist, Bill Uhouse of Las Vegas, says that he designed flight simulators for our pilots because our pilots had difficulty controlling the aliens’ avionics.

Bill worked at Los Alamos in conjunction with an alien scientist on designing a simulator using our own avionics technology. Bill said that General Electric built the anti gravity engines for U.S. discs and Westinghouse provided the nuclear reactors to power the engines. I asked him if he knew any reason why U.S. discs could not fly in space and he replied that he thought they could. Bill was a Mechanical Design Engineer when he was recruited for this highly secure position.

On September 23, 1990 I was introduced to a man named Ozzie who related a detailed story of his participation in two crash-retrievals while he was in the Army stationed at Roswell in 1948 and 1949. This is a single-witness story that has not been corroborated by other witnesses. He doesn’t know the exact dates of the crashes, but believes the first one occurred in the desert near Socorro, New Mexico. His recounting of this incident took place inside of a locked car with rolled-up windows, which seemed a little paranoid to me. There was no doubt that he came across as sincere, answering all my questions without hesitation and to the best of his knowledge. His attitude was one of not caring whether he was believed or not as he claimed he had already been the butt of much ridicule. He currently held a job at a large aerospace company and did not want to publicly divulge his background. I found this to be the case with other witnesses I have interviewed.

One night in 1948 he was called out of his barracks to climb aboard a bus that looked like an old school bus with darkened windows. After hours of riding through the desert on a generally westward course, the bus came to a stop during the very early hours of the morning and he could see a disk standing on the desert sands illuminated by floodlights. It was like a movie set, but there were no movie cameras or directors barking orders. The disk was silvery and about 30 feet in diameter. He learned that two aliens were recovered from the disk. One was alive. White-coated doctors walked the live alien around the site. It lived for 12 hours. The disk had one compartment with a shaft running up the center of the compartment. The exterior hull of the craft felt smooth and slippery to the touch. Ozzie said that only 3 men lifted the lightweight craft onto a flat bed truck. Men went ahead and scouted a back roads transport of the truck away from the site. Ozzie accompanied a scientist who caravanned along the back roads until they reached their ultimate destination at a little auxiliary airfield on the edge of Groom Lake in Nevada.

There were only five buildings at this airfield and they arrived at night. The truck drove up to one of the buildings and Ozzie saw two living aliens standing by this building. One of the doors of the building opened, he could see that six other disks had already been retrieved and placed inside the building.

The whole recovery team was taken into a room in another one of the buildings and debriefed. Ozzie saw pictures on the wall of the room that depicted six different types of aliens. He remembers that one of the aliens looked human. Short grays were also in one of the pictures. He did not say whether these were photos or drawings, but he called them pictures so I assume they were photos. At one point during the debriefing, a small alien appeared to pass through one of the walls of the room. He was holding a small black box that Ozzie called an “augmenter.”

Ozzie made some interesting detailed observations, but it is admitted that his story has bizarre elements to it. But, when we compare some of these bizarre elements to stories told by abductees they seem less bizarre by far. We find it hard to believe that the military had such a high degree of involvement with aliens as early as 1948.

Ozzie claims that he was called out on a second retrieval in 1949 at close to the same site as the first retrieval. The second disk was 100 feet in diameter and ten dead crew were found at the site. Their skin had turned a purplish color. These beings were about 5′ 8″ in height. Ozzie had to carry one of the aliens and estimated its weight at only 55 pounds. He was very emotional about this incident. The aliens were dressed in one-piece coveralls that have a Velcro-type fastener at the back. Of course, velcro-type fasteners did not exist in 1949 and Ozzie is only comparing what he saw to what we know today. The big disk had a conveyor on the floor that transported the crew from one control center to another. There was also an instrument that contained colored fluids. A central column ran through the center of the craft, which had multiple rectangular compartments. When inside the control room of the craft, Ozzie said you could plainly see through the sidewall of the craft and the desert was plainly
visible even at night. The metal of the craft could not be marred with any of our tools. This disk was also transported to the site at Groom Lake.

That ended Ozzie’s involvement in crash-retrievals though he has kept in contact with others he had met during his involvement. He also claims that he has a photo of the second retrieval locked in a vault or safekeeping. He does not know when it might become safe enough to bring out this photo as evidence. So we are left with another story and no corroborating evidence, but a pattern begins to emerge from the details as we talk to other witnesses.

A man named Frenchie was stationed at Edwards AFB in 1951 when he was called out of his barracks along with others because something had crashed just south of the air base. When he got to the site, he was not allowed to get any closer than an outer established security perimeter, but could see men lifting up large chunks of metal. Sheets of metal were all over the crash site, but no engine or fuselage was visible. Frenchie said they had to cut out a piece of a C-47 to enlarge its door to fit a large piece of the retrieved material into the plane for transport.
The large piece was lightweight and was lifted by two men. Frenchie never found out what the object was.

A lot of this crash debris was supposedly transported to the Air Material Command at Wright Field. However, craft recovered in one piece were
probably shipped elsewhere, perhaps Groom Lake. The engineering division at Wright Field called T-3 had already concluded that the UFOs were advanced
aircraft or spacecraft, which used nonconventional methods of propulsion and were constructed from composite layers of lightweight material. It was the opinion of the General staff that the unidentified objects were interplanetary spacecraft.

There are more reports that can be added to the list up to the present year. However, investigators have obtained little information on most of these, little to no corroboration by multiple witnesses, and questionable physical evidence. Yet the stories persist and the list has gotten longer over the years. The Roswell incident has been the most compelling of the crash-retrieval stories because of the sheer number of witnesses who have testified to this event, albeit there are discrepancies when trying to recreate the actual scenario of events. Without publicly available records and mostly human testimony, the actual events around these early crashes may never be known.

The military agenda for recovered alien vehicles was to learn as much as possible about the technology. To do this, they had to turn to the experts in corporate America, to companies they had a long-standing relationship with, and which had the facilities to conduct studies and maintain the vow of silence on their findings.

The engineering of secret technology to satisfy DOD requests is conducted under a classified umbrella of programs and projects, the most secretive of which are known as Special Access Programs. There are even unacknowledged SAPs. This is what has been referred to as The Black World. Lockheed Skunkworks developed the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes in the Black World.

The money for financing these projects is part of a black military budget that recently exceeded $14 billion.
This does not include the cost of operations and construction.
Two of our famous stealth aircraft, the B-2 and the F-117 were born in the Black World, but have become a part of the white world. The existence of the so-called Aurora spy plane was denied by the Air Force. The expenditure of these funds is in itself a secret and a mystery. We now know that Area 51, the Nevada flight test base has been the home of classified aircraft projects since 1955. Engineers, technicians, and security personnel generally do not talk about their experiences in the Black World. In some cases, workers have reported that security was oppressive. I have had engineers tell me that not only were their activities at work monitored, but their leisure-time activities and their conversations with friends.

The back engineering of alien space technology would probably rank as the deepest Black World project in terms of secrecy and security. It also carries with it a natural cloak of security—it sounds too incredible to be true. Many would not believe it without an overwhelming presentation of evidence, and, yet the intense security surrounding these projects makes it nearly impossible to obtain that evidence. Researchers have attempted to obtain what little evidence they can from testimony, leaked documents, and direct observations of secret sites outsidethe security perimeters of these sites.

With the handicap of limited disclosure we can still try to reconstruct an overview for alien astronautical systems and, from this, learn something about the aliens who developed this artful handiwork.

In 1997 (Ret) Colonel Philip J. Corso’s book hit the UFO book market with a splash. The Day After Roswell contained some eye-opening revelations. The Colonel divulges how he spearheaded the Army’s super secret reverse-engineering project that “seeded” extraterrestrial technology at American corporations such as IBM, Hughes Aircraft, Bell Labs, and Dow Corning – without their knowledge. He describes the devices found aboard the Roswell craft, and how they became the precursors for today’s integrated circuit chips, fiber optics, lasers, night-vision equipment, super-tenacity fibers (such as Kevlar plastic armor), and classified discoveries, such as psychotropic devices that can translate human thoughts into signals that control machinery, Stealth aircraft technology, and Star Wars particle-beam devices. He also discusses the role that extraterrestrial technology played in shaping geopolitical policy and events; how it helped the United States surpass the Russians in space; spurred elaborate Army initiatives such as SDI (Star Wars Projects), Project Horizon (to place a military base on the Moon), and HARP; and ultimately brought about the end of the Cold War.

Colonel Corso also said that captured UFOs were/are kept at Norton, Edwards and Nellis (Area 51) Air Force Bases.

Many UFO researchers have found discrepancies in Colonel Corso’s accounts and have discarded his testimony as authentication of reverse engineering. If they are right, it doesn’t negate the possibility of reverse engineering, but it does emphasize the minefield that this subject presents to those who are trying
to ferret out the truth about our black world efforts.

In 1989, Robert Lazar had come forward with the claim that he had worked on a reverse engineering project at S-4, a site 10 miles from the Groom Lake test site. Although Lazar’s credentials were questioned and no record of his claimed educational degrees as a physicist could be found, Colonel Corso’s credentials were a matter of public record.

Others have spoken out as witnesses to captured UFOs or reverse engineering projects. The case of the Kingman UFO retrieval involved an engineer who took preliminary measurements to assess the momentum of a crashing craft, measurements useful to any reverse engineering efforts. The engineer who brought this story to light was Arthur G. Stancil (previously known by the pseudonym Fritz Werner). Stancil graduated from Ohio University in 1949 and was first employed by Air Material Command at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio as a mechanical engineer on testing Air Force aircraft engines.

Dr. Eric Wang who was suspected of leading a reverse engineering team on alien craft headed the Installations Division within the Office of Special Studies where Arthur worked.

Stancil was loaned out to the Atomic Energy Commission and was designated as a project engineer on some atomic bomb tests referred to as “Operation Upshot Knothole”. The location of these tests was at Frenchman’s Flats at the southern end of the Nevada Test Site. The test director was a Dr. Ed Doll.

On May 21, 1953 Stancil was told to report for a special assignment at the Indian Springs Air Force Base where 15 other specialists joined him. They were flown by military plane to Phoenix where they boarded a bus with blacked-out windows and rode for an estimated four hours. When they arrived at their destination somewhere southeast of Kingman in one of the washes of the

Hulapai Mountains, they were met and briefed by an Air Force Colonel who told
them they were to investigate the crash of a super-secret test vehicle. Stancil’s job was to determine the forward and vertical velocities of the vehicle when it impacted in the sand.

Stancil was escorted to the site by military police. Two spotlights illuminated the saucer, which appeared to be two convex plates inverted over each other, approximately 30 feet in diameter. The saucer was embedded in the sand about 20 inches. From this Stancil had determined that the saucer crashed at a velocity of 100 knots yet it had not dents, marks, or scratches on its burnished aluminum surface. The disc was oval and looked like two deep saucers inverted over each other.
It was constructed of dull silver metal like brushed aluminum. Another specialist had gotten a look inside the craft, as a 1.5 x 3.5 foot hatch was open revealing an oval interior cabin with two swivel seats and many instruments. Stancil saw one body recovered from the crash. It was humanoid, about 4 feet
tall, with brown skin and wearing a silver-metallic flight suit.

Stancil worked for Raytheon in Sudbury, Massachusetts in the early seventies on avionics systems. It is unknown as to whether he had further involvement with alien technology, especially since it is likely that he worked for Dr. Wang at some point.
Dr. Wang was an Austrian-born graduate of the Vienna Technical Institute, and close associate of Victor Schauberger who had developed a concept of a flying disc and worked on the German flying disc program as early as 1941. Wang taught structural and metallurgical engineering at the University of Cincinnati from 1943 to 1952. Dr. Wang supposedly examined some of the recovered crashed discs and compared them to the vehicles tested in the German V-7 program, but found the retrieved craft to be different in nature. In 1949, he became Director of the Department of Special Studies at Wright-Patterson where he worked long hours in cooperation with scientists from the “Office of Naval Research” and with Dr. Vannevar Bush and others from the “Research and Development Board”. Dr. Wang relocated his research from Wright-Patterson to Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Dr. Wang passed away on December 4, 1960.

Bill Uhouse served 10 years in the Marine Corps as a fighter pilot, and four years with the Air Force at Wright-Patterson AFB as a civilian doing flight-testing of exotic experimental aircraft. Later, for the next 30 years, he worked for defense contractors as an engineer of antigravity propulsion systems: on flight simulators for exotic aircraft - and on actual flying discs.

He testifies that that the first disc they tested was the re-engineered ET craft that crashed in Kingman, Arizona in 1953. He further testifies that the ET’s presented a craft to the US government; this craft was taken to Area 51, which was just being constructed at the time, and the four ET’s that accompanied the craft were taken to Los Alamos. Mr. Uhouse’s specialty was the flight deck and the instruments on the flight deck – he understood the gravitational field and what it took to get people trained to experience antigravity. He actually met several times with an ET that helped the physicists and engineers with the engineering of the craft.

Strange as it seems it was during the 1950s that various aircraft companies started research projects on the control of gravity and electro-gravitational propulsion. It is possible that these projects constituted some of the first reverse engineering projects on extraterrestrial propulsion systems.

American physicist and inventor, T. Townsend Brown discovered an effect of highly charged disk-shaped capacitors. When the capacitors were charged in excess of 50 KV, they would have a tendency to accelerate in the direction of the positive pole. Suspending a number of these disk capacitors from a freely rotating carousel would cause, when charged, the entire assembly to rotate. These charged capacitors could also levitate.

According to the Air Force Manual from Wright-Patterson AFB on Electrogravitics we have this description on the Thomas Townsend Brown discovery.

Electrogravitics might be described as a synthesis of electrostatic energy used for propulsion – either vertical propulsion or horizontal or both – and gravitics, or dynamic counterbary, in which energy is also used to set up a local gravitational force independent of the earth’s.

Electrostatic energy for propulsion has been predicted as a possible means of propulsion in space when the thrust from a neutron motor or ion motor would be sufficient in a dragless environment to produce astronomical velocities.
But the ion motor is not strictly a part of the science of electrogravitics, since barycentric control in an electrogravitics system is envisaged for a vehicle operating within the earth’s environment and it is not seen initially for space application. Probably large scale space operations would have to await the full development of electrogravitics to enable large pieces of equipment to be moved out of the region of the earth’s strongest gravity effects.
So, though electrostatic motors were thought of in 1925, electrogravitics had its birth after the War, when Townsend Brown sought to improve on the various proposals that then existed for electrostatic motors sufficiently to produce some visible manifestation of sustained motion. Whereas earlier electrostatic tests were essentially pure research, Brown’s rigs were aimed from the outset at producing a flying article. As a private venture he produced evidence of motion using condensers in a couple of saucers suspended by arms rotating round a central tower with input running down the arms. The massive-k situation was summarized subsequently in a report, Project Winterhaven, in 1952. Using the data some conclusions were arrived at that might be expected from ten or more years of intensive development – similar to that, for instance, applied to the turbine engine. Using a number of assumptions as to the nature of gravity, the report postulated a saucer as the basis of a possible interceptor with Mach 3 capability.
Creation of a local gravitational system would confer upon the fighter the sharp-edged changes of direction typical of motion in space.

The essence of electrogravitics thrust is the use of a very strong positive charge on one side of the vehicle and a negative on the other. The core of the motor is a condenser and the ability of the condenser to hold its charge (the k-number) is the yardstick of performance. With air as 1, current dielectrical materials can yield 6 and use of barium aluminate can raise this considerably, barium titanium oxide (a baked ceramic) can offer 6,000 and there is promise of 30,000, which would be sufficient for supersonic speed.

The original Brown rig produced 30 fps on a voltage of around 50,000 and a small amount of current in the milliamp range. There was no detailed explanation of gravity in Project Winterhaven, but it was assumed that particle dualism in the subatomic structure of gravity would coincide in its effect with the issuing stream of electrons from the electrostatic energy source to produce counterbary. The Brown work probably remains a realistic approach to the practical realization of electrostatic propulsion and sustentation. Whatever may be discovered by the Gravity Research Foundation of New Boston a complete understanding and synthetic reproduction of gravity is not essential for limited success. The electrogravitics saucer can perform the function of a classic lifting surface – it produces a pushing effect on the under surface and a suction effect on the upper, but, unlike the airfoil, it does not require a flow of air to produce the effect.

The Department of Defense was not ignoring these ideas, but was more intent on turning theory into practice. In June, 1957 G. Harry Stine wrote for Mechanix Illustrated magazine that “there is a good chance that the rocket will be obsolete for space travel within 50 years”. This was at a time when the multi-stage rockets were being fired from White Sands Army Proving Grounds in New Mexico. Though Werner von Braun saw the multi-stage rocket as a solution to space travel, able to boost a payload beyond the pull of earth’s gravity, the DOD had other purposes in mind. The rocket was the dream of the future, and yet Stine was predicting its obsolescence. That was because he was aware of T.T. Brown’s work on electro-gravity and the DOD contractors that were working on anti-gravity — the Glenn L. Martin Company, Bell Aircraft, General Electric, and Sperry-Rand just to name a few.