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276 The Hunt for Zero Point
orbiting space junk can also stop a reconnaissance satellite or a ballistic
missile dead in its tracks. Hit a foot-wide gravity-reflecting beam at an
orbiting velocity of 17,000 miles per hour and it would be no different to
hitting a brick wall, except there would be no evidence to say that you had
hit anything. The results, to borrow an expression from science-fiction
writer Arthur C. Clarke, would be "indistinguishable from magic," the
ultimate in weapons technology.
Over recent years, a wealth of articles have appeared outlining the view
of an emerging breed of physicists that we may indeed reside in a multidimensional
cosmos. The August 2000 edition of Scientific American, for
example, generated a mass of copy in newspapers here and in the States
on this growing belief—that parallel universes may exist alongside our
own and how additional, unseen dimensions would help to unify the
fundamental forces of Nature that inhabit our four-dimensional spacetime.
According to this thinking, much of it wrapped within so-called
"string theory," our universe may simply exist as a membrane floating
within a higher-dimensional space, with gravity—this impossibly weak,
little-understood yet massively influential force—the only one of the four
fundamental forces capable of propagating across the dimensions. Over
the course of the next decade, experimentation may provide real answers
to these tantalizing and complex suppositions. For me, it has simply
served to show how taboo notions—taboo science—can, in time, enter the
mainstream of ideas.
As I sit here, picking over clippings related to these and other areas of
research connected with this book, it has dawned on me only now that
attitudes have changed in the relatively short space of time it has taken
me to write it. Broadsheet newspapers from the New York Times to
the Sunday Times and the Observer have all carried thought-provoking
features over the past few years on zero-point energy, faster-than-light
travel and other contentious areas of science. Suddenly, the idea of
gravity having an antigravity component—this heresy that terrified the
professional daylights out of me a decade ago—doesn't seem so strange
after all.
On that note, I should add that this book is in not intended to be a
catchall explanation for UFOs. While it may go some way toward
explaining some of the thousands of sightings that have occurred since
the Second World War—many of them documented in official files—the
subject is too complex, too multifarious, in my opinion, to conform to a
single explanation. Although the data that Boyd Bushman encouraged
me to follow to glean the truth about antigravity is sufficient for me to
reach some definitive conclusions on that subject, it is inconclusive, to