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

82 The Hunt for Zero Point
He turned out to be a nice, soft-spoken mathematician based at BAe's
Warton plant, a facility that cranked out jet fighters close to where the
bleak mudflats of Lancashire's Ribble Estuary met the Irish Sea.
When I asked if he could brief me, as per the suggestion of Professor
Young, Evans said he needed to consult with the company's media
managers. He'd never dealt with the press before. I got the impression it
was sensitive stuff.
It was, but not for any of the reasons I had guessed or hoped. Britain's
biggest aircraft manufacturer, BAe, had an antigravity department. That
in itself was key.
But its activities weren't classified. Far from it. The impression I got,
more than anything else, was that the management had tucked Evans'
tiny department into the farthest-flung corner of the company because it
didn't know what else to do with it. That and the fact no one in BAe at
that level wanted to wake up to headlines that it was involved in kooky,
Buck Rogers science. It would destabilize the share price.
In the end, Evans wasn't allowed formally to brief me on his work, but
he was given permission to fill me in on some of the background that had
led to the formation of his Exploratory Studies group. That suited me
fine. BAe didn't want to break cover—nor did I. For once, we were on
the same side of the secrecy divide.
In March 1990, Evans chaired a two-day University-Industry Conference
of Gravitational Research, sitting around a table with a gathering
of distinguished academics to identify any emerging "quantum leaps"
that might impact on BAe's military aircraft work. Gravity control
figured extensively on the agenda.
Imagine it. A technology, popping out of nowhere, that rendered all
of its current multibillion-pound work on airliners and jet fighters
redundant at a stroke. Now that, I thought, really would do things to the
share price.
The company also undertook some practical laboratory work in a bid
to investigate the properties of a so-called "inertial-thrust machine"
developed by a Scottish inventor called Sandy Kidd.
In 1984, after three years' work building his device—essentially, a pair
of gyroscopes at each end of a flexible crossarm—Kidd apparently turned
it on and watched, startled, as it proceeded to levitate, then settle three
inches above the surface of his workbench.
An ex-RAF radar technician, the Scotsman had become obsessed with
the idea of inventing an antigravity machine after he'd removed a stillspinning
gyroscope from a Vulcan nuclear bomber. Carrying it backward