Secrets of Antigravity Propulsion (26 page)

7.1 • EARLY MICROWAVE RESEARCH

One evening in 1986, I went out for a beer with a friend of mine, a naturopathic physician by the name of Thomas Chavez.
Like myself, Thomas had a keen interest in alternative, cutting-edge science.
The topic of our conversation eventually turned to electrogravitics, and at this point my friend shared an interesting story.
He told me that during the late 1950s, his father had worked as a physicist at the Rocketdyne Aerospace Corporation in Southern California and had been involved in some sort of super-secret antigravity research.
At that time, Thomas had been just a young boy.
He said his father normally told him nothing about what he did at work because of an oath of secrecy he had taken, but one evening, after returning home from work he had been unable to contain himself.
Very exuberantly, he had exclaimed, “We got it to work, we got it to work!”
When my friend inquired what it was that was made to work, his father drew him a picture showing a lens-shaped craft suspended in midair.
He said, “We got it to lift off!”
He would not say anything more about it, but that moment stuck in Thomas’ mind and now he shared it with me.
I knew him well enough to know that what he told me was entirely genuine.

Rocketdyne was first formed in the post–World War II era as a rocket engine R&D company.
For most of its history, it was associated with North American Aviation.
It was spun off from North American Aviation as a separate division in 1955.
Then in 1984, it remerged with its former company, which by then was named North American Rockwell as a result of the merger in 1967 of North American Aviation and Rockwell International.
North American’s aerospace and defense business had, among other things, developed the Apollo spacecraft and the space shuttle.
At the time of the merger in 1984, Rocketdyne was producing most of the rocket engines used in the United States, but it appears it was developing much more than conventional rockets for its aerospace propulsion business.
As we will discover below, its scientists were working on a next-generation propulsion system, a technology that goes far beyond the conventional rocket.
At the end of 1996, Rockwell sold off its Rocketdyne division, along with most of its space and defense business, to Boeing Integrated Defense Systems.
Then in 2005, Rocketdyne was resold to Pratt and Whitney, a business unit of United Technologies Corporation.

I frequently thought about my friend’s story about this Rocketdyne project.
It implied that the United States successfully demonstrated a field propulsion vehicle by the late 1950s, a time when Townsend Brown was still trying to interest the Pentagon and aerospace companies in his own electrogravitics research.
The 1956 “Electrogravitics Systems” report did mention that North American was studying electrogravitic propulsion but that the company had not yet openly declared that it was working in this exotic field.
No mention was made of its Rocketdyne division, which indicates that, at that early date, a very tight lid was already in place on Rocketdyne’s antigravity project.

Some years later, in the summer of 1994, another piece of the puzzle dropped into place.
At the time, I was attending a Tesla science symposium in Colorado Springs, where I was an invited speaker.
I had just finished delivering my lecture on NASA’s apparent suppression of electrogravitics technologies (discussed in chapter 13) and was surrounded by a small group of people asking various follow-up questions when someone handed me a quickly scribbled note, which I had a chance to read only much later.
The note read:

Sir, I’ve worked with the Biefeld-Brown effect for a number of years.
I may be of help to you on verifying the effect.
I believe I know your mistake with the discs.
I did correspond with T.
Brown by mail and phone.
Also associated with Project Winterhaven was a project with a slang name of “Sky Vaulting,” a government funded project with North American Rockwell.
If you are interested contact me.

P.S.
NASA data is shared with the Department of Defense.
Your key is with the Air Force.
They are many years ahead of civilian research.
NASA is a PR or a front to obscure Air Force research.

For purposes of confidentiality, I have chosen to withhold this person’s name and refer to him only as Tom.
The story he later told me about the Skyvault project was quite astounding.
He said that he first heard about it in the fall of 1974, when working for an engineering firm in Texas.
His supervisor, with whom he had come to be very good friends, one day told him about a top-secret government project that he had worked on between 1952 and 1957 while at North American Aviation, a company that was later renamed North American Rockwell.
The project had been initiated by the Defense Department through North American’s Rocketdyne division.
Although Tom’s boss had already passed away, Tom did not wish to reveal his name, so to facilitate the discussion, we will call him Murray.
Well, Tom had heard from Murray that the purpose of this project was to develop an antigravity vehicle that used microwave beams as its means for propulsion.
It is uncertain whether Skyvault was the official name of the project, but at least this is what the scientists at Rocketdyne used to call it.

Although Project Skyvault was initiated by the government in the early 1950s, investigations into this exotic microwave propulsion technique actually dated back to the late 1940s.
Murray, who held a Ph.D., said that in those earlier days he had worked on projects that were associated with an initial phase of this research and that later he had continued this work at Rocketdyne, where he worked up until the 1960s.
This microwave antigravity propulsion research project was still in progress in 1974, because Tom learned that a close friend of Murray’s was then still working on the project at North American Rockwell, presumably in its Rocketdyne division.
At that time, the whole matter was still very secret, because there was a lot that his boss couldn’t tell him about the project.

Later, in 1975, Tom obtained what he felt was additional confirmation for the existence of Project Skyvault when the military sent his Texas-based engineering firm a bid request for building a vehicle launch gantry in New Mexico.
From the blatant description of the shape of the gantry and the way it was to be built, he recognized that this was to be a launcher for a microwave beam antigravity craft.
In this particular version, the power was generated on the ground and sent up to the craft as a microwave beam.
The beam was emitted from upward-pointing microwave horns that were supported by the launch gantry.
The craft was made of a special kind of material that was repelled by microwaves and, hence, was to be buoyed upward by the beam (see figure 7.1).
A portion of the beam was returned to the ground to modulate the outgoing microwave beam.
The craft was to be able to go straight up and down and could deviate only a small amount to either side of vertical.

In 1996, two years after my conversation with Tom, CBS-TV aired a weekly spy thriller called
Mr.
and Mrs.
Smith
, which starred Scott Bakula, an actor who also has had leading roles in various science-fiction series such as
Quantum Leap
and
Star Trek
.
Interestingly, the “Space Flight Episode,” number nine in the series, which aired on November 8, 1996, came very close to portraying Tom’s story about the propulsion beam craft and launch gantry his firm was asked to bid on.
The plot of this particular episode was based on the testing of an experimental disc-shaped vehicle called a “beam rider.”
The launching took place from a secret desert location.
The test vehicle was lofted on a powerful microwave beam that was directed vertically upward toward the craft from a ground-based parabolic mirror.
Since much of the early Rocketdyne research on Project Skyvault was done in the Los Angeles area, it is not surprising that this idea would one day find itself worked into a Hollywood script.
However, even though there were four more episodes left to run, to the disappointment of many,
Mr.
and Mrs.
Smith
was canceled immediately after this episode had aired.
As we shall see, the notion of using microwave beams for aerospace propulsion is not science fiction.

The discussion about Project Skyvault that is presented here and in the next chapter is based on notes I made of my conversations with Tom and on some material Tom had sent me.
The latter includes copies of notes that he made of his 1974 discussions with Murray and a copy of a letter written by Murray’s friend who was at the time still working on Project Skyvault (see
appendix E
).

Figure 7.1.
Artist’s conception of a Skyvault-type craft being launched on a
ground-based microwave beam.
(P.
LaViolette, © 2007)

According to Murray, the first indication that microwaves could be used for propulsion came about when it was discovered that microwave beams could move objects if the objects happened to be made from the right kind of material.
The scientists believed that the microwave beam was somehow inducing a gravitational force on the object.
The idea that microwaves could move objects was believable to Tom since he had heard of something remotely similar from a radar engineer friend of his who worked at Homestead Air Force Base in Florida.
His friend had witnessed an experiment in which a low-power microwave beam from a klystron tube was aimed at pencils placed on a table and caused them to move around.
Tom theorized that the microwaves must induce electric charge gradients in certain materials having nonlinear electrical properties and that the observed movement was actually due to the Biefeld-Brown effect imparting a thrust to the material.

The group that Murray had worked with had experimented with a whole lot of different kinds of samples to find out which ones worked best.
Paper, silk, and some kinds of wood, for example, showed no movement.
Brick and concrete also exhibited no movement, being essentially transparent to the microwaves.
They found that some materials would move quite violently, whereas others would just vaporize.
Aluminum foil would move but would disintegrate upon exposure.
They carried out extensive tests, subjecting various kinds of materials to microwave waveforms of varying shapes, and accumulated data on the destruction and burning of the materials and on the effect of shock waves on those materials that responded.
They found that the best propulsion effect occurred in materials that had a particular
magnetic
property.
Tom attempted to find out more specifically what these types of materials were, but was told that the information was classified.

Murray said that their group had found that the effects were very frequency-sensitive, that is, that they were observed only within certain frequency bands that were characteristic of each material.
If the frequency was off by a slight amount, the object could suddenly vaporize.
He described an experience they had in their lab one time when they were experimenting with various frequencies—they had turned on their microwave generator and it had produced a bluish microwave beam that blew a hole through their laboratory wall and continued through an adjoining outside embankment as well.
The beam was going into another building before they managed to shut it off.
He said it “scared the living daylights out of them.”

7.2 • ELECTROMAGNETIC RESONANCE

Although Murray would not reveal what this unique class of materials was that could respond with a strong propulsive force, it is apparent that he was talking about materials that exhibit a strong resonance at a particular frequency.
Such materials respond to incident microwaves in an unusual way.
Take as an example a material that exhibits a resonant response to the electric component of an electromagnetic wave.
Over most frequencies, the material’s permittivity will have a positive value, and as a result, the applied electric field will induce a polarization in the same direction as its own field vector, as is commonly observed in most materials.
Near a resonant frequency, however, the induced polarization will become very large, the material’s large response being due to its accumulation of energy from the microwave beam over many wave cycles.
The energy stored in the resonating medium can then greatly exceed that delivered by the incident-driving field.
It can be so large that even changing the phase or sign of the incident wave would have little effect on the polarization oscillation.
¹
As a result, when the frequency of the incident wave is increased slightly above this resonant frequency, the applied electric field will be out of phase with respect to the induced polarization oscillation, and as a result, the material will respond by exhibiting a
negative
permittivity, the induced polarization now being out of phase with the applied electric field.
The electrons oscillating in the material will now resist the applied electric field, and as a result, the electromagnetic wave will exert a repulsive force on the material.

Physicists John Pendry and David Smith illustrated this repulsive force phenomenon by considering the example of a person pushing a swing.
In an article in
Scientific American,
they wrote:

Think of a swing: apply a slow, steady push, and the swing obediently moves in the direction of the push—although it does not swing very high.
Once set in motion, the swing tends to oscillate back and forth at a particular rate, known technically as its resonant frequency.
Push the swing periodically, in time with this swinging and it starts arcing higher.
Now try to push at a faster rate, and the push goes out of phase with respect to the motion of the swing—at some point, your arms might be outstretched with the swing rushing back.
If you have been pushing for a while, the swing might have enough momentum to knock you over—it is then pushing back on you.
²

In the same way, electrons in a material with a negative permittivity,
ε
, go out of phase and resist the “push” of the electromagnetic field.
Such materials include silver, gold, and aluminum, whose resonances usually occur at optical frequencies.

The same repulsive force phenomenon occurs in materials that resonate with the magnetic component of an incoming electromagnetic wave.
The magnetic permeability of the material, μ, which normally would be positive, becomes negative at frequencies slightly above the material’s resonant frequency.
The material’s response then is to magnetically resist the magnetic field of the applied electromagnetic wave.
Materials that naturally exhibit negative μ domains include ferromagnetic or antiferromagnetic materials that exhibit resonances.
Such resonances usually occur at frequencies in the gigahertz range and tail off at higher frequencies in the terahertz-to-infrared range.
For example, a group of Japanese scientists have reported negative permeability in a granular composite material consisting of 70 percent Permalloy when the material is exposed to microwave frequencies higher than 5 gigahertz.
³

The special microwave propulsion materials that Murray said were being researched by the Project Skyvault engineers, which “had a particular magnetic property,” were most likely materials of this sort exhibiting magnetic resonances in the gigahertz range.
This would account for Murray’s comment that the propulsion effects were very frequency-sensitive, that is, that each material had its own frequency band at which it would respond by developing a propulsive force.
As mentioned earlier, negative μ domains in such materials are limited to a specific frequency range, with the greatest repulsive effects occurring when the incident wave has a frequency close to a material’s magnetic resonant frequency.
If the microwave beam was adjusted to have a frequency slightly lower, so that it matched the material’s resonant frequency, then the material would absorb an enormous amount of energy from the beam and would store this energy in its resonant oscillation.
In cases in which the material was being exposed to a very powerful microwave beam at this resonant frequency, it is possible that the energy that the material would capture would be great enough to vaporize it, just as Murray had said.

According to Pendry, the force that microwaves exert on a material at a given frequency depends on the strength of the material’s interaction with that beam, which is proportional to the beam’s scattering cross-section.
⁴
This force is always rather weak but can be significantly enhanced by tuning the beam to have a frequency close to one of the material’s resonant frequencies.
When the beam is at the material’s resonant frequency, the material would present a high scattering cross-section and would strongly absorb the incident beam.
At a slightly higher frequency, the scattering cross-section would continue to be high, but the ε or μ would now become negative and the material would begin to exert a repulsive force relative to the exciting beam.

A material would respond with an even stronger repulsive force if it were to exhibit electric and magnetic resonances in the same frequency range, allowing both ε and μ to become negative at a slightly higher frequency range.
Such a material would have a negative index of refraction.
The index of refraction (
n
) of a material is determined by the values of its permittivity and
permeability; that is,
n
=
√
ε
μ
⁄
ε
_o
μ
_o
, in which the constants
ε
_o
and μ
_o
are the permittivity and permeability values in a vacuum.
Most commonly occurring refractive materials such as plastic and glass have a positive index of refraction, with either one or both of their ε and μ parameters being positive.
Materials with a negative index of refraction are not normally observed in nature, since electric resonances producing negative ε values and magnetic resonances producing negative μ values occur at differing regions of the electromagnetic spectrum.
However, with proper engineering, it is possible to produce special materials, called “metamaterials,” whose permittivity and permeability both are simultaneously negative over a specific frequency range, causing them to exhibit a negative index of refraction.
Since negatively refracting materials are full of resonances, these resonances can be exploited to enhance the scattering cross-section and hence the propulsive force on the material.

The idea that it might be possible to produce a material with a negative index of refraction was first suggested in the open literature in 1967 by the Russian physicist Victor Veselago.
⁵
Beginning in the mid-1990s, researchers began experimenting to see if Veselago’s prediction might be true.
Finally, by 2001, Smith and his colleagues at the University of California San Diego successfully demonstrated the production of one such artificial metamaterial, which they made by constructing an array of straight wires and wire-loop split-ring resonators.
^{6,
 
7,
 
8}
Using lithographic techniques, they fabricated a series of resonator elements into printed circuit boards having a straight wire on one side and C-shaped split-ring resonator patterns on the other side (figure 7.2).
⁹
These elements were then assembled in rows having a spacing of the order of 0.5 centimeter to compose a metamaterial matrix (figure 7.3).
The array was found to exhibit both electric and magnetic resonances, causing the material’s
ε and μ values both to become negative over a frequency range of 10.3 to 11.5
gigahertz.
They showed that a 10.5-gigahertz beam (2.8 cm wavelength) refracted negatively as predicted.
Soon after, Claudio Parazzoli, Kin Li, and coworkers at Boeing’s Phantom Works Division constructed a three-dimensional wire lattice in the form of a 2.7-millimeter cube that negatively refracted a 10-gigahertz microwave beam.

Figure 7.2.
(a) A split-ring resonator.
(b) Split-ring resonators combined on a circuit board with straight-wire segments to form an electric and magnetic resonator element.
Many such elements together would be used to compose the metamaterial.
The dimensions of the pattern are specially chosen to give the desired resonance effect.
(After R.
Shelby, et al., “Microwave Transmission through a Two-Dimensional Left-Handed Metamaterial,” Applied Physics Letters, 78[4] [2001]: 489–91, fig.
1)

Figure 7.3.
Resonator elements combined to form a metamaterial array.
This metamaterial would exhibit a negative index of refraction over a specific microwave frequency range.
(Photo courtesy of Richard A.
Shelby)

Another group, at Bartol Research Institute at the University of Delaware, created a metamaterial in a very different manner by incorporating metallic magnetic nanoparticles into an appropriate insulating matrix.
¹⁰
This sounds similar to Brown’s idea of embedding massive semiconductor particles, such as lead oxide, in the conical dielectric member of his electrokinetic apparatus.
A diagram taken from his 1965 patent and included here in chapter 3 as figure 3.8 shows these particles as speckles concentrated near the tip of the dielectric cone.
Brown disclosed that it would be advantageous to incorporate such particles to improve the thrust of his device when it was excited at microwave frequencies.
His dielectric was made so that the particles became increasingly concentrated toward the tip, his intention being to progressively decrease the permittivity of the dielectric so that the voltage gradient at its tip would become increasingly high.

Although the term had not been invented at the time, Brown was in fact fabricating a metamaterial.
Moreover, like the Bartol group, he may have been experimenting with embedding ferroelectrics in dielectric media to cause magnetic permeability to vary along the length of the dielectric.
For example, in his patent he wrote:

In applying potentials to these various embodiments, it has been found that the rate at which the potential is applied often influences the thrust.
This is especially true where dielectric members of high dielectric constant are used and the charging time is a factor.
In such cases, the field gradient changes as the charge is built up.
In such cases where initial charging currents are also high, dielectric materials of high magnetic permeability like-wise exhibit varying thrust with time.
¹¹