ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

NICK COOK 141
harder and harder, the force driving my head deep into the mattress. And
above it all, the double click of the bolt being cocked and locked, a shock
of white teeth in a face otherwise hidden by the shadows as he braced to
take the shot.
It was then that I came up for air, sucking it down in great gulps, my
hands outstretched, pushing against bodies I could still see but weren't
there and never had been.
Slowly, the ropey, '70s charm of my motel room at the Desert Inn
pulled into focus. I was bathed in sweat and my hands were shaking. I lay
there motionless until the sweat dried on my skin and then I tried to get
back to sleep, but against the rattle of the air-conditioning unit, I knew I
was righting a losing battle. Around four-thirty, I gave up, got out of bed
and stepped outside, a bottle of Coke in hand, into the enveloping
warmth of the tinder-dry Mojave night air.
The liquid shimmer of the night sky had been diluted by the first
traces of dawn light, dimming the intensity of the stars a little, but not the
overall effect. I lay back on the hood of my car and tried to lose myself in
thoughts of the cosmos and Garry Lyles' dreams of a "50-year fast trip"
to Alpha Centauri in a craft whose modus operandi was beyond the
comprehension of the best brain talent in NASA.
After six months of sniffing around the black world, even longer
reporting on its periphery, I had found nothing within the Air Force or
its attendant industry to suggest the remotest link with any of the five
methodologies espoused by NASA for cracking the gravity code. All I
had found was a possible link to T. T. Brown and, significant though this
was, it left too many gaps in the overall picture.
While Brown's early work might conceivably have explained how an
aircraft with the performance characteristics of a UFO had come to be
"within the present U.S. knowledge" in 1947—the footnote to the memo
I'd found between USAAF generals Twining and and Schulgen (now
stained with the coffee I'd spilled across it)—it begged other questions:
why NASA had studiously chosen to ignore his work, for example, as a
pathway to antigravity.
The official reason, according to Valone, LaViolette and others, was
that the Air Force had carried out its own investigation into the Brown
effect as recently as 1990 and had found no cause to believe it was real. In
a report on "Twenty-first Century Propulsion Concepts," prepared for
the Air Force Systems Command Propulsion Directorate, the author,
Robert Talley, had concluded from his experiments that "no detectable
propulsive force was electrostatically induced." This failure to replicate