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

84 The Hunt for Zero Point
In May 1990, a trial went ahead under the watchful eyes of two wind
tunnel engineers from BAe's Warton aircraft plant. The first series of
tests showed no antigravity effects, but to everyone's surprise, during a
second series of trials, one result did appear to indicate that the machine
had changed weight.
Unfortunately, the engineers failed to repeat the result; and in science
and engineering, repeatability is the benchmark of success.
Had it been repeatable, the two percent weight change Kidd claimed
for his device would have been scientifically verified, and BAe would
have employed the world's first known antigravity device as an orbital
maneuvering motor for satellites.
Shortly after the trial, Cold War defense budgets collapsed and BAe's
share price went into free fall. As it fought for its survival, there were
cutbacks across the company and Dr. Evans' department, with little hope
of any short-term returns, was disbanded as quietly as it had come
together.
That, essentially, was how things were when he and I met.
I rang Dr. Marckus a few times, but only ever got an answering
machine and so I capped my involvement in the BAe antigravity story
with a few low-key articles in Jane 's about the BAe investigation. It was
more an excuse than anything else to broadcast a question: Was anyone
else out there engaged in similar work?
The U.S. Air Force had recently proclaimed its interest in the field
with a document, published in August 1990, called the Electric Propulsion
Study. Its objective was to "outline physical methods to test theories of
inductive coupling between electromagnetic and gravitational forces to
determine the feasibility of such methods as they apply to space propulsion."
Stripped of the gobbledygook, it was really asking whether
there was any theory out there that might permit the engineering of an
antigravity device.
The existence of the Electric Propulsion Study gave me an excuse to slip
tailored messages into a couple more stories about futuristic propulsion.
It felt a little like pointing a transmitter into deep space and waiting for a
response.
I waited, but nothing came back. No emails, no anonymous faxes, no
spooky phone calls. Nothing.
Thereafter, I kept a weather eye on the antigravity scene, but the
receiver I had rigged for the slightest trace of life out there remained
silent. In the end, I switched it off.
During the mid-1990s, BAe kept its toes in the gravity field by placing
a few small-scale contracts with a number of British universities,