Dr Eugene Podkletnov, one of the foremost researchers in antigravity and whose work is sought by NASA, Boeing and British Aerospace (now known as BAE Systems), describes the hunt for antigravity as the greatest scientific quest of this century. He calls for an international effort, akin to the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb, to conquer the secrets of antigravity and usher in a new era of scientific understanding whose technological development will be at a scale so vast that the potential outcomes are merely hinted at by our previous achievements. Just getting such a project off the ground will require unprecedented international cooperation, and public disclosure as well--the potentials are that vast, that scary, and that dangerous.

Dr Dan Marckus, noted British avionics expert, states in The Hunt for Zero Point--the seminal work to date on antigravity, written by Jane's Defence Weekly aviation editor Nick Cook--that the secrets of antigravity in the wrong hands will make thermonuclear weapons look like firecrackers.

The secrecy surrounding antigravity research is phenomenal. Boeing refuses to acknowledge publicly any activity in antigravity development despite the fact that its competitor and sometime subcontractor British Aerospace (BAE Systems) does--and has provided funds for four university research efforts as part of its Project Greenglow, one of which was a Podkletnov replication experiment headed by Dr Clive Woods at the University of Sheffield. Further, Nick Cook publicly, and privately to me in an email, states quite directly that George Muellner, former director of Boeing's ultra-secret Phantom Works, claims Boeing sought the services of Dr Podkletnov to unlock the secrets of his gravity-shielding research. Cook says that Muellner states Boeing was denied Podkletnov's services due to the objections of Russian officialdom--which the Russian-born Podkletnov must pay attention to, apparently, despite the fact that he works in Tampere, Finland. Dr Podkletnov, wisely perhaps, chooses not to clarify these particulars despite our several emails.

Perhaps Boeing can deny any activity on antigravity because NASA is doing its own research, and as a prime contractor to NASA, such as by running the Space Shuttle Program, Boeing probably knows what NASA knows. NASA spent US$600,000 recently in its Breakthrough Propulsion Physics (BPP) program to purchase Podkletnov replication equipment. Inexplicably, that equipment sits in boxes in NASA's Marshall Research Center in Huntsville, Alabama, awaiting more funding, according to an email I received from NASA propulsion researcher Ron Koczor.

But enough of the cloak-and-dagger business. What do we know about antigravity?

The search for that answer has taken me to some exciting and obscure places in this world, like the Aeronautics and Astrophysics lab at the Seattle campus of the University of Washington. I called those folks because Nick Cook, in The Hunt for Zero Point, mentions that UW received a NASA contract to study theories of inertia as part of its BPP program. That's a good place to start, I thought, but it took backtracking to BPP Project Director Marc Millis at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland to find Dr John Cramer at the UW Physics Department. His mission was to confirm with Dr James Woodward the latter's 1996 preliminary research into the loss of gravitational mass in a targeted piece of metal from oscillating capacitors. Although Woodward's initial data appeared encouraging, NASA's Millis told me that their funding dried up before they'd completed their research.

Furthermore, the entire BPP became unfunded in 2002, and now, in 2003, has become a hazy, privatised version of its former NASA subset self.